Volume 2, Issue 4 – August, 1999

Rob MacGregor: The Co-Writer’s Lot

Two heads are better than one, right? 

If the second head in question happens to belong to Billy Dee Williams, Edgar Award-winning writer Rob MacGregor would wholeheartedly agree. 

“Billy was great to work with. He really is an excellent co-author. The process was really smooth and worked really nice,” MacGregor said.  

MacGregor and Williams worked together two years on PSI/Net. Faxes, email and telephone calls played a bigger role in shaping the book than face-to-face meetings. MacGregor expects the sequel to take shape the same way. 

“It’s a collaboration,” MacGregor said. “The sequel’s a continuation of Trent Calloway, and Billy, again, is giving me his comments as we’re working on it.” Williams recognizes MacGregor’s status as the primary “weaver of tales.” A lot of celebrities, MacGregor notes, are not so generous.

“I had one [celebrity co-author], in particular, who was very difficult — a well-known actor who all but moved into our house and was reading over my shoulder each page of the way. Finally, we had to break this off. All of the neighbors really liked having this guy in the neighborhood. But my wife and I couldn’t live a normal life with him being so hyper and changing everything as we wrote it. It’s just no way to write a book.”

Jean Marie Ward

In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006..