Then there are the phone calls.
MORRIS/TEMPUS/ROXANE: Look, there’s this little matter I couldn’t get taken care of…. Could you get rid of the demon?
DUANE/HARRAN: Can Ischade go to hell?
CHERRYH/ISCHADE: Maybe we could silt in the harbor?
PAXSON/LALO: I don’t know, the painting just sort of grew on me.
Writing is a profession practiced in locked rooms, in manic solitude. At least we try, between ringing telephones and solicitors at the door. Rarely do writers get the chance to practice their art in groups, or to write each others’ characters, or interfere in each others’ plots and plans; so part of the success of Thieves’ World is that it’s a challenge and a new kind of art form for the writers. Asprin and Abbey have invented an entirely new literary form, and an environment which has regularly surprised even the seasoned participants, who, you would imagine, ought to know what is going on and what turns the story will take.
Well, the honest truth is that we have very little idea what will happen.
Unplanned war breaks out in the streets. It lurches and falters in settlements, just the way it does in real life, my friends, because certain people in it have to get certain things or believe there is a way out, or they go on fighting.
Feuds break out between characters and resolve themselves the way they do in life-with some change in both characters. Characters mutate and grow and turn out to have apsects that surprise even their creator. Moria of the streets has become Moria the Rankene lady; Mor-am is in dire straits and may never recover