Let’s start at the beginning: how did you two first decide to team up?
DAYTON: “Man, is that a long, winding, and extremely painful story. I was already under contract at Pocket, writing In the Name of Honor, and Kevin was interviewing then-editor John Ordover about the forthcoming S.C.E. series. Kevin threw out an idea for a story concept, John told him to write up a proposal, and then Kevin came screaming to me for help. (We had met a couple of years previously, when he was interviewing me as part of an article he was writing for the Communicator magazine profiling the first Strange New Worlds contest winners.)”
How is writing together different from writing alone?
DAYTON: “It’s harder to fit two on a keyboard? Writing together is (for me) different from writing alone…for one, the workload is split between two writers, but that can also cause problems as we sometimes approach problems from different angles, and our approaches don’t always complement each other. Then we have to fight to the death to see whose idea will be used.”
KEVIN: “He usually kicks my ass. But I like the instant gratification aspect of it. If I like something I do, I can find out right away if someone else likes it, too, instead of waiting months to see it in print.”
The A Time to… series changed a lot of readers’ perceptions of Star Trek Nemesis. What were your personal views of the movie?
DAYTON: “I didn’t enjoy it as much as I enjoyed other Trek movies, but I’ve found that on watching it on DVD (as we did one bazillion times for the books) that there’s a lot to like there. I also liked the fact that – from a storytelling standpoint – Nemesis leaves a lot of new paths for the TNG gang to follow.”
If it had been up to you, where would you have taken the Next Generation crew after Nemesis?
KEVIN: “Pretty much along the path that Pocket’s following now, I guess. A series with Riker and his new crew on the Titan, and more stories with Picard and his revamped crew on the Enterprise. I think change is very important to avoid stagnation. One of the flaws with Kirk and crew is that they stayed together for so long, in the same jobs, for decades. That’s just not realistic.”
DAYTON: “No bashing Kirk and his posse, yo.”
Is it easier to develop characters that you created, or that are pre-existing?
KEVIN: “It’s certainly easier to kill characters we create ourselves. It depends on the story. With Trek, the main characters are already defined, and there’s only so much ‘new’ stuff you can bring to them, depending on where/when your story is set.”
What about with characters like Kell Perim and Christine Vale, who were “already defined” but in other novels rather than on screen?
DAYTON: “Good question. In these cases, we have access to the writers who first created them (i.e. Bob Greenberger, etc). We just go to them when we need info on these characters, and they make sure our developments are in keeping with the way they originally envisioned them.”
KEVIN: “With Perim, for example, we wanted to show a Trill who was proud of herself and secure without having a symbiont.”
DAYTON: “It hadn’t been covered much to this point in Trek, and so we went from there.”
How much did your collaborations with the other A Time to… authors shape their storylines, or they yours? Do you want to take credit for thinking up any of the plots in their novels…?
DAYTON: “Yeah, everything [David] Mack wrote was mine. Bastard. Seriously, the main plots of each set of books were pretty much the creation of the individual authors. Where the collaboration came in was in making sure that character arcs progressed logically from book to book, etc. There may have been a few tweaks here and there in order to have the books fit within the overarching series, but there were pretty rare, as I recall. We made a few minor changes based on stuff John Vornholt had to change in his books, and Bob Greenberger had to shift a bit because of something we did, but it was pretty minor stuff.”
KEVIN: “Keith DeCandido was acting as the ‘continuity cop’ on the series, making sure everything squared up just right. Give that man a cigar, folks.”
How long did it take for you to write your A Time to… books, A Time to Sow and A Time to Harvest?
KEVIN: “About ten weeks each, as I recall.”
DAYTON: “And that was moving very fast for us. We had the good fortune to both be away from regular day jobs during that period, so I was able to devote my full attention to the books, every day for almost three solid months. Normally we juggle our writing projects with my day-job work schedule, which is – to put it mildly – hectic.”
How did you come to be involved with the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series?
DAYTON: “As we said earlier, Kevin actually got us involved with that. He essentially pitched ‘recover the Defiant from interspace’ to John as an idea that might make a good S.C.E. story. John liked the idea, and asked Kevin to write a proposal. Kevin came to me and asked if I wanted to help him, and we wrote up an outline for what became Interphase, our first collaboration.”
KEVIN: “Later, John approached us to write the ‘origin of the S.C.E.‘ story, and that became Foundations. Since then, we’ve had three other S.C.E. stories for the series (Home Fires, Grand Designs, and Where Time Stands Still) as well as an S.C.E. short story in Tales of the Dominion War (Field Expediency).”
This one’s for Dayton: It looks like Star Trek: Enterprise will be explaining the Klingon head ridges, which you also had a go at in In the Name of Honor. How conscious are you of the fact that all your books can be ‘disproven’?
DAYTON: “It’s a reality of writing media tie-in fiction, no matter the series. It’s just one of the things that you accept going in.”
What about the other way round – do you ever find it difficult to remain within the confines of existing Trek canon?
KEVIN: “We don’t find it constricting, if that’s what you mean. The Trek universe is a big sandbox in which to play, with plenty of room for all kinds of stories.”
DAYTON: “Again, it’s just one of those things you accept when you write tie-in fiction. In the case of Trek, I enjoy working within the canon, and in fact get a huge kick out of writing stories that tie seemingly unrelated elements together.”
This one’s for Kevin: Who’ve you enjoyed interviewing the most so far?
KEVIN: “I’ll always have a soft spot for Chase Masterson, because she was the first interview I ever did, but… I always have fun talking to writers and other behind the scenes people, because they’re very open, very interesting, and often overlooked. Oh, and Clint Howard, because he let me interview him pantless (him, not me).”
DAYTON: “Okay, that’s more than I wanted to know, dude.”
You’ve done standalone novels, interlinked eBooks, chunks of an epic miniseries… Which do you enjoy the most?
DAYTON: “They’re all fun, for different reasons. On the miniseries, collaborating with the other authors is a large part of what made it fun for is. The same can be said with S.C.E. Even though we write standalone stories within the series, the serial nature of the series allows us to interact with other authors as we plant seeds for future plot arcs, or pick up something that someone else came up with.”
If you could write a dream Trek book, what would it involve?
DAYTON: “A ‘dream project’ of mine involves involving Trek history with the UFO lore/space programme activities of the 1950/1960s. I’d also like to do a Kirk and crew during their five-year mission. Just a pure Trek story without any baggage/references to prequels/sequels/etc. Just like a writer would have done in the 1970s.”
KEVIN: “I really the short story format that we’ve had a chance to play with over the last couple of years. I’d like to do more short tales that aren’t suited to novel length, or which follow a theme that other writers are also working toward.”
Are there any specific Trek series you’d like to write for? Enterprise, for example?
KEVIN: “I’m open to anything. I admit that it would probably be hardest to jump into a DS9 book, given the depth and complexity that’s already been established.”
DAYTON: “I’d be up for an Enterprise book, though I’ll probably wait for the series to run its course before I submit anything on my own. If Pocket comes to me/us and says, ‘Hey, we have an Enterprise idea we think would be perfect for you to write’, then I’d be up for that, too.”
KEVIN: “For what it’s worth, we have had very preliminary discussions with editors about both Voyager and DS9-related projects. Nothing that we can really talk about now, though.”
Do you prefer writing articles or fiction? How much do the two differ?
KEVIN: “It’s two completely different types of writing, and both push different ‘fun buttons’ for me. In fiction, we make everything up. For articles, we make everything fit.”
DAYTON: “The only non-fiction writing I’ve done is with Kevin, and he’s right that it’s different from writing fiction. Of course, he handles all the heavy lifting on our articles (interviewing people, etc). I usually do all the grunt work (episode recaps, etc) that help fill out the article as we’re putting it together.”
KEVIN: “Our approach to articles is ‘What would be cool to read?’ and go from there.”
Classic question: Who would win a fight between Kirk and Picard?
KEVIN: “If Kirk couldn’t take him out with a flying leg kick right away, Picard would win by talking him to death. Good enough? [I’m an] Original Series fan, but also a fan of The Animated Series. I can always watch The Doomsday Machine.”
DAYTON: “Die hard Original Series fan, too. I really got into DS9 all over again when watching them on DVD, though. And I’ve gotten a renewed interest in Enterprise this season.”
When writing Trek, do either of you use a Star Trek encyclopaedia? Does re-watching episodes help?
DAYTON: “Like the Bible as handed down by God himself. Okay, maybe a little overstatement, there. We use all sorts of references for our Trek work (Encyclopedia, Chronology, Star Charts, etc). We also use various web-based sources (Starfleet Museum is AWESOME), and Curt Danhauser’s site on the animated series, for example. And yes, rewatching relevant episodes is always first up when we start work on a project. I also like to use older, lesser-known, fan-favourite references so that we can pepper in little winks to the reader. The old SpaceFlight Chronology is a goldmine for me on this sort of thing.”
Is there a Trek book that you would have written differently had you been the author?
DAYTON: “I would have killed [Kevin’s] The Road to Edos at the proposal stage.”
KEVIN: “I would have rewritten [Dayton’s] In the Name of Honor from the ground up.”
Which other Trek writers’ work do you admire?
DAYTON: “I’m a fan of the Reeves-Stevenses, as well as Margaret Wander Bonanno. Among the newer gang, I really enjoy Dave Mack’s and Keith DeCandido’s stuff. They’re both huge Trek fans, and it comes through pretty much on every page of their writing.”
KEVIN: “I echo Dayton, but I’ll add Mike Friedman, and of course James Blish.”
Have you ever added any hidden themes or messages to your books?
DAYTON: “If you read our books backwards, you’ll find a secret treasure map that leads you to the coolest rollercoaster park in Ohio.”
KEVIN: “No hidden agendas or subversive messages… at least not that I’ll admit to.”
A Time to Sow and A Time to Harvest were released by Pocket Books in March and April 2004 respectively.