• Robert L. Fleck
• Co-Authors and Co-Editors
• Photo Gallery

The Road Crew and Rhythm Section

In his acknowledgement in Unicorn Sonata, Peter S. Beagle refers to me, Bob Fleck, as Janet's "road crew and rhythm section." I like it. It's pretty descriptive of what I do. The comment comes from a story I tell about trying to explain to David Copperfield's personal secretary the differences between our jobs.

As a little background, I came to work for Janet after being the managing editor of Midnight Zoo magazine for a few years. At MZ, I did everything from open the mail to print and bind the magazine. More than that, who cares about me. This site is dedicated to Janet.

Co-Authors and Co-Editors

Janet has worked with numerous fellow authors and editors over the years. Most recently available is Artifact, her ground-breaking high adventure/suspense novel cowritten with Kevin J. Anderson, Matthew J. Costello, and F. Paul Wilson. It's now out in paperback from Forge, and should give every reader an explosively good read.

Her most recent editorial collaboration was with Joyce Carol Oates on the anthology Snapshots: 20th Century Mother-Daughter Fiction, a collection of 17 stories by women about the relatonships between mothers and daughters.

In 1995-96, she edited four anthologies. Two with David Copperfield, one with Peter S. Beagle, and one with Uwe Luserke. On all of these anthologies, Martin H. Greenberg of TeknoBooks provided advice, experience, and accounting.

In addition to co-editing Immortal Unicorn, Janet and Peter Beagle (again with a little help from Marty Greenberg) worked together to create The Unicorn Sonata, which Peter wrote for Turner Publishing. Since that company's dissolution, the rights have been purchased by Sheryl Leach, creator of the Barney^TM franchise. Her focus is developing the film of Sonata, but she is keeping the book available for sale through bn.com and amazon.com.

Janet wrote the Madagascar Manifesto trilogy with her long-time collaborator George Guthridge. They are now in the process of roughing out a stand-alone sequel to the series, which follows the life of Deborah, the child born at the end of Dusk. The two also co-wrote over a dozen short stories. A limited edition CD-ROM, Exotic Locals, which collects most of their coauthored short fiction, was released 1/1/00 by Lone Wolf Publicatons. They are currently discussing options with publishers to release Locals a trade book.

With comic book legend Jack Kirby, Janet worked on three stories. She began working with Jack as a literary agent in the early eighties, but his book, The Horde!, never sold. In the early nineties, Janet pulled out the old manuscript and received Jack's permission to cull material from The Horde! and extrapolate it into three stories. See Janet's short story bibliography), for information about the specific publications.

Long-time friend Dave Smeds co-wrote one erotic story with Janet (under her Jan Barrette pseudonymn), which was published in different versions in Club International and Flesh Fantastic (Masquerade, 1996, ed. by Nancy Kilpatrick).

Lastly among the historical coauthorships, Janet's second (or first, depending on how you look at it) novel, Execution Exchange, was cowritten with Woody Greer. Before cowriting the book with Woody, Janet was his agent, but every publisher said the same thing: great ideas, now find him a writer. Eventually, Janet gave up and did the job herself.

The Janet Berliner Photo Gallery

Okay, here's a first picture for everyone. David recently levitated Janet for a publicity photograph for the Chinese edition of Tales of the Impossible.