And so things come full circle (of magic). The first novel that Doyle and I wrote together was the (still unpublished) Ice Cream Wizard. A fantasy/SF crossover with some great bits — including the Secret Origin of Doc and Beka (two characters who you’ll remember from the Mageworlds series.)
Anyway, I went to the Ice Cream Ride in Turners’ Falls last weekend to do magic. I did magic, and had a great time.
While there, I met one of my fellow performers, a caricature artist named Otto Metzger, who did this picture of me.
(If you’d like to have Otto at your event, get in touch with Kaleidoscope Art & Entertainment.)
JAMES D. MACDONALD 
That first novel had a lot of good bits in it, and over the years since we’ve strip-mined it for most of them. (At the time we wrote it, we were still working on getting a handle on how to go from “collection of nifty bits” to “fully realized novel.”)
It wasn’t a wasted effort, though. In addition to providing us with all of the aforementioned nifty bits, it demonstrated to us that we could in fact finish a novel, and gave us a lot of good experience.
(The moral of the story, if there is one: Don’t throw out your not-quite-ready-for-prime-time stuff; it may have things in it that you’ll want for later.)