Ok then, if you wish me to be specific then since I'm in the midst of reading Q & A, perhaps you can describe the process of this book?
Margaret called me into her office and said, "How'd you like to write the next post-
Nemesis TNG novel after
Resistance?" Not being stupid, I said, "YES!"
Since this was the 20th anniversary, and since Jeannie was already covering the Borg, my feeling was that this was the ideal time to do the ultimate Q story. After all,
TNG began and ended with Q, and I'd had this idea in the back of my head that would tie most of Q's appearances together into a vaguely coherent whole -- after all, there had to be a reason why he kept coming back to annoy Picard.
So I wrote an outline. This is
always the first major writing step with tie-in fiction, because the detailed plot has to be approved by the licensor. Sometimes the plot is only a couple of pages, sometimes it's 15-30 pages, sometimes it's 60-80 pages, and pick any length between those.
I gave Margaret a 22-page outline for a novel I called
Quite Ugly One Morning (a Warren Zevon song I'm fond of that starts with the letter Q: "From dawn to sundown, it's a long long way / And it's a hollow triumph when you make it to the bottom of another day / There's a fever rising when the evening comes / And when the battle's over there'll be nothing left but the sound of drums"). She sent it back to me with about a thousand notes, as the thing was all over the map. The first note? "Change the title."
I revised it considerably, and gave it back to Margaret, this time with a new title. I told
TerriO I needed a new title for this book that answered all the questions about Q, and she said, "Why not call it
Q & A, dumbass?" This is why I'm marrying her.
(Ironically, this is my shortest novel title. My previous
TNG novel was my longest novel title,
A Time for War, a Time for Peace.)
Margaret liked it much better the second time around, and then she sent it to CBS. They approved it with no changes, and I started writing. I sent the first part of the book through my writers group, who pointed out that it was taking too long to get the action going, which caused me to reshuffle a lot of the chapters around (the around-the-galaxy interludes started out later in the book in the first draft).
Then I sent it to Margaret, who had copious notes about various and sundry things, all of which were right on the money. This is what editors do: take us writers' self-indulgent nonsense, beat us over the head with it, and make us take it out.
Oh, one other thing with this book, was that Margaret gave me the green light to create a new security chief (since the old one was killed off in
Resistance) and a new second officer. I came up with Zelik Leybenzon for the former -- borne of a desire to see a mustang, someone who clawed his way up the ranks, and who doesn't get along all that well with the rest of the crew -- and Miranda Kadohata for the latter -- borne of a desire to see a character dealing with new motherhood, and also one of the 950 people who served on the
Enterprise-D that we never saw.
I think that covers the high points.....
Sorry, that's gotta be my favorite line in any Trek book so far! 
