writing.
In the early 1980s, my dear friend Barbara and I took over one of the very small press magazines for the Society for Creative Anachronism for a couple of years—a kingdom newsletter which was called Dragonrunes. We edited and wrote articles. I took over a humorous saga from the previous editor who surrendered it to me. I changed the characters just a little, and had a lot of fun with it because it was goofy and full of dreadful puns. So I was ready for Xanth.
My first paid work in publishing was typing—for a dollar a page—the Players Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual for TSR; which included correcting Gary Gygax’s grammar.
My first publications in the professional press were technical articles for a magazine called Video Action, as well as RoleAids modules for Mayfair Games which were used to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
SEC: You wrote eight books with the late Robert Asprin. How did that collaboration come about?
JLN: My husband, Bill, was one of Bob’s best friends and also acted as his agent. He kept the creative Bob on a more business level. He was a good friend to him, but also able to tell him, “Bob, that’s not going to work.”
Bill introduced me to Bob early in our relationship. We went up to Ann Arbor to stay with Bob and his second wife, Lynn, for what I thought was going to be a nerve wracking experience. It turned out they were incredibly nice, generous people who went to a great deal of trouble to make me feel at ease.
Bob and I got along like a house on fire. We hit it off immediately. We discovered how ridiculously much we had in common, despite being born eleven years apart. We liked much of the same music, movies and writers. We both wrote humor, and the same things made us laugh.
A few years later, Bob was having trouble writing. He was frozen. Having achieved a little too much success with one of his novels, he feared he could not match it. So to get him through this frozen period, Bill proposed we do a project together. Something completely unrelated to anything Bob had written before. And so we wrote the novel License Invoked. A story of magic, spies and Rock & Roll!
SEC: What were the mechanics of that collaboration?
JLN: Bob and I sat together in the living room at my and Bill’s house and talked at length about what we would like to do with this project. We put together an outline (which I still have somewhere) then went through the outline and decided which of us was likely to know the most about each section, and scribbled in the margin who would write that section. Then he took his half of the outline down to New Orleans, I kept my half up in the Chicago area, and we started writing. We wrote the sections while apart, then we put them together and I went over it, then Bob went over it—because his name is first on the cover—and then it went to the publisher.
SEC: You also collaborated on many books with Anne McCaffrey. How did that collaboration differ?
JLN: First, it was much earlier in my career. I began writing with Anne in 1987; Bob and I didn’t write together until the late ’90’s. And second, Anne was much more the senior writer; I was really more an apprentice.
The first thing I wrote with Anne was Dragonharper which was one of the Crossroads Adventure series. In the 1980s “branching-path” gamebooks, also called choose-your-own-adventure books, were very popular. They weren’t linear stories. At the end of each chapter it said, “If you choose to take this action go to page 35, but if you choose to take that action go to 87.” I wrote two of them in Anne’s universe.
But Anne also had a number of books that she had always meant to go on with. She wanted to explore their world more but just didn’t have the time. One of them was Dinosaur Planet, so she agreed to work with junior authors. Elizabeth Moon and I were both selected to write novels in that universe. It’s now called the Planet
In the early 1980s, my dear friend Barbara and I took over one of the very small press magazines for the Society for Creative Anachronism for a couple of years—a kingdom newsletter which was called Dragonrunes. We edited and wrote articles. I took over a humorous saga from the previous editor who surrendered it to me. I changed the characters just a little, and had a lot of fun with it because it was goofy and full of dreadful puns. So I was ready for Xanth.
My first paid work in publishing was typing—for a dollar a page—the Players Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual for TSR; which included correcting Gary Gygax’s grammar.
My first publications in the professional press were technical articles for a magazine called Video Action, as well as RoleAids modules for Mayfair Games which were used to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
SEC: You wrote eight books with the late Robert Asprin. How did that collaboration come about?
JLN: My husband, Bill, was one of Bob’s best friends and also acted as his agent. He kept the creative Bob on a more business level. He was a good friend to him, but also able to tell him, “Bob, that’s not going to work.”
Bill introduced me to Bob early in our relationship. We went up to Ann Arbor to stay with Bob and his second wife, Lynn, for what I thought was going to be a nerve wracking experience. It turned out they were incredibly nice, generous people who went to a great deal of trouble to make me feel at ease.
Bob and I got along like a house on fire. We hit it off immediately. We discovered how ridiculously much we had in common, despite being born eleven years apart. We liked much of the same music, movies and writers. We both wrote humor, and the same things made us laugh.
A few years later, Bob was having trouble writing. He was frozen. Having achieved a little too much success with one of his novels, he feared he could not match it. So to get him through this frozen period, Bill proposed we do a project together. Something completely unrelated to anything Bob had written before. And so we wrote the novel License Invoked. A story of magic, spies and Rock & Roll!
SEC: What were the mechanics of that collaboration?
JLN: Bob and I sat together in the living room at my and Bill’s house and talked at length about what we would like to do with this project. We put together an outline (which I still have somewhere) then went through the outline and decided which of us was likely to know the most about each section, and scribbled in the margin who would write that section. Then he took his half of the outline down to New Orleans, I kept my half up in the Chicago area, and we started writing. We wrote the sections while apart, then we put them together and I went over it, then Bob went over it—because his name is first on the cover—and then it went to the publisher.
SEC: You also collaborated on many books with Anne McCaffrey. How did that collaboration differ?
JLN: First, it was much earlier in my career. I began writing with Anne in 1987; Bob and I didn’t write together until the late ’90’s. And second, Anne was much more the senior writer; I was really more an apprentice.
The first thing I wrote with Anne was Dragonharper which was one of the Crossroads Adventure series. In the 1980s “branching-path” gamebooks, also called choose-your-own-adventure books, were very popular. They weren’t linear stories. At the end of each chapter it said, “If you choose to take this action go to page 35, but if you choose to take that action go to 87.” I wrote two of them in Anne’s universe.
But Anne also had a number of books that she had always meant to go on with. She wanted to explore their world more but just didn’t have the time. One of them was Dinosaur Planet, so she agreed to work with junior authors. Elizabeth Moon and I were both selected to write novels in that universe. It’s now called the Planet
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