Jody Lynn Nye - Career

Career

Nye says that she "always told stories" to her younger brothers, cousins, and friends, and as a junior camp counselor. Her first published writings were technical articles on broadcasting in the magazine "Video Action" during the 1980s. She first wrote fiction for the "Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine game" and the Role-Aids line of game supplements published by Mayfair Games.

Late in the eighties Nye wrote six companion books for the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey and the Magic of Xanth series by Piers Anthony. The first four were "branching-path" gamebooks in the Crossroads Adventure series, two set on Pern and two in Xanth. Then simultaneously November 1989, Ballantine Books published The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern by Nye with McCaffrey and Avon Books published Piers Anthony's Visual Guide to Xanth by Nye and Anthony. Todd Cameron Hamilton and James Clouse were the illustrators for both Guides, as Hamilton had been for Roger Zelazny's Visual Guide to Amber published by Avon one year earlier.

For the Pern guide, Nye explained in its introduction, her team (without Clouse) had visited McCaffrey two years earlier, for ten days (October 1987). In the living room Nye, editor Bill Fawcett (Nye's husband), illustrator Hamilton, and McCaffrey's son Todd Johnson discussed Pern with its creator and Hamilton sketched under her direction. They produced "a companion volume to her work, intended to help you visualize the setting and background for her chronicles."

Before the Dragonlover's Guide was finished, McCaffrey and Nye were working together on a novel, presumably The Death of Sleep (1990) in the Planet Pirates trilogy. In the early 1990s they collaborated in three series based on McCaffrey stories from the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile McCaffrey completed five more Pern books, after which they revised the guide.

Late in the 1990s Nye began work with Robert Asprin to extend the Myth Adventures series he had started in 1978. After his 2008 death she continued to write books they had planned. Three of Nye's book series were "adrift" after Meisha Merlin Publishing went out of business in 2007.

Among other projects she is continuing to write her military sf/humor series begun with View from the Imperium and the Myth Adventures series.