Jody Lynn Nye has co-authored several books with world-famous authors such as Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, and Robert Asprin. She’s also written a humorous set of fantasy novels of her own called the Mythology series. More recently, Jody co-authored with the late Robert Asprin several books in the New York Times bestselling Myth-Adventures series. She now plans to continue the Myth-Adventures series on her own.
Matthew: My next guest is Jody Lynn Nye, an author who has not only written quite a few books on her own, but who has also co-authored several novels with Anne McCaffrey, Piers Anthony, and Robert Asprin. Welcome to the show Jody.
Jody: Thank you very much.
Matthew: Let’s go back in time, just for a moment. I know you collaborated with books with Anne McCaffrey. How did that come about?
Jody: That came about . . . I have to go even farther back in time. My husband, or at the time, husband-to-be, was part owner of a game company called MayFair Games.
Matthew: Okay.
Jody: And they produced the Dragon Riders first role playing game. And Todd McCaffery, still in college at the time, was their intern for the summer and helped work on his mother’s universe’s game. So, Bill was already friends with the family at the time that he came up with a project for Tor Books called Cross Roads.
Matthew: Oh, okay.
Jody: And in the late ‘80's, Choose Your Own Adventures were very popular, but they were very simplistic. They were . . . you open the door, you see a monster, do you hack and slash, or do you run?
Matthew: I remember those when I was a kid. That’s great!
Jody: That’s exactly . . . But Bill’s concept was to bring in known science fiction/fantasy roles, and create, not only individual adventures, but also group adventures, and Combat Command for ACE Books, you command in an army or a fleet, also from a noted fantasy world, such as Hammer’s Slammers, Dave Drake’s world.
Matthew: Oh.
Jody: After some persuading, he got Anne to agree to be part of it. And I dropped a couple of books that I had asked to write so that I could do the Pern books and the Xanth books, as a matter of fact. So, they’re both included in it. And over the course of the next two years, I wrote Dragon Harper and Dragonfire for the Cross Roads series in Pern and Encyclopedia of Xanth and Ghost of a
Chance in the Xanth Universe. So those were the first of them.
Matthew: The Xanth Universe was Piers Anthony.
Jody: Piers Anthony’s work, pun-filled, humorous, but also some serious fantasy adventures that has been running for many years now.
Matthew: Yeah, I’m going to be speaking with Piers right after this section. So that’s ironic
Jody: Well, it’s fortunate circumstance, as I call it. So, I was already familiar with Anne, and she was already familiar with working with me and knew that I respected her work, when another Bill project came up and this was to help Anne write books in universes that she had established that she had no time to write entirely on her own. And the first was based upon her Dinosaur Planet Books. There were 3 books in the series and the first of them chronologically, was The Death of Sleep, which I wrote with Anne. And the subsequent books were written with Elizabeth Moon.
Matthew: Oh, okay.
Jody: And after that, more of these projects sort of came up. It was a terrific experience working with Anne. She is a tremendously warm and generous person and taught me a great deal about my craft. So it was on-the-job training as well as a working gig. But I’m very proud of those books.
Matthew: And you helped write the Dragon Lovers’ Guide to Pern.
Jody: Yes.
Matthew: And Anne McCaffery, I assume, had a lot of input with that.
Jody: Oh heavens! We went to Ireland, along with the primary artist of the project, Todd Cameron Hamilton. His beautiful work is throughout the book. And in fact, his portrait of me is on my website. jodylynnnye.com Take a look. And we sat in her front room and interviewed her for several days on tape and give her questions, probing details, the kind of things she sort of knew instinctively, if not openly and put them on paper, so that her fans could enjoy details about their favorite roles. It’s sort of like a gadgeteer or a history to Pern.
Matthew: Yeah. I know her son, now, Todd, has been continuing on the mantle, I guess, with the Pern novels. Do you ever see a future, maybe, doing another collaboration with Anne, or with Todd?
Jody:
Probably not with Todd, he’s clicking along right now like gang-busters.
Matthew: Yeah.
Jody: I would always welcome a chance to work with Anne if I could. But I can’t be that greedy.
Matthew: Yeah, yeah.
Jody: I’ve had many chances to work with her and I’ve enjoyed them.
Matthew: There’s quite a few books in the Pern Universe. I’ve read most of them, actually. So, that’s great. And with Piers Anthony and the Xanth series, I just actually started reading those a couple months ago.
Jody: Oh you’ve got treats in store.
Matthew: Yes, I know, I didn’t realize all the puns and . . . I understand that you’ve actually written some humorous fantasies. I don’t know if they’re similar, but I thought the names were interesting. ‘Cause you’ve also written some books with Robert Asprin, with the Myth-Adventure Books. And we’ll talk about that in just a moment. But I wanted to talk a little bit about your Mythology Series?
Jody: Yes.
Matthew: Is there any correlation with the Myth-Adventure series and the Mythology series?
Jody: Because they were set in a college, I meant the titles to sound like text books. And that is why the first one is called Mythology 101. Like a course book. The similarity between Piers Anthony’s Xanth series and the Myth-Adventure series, if you will, is that I have a young eager teenager, starting out in life. And making all the kinds of mistakes you can make in a humorous fashion. And I suppose that is a sort of tie to it, but mine are set in a college, in central Illinois, and of course very few colleges that I know of in Illinois actually have little people living in the basement of the library.
Matthew: [Laughs] Little people, like dwarves, or like little fairies?
Jody: Well . . . leprechauns.
Matthew: Leprechauns? Okay.
Jody: And I wrote 4 books in that series. And I would love to be able to continue on with it someday.
Matthew: And I noticed that you did write one book this year, or it came out this year, A Forthcoming Wizard.
Jody:
It’s actually the second book in a duology the first book is called An Unexpected Apprentice and that’s as close to a fantasy epic as I have ever written.
Matthew: And that duology, is finished then, you have both of those books?
Jody: Yes.
Matthew: Good. I wanted to talk, just a little bit, about your work with Robert Asprin. Now I was actually very saddened to hear that he had passed on. That was just last year, I think.
Jody: I know.
Matthew: And I have to say the Myth-Adventure books, I remember reading those years ago, years, years ago. I think they were probably the first series that I ever read with humor in it. And I just remember those covers were quite interesting. And then I noticed that a lot of time seemed to go by . . . at least my library never picked any more up. And then the other day I was looking online and I was like, “Oh no, he passed on! I didn’t realize that.” And then I noticed that you had been co-authoring some books with him and might actually continue the series. How did you start writing with Robert Asprin? How did that come about?
Jody: Well because we were both writing humor. Now let me back track just a little bit. I had found the first Myth Adventures book, when I was just in college. They came out that long ago. And yes, there was a long hiatus between books 10 and 11 and we started talking about whether or not we should work together. We’d written about that in the preface for a couple of the books that have been re-published, as a matter of fact. How we decided that we should start working together, everybody kept saying, “Oh you two both write humor! You should work together!”
Matthew: You should do it together, yeah!
Jody: We sort of eyed each other suspiciously. ‘Cause while we were both funny, and while we both got along tremendously well, and we did. We both had our own way of doing things. But I had every hope that we could do it. I thought it would be huge fun because I was a fan of his. I loved Myth Adventures Books. Of course, the first book that we did together was not a Myth Adventures book, it was a solo book called License Invoked. And it involved two brand new characters and it was set in New Orleans and it had to do with spies, rock and roll and magic.
Matthew: Ahh.
Jody: And when Robert was having some issues about getting started back with the Adventure series. It’s funny how when you’ve left something alone for a little while, you sort of rev up again and go and rediscover all of your details and get back into the series. It was suggested that maybe I would work with him and I thought that this was a good idea. And Bob had trusted me by this time and thought it was a good idea. So, we broached the idea and once Bob was finished with, what actually was an original contract of 12 novels, we did actually begin to work together. And we talked about what would happen with the structure of the books if we followed on with the action that had occurred in the original 12, where he had left Skeev and the others. And he covered Skeev and Aahz in different books for a while. He thought that that would be interesting and get people interested again in the series, because there had been a gap in publication and he wanted to see if people would accept me as a collaborator. At first, naturally there was some resistance, with a few people, but most people were so happy to have more Myth-Adventures, that they accepted me, because Bob did.
Matthew: Yeah.
Jody: And I respect the series and I respect the characters and I’m a pretty good mimic. So having worked with a couple of other noted authors before, I was ready to work with Bob, and because it was his series, do the things that he thought would fit.
Matthew: Are there any plans in the future for another Myth-Adventures novel?
Jody: Oh, yes.
Matthew: And so you will be taking on that then. That’s great! Yeah, because I know that that’s one of the series that I think millions of people are familiar with. That’s one of those series that I’d hate to see go by and so I’m excited to see that it continue on.
Jody:
More than that . . . I have been given a contract by Ace Books to write the next in the series that Bob began and the second book was actually sent to the publisher not long before he died. And I actually did a copy on it, which is called Dragons and the main character is named Griffen McCandles. Who discovers that he is a hereditary dragon. They too are set in New Orleans, also before Katrina. So, I’ve been asked to write the third book. So, we’ll see how that goes. We had other projects that we were going to work on. A few new things, as well as more Myth-Adventures. So, I plan to carry on with them.
Matthew: Oh that’s great!
Jody: They’re too much fun, I love them, I miss Bob, but because the publisher is interested, well, who are we to say no?
Matthew: Yeah, yeah, don’t say no. I think that’s great. You know, I know there’s a lot of authors right now that are getting the opportunity to finish off series that were never finished because the authors had passed on, like the Myth-Adventure series, and The Wheel of Time Series is another one. And I just finished interviewing Eoin Colfer in the last segment, and he just finished up Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. So that’s exciting. I know that Brandon Sanderson, who is finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Times and I think I’m going to have him on the show. We’ll talk about that later, but that is exciting.
I’m so grateful to be able to speak with you Jody. I’ve been speaking with Jody Lynn Nye. Well, thank you so much for being on the radio show.
Jody: Thank you very much.
Matthew: Alright everyone, before we go to a commercial break, I thought I’d give you a little trivia. Robert Asprin, who started the Myth-Adventures series, died May 22, 2008, in bed, where he had been reading a Terry Pratchett novel. What a nice way to go! It makes you wonder, which novel was he reading? Don’t go away, Piers Anthony, best selling author of the Xanth series, is comin’ up next.
Bonus Question(s) that Didn't Air on the Live Radio Show
Matthew: Now Jody, let me ask you a bonus question here. The question I would ask, with the next book that’s coming out, is there anything you can tell us about the next Myth-Adventures book that you’ll be writing?
Jody: Ooh, uh . . . there are two outlines and the publisher is going to decide which one she would like to see first.
Matthew: Oh, ok, so you have two outlines, and they’ll just decide which one comes first and then the next one will come after.
Jody: Will be the one after.
Matthew: Oh, ok. Let me ask you another question. Do you have any other series in mind to write?
Jody: Well, I’m working on one now, as a matter of fact. I’m most of the way through a novel for Baen Books, a humorous, science fiction.
Matthew: So it will be kind of like the same vein of your Mythology Series, or is it totally different?
Jody: Well, if I was going to say it was like anything, I would say it’s an homage to P. G. Wodehouse.
Matthew: Oh, ok. Oh, and you said this would be science fiction, though. So, ok, your Mythology was fantasy. Do you have a name for your new book, the new series that you’re writing?
Jody: The series name, as I have sent to the publisher is The Fool of the Family. There’s a tradition in British families and noble families of the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries is to send the fool of the family to sea. And then if he doesn’t come back, well, no loss.
Matthew: No loss, because he was just the fool.
Jody: Exactly, you don’t trust him in government, you don’t send him to the priesthood, and you certainly don’t send him to run your farms and your estate. So, where he can do the least harm is where he’s under strict orders night and day.
Matthew: Yeah.
Jody: And if he rises to the rank of captain, well, it’s all by accident.
Matthew: I can see a lot of potential. That’s kind of a fun story. To have a character that . . . so I assume your main character is probably the fool, or what they assume is the fool.
Jody: Well, yes. He’s a cheerful, un-self-conscious soul, who has no idea really what people think of him. He’s a noble and in this universe nobles appear to be extremely useless. They don’t associate with the common man. They have a high allowance from the government and they really seem to be just wasting space. He finds being useful so different from his normal lifestyle.
Matthew: Yeah, well that is interesting. We’ll be looking out for that one, The Fool of the Family.
Jody: That’s the series name, but the title of the first book, at least . . . remember publishers get to change the titles if they want . . .
Matthew: Oh yeah.
Jody: The proposed title is View from the Imperium.
Matthew: Ok. And is there a time frame for that book? Have you finished writing it?
Jody: I have not finished writing it. It is due on Halloween.
Matthew: Halloween, ok.
Extra Material That was Cut from the Radio Show Because of Time Constraints
Matthew:
I notice that you did write one book this year, or it came out this year, A Forthcoming Wizard.
Jody:
Actually it’s the second book in a duology. The first book is called An Unexpected Apprentice. It is a book from Tor books and it’s available now in paperback. The second book, the second half of the story is A Forthcoming Wizard. And as close to a fantasy epic as I have ever written. Grand in the scale as in The Lord of the Rings, if I could be so bold. But my main character is a little girl, well, she’s short in stature, she is 17 years old, who finds herself in a situation where she needs to leave her home and go to a place that she finds to be safe and discovers that it is her responsibility to carry out this massive quest. But she has help, she has many people who help her, including a couple of wizards, mother and daughter, a female centaur who is a princess of her race, a couple of soldiers, a dwarvin merchant. I find it to be a lot of fun. She runs into all sorts of interesting people, who will help her or not help her, as the case may be.
Matthew:
And that duology is finished then, you have both of the books then.
