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Born in New York City, she grew up in Roosevelt, Long Island. After school, she studied nursing and practiced as a psychiatric nurse for two years until 1976, when she moved to California and worked as an assistant to David Gerrold. Her first novel was published by Dell Books in 1979; Gerrold wrote an "overture" to that novel, on the grounds that he'd rather be making overtures than introductions to Duane. She subsequently worked as a freelance writer. In 1981 she moved to Pennsylvania. She married Northern Irish author Peter Morwood in 1987; they moved to the United Kingdom and then to Ireland, where she currently resides in County Wicklow.

Young Wizards

A short story within the same universe, "Uptown Local", has also been published as part of Jane Yolen's Dragons and Dreams anthology, and a mp3 of Duane reading it is freely available from her website.

Feline Wizards

The series focuses on cat-wizards, who maintain the worldgates that wizards use for travel between the sheaf of canonical universes. They take place in the same setting as the Young Wizards novels.

1. (Published in the UK as )

In December 2005, Duane proposed to her fans that they fund a third novel in the series, The Big Meow. After funding the project viawhole-book subscriptions, per-chapter threshold pledges, merchandising, "put something in the kitty" donations, and $2,900 in challenge grants, Duane wrote, over a span of two and a half years, seven of the book's 12 chapters. No new chapters have been published since July 2008.

Adult Wizards

Books about adult wizards set in the same universe of the Young Wizards series.

• Short Circuit (projected) [1]
• "Theobroma" featured in Wizards, Inc. (November 2007) [2]

Alternate Universes

The Young Wizards universe contains canonical alternate universes (So You Want to Be a Wizard and To Visit the Queen are good examples: the protagonists travel to alternate universes to solve problems there).

• Stealing the Elf-King's Roses (ISBN 0-446-60983-8) is set in a sheaf of universes originally mentioned in Nita's studies in So You Want To Be A Wizard.

The Middle Kingdoms

Also known as the Tale of the Five, this high fantasy series has been awaiting completion since 1992. The books center on some of the same themes as her better-known Young Wizards series; those who wield the Blue Fire have many of the same responsibilities as the wizards and fight the same battle against entropy. In So You Want to Be a Wizard Nita's wizardry manual is written by "Hearnssen", a reference to the protagonist of The Door Into Fire, Herewiss s'Hearn (son of Hearn), so it may be that the Middle Kingdoms are part of the same sheaf of universes as the Young Wizards setting. Adding to this, one interdimensional portal in The Door into Fire appears to open over New York City. Unlike Duane's children's books, however, the Tale of the Five series deals openly with issues of alternative sexuality. Within the Middle Kingdoms, bisexuality and group marriage are the norm. Duane is working on the final volume. The Door into Fire and The Door into Shadow have an omnibus reprint called Tale of Five: The Sword and the Dragon. [3]

1. The Door into Fire (1979)
2. The Door into Shadow (1984)
3. The Door into Sunset (1992)
4. The Door into Starlight (to be written)

Star Trek

She has also written a number of Star Trek novels:

• Original Series
1. (omnibus, containing Spock's World and A. C. Crispin's Sarek)
2. Rihannsu
1. (co-written with husband Peter Morwood)
2. An omnibus of the first four Rihannsu novels, containing minor tweaks for consistency and reediting Swordhunt and Honor Blade.
• Next Generation

Duane also shares story credit on the TNG episode "Where No One Has Gone Before" with Michael Reaves.

Harbinger

The Harbinger Trilogy, published by Wizards of the Coast, is set in the Star*Drive universe. While Duane is not the only author to write for this universe, she was the first.

Spider-Man

Duane wrote a trilogy of Spider-Man novels, The Venom Factor, for Byron-Preiss Multimedia from 1994 to 1998. The trilogy was composed of:

Guardians of the Three

(written with Peter Morwood)

SeaQuest DSV

Space Cops

(written with Peter Morwood)

X-COM

X-Men

Net Force

Co-authored with Tom Clancy and Steve PieczenikVirtual VandalsOne Is the Loneliest NumberEnd GameSafe HouseDeathworldRunawaysDeath Match

Omnitopia

Short Stories

• "Parting Gifts" featured in Flashing Swords! #5: Demons and Daggers (1981), and released for free on her website as part of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day
• "Lior and the Sea" featured in Moonsinger's Friends (1986)
• "Apparitions" featured in The Further Adventures of Superman (1993)
• "The Dovrefell Cat" featured in Xanadu 2 (1995)
• "Don't Put That in Your Mouth, You Don't Know Where It's Been" featured in Don't Forget Your Space Suit, Dear (1996)
• "Recensions" featured in Amazing Magazine (1998)
• "Blank Check" in On Crusade: More Tales of the Knights Templar (1998)
• "1-900-nodream" featured in Perchance to Dream (2000)
• "Night Whispers" featured in Star Trek: Enterprise Logs (2000)
• "Herself" featured in "Emerald Magic" (2004)
• "The Fix" (2006)
• "Goths and Robbers" featured in the Doctor Who anthology The Quality of Leadership (2008)
• "The House" featured in Witch High (2008)

Comics

• "Ill Wind", five part graphic novel/miniseries for STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, DC Comics, New York: Autumn 1995-Spring 1996.
• "The Tale of Prince Ivan the Not-Too-Experienced", six-part comic script for THE DREAMERY, Epic Comics, December 1987 through August 1988.
• "The Last Word", STAR TREK #28: single-issue comic script for DC Comics, NYC, April 1986.
• "Double Blind", STAR TREK #24-25: two-part (comedy) comic script for DC Comics, NYC, Jan/Feb 1986.
• "The Misadventures of Prince Ivan." About Comics. February 2011. ISBN 978-1936404018.

Other prose works

Duane has recently made available in various e-formats a previously unpublished book which was sold to at least two European publishers, but never actually brought out due to internal restructuring at one publishing house (Corgi) and the sale of another (Heyne Verlag). The novel, A Wind from the South, is the first of a projected trilogy telling the story of a young girl born in the 11th century in a remote region of the Alps. This girl slowly discovers that she is the intended physical avatar of an exiled Roman goddess, while (as she grows) she becomes caught up in the political turmoil of William Tell's time. The book can be downloaded in DRM-free PDF, .LIT and .PDB versions.

Duane was also responsible for a novelization of UFO Defense, and for prose adaptations of several scripts from The Outer Limits. She has also written numerous short stories, about equally divided between fantasy and science fiction, which have appeared in various anthologies and collections over the last twenty years.

Duane has worked in television since the early 1980s, initially becoming involved in script work at the Hanna-Barbera animation studio (now Cartoon Network). After writing numerous scripts for such series as Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, Captain Caveman, Space Stars, Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Biskitts, and Laverne and Shirley in the Army, she moved on to work in development and serve as a staff writer at Filmation, and in 1985 was hired to story-edit the DiC animated series Dinosaucers. During this period she also wrote scripts for Sunbow Productions (Glo Friends, Transformers, and My Little Pony) and Walt Disney Productions (Duck Tales). In 1986, she co-wrote (with Michael Reaves) the script of one of the earliest episodes of The Next Generation, "Where No One Has Gone Before".

In the early 1990s Duane was brought on board as the head writer on the BBC Television educational series Science Challenge. Shortly thereafter she co-wrote (with her husband) scripts for The Animated Series and for Gargoyles. She also wrote the screenplay for the 1996 space adventure game Privateer 2 - The Darkening, which starred Clive Owen, Christopher Walken, Jürgen Prochnow and Mathilda May. Other screen work from that period includes the screenplay for the Space Island One episode "Not In My Back Yard" (1998—1999).

In 2003, after doing nearly four years' development work with the production company Tandem Communications of Munich, Germany, Duane and Peter Morwood co-wrote the script for the German TV miniseries Die Nibelungen. The miniseries aired in Germany on the Sat.1 network in late November 2004, and a feature version (titled Sword of Xanten) screened in the UK in December 2004. A "megafeature" cut of the entire miniseries was aired on Channel Four television in the UK in December 2005. The miniseries aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in the US in late March 2006 under the title The Dragon King. The miniseries has also been released on DVD in the US and numerous other markets, under various titles (the previous US title was Curse of the Ring).

Duane was also the co-author of the Barbie movie Fairytopia.

An adaptation of So You Want to be a Wizard is currently in the works.

• "Midnight Snack" (Cassette version): Award for Excellence in Education from Media & Methods Magazine, 1987.
• The Door Into Fire: Two-time John W. Campbell Award nominee for best new writer.
• "Young Wizards" series: special commendation in the Anne Spencer Lindbergh Prize in Children's Literature, 2003

" So You Want to Be a Wizard" got the Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers award, 1984.

• Wizard's Dilemma: Mythopoeic award nominee, 2002.
• Wizards at War: Mythopoeic award nominee, 2006.