"No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge." -- Lynn Abbey
Lynn Abbey (born September 18, 1948; birth name Marilyn Lorraine Abbey) is an American author.
"A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.""During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.""Editors of open anthologies actively seek submissions from all comers, established and unknown. They are willing to read whatever the tide washes up at their feet.""For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.""I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.""I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.""I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.""I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.""I'm always trolling for trivia.""I'm dense when it comes to discouragement.""I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.""I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.""I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.""Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.""If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.""It took me about 12 years to reach my million-word mark. The challenge now is to continue to challenge myself.""It's been a long time since I've written old-fashioned sword and sorcery; I'm hoping it's like riding a bicycle.""It's possible to become so comfortable with one's style and structure that one ceases to grow.""My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.""Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.""Once you've invested hundreds of hours in creating a coherent universe, your story's grown to around a half-million words and can't be written as anything less than a trilogy.""One of my great passions is the collection of historical trivia.""Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.""That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me.""The money can be decent, but I really don't recommend the work-for-hire route as an entry into publishing. Too many things can go wrong.""There is nothing that compares to an unexpected round of applause.""When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.""When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery."
Born in Peekskill, New York, Abbey was daughter of Ronald Lionel (an insurance manager) and Doris Lorraine (a homemaker; maiden name, De Wees). She attended the University of Rochester, where she began as an astrophysics major. She earned a A.B. (1969) and an M.A. (1971) in European history, but shifted to computer programming as a profession "when my advisor pointed out that, given the natural rise and fall of demographic curves, tenured university faculty positions were going to be as scarce as hen's teeth for the next twenty-five years and my education was turning into an expensive hobby. (He was right, too.)" She had married Ralph Dressler July 14, 1969; they were divorced October 31, 1972. During this period she also became a member of science fiction fandom.
In 1976, after a stint as a programmer for insurance companies, and work on the state task force involved in documenting the New York City bankruptcy crisis, she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. In January 1977, she was injured in an automobile accident while going to pick up Gordon R. Dickson, who was to be a Guest of Honor at that year's ConFusion. The guilt-ridden Dickson volunteered to assist her by reading and critiqueing her work (she'd been writing since childhood). The manuscript he helped her with became Daughter of the Bright Moon.
Abbey began publishing in 1979 with Daughter of the Bright Moon and the short story "The Face of Chaos," part of a Thieves World shared world anthology.
On August 28, 1982 she married Robert Asprin, editor of the Thieves World books, and became his co-editor. She also contributed to other shared world series during the 1980s, including Heroes in Hell and Merovingen Nights.
Lynn Abbey wrote for TSR's Dark Sun Series starting with The Brazen Gambit. Further novels in the series include The Rise and Fall of a Dragon King, a novel exploring the topic of genocide, a central theme in the ancient history of Athas, the world on which the Dark Sun setting takes place. Along with Cinnabar Shadows, all three of Abbey's books written for the Athasian setting take place in and around the City-state of Urik.
Lynn Abbey's novels are best known for believably ugly anti-heroes doing the best that they can in incredibly brutal environments.
Abbey and Asprin divorced in 1993 and Abbey moved to Oklahoma City. She continued to write novels during this period, including original works as well as tie-ins to role playing games for TSR. In 2002, she returned to Thieves World with the novel Sanctuary and also began editing new anthologies, beginning with Turning Points. She has lived in Leesburg, Florida since 1997.
