Margaret Weis's Blog

Hi, all,

You can read an excerpt from the last in the Dragonship's series, Doom of the Dragon. The book is due out January, 2016.

http://torforgeblog.com/2015/11/03/sn...

Margaret

Hi, all,

Tracy found this video in storage. It's the first reader's theater we did at Gen Con in 1984 to promote Dragons of Autumn Twilight. The book had not yet been published.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kVJ2S...

Our deadline for Tracy and I to submit the first draft for Dragons of Autumn Twilight was June, 1984. We started writing in March, although we had been living in the world of Krynn and adventuring with the companions for months and, as I remember, we came pretty close to meeting the deadline. It was around this time that the TSR legal department wanted to review the ms to make sure there were no trademark violations. Now, to understand this, when a company registers a trademark, they have to state whether the word(s) will be used as a noun, adjective, etc. Dragonlance was registered as an adjective. (Dragonlance Chronicles, Dragonlance Legends, etc.). So, legal came back to us to say that we couldn't used the word "dragonlance" as a noun in the novel because it would weaken the trademark. They wanted us to refer to the weapon as a "dragonlance lance". They were serious! The head of the book department, Jean Blashfield Black, went to battle. In the end, legal capitulated and Theros was able to forge the dragonlance, not the dragonlance lance.

So in April, thirty years ago, Tracy and I were growing increasingly worried about the DL novel which was being written by another author. None of us liked his work. We were in a meeting when Michael Gray, board game designer for TSR (he just retired as Hasbro VP) said, "I think Margaret and Tracy should write the novel." We began to think so, too. We took a weekend and wrote the Prologue and the first five chapters. That Monday, we took our work to the head of the book department, Jean Black, and told her we thought we should write the book. Jean read what we had written, then came back to us and said, "Wow! This is what we want!" We immediately set to work.

If you visit the Facebook page, Dragonlance Legacy, I have posted photographs of a chapter from the original manuscript with my notes.

The first Dragonlance adventure module, Dragons of Despair, by Tracy Hickman, was published thirty years ago this month. In order to help promote the line, I wrote a short story for the March, 1984 issue of Dragon Magazine about my favorite character, Raistlin. The story was "The Test of the Twins". Interesting note: the editor of Dragon thought my original ending for the story was too dark, so I had to change it to make it "happy". (The story was later published with the original ending in a DL anthology.) The story generated more fan mail than Dragon had ever received about a piece of fiction and was one reason Tracy and I eventually decided to write the novel. This issue of Dragon also featured one of artist Denis Beauvais' famous "chess" pieces of cover art. Denis would later go on to draw the chapter headings for Dragons of Autumn Twilight.
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n October, 1983, recently divorced, I packed up two kids and three cats, borrowed money from my parents, and moved to Lake Geneva. The furniture and our clothes were late arriving. The check from parents took two weeks to clear, so we lived off my daughter's birthday money. Ray bought a dress for me so I would have something to wear on my first day at TSR. I went from being one of the youngest employees at my old job to one of the oldest at TSR. (I was thirty-five!) But when I entered that building and saw Zeb's cubicle decorated with hundreds of Transformers and the art department with the hand waving at me from the toilet in the middle of the room, then I met for the first time with Tracy Hickman and Michael Williams and the rest of the Dragonlance team, I knew I was home.

In 1983, TSR was having phenomenal success with the Endless Quest books. Jean Blashfield Black, head of TSR's book department, was looking for a book editor who was also a writer, not only to edit these books, but also to write them. She contacted an agent she knew in Milwaukee, Ray Peekner, to ask if any of his clients might be interested. He said he had one writer (me!) who had already submitted an application to TSR. Jean went over to the game division, found my application, and gave me a call. I traveled to Lake Geneva for an interview. Jean hired me that day. Among my duties would be to edit the new line of Heartquest books (good idea, but didn't succeed) and to be the book editor for a new project: Dragonlance. (To be continued.)

Picking up where I left off yesterday, Ray told me the sad tale of Pug-Wud-Gee Land. Seems this guy sent him this terrible ms. Ray sent back a rejection letter. The guy forged Ray's letterhead, forged his signature and sent out copies of Pug-Wud-Gee Land to publishers all over the US! Ray had to call up editors to apologize! Ray and I continued our correspondence and he offered to be my agent. He sold several nonfiction juvenile books for me. But more than that, Ray became a really dear friend. Now, remember when I said he lived in Milwaukee. He knew about TSR and he knew Jean Blashfield Black, the head of the book department at TSR. So when Jean called to ask him . . . (To be continued.)

To continue yesterday's story, I need to backtrack a little to introduce you to my agent and friend, the late Ray Peekner, who plays a major part in the history of DL. I was an aspiring writer in need of an agent in the early 80s. I worked an editor at the time for a very small publisher in Kansas City. We published "Missouriana" books for kids. No agent ever bothered to contact us, so I was amazed to receive a letter and a ms from the Ray Peekner Literary agency out of New York and Milwaukee. The ms was titled "Pug-Wud-Gee Land" and Mr. Peekner promised that it was greater than Lord of the Rings. I read it and it was the worst writing ever! I was so angry at Mr. Peekner, I sent him a letter that read, "This is awful. May an orc eat you for breakfast." To my chagrin, I received a letter back from Mr. Peekner! I was mortified, certain I had been blacklisted by agencies everywhere. (To be continued.)

Hi, friends!

This year is the 30th Anniversary of the publication of Dragons of Autumn Twilight. To commemorate, Tracy and i started a Facebook page called Dragonlance Legacy talking about how Dragonlance came to be. I've been posting some of my history there and I thought I would share it with you. Here's the first installment.

Happy 40th Birthday, D&D! I first played the game in 1982. I had read about it in an article in Publishers Weekly which described the phenomenal rise of TSR, Inc. I thought D&D sounded like a great game to play with my kids. I found a copy of the DMG at a hobby store and was immediately utterly baffled by the rules. A friend of mine offered to run the game. My kids and I had a wonderful time. I continued to be intrigued by the company. In 1983, when TSR ran an ad in PW looking for game editors, I applied for the job. They sent me a games editing test, which I flunked since to this day I still don't understand the rules. I was turned down for the job. However, due to fate, serendipity, or the gods of Krynn, that is not the end of the tale . . . (to be continued).