Lynn Abbey was born in New York's Hudson River Valley, in the city of Peekskill, during the so-called "baby boom." Peekskill is also the birthplace of Mel Gibson, PeeWee Herman, and one of the first nuclear reactors in the US. The Gibsons moved to Australia shortly after Mel was born. PeeWee and Lynn just kept on drinking that supercharged water.
Family legends confirm that she's been a storyteller pretty much from the moment she learned to talk. She quickly learned that character, pacing, and plot were important to any work of fiction, but that nothing was more important than believability. Parents cannot be convinced that there are monsters under the bed, but they will spend hours looking for mice or squirrels. She discovered her father's typewriter long before she learned to read and decided that any machine which had so many moving parts and made such amazing noises was going to be a major part of her life.
Lynn has been an only child most of her life and filled her world with imaginary friends. She didn't play with them but watched them play with each other, then wrote about them. She kept this up until she got to college, the University of Rochester, class of 1969, where the real world was, at long last, more interesting than anything she'd imagined. At first she majored in hard science—astrophysics—but migrated to the humanities because they understood that life did not begin until noon and never scheduled 8AM organic chemistry labs. She earned two degrees in European history and was well on her way to a Ph.D. when her 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 25 years and her education was turning into an expensive hobby. (He was right, too.)
He suggested Lynn get a real job, so she became a computer programmer, which in those days (after dinosaurs, before IBM 360's) was a wide-open, hands-on field. Companies were eagerly hiring warm bodies to computerize decades, even centuries, of handwritten data.
Lynn vanished into the dusty archives of a huge insurance company and might have remained there forever, but fate—masquerading as the New York City Bankruptcy Crisis of 1976—intervened. The powers that were, in recognition for her tolerance of dust, silverfish, and the occasional mouse, made Lynn the least significant member of the state task force charged with deciphering the city's arcane pension funds. Her job: take a forklift full of key-punched cards— representing a quarter century of police, fire, and sanitation force records which had been stashed in leaky closets all over City Hall—and load them onto "modern" magnetic tape! (Deleting, of course, the ones the mice, roaches, and whatnot had mangled beyond all electronic interpretation.) When she was finished, senior members of the task force would prove actuarially what everyone already knew intuitively: there was no earthly way New York City could meet its obligations.
Throughout that long winter and spring, while decoding one ancient algorithm after another, Lynn contemplated life in the Big Apple without police, without firefighters and—especially—without garbage collection. The state did eventually decide to bail the city out; she decided to bail out of the city. She headed west and got as far as Ann Arbor, Michigan, where bagels were fresh, lox was airlifted daily, and the sky was frequently blue and rarely green.
Still, it took one more major turn of events to get Lynn back to her childhood dreams. In January of 1977 she headed for the airport to fetch Gordon Dickson back to Ann Arbor for the annual science fiction convention. The temperature hadn't seen the plus side of zero degrees Fahrenheit for a week, and the brake cylinders on her vintage VW Bug finally said "enough." They gave up the ghost on the airport access road. Lynn came to in an emergency room. The less said about the balance of that afternoon, the better.
Except that Gordie felt guilty: Someone he didn't know from Adam had very nearly made the ultimate sacrifice to get him to the convention on time. He felt a karmic need to make a sacrifice in return and offered to read such prose as Lynn could manage to produce. It was an offer that she couldn't refuse. Propped up by pillows and crutches, and still suffering the hallucinations of a fractured skull, she began working (feverishly) on Daughter of the Bright Moon.
Poor Gordie. He would later confess that Lynn Abbey was, beyond doubt, the least-promising would-be writer ever to cross his bows. He swore he did his best to discourage her, and that he wasn't at all subtle, but Lynn never got the message. She'd been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become what she'd always dreamed of being, and a simple thing like a style charitably described as "academically turgid" wasn't going to get in her way.
Fortunately for Lynn, by the time she was rid of her crutches and Gordie might have considered his karmic debt fully repaid, with interest, she'd taken his blunt lessons to heart and incorporated them into Daughter. Gordie sat back after what must have been the ninth or tenth rewrite of chapter one and said, with a look of astonishment, that it was time to start chapter two.
The rest, one might say, is history. A year after her accident, with Daughter finished but advisedly left behind, Gordie squired Lynn through the editorial gauntlet at the 1978 Boscon. She was initiated into the ranks of soon-to-be-published writers and never looked back. There've been many ups and downs since 1978. Any creative lifestyle can be categorized as "life without any visible means of support.'" She married Bob Asprin and spent most of the 1980's as a step-mother—a role which, especially for a fantasy writer, came with a whole lot of emotional baggage.
Since completing Daughter started, she's published over two dozen novels. She also wrote for and eventually wound up editing the Thieves' World shared-world anthology series which ran for twelve volumes in the 1980s and has resurrected for the third millennium. Courtesy of TW, Lynn has been invited into other shared-world anthologies—often in exchange for the "inside scoop" on how to handle story continuity, not to mention egos and deadlines. She has also navigated the tricky shoals of translating narrative prose into role-playing games.
In 1997, after several delightful and productive years spent in Oklahoma in a household of writers, Lynn decided it was time to get back to her family on the eastern side of the Mississippi and moved to Central Florida. Since arriving in that stranger-than-fiction state, she has written the Orion's Children series (Out of Time, Behind Time, Taking Time, and Down Time) about a librarian who belatedly discovers that she has the talent (and obligation) to travel back in history to free people from curses.
For years, Lynn had said, "Pigs will fly before Thieves' World comes out of freeze-dry mode. In 1998, a record-setting swath of tornadoes swept through Oklahoma, devastating neighborhoods, cities, and at least one commercial hoggery. Since she'd never specified that the pigs had to survive being airborne, the time appeared right to bring Thieves' World back. The new millennium has seen a "bridge" novel, new anthologies, and some reprints. In addition, Green Ronin, an award-winning game-design company licensed Thieves' World for a series of fantasy role-playing supplements.
In 2006, TOR published Rifkind's Challenge, a long-simmering sequel to Lynn's first novel, Daughter of the Bright Moon. Currently, she's hard at work on two projects, one of them is "top secret" and the other is a contemporary fantasy inspired by the not-quite-reality of central Florida.