Margaret Weis

Margaret Edith Weis (born March 16, 1948) is an American fantasy and science fiction author of dozens of novels and short stories.

At TSR, Inc., she teamed with Tracy Hickman to create the Dragonlance role-playing game (RPG) world.

She is founding CEO and owner of Sovereign Press, Inc and Margaret Weis Productions, licensing several popular television and movie franchises to make RPG series in addition to their own.

Margaret Weis was born on March 16, 1948, in Independence, Missouri, where she was raised.

She discovered heroic fantasy fiction while studying at the University of Missouri (MU).

She conscientiously avoided buying unauthorized publications of his work, and she related the wars in his fictional world to those in the real world of the 1960s.

She said, "I read Tolkien when it made its first big sweep in the colleges back in 1966. A girlfriend of mine gave me a copy of the books while I was in summer school at MU. I literally couldn't put them down! I never found any other fantasy I liked, and just never read any fantasy after Tolkien."

She graduated from the University of Missouri in 1970 with a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing and literature.

Weis recalled, "Of course, my mother knew I was going to starve with such a worthless degree", so her mother got her a job as a proofreader at a small publishing company in neighboring Kansas City, Missouri.

There, she ascended to editor, learned all about the book industry, and found an agent—crediting the job as an unusually good start for an author.

She started writing for the low-paying juvenile book market by appealing to librarians with her high-quality, well-researched books.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she wrote children's books about computer graphics, robots, the history of Thanksgiving, and an adventure book at a second-grade reading level for prisoners with low literacy levels.

From 1972 to 1983 she worked for Herald Publishing House as advertising director and subsequently as director of Independence Press, Herald Publishing's trade division from 1981 to 1983.

Weis's first book is a biography of the outlaws Frank and Jesse James, because Frank had been buried in a cemetery near her childhood school in Independence.

In 1983, Weis applied for a job as a game editor at TSR, Inc. that she saw advertised in Publishers Weekly.

TSR turned her down for that position, but hired her as a book editor.

After two years of development, TSR released the game module Dragons of Despair in March 1984 and the novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight in November 1984.

TSR had doubts about the finished novel's sales potential, and attempted to order 30,000 copies before ordering the minimum print run of 50,000.

The novel's success prompted TSR to publish more copies to meet demand.

The novel was written after the completion of the first Dragonlance game modules.

Weis and Hickman found this constraining and made the novel too episodic, so they reversed the process for the next books and completed the novels before the related modules were written.

She stayed in the book division, leaving the company as an independent author in 1986.

One of her first assignments at TSR was to help coordinate, in a chance meeting with TSR colleague Tracy Hickman, Project Overlord, which was to include a novel and three AD&D modules.

Weis and Hickman plotted the novel and hired an author to flesh out story ideas but who lacked grasp of the characters or plots.

Having "lived with those characters for months" and threatened by deadline, the two saved the project.

She said, "By that time, [Hickman] and I were so into the project that we felt we had to write it."

Project Overlord soon became known as Dragonlance.

With 4 million sales of the first book in the US and UK, it grew into a trilogy of novels, called the Dragonlance Chronicles, and 15 linked modules.

Jean Black, managing editor of TSR's book department, selected Weis and Hickman to write the series.

She said, "To my mind, what made the project so successful was that everyone was involved in it, excited about it, and believed in it."

Weis and Hickman also authored the Dragonlance Legends trilogy, published in 1986.

Their Dragonlance products included novels, game supplements, short stories, art books, and calendars.

The two started moonlighting as book authors, for four hours each evening and through every weekend.

Several successful books afforded them to quit TSR and begin writing full-time in 1986.

Having left TSR in 1986, Weis and Hickman continued as a writing team.

According to the Kansas City Star profile of major local authors "transformed" by pioneering fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien, the duo sought to recapture the reality-grounded and humanized experience of Tolkien literature but without copying or emulating it, so a reader could imagine meeting their original magical characters in a real place like a bus stop and conversing using pronounceable names.

She attributed their writing partnership's longevity to specialization, where Hickman was the world builder and storyteller who defines "when the moon rises and which way the winds blow", and she brought characters and substance.

He then untangled her unsolvable situations.

In 1999, Pyramid magazine named Weis one of The Millennium's Most Influential Persons, saying she and Hickman are "basically responsible for the entire gaming fiction genre".

In 2002, she was inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame in part for Dragonlance.