James D. Macdonald

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James D. Macdonald
DoyleMacDonald.png
Jim Macdonald and Debra Doyle at Readercon
BornJames Douglas Ignatius Macdonald
(1954-02-22) February 22, 1954 (age 71)
White Plains, New York, U.S.
Pen nameRobyn Tallis, Nicholas Adams, Victor Appleton, Douglas Morgan, Martin Delrio
OccupationWriter
Period1990s to present
Genre fantasy, science fiction, mystery
Website
madhousemanor.com
Jim Macdonald reads at Boskone 43, 2006 Jim Macdonald does wireless on the go, Boskone 43.jpg
Jim Macdonald reads at Boskone 43, 2006

James Douglas Ignatius Macdonald (born 1954) is an American author and critic who lives in New Hampshire. He frequently collaborated with his late wife Dr. Debra Doyle. He works in several genres, concentrating on fantasy, but also writing science fiction, and mystery and media tie-ins. [1]

Contents

Biography

Macdonald was born in 1954, and raised in White Plains, New York. He attended the University of Rochester [ citation needed ], and went on to serve in the US Navy for fifteen years.[ citation needed ] He has been writing professionally since the early 1990s and has published 35 novels.

Educational work

Macdonald is well known for his work in educating aspiring authors, particularly for his advice on avoiding literary scams. Early in his career, he was asked by such an author how much he had paid to have his books published, and in response began a campaign of educating other writers about the problems of vanity publishers. As part of this campaign, he coined Yog's Law, [2] which states "Money should flow toward the author." This rule is named after "Yog Sysop", a nickname of Macdonald that refers to Yog-Sothoth. It is often quoted by professional authors such as John Scalzi [3] and Teresa Nielsen Hayden [4] when giving advice on finding an agent and getting published.

Atlanta Nights and PublishAmerica

One target of his campaign is PublishAmerica, a company that claims not to be a vanity publisher but a "traditional publisher" that accepts or rejects books based on their quality. Macdonald organized a group of professional authors to test whether that company was actually reading any submissions for clarity and realism before accepting them. One day after Macdonald issued a press release announcing that PublishAmerica had accepted a manuscript that was created to be as bad as possible, the company withdrew the offer to publish it. [5] [6]

Awards and honors

Knight's Wyrd was awarded the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children's Literature, [7] 1992, and named to the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age list in 1993. [8] In 1997, he was awarded Best Young-Adult Science Fiction by the Science Fiction Chronicle for Groogleman .[ citation needed ]

Select bibliography

This bibliography is based on Macdonald's entry on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. [1]

Novels

Novels with Debra Doyle

Circle of Magic series, with Debra Doyle

Mageworlds series

Written with Debra Doyle, Mageworlds is a space opera novel series originally published in the 1990s and re-issued as e-books in 2012.

  1. The Price of the Stars, Tor Books (New York), 1992. ISBN   978-0812517040
  2. Starpilot's Grave, Tor, 1993. ISBN   978-0812517057
  3. By Honor Betray'd, Tor, 1994. ISBN   978-0812517064
  4. The Gathering Flame, Tor, 1995. ISBN   978-0812534955
  5. The Long Hunt, Tor, 1996. ISBN   978-0812534962
  6. The Stars Asunder, Tor, 1999. ISBN   978-0312864101
  7. A Working of Stars, Tor, 2002. ISBN   978-0312864118

Bad Blood series, with Debra Doyle

Under joint pseudonym "Martin Delrio", with Debra Doyle

Short stories

References

  1. 1 2 James D. Macdonald at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
  2. "Yog Sysop - Yog's Law".
  3. Scalzi, John (22 August 2005). "Amazon Shorts".
  4. Nielsen Hayden, Teresa (1 July 2003). "Follow the Money".
  5. "SF Authors Sting Publisher". SciFi.com. Archived from the original on 2005-02-17.
  6. "The Making of Atlanta Nights". Science Fiction Writers of American (SFWA). Archived from the original on April 2, 2014.
  7. "Complete list of Mythopoeic Award Winners". Mythopoeic Society. Archived from the original on 2007-02-06.
  8. "Knight's Wyrd - Awards, Reviews and Excerpt". Archived from the original on 2006-09-27.
  9. "Series: Horror High".
  10. "Nicholas Adams".
  11. "Lincoln's Sword". Harper Collins Publishers. Archived from the original on July 31, 2010.