Diane Duane

Diane Duane (born May 18, 1952) is an American science fiction and fantasy author, long based in Ireland. Her works include the Young Wizards young adult fantasy series and the Rihannsu Star Trek novels.

Born in New York City, she grew up in Roosevelt, Long Island. After school, she studied nursing and practiced as a psychiatric nurse for two years until 1976, when she moved to California and worked as an assistant to David Gerrold. Her first novel was published by Dell Books in 1979; Gerrold wrote an "overture" to that novel, stating he'd rather be making overtures than introductions to Duane. She subsequently worked as a freelance writer. In 1981, she moved to Pennsylvania.

She married Northern Irish author Peter Morwood in 1987; they later moved to the United Kingdom and then to Ireland, where they resided in Grangecon, County Wicklow.

A short story within the same universe, "Uptown Local", has also been published as part of Jane Yolen's Dragons and Dreams anthology, and a podcast of Duane reading it is freely available from her website. It also appears in the twentieth anniversary edition of So You Want to Be a Wizard.

In February 2011, Duane announced she would be releasing new versions of the first 4 books in the series, updating the technology used in the books, fixing some timeline issues within the series, and overall making the series more appealing to contemporary young adult readers. The first of the series would be available in June 2011, initially in ebook format, with the next three books to follow in the succeeding months and all these to have new ISBNs, with the publisher switching to the revised editions with new covers around the time the next book in the series is released.

The series, in the same setting as the Young Wizards novels, focuses on cat-wizards, who maintain the worldgates that wizards use for travel between the sheaf of canonical universes.

In December 2005, Duane proposed to her fans that they fund a third novel in the series, The Big Meow. After funding the project via whole-book subscriptions, per-chapter threshold pledges, merchandising, "put something in the kitty" donations, and $2,900 in challenge grants, Duane wrote, over a span of two and a half years, seven of the book's 13 chapters. No new chapters were published between July 2008 and February 2011, but on February 2, 2011, Duane announced the project's completion and posted the remaining chapters for subscribers between then and the 15th.

Books about adult wizards set in the same universe of the Young Wizards series.