Kathy Tyers



Kathy Tyers is the author of The Truce at Bakura and Balance Point. She also wrote the short stories We Don’t Do Weddings: The Band’s Tale for Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and A Time to Mourn, a Time to Dance: Oola's Tale for Tales from Jabba's Palace.

Biography
Kathy Tyers was born in Long Beach, California on July 21, 1952. She was the first child of Dr. H.C. Moore, a dentist who served during WWII as a test pilot, and Barbara Putnam Moore, flutist. Barbara Moore played with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the Twentieth-Century Fox sound stage orchestra, and the Long Beach Symphony. Dr. Moore recently retired as founder/director of the Shasta Jazz festival in Redding, California.

As Kathy grew up, her first "heroes" were Peter Pan, Robin Hood, Paul McCartney, and J.R.R. Tolkien. That mixture of music and heroic fantasy plainly left its mark. In second and third grade, and again in junior high and high school, she wrote adventure stories -- just as a hobby -- and then set them aside as school work and other interests demanded her time.

During Kathy’s teenage years, her parents bought a summer home in Montana. She was dragged north annually, with all of her protests ignored, until she fell in love with the place. She attended Montana State University, where she took her first degree in microbiology. At MSU, she met her husband Mark (in the marching band, of all places). Kathy worked as a technician in the microbiology department while Mark completed a degree in music education and another in plant & soil science. Then she returned to college and became certified to teach grades K-12. Shortly after their church started a private school, she took over the lower grades.

This was about the time when the first Star Wars movie was released. Kathy was the only teacher at Christian Center School with a cereal-box decal of Luke Skywalker on her filing cabinet, and she used the Star Wars soundtrack album to show her students how musical themes can represent events and characters.

In 1979, Kathy retired from teaching to start a family. The family (Matthew) arrived in 1981. He was one of those unbelievable toddlers who took long naps and enjoyed playing alone, so in 1983 she set her electric typewriter on her kitchen table and started writing a book -- just for fun, like in the old days.

At her father-in-law’s suggestion, she joined a writers group where she learned to critique, self-edit, and submit a novel to publishers. She collected one form-letter rejection, one highly encouraging personal rejection letter, and then sold FIREBIRD to Bantam Spectra Books. FIREBIRD was followed by FUSION FIRE, CRYSTAL WITNESS, and SHIVERING WORLD.

She was struggling with a near-future novel that was to be set in Montana, but which was going nowhere, when her Bantam editor called and asked if she’d like to be a Star Wars writer. Kathy’s answer: "Let me think about that ... yes!" With "Star Wars" on the front cover, naturally it hit the bestseller list. Life got hectic, exciting, and generally crazy-making for a while.

Later, after a few more novels, Star Wars came again. -- this time from Del Rey Books and Shelly Shapiro, the same editor who wrote that personal, encouraging rejection letter for FIREBIRD. Star Wars: New Jedi Order: Balance Point was a 2000 release.