The first story Jess Lebow wrote was about a young boy who was late for school because his tennis shoes had gone for a run all by themselves. That was in the third grade. His mother still has the hand-written first draft (in case you're interested in the movie rights). Over the years, Jess has developed a love for telling people stories, which led him to get a degree in creative writing. He might be embarrassed to tell you that the first piece of writing that he managed to get published was a poem entitled Lindsey has Community Hair. Though he's not much for poetry anymore, he still likes that poem. Over the next year, Jess published four more poems. He still has copies of all the little chapbooks they appeared in. One had the picture of a naked woman on the cover. That was his favorite when he was twenty-one. (It might still be today.)
Not long after his first few published works, Jess started his own literary magazine called Demos. The day the first issue came off the printing press was one of the best of his life. Though the magazine eventually died due to a long string of bad luck, including losing his co-editor and his distributor, he wouldn't trade the experience.
At the same time Jess was creating Demos, he got sucked into playing a new card game called Magic: The Gathering. He felt tremendous guilt when he used the money he had budgeted for school books to instead buy foil packs for this tradable game. But it was his well-honed collection of those cards that eventually got him his job editing the Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons novel lines for Wizards of the Coast. Years later, the bulk of his collection of cards long gone, Jess still finds the time to play a game or two over at the local pizza parlor. On a good day, he can squeeze in a game between ordering and when the pizza arrives.
Jess has published four novels (Master of Chains, Wind of War, and The Darksteel Eye under his own name, and Return of the Damned as T.H. Lain), and his fifth, Obsidian Ridge, is due out in April 2008. He has nine short stories to his credit, one of which (Assassin's Shadow) won a People's Choice Award in 2004. He's also done a substantial amount of publishing online. At last count, there were over two hundred online articles and stories floating around in cyberspace with his name on them.
In the midst of his rigorous publishing schedule, Jess also found the time to be the World Designer and story writer for the #1 selling online RPGs Guild Wars and Guild Wars Factions—an opportunity that arose out of his work with Magic and Wizards of the Coast. The founders of the company that produced Guild Wars were huge Magic junkies back in the day. So much so, that when the time came for them to begin creating the story for their new game, they came looking for Jess. It worked out well for both of them.
More recently, Jess has taken up the creative reigns at Flying Lab Software as Content Director for the Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO. He spends his days writing dialogue for the game, fiction for the website, scripts for voice work, and managing the content team. And when he gets the time, he puts on his virtual pirate persona and sets sail across the Caribbean, blasting ships and chasing booty.
Writing has been a passion of Jess's ever since he first put pen to paper way back in the third grade. When he's not writing for a deadline, he's usually tinkering with ideas for other books or stories. Jess just started collaborating on a children's book with a talented illustrator and is working up an outline for a new sci-fi novel. If you want to know what he's working on right now, just drop him a line.
Current projects: PARA, Girls and Boys, Memory Lapse, and The Spire Wars.
Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons are registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc., a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc.
Guild Wars and Guild Wars Factions are registered trademarks of ArenaNet and NCSoft Corporation.