Since her first published fantasy in 1982 - THE TIME OF THE DARK - Barbara Hambly has touched pretty much all the bases in genre fiction, including historical murder mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, comic books, and scripts for Saturday morning cartoon shows. In the upcoming year she'll catch a couple that she's missed: a "contemporary occult romance novella" for Harlequin, and a straight historical novel about the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, THE EMANCIPATOR'S WIFE.
Born in 1951, she grew up on science fiction and fantasy in Southern California, and attended the University of California where she received a Master's degree in Medieval History, and a black belt in karate. She attended the University of Bordeaux and traveled in Europe in 1971-72, and held the usual assortment of day-jobs before being published: teacher, secretary, liquor-store clerk. She married science-fiction writer George Alec Effinger in 1998 and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years.
Hambly's interests include historical research, bellydance, costuming, and carpentry; she shares a house in Los Angeles with several small carnivores.
