The White Dragon: In Fire Forged, Part One Hardcover - 2003

Laura Resnick was born in Chicago, Illinois. A childhood of being thrown by horses, bitten by dogs, and terrorized by the Resnicks' notorious exploding water well helped prepare her adequately for her future in the publishing industry.
Resnick went on to study French, Italian, and linguistics at Georgetown, graduating "cum laude." Shortly thereafter, she tramped around most of the Old World, looking at lots of cool paintings, working in France, and winding up on a kibbutz in Israel for a while. She studied acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in London, and spent a volatile but happy year teaching English at the University of Palermo in Italy.
By the time she was thirty, Resnick had sold a dozen romance novels, all but one of them written under the pseudonym Laura Leone, and "Romantic Times "magazine named her the best new writer in her genre. She then went on an overland journey across Africa. Everything you could ever want to know about that 8-month journey is recounted in the award-winning nonfiction book, "A Blonde In Africa."
While she was in Africa, Resnick won the John W. Campbell Award as Best New Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer in recognition of the short stories she had been writing. Having thus warmed up her muscles, she wrote her first fantasy novel, "In Legend Born" -- a project which made crossing Africa overland seem easy by comparison.