Twin Passions
How does a writer go from Western history to epic fantasy?
Deborah J. Lightfoot, a native of West Texas, got her love of history from her grandfather, a High Plains cowboy. From her mother, an artist and avid reader, came her love of books and all things mysterious and magical. Dark horsemen entered her imagination through such early influences as the television show Have Gun Will Travel, in which Richard Boone's Paladin was "a knight without armor in a savage land." Small matter that the sophisticated Paladin wielded a six-shooter instead of a sword.
Six-shooters figure in Lightfoot's award-winning books of Western history and biography. Swords and sorcery provide the action in her Waterspell saga, an epic fantasy with medieval overtones and historical background. In combining her twin passions, Lightfoot takes inspiration from movie stuntmaster Yakima Canutt, a former rodeo champion whose horseback stunts in such classic films as Stagecoach and Ivanhoe took him from the Old West to Medieval England.
With a Bachelor of Science in journalism summa cum laude from Texas A&M University, Lightfoot has worked on both sides of the editorial desk for newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. She has freelanced for a national youth organization as a writer-editor, working with subject matter in the biological and environmental sciences. She has taught creative writing at the college level and won many writing awards.
Besides writing, editing, and devouring books, her pleasures include traveling abroad and hiking the Yorkshire moors, Vancouver Island's Pacific Rim National Park, and Mexico's La Primavera Bosque.
"History did not have to happen the way it did ... what exists today is not its logical conclusion. There is no freedom where history is a straitjacket."
So writes Theodore Zeldin, author of An Intimate History of Humanity. His words neatly pull together Deborah's two ways of looking at, and writing about, history.
The real history—history that happened "the way it did"—appeals to the journalist in her. Searching for old stories, finding the facts along a trail that is not much trodden now: that's like going on a treasure hunt.
You'll find history's true happenings in Deborah's three books of History & Biography (all of them award-winners):
Trail Fever: The Life of a Texas Cowboy (by D.J. Lightfoot)
The LH7 Ranch in Houston's Shadow (by Deborah Lightfoot Sizemore, her "other byline")
A Century in the Works (by Deborah Lightfoot Sizemore, coauthored with the late Simon W. Freese)
For Something Entirely Different: WATERSPELL
These days Deborah is also a novelist, and she loves the freedom of writing fiction that speculates about history as it might have been (or may become). Check out her "speculative history," the epic Waterspell fantasy series, here.
Her newest novel (2026), which may also be thought of as speculative history, is the standalone Adverse Reactions. A genre-mashup, Adverse Reactions: A Novel of the Paranormal is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian paranormal, dark fantasy "weird Western" that can be categorized as a suspense-thriller. It's speculative fiction, adventure fiction, and (in certain aspects of its setting and characterization) alternative history. The "paranormal" in the subtitle refers to psychokinetic ability, which is typically thought of as science fiction. But Deborah sees the book as an SF-fantasy blend that leans more toward fantasy: Old Magic plays a significant role. This book, following in the footsteps of Waterspell (and possibly linked to that series in a tangential way), explores history as it might have been, or perhaps predicts a society yet to come.
Backstory
Behind the Scenes with the Author:
I wrote much of Waterspell while living in the tropics in a house that was open to the breezes of soft summer nights. Often I worked late, gripped by a writer's high, my fingers flying over the keyboard while the world slept. Vaguely I would catch the hoots of owls and the fragrances of night-blooming flowers wafting in on the breeze, but I wasn't really occupying the same universe as the house that held me. On those magical nights, I was living with—and in—the characters of my medieval fantasy. I saw through their eyes, thought their thoughts, and felt their anguish. I didn't merely sympathize with their pain: I felt it.
My writing became an out-of-body experience as my consciousness melded with my characters. Nothing existed in those moments except my pulse-pounding rush to capture not only their words and actions, but also their deepest secrets. I saw behind their masks. I knew things they'd never told anyone—hidden things they had not fully acknowledged even to themselves.
In the small hours of the night when exhaustion finally drove me from the keyboard, I sometimes found myself thinking, as I headed for bed, that I would like to read more of the story which had so riveted me. Then I would realize that I couldn't read more of it until I had written it. The experience was like being split in two. The hours I spent out of my body, my mind at one with my characters, made for confused dreams as my essence struggled to leave the world of Waterspell and return to Earth.
When at last the writing was done and I could declare the books finished, I cried a little to be parting from my characters. They were real to me. For the better part of 16 years they had lived in me, and I in them. We had spent a life together.
But now they were moving into a wider realm. The books were published, and readers began responding. I have been deeply gratified by the emotional connections that many readers have forged with these idiosyncratic characters of mine. Reviewers have called them complicated, original, mesmerizing.
Beyond Character: Going Deeper
As thrilling as it is to see my creations become real in readers' imaginations, I've now found myself hoping for reviews that will give equal time to the story's deeper themes.
One of those themes deals with the human need to belong. We all want to fit in; we want a place and a community to call our own. My protagonist, a lost misfit named Carin, is homeless and rootless as the story begins. Her quest is to find the place where she belongs. Or more accurately, her challenge is to make a place for herself in a world where she does not really fit.
That's one subtext of the story. Going deeper, camouflaged amongst the underpinnings of the plot, is a commentary on environmental exploitation, ecological devastation, and Nature's powers of regeneration, if we'll only give Earth the chance to heal. That theme is nuanced enough that I wouldn't expect most readers to pick up on it until late in Book 2. And even when this subtext is more fully explored in Book 3, it's far subtler than the adventure, mystery, and romance of the series' surface layers.
Even so, I'm hoping to connect on those deeper levels with readers who enjoy a good fantasy adventure, but who also want more from a book than simple entertainment. Come for the characters, love or despair of them as you will, but please know there's more happening in the depths of Waterspell. On the surface, the story may seem medieval. Down below, however, it's as contemporary and relevant as the latest ecological disaster or planetary catastrophe to strike our Mother Earth.
If you're interested in environmental literary fiction or you like characters who will keep you up nights, I invite you to sample the books of Waterspell at any online bookseller. The four books of the series—Warlock, Wysard, Wisewoman, Witch—are the beginning, middle, "end," and coda of one continuous story, and are best read as a set.
Waterspell: The literary, portal fantasy, epic, heroic quest, coming-of-age, gothic slow-burn romance (give it time!) adventure you've been looking for