1. Please tell us a bit about your author journey, including what inspires you to create.
I began writing stories around fourth grade, mostly featuring horses and dogs, but didn’t get serious about it until the early 1980s, when I made my first professional sale to the debut volume of Sword & Sorceress. For the next decade or so, when my children were small, every year I wrote one or two short stories every year, which Marion bought for her anthologies or MZB’s Fantasy Magazine, and one unpublishable (“practice”) novel. As my writing craft improved, I started selling short fiction to Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and anthologies like Star Wars: Tales from Jabba’s Palace. My work garnered critical acclaim and award nominations. In the early 1990s, I sold a science fiction novel to DAW—Jaydium—and then another, Northlight.
2. Please tell us about The Laran Gambit (and any other titles you'd like to mention).
In 2013, when I developed the concepts and plot for The Laran Gambit, I wanted to return to the “modern” timeline envisioning Darkover as no longer vulnerable to exploitation, as it had been in earlier novels such as The World Wreckers. Meanwhile, the real world moved on. The 2016 United States presidential election increased the polarization of the nation, and social media became a hotbed of contention. More than once I wondered if my vision of a ruthless, totalitarian Star Alliance was not becoming reality. I didn’t write The Laran Gambit as a prediction of the future or a commentary on our modern world, however. I wrote it as an entertaining story.
Collaborators is an occupation-and-resistance story set on a world where the humans are the inadvertent oppressors and the native race is gender-fluid. It was inspired by my time living in Lyon, France, which was the center of the French Resistance. I was fascinated by all the reasons the French cooperated, resisted, or collaborated with the Nazis. It all came down to who had power and how it was used, but in order to talk about power, I had to talk about gender. The book was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and on the Otherwise Award Long List.
The stories that gave rise to The Seven-Petaled Shield began with my love of horses and a special exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County of the art of the nomads of the Eurasian steppe. I marveled at the beautiful gold artifacts of the Scythians, depicting horses, elk, and snow leopards, and the lives and adventures of these people. I wrote a series of “Azkhantian” short stories for Sword & Sorceress, but I kept wanting to go back and explore more...and before I knew it, I'd committed trilogy—one long story arc with four major cultures, a vast and wonderful landscape, and characters I came to treasure for their compassion, their arrogance, their wisdom, their courage, their human frailty.
Azkhantian Tales (short story collection)
4. Please tell us about your collaboration with Marion Zimmer Bradley.
I met Marion by writing her a letter. This was back in 1980 and I felt so excited by her work that I wanted to let her know. Marion wrote back, three pages of single-spaced typewriting. We began a correspondence, and I must confess to a certain giddiness that my favorite author had taken the care to write to me. Marion read my Darkover stories for a fanzine she edited for Friends of Darkover, so when she began work on the first Sword & Sorceress, she invited me to send her a story for consideration. She bought that story and many others over the years. Toward the end of her life, Marion suffered a series of strokes, which made it difficult for her to concentrate on novel-length stories. I was one of the writers Marion considered as a collaborator because she had watched me develop from a novice to an established professional. We began work together, first in correspondence, then in person. We'd settled on a time period and general story arc when I visited her for the last time. When I arrived at her home, she had been resting, on oxygen, but insisted on sitting up to talk. I knew she had been very ill, but seeing her made her condition so much more vivid for me. One of my best memories of her was watching her come alive as we discussed character and hatched plot points. Her eyes "glowed as if lit from within," to use one of her favorite descriptions. I asked question after question and then sat back as she spun out answers. It was as if she had opened a window into her imagination and invited me to peek inside. We never got a second visit. She died a month later.
5. Where can we find more information about your work, including your author site and social media links?
The best way to keep up with Deborah-news (plus snippets from works in progress, giveaways, favorite recipes, and cute cat pics) is to subscribe to my newsletter: https://tinyurl.com/yydem5yw
Website: https://deborahjross.com/
Facebook: DeborahJRoss
Instagram: deborahjross1
Twitter: @DeborahJRoss
Mastodon: @DeborahJRoss@mastodon.social
Deborah J. Ross writes and edits fantasy and science fiction. Her work has earned Honorable Mention in Year's Best SF, and nominations for Lambda Literary Award, Gaylactic Spectrum Award, the National Fantasy Federation Speculative Fiction Award for Best Author, and inclusion in the Otherwise Award List, Locus Recommended Reading, and Kirkus notable new release lists. When she's not writing, she knits for charity, plays classical piano, and hikes in the redwoods.
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