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Fantasy (In progress)
Waterspell
"Not a word wasted or out of place. Strong, compelling, intriguing, taut. A real pleasure to read such mature, competent writing." —SouthWest Writers Contest, Science Fiction/Fantasy Novel Category
History & Biography
Trail Fever: The Life of a Texas Cowboy
"A fascinating look at one man's life during an important era of American history."
—Booklist
The LH7 Ranch:
The E.H. Marks' Legacy
"A most compelling and highly recommended slice of Texan-American regional history."
—Midwest Book Review
A Century in the Works
"This history of the firm of Freese and Nichols and its substantial impact in Texas constitutes a survey of 100 years of civil and environmental engineering."
—Book News, Inc.
Teacher's Guide
TRAIL FEVER Teacher's Guide
By Pat Miller, a companion book to TRAIL FEVER: The Life of a Texas Cowboy
Magazine Articles
Cowboy Stuntman Yakima Canutt
A biography of Yakima Canutt (1895–1986), a master of movie stuntwork from Stagecoach to Ivanhoe.
Reviews I've Written
Book Review:
Under the Tuscan Sun
Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy—a review recounting the parallels with my own move to Mexico.
Book Review:
Black Holes and Baby Universes
Stephen Hawking's Black Holes and Baby Universes—space and time aren't what they seem.
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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 newest work, Waterspell, a YA/crossover 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 degree from Texas A&M University in agricultural journalism, Lightfoot has worked on both sides of the editorial desk for newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. She freelances for a national nonprofit youth organization as a writer and an editor, working with subject matter in the biological and environmental sciences. She has taught creative writing at the college level and has won many writing awards.
Besides writing, editing, and ingesting books, her pleasures include traveling abroad and hiking the Yorkshire moors, Vancouver Island's Pacific Rim National Park, and Mexico's La Primavera Bosque. With her husband, Gene Sizemore, Deborah splits time between the prairies of Texas and the mountains of Mexico.
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) featured at left under "Selected Works":
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)
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). To explore her "speculative history," please visit the site of her work-in-progress, a fantasy twosome (eventually to be a trilogy) called Waterspell. There you'll find the treasures Deborah has collected while doing research. Her Waterspell site has these pages:
Author Interview (a far-ranging Q&A in which she tells all)
Excerpts (a couple of scenes from Books I and II)
Frequently Asked Questions (things like "How does a new writer get started?" and "How long does it take to get published?")
Links for Writers of Fantasy and Science Fiction (useful organizations, vocabulary help, markets, agents, etc.)
Programs & Talks (information on booking Deborah as a speaker)
Queries That Worked (the successful query letters for her first two books)
Readers' Comments (what people have said about her novels)
Recommended Reading and How-To Books for Writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy (a list built upon one compiled originally by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop)
Word Games (just for fun, some word-search and multiple-choice games for you tireless word lovers)
Words & Other Treasures (a collection of old words, great books, and fascinating Web sites—one way or another, they all figure in Waterspell)
Thanks for visiting!
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Last updated
1-7-2010
"Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago."
—Art historian Bernard Berenson, quoted in the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer
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