Deborah's Journal

SFFWRTCHT: You also have Shadowdance, a personal favorite, which is dark fantasy. Tell us a bit about that story and how it came about?

RWB: That book came from a very dark place at a particularly dark time in my life.  I was struggling with a wide range of life issues: child abuse, molestation, depression and sexual identity, career insecurities, and what I then perceived as an abyss of deep personal failures.  I felt smothered in secrets, not just my own, but secrets that other people had put upon me.  It all bubbled up into the writing of that book.  I’ll never forget my agent calling me up literally in the middle of the night.  “This is the book you were born to write,” he said.  I don’t know if that was true, but it was certainly the book I had to write at that time, and finishing it felt like an exorcism.  It taught me the importance of writing honestly and writing with purpose.

SFFWRTCHT: Around the same period, you did Swords Against The Shadowland, a sequel to Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series? How does one go about taking on such challenge?

SWB: Carefully and with humility.  I had met Leiber a handful of times, and he was a sort of God of Fantasy to me.  He was tall and gaunt and had such an aura of mystery about him, a kind of charisma, and yet he was approachable and fun.  When I decided that I was going to write fantasy, he was one of the writers I studied, and I mean “studied” with all the skills I’d used in graduate school with any other major writer.  Leiber and I shared the same agent, and when I was invited to take up the mantel of Lankhmar under Leiber’s guidance, I was stunned.  Daunted is perhaps a better word.  Unfortunately, Fritz Leiber died before the ink was dry on our contract, so the collaborative experience I’d hoped for wasn’t possible.  I didn’t have ego enough to imagine I could tell any story just the way Leiber would tell it, so I taped a note to my brain: honor — don’t imitate.  While working in his world with his characters, I still had to bring my own concerns and themes, my own voice, to the work.  A lot of people liked the result; some didn’t.  That’s life.  I’m forever grateful that Leiber trusted me.