Deborah J. Ross: Tell
us a little about yourself. How did you come to be a writer?
Marella Sands: In
fourth grade, our teacher wrote a sentence on the board first thing in the
morning, and we had to use it as the first line of a story. I still have some
of those stories, and they are truly terrible in a funny way. My favorite was
about me living in a haunted house. The ghost was so powerful, it killed
everyone else on my block, so I moved. Apparently, I was a rather practical
nine-year-old. Anyway, after that, I never really stopped.
DJR: What
inspired your story in Lace and Blade 4?
MS: A few years
ago, a Pakistani man I know introduced me to the game of cricket. He was so
excited about it that I guess I just caught the fever, because then I started
watching it (also, I read "Cricket for Dummies," which is actually a
real thing). For my birthday that year, I asked for a subscription to Willow TV
(all cricket, all the time). While I was watching a match and wondering what to
do for this story, I suddenly thought, why aren't there more team sports in
fantasy stories? Not just mentioned in passing, or set up as a bit of world-building,
but introduced as something so integral to the plot, you couldn't have the
story without the sport. Almost instantly, I had my four main characters, who
play a very cricket-like game in a vaguely West African-like land.
DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing? What about them do you find inspiring?
MS: The first two
that come to mind are Richard Adams and J.R.R. Tolkien, because the two books I
couldn't put down for years were Watership
Down and The Lord of the Rings --
sweeping fantasy stories that just carried me away into worlds so completely I
was almost distraught I couldn't actually go there. If I lived in the world of Fahrenheit 451 and had the opportunity
to be a book, I'm not sure I could choose between them.
