Dreaming Of The Compass Rose

Fantasy author Vera Nazarian is quizzed by our Donna on making the Nebula Award Preliminary Ballot and how she was forced to flee the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Reviewing fantasy these days can be tiresome. The onslaught of the next dwarf or elf on another quest coming at you from the page gets a little cliché. I mean, once you've seen one dragon, you've seen them all...haven't you? Well, just as dragons take on a merged feel about them, fantasy novels have at times done the same as their subject matter...until now.

Vera Nazarian has written two novel-length books. Her first, 'Dreams Of The Compass Rose', made the 2002 Nebula Award Preliminary Ballot. 'Lords Of Rainbow', her most recent novel, has received great reviews. Her background of being a former child refugee fleeing the former Soviet Union during the Cold War with her family is extraordinary in itself.

I caught up with Vera in her new busy lifestyle as a full-time writer to get the word on life as a fantasticalist and being the only Armenian-Russian Author working in English.

SFC: Hello Vera, may I start by asking how life is going being a full-time writer and how you came to be in that fortuitous position?

Vera Nazarian: Sure. I became a full-time writer by the will of the powers-that-be or, you might say, by fortuitous accident. In the summer of 2003, my then-employer, a Los Angeles area database software company, was acquired by another in a merger and they laid everybody off, myself included.

Fortunately, at about the same time that my techie job waved goodbye at me, my home mortgage refinance went through and the equity loan from the bank provided enough to live off in Spartan frugality for about two years - just enough time to do something significant with my writing on my own dedicated and focused time (no, don't laugh just yet).

So, I decided to take the once-in-a-lifetime chance, a break from the decades of day job and night shift drudgery and see if I can manage as a freelancer. Between doing websites part-time and selling my writing when I can, let's see how long I can last at this.

Really, this is a terrifying leap off a career cliff. Do not try this at home, friends, not unless you really have a financial line of support to fall back upon, like a willing spouse. Most people in the industry recommend at least two years of financial backup as a pre-requisite to going full-time. And even then, you and I are but happy fools while the financial squandering clock starts ticking. Come to think of it, it sounds rather like a gong, from where I am sitting.

Now, you may laugh.

SFC: Have you always wanted to be a writer or were there any other careers you would have preferred?

VN: All right, that's a trick question. Because, you see, a part of me - the portion of my brain that handles rational analysis, long term perspective and knowing what's in my socks drawer and also occasionally verifies my sanity - that part still does not know nor choose to acknowledge the fact that I am a writer. Being a writer is loony.

Really, think about it. It involves sitting all alone in a room at a desk (or in a comfy chair, or in bed, or in a coffee shop, or in a prison cell...), staring at a blank sheet of paper or blank computer screen and creating something out of nothing for hours on end, day after day...for the rest of your life. Pulling vaporous stuff out of your brain and passing it through your daydream filter. Then, putting the percolated output in semantic order, giving it texture, colour and substance, and telling a rollicking good story all at the same time.

I remember being a smart six-year-old kid and considering at some point back in Russia what it meant to be a writer, trying it on for size in my imagination and immediately thinking, ‘Wow, that's impossibly boring. I could never ever be a writer. They never leave the room!’

And I continued telling myself I was not a writer but an artist or a psychologist-in-training all through my childhood and elementary and junior and high school, while I would carry around notebooks and write a long grand epic fantasy novel in every moment of my spare time. See, I was just going to write this one novel and that's it, and I was in no way going to be a loony writer - why, that is just ludicrous to be a writer. Everyone knows those people are too weird and develop premature haemorrhoids.

But eventually truth surfaced and I had to face the facts. I was too far past the teens and out of shape to start training to be a folk dancer, too much of a math moron to be an astronomer and not happy at all with the present institutional system of psychiatry and formal psychology to pursue it as a profession.

The one thing that was left that I enjoyed, all through college, was computers - I was a self-taught tech, starting on the IBM and DEC VAX mainframes as a student consultant and then going on to do nearly two decades of tech hardware and software support (printers, PCs, then database software). That ended up being my full-time day job and paying the bulk of the bills. And the other thing that I enjoyed was the creative arts - painting, drawing, sculpture, music and, yes, writing.

I was an artist, a singer and a writer. But in the end, writing won completely.

So now, here I am, sitting alone in a room (not completely - the dogs and cats are ever at my back), staring at a blank screen and making these black squiggles appear to mean something and take you away on an entertaining mind trip - one hopes.

SFC: What have your experiences as a child fleeing the former Soviet Union, if anything, brought to your writing?

VN: I like to imagine that I haul all of my past - all of Russia and Armenia and ancient myth and Europe and the old country - here with me and into my fiction. It is my permanent filter through which I visualise all events, multi-layered onion-skins of culture and mores and tradition, an optometrist's arsenal of lenses all stacked up to form a tele-micro-psychescope.

Basically, whatever life experience we collectively compile in our beings, is what comes out in our creative output. Having been raised on Russian and European classics first, steeped in that tradition, and then coming to the United States and starting on the speculative fiction genre, I might have a somewhat different approach to writing than someone who has always lived in one place or one country.

For example, my natural novel mode is a long-winded and descriptive verbal ocean rendered through an omniscient POV, as perpetrated by Tolstoy and Victor Hugo. My English, by nature, is very high-archaic if I don't watch it, because this is what I had come away reading in Russian and English - Medieval and ancient things.

I am drawn to the old language and, yes, I have been accused of stodgy style. Only relatively recently has it occurred to me that it is *not* absolutely necessary to write high fantasy that way. This may be an obvious thing to everyone, but it took me all of twenty years to figure out that fantasy does not mean ancient.

So as you see, I have my peculiar quirks and I blame some of it on where I've come from. Time moves more slowly in Russia or at least it used to, back when I was there. The old Soviet Union was a time capsule of sorts, like a proletariat region of Faerie encased in a stagnant bubble. It always seemed to lag by at least 20 years in social detail and by at least a century in cultural thought. And yet, I think in some ways the ordinary people in Russia had a truer link to the ancient classical clarity of thought and chose to look back for hope and inspiration, rather than looking forward like most of the rest of the planet. This could be both a bad and a good thing.

SFC: You speak Russian, Armenian and Spanish. You have also studied Mandarin Chinese and German. Why do you prefer writing in English? And does your multi-lingual background ever help in your writing?

VN: Russian, my first, my native language, is so glorious and precise and baroque, filled with so many fine nuances of vocabulary and grammar that it is too intimate for me to write in. Emotion in Russian is overwhelming; the imagery is overly rich, even sentimental. This could be a weird admission, but I am embarrassed to write in it for fear of saying too much. I need that slight millimetre of distance that English provides.

I love English because it is like a good friend who's come to visit me in my living room and I can lounge around in old pyjamas and comfortably discuss anything and everything with this friend, but never have to disrobe myself completely because that would not be expected in such a relationship. Russian, on the other hand, is like a blood relative who has seen my 3-year-old naked ass and for that reason I'd rather not have to dredge all of that up again, thank you.

As far as the other languages, I am a peculiar illiterate native speaker of Armenian, having picked it up in my international refugee days in Lebanon and Greece, where my family spent the bulk of time in the Armenian Diaspora communities there. Spanish was learned formally in high school and I became fluent to the point of enjoying Spanish language TV and doing tech support in Spanish at my various day jobs. Mandarin Chinese came as a result of college and it blessed me with the understanding of tonality and semantic conciseness and the poetic balanced spirit of China - though I am still incapable of using chopsticks during a meal. And German was audited just for fun when I was working at my alma mater, Pomona College, after graduation and attending some classes for free just because I could. There is also Italian opera, since I am a huge fan (and I sing along with all the arias too).

As a result of these linguistic pursuits, I hear things a bit differently and see words on the page not as words but as roots. Original meanings and common synonyms leap out at me from across languages and, as a result, my English often displays a peculiar grammatical cadence and sometimes unusual word order - okay, weirdass backwards structure. Sentences are chosen for rhythm and for musicality. Of course, some might argue it may not be musicality to an English speaker's ear, but jarring affectation. Unfortunately I cannot always quite tell which it is. But it certainly helps me come up with interesting character names. And at least I am usually aware enough not to accidentally gift my characters with names that are obscenities in other languages. (Yes, it happens. Even Shakespeare did it. I had to endure one of the Bard's otherwise lovely plays where the female character was called what in Russian translates to a ‘fart’).

SFC: May I ask which Shakespeare character's name sounds like a fart?

VN: You'll be sorry you asked. Okay, it's Perdita from ‘The Winter's Tale’. In some Russian translations of Shakespeare, they simply translate her name as ‘The Lost One’ instead of literally sounding it out, in order to avoid embarrassment for all. In Russian Mat (Russian has a hardcore ‘sub-language’ of obscenities called ‘Mat’ in case you did not know), the word ‘perda’ is ‘fart’ but the actual connotation is much coarser than it is in English. So, in effect her name is ‘Little Fart’ or ‘Farting One’. Seriously, I cannot convey how really awful it sounds in Russian compared to English. Especially on stage...

SFC: You majored in English and Psychology. How do you think the Psychology part of your education has helped you in your writing career?

VN: Psychology is one of those things that continues to be useful, regardless of my present occupation. When I majored in Psychology, I received a grounding in the theories and concepts and research modes and stats analysis. It showed me just enough to discover that psychology as scientific method was not my preferred approach to the study of human nature. As a method, it is plodding and cautious and unwilling to take risks of hypothesis, while my personal tendency is to make daring leaps of assumption and to just fly.

I find that the life-illustrative mode that is fiction is more my thing. Here I can create characters according to my own intuition and give them behavioural quirks and tendencies based on what my logic finds plausible as extrapolation. Logical development of the psychology of characters is always vital, but it has to be done my way.

SFC: You have many short stories, some published in 'Sword And Sorceress' and now two novel-length stories published by Wildside Press. Do you find switching between lengths of work a problem at all? If so, how do you cope with this change of pace?

VN: First, allow me to be extremely vulgar. You know how we all go to the bathroom (or loo, if you will). And you are familiar with the concept of number one and number two - sometimes there's solid business to take care of and, other times, well, it's all liquid after you've drank five mugs too many. And despite the distinct nature of both of these eliminations, there's never really a problem for most people handling both sorts and switching between one kind of output to another.

That's exactly how I see novel versus shorter fiction writing. You write whatever needs to come out. It is all wholesome and natural. And if you take in just the right kind of nutrient material and if, by means of proper life experience, you feed your brain and soul and funny bone and curiosity and intellect and heart and wit and innocence and wisdom and compassion and discrimination - all to some extent - if you subsist on a complete and well-rounded existential diet, then you are bound to digest it all equally well and in the process eventually eliminate in the form of long and short prose, non-fiction, poetry and even newsgroup and blog posts and media soundbites!

Seriously, I find that I prefer novel-lengths overall because that way I can develop characters and milieu to a greater depth. But sometimes, when working too long in the more ponderous long mode, a short story is just bursting to come out. Something usually completely different in tone from my current work in progress and something that is short and self-contained, in contrast to the other long thing. On the other hand, when I spend too much time cranking out short stories one after another, eventually there comes a need to stop the flittering about and go for all-depth immersion in a novel to cleanse the writerly palate.

Lately, novels seem to be consuming me, so that I hardly find time for an occasional shorter story or novelette.

SFC: You seem to attend an awful lot of conventions in the States. Do you enjoy this direct feedback from fans?

VN: Conventions are great. I really could not afford them as much as I would like and last year (2003) was awful in that sense where, due to very poor finances, I was limited to local cons only. But when I do manage, it's like coming home. I love the fellow writers and the kind and gracious fan and the whole atmosphere of comfortable casual intellectual discourse that they provide, coupled with the high energy buzzing in the background that is the Schmooze Potential.

What's that, you might ask? The Schmooze Potential, like the neurological action potential, is a sudden permeability of the ‘hope to make a publishing deal’ membrane. It is a buzz of possibilities, a sense that at any moment luck and opportunity might knock and around the corner you might run into an editor or agent or publisher or lord knows who else in the industry, strike up a smooth conversation and voila! - you just made a multi-book deal on the basis of a three-sentence description and doodle on the back of a cocktail napkin. It can happen, you know, that's the hope and buzz and energy that always follows us at cons. Us, ever-optimistic, loony writers, that is.

Seriously, attending conventions at least upon occasion is something I recommend to anyone who is planning to stick around in the industry for the long haul. It is a way to get to know the principal players and gradually to become one. And it is a way to know the trends and to get to know your once and future fans.

SFC: If we can move along to your most recent book, 'Lords Of Rainbow', can you tell me what your inspiration for the book was?

VN: This is going to be particularly amusing, all things considered, but it was a TV commercial. In the summer, right after my high school graduation, I was lounging in front of the TV and saw a commercial for a kid's doll. Not to name any brands - because I am not even sure what it as, but there was something about the commercial itself - the sudden appearance of an animated cartoon rainbow, that sent me into a John Lennonesque ‘dream’. I saw the notion of rainbow for the first time as a beautiful, haunting, serious thing, the stuff of wonder and legend and a whole life philosophy. The idea took hold and the book germinated.

SFC: The three main players in 'Lords Of Rainbow' seem to be wonderfully intricate and real characters. Did you draw these fantastical people from those that you know in your real life and would you be willing to share where they come from?

VN: I would say, the three came out of nowhere and everywhere. The guys are my two opposite male ideals, one riffling off the other and, in a way, complementing each other's strong points and faults. They take turns playing the good and bad, the fair and the unfair, the loving and the hateful. I really love them both to death but, yeah, one of them gets the upper hand in my heart and I am sure you can guess which one of the two it is.

As far as Ranhe, well, she is me in some ways and, in many ways, she is also a composite of all the downtrodden, low-self-esteem, mousy and yet steadfast and strong and ultimately heroic women in my imagination. Most of all, she reminds me of my favourite Shakespearean female character - Viola in ‘Twelfth Night’. I've always wanted to write, re-write or somehow just get my grubby big writerly paws on the premise of ‘Twelfth Night’ and do something else with it, not sure what. Maybe, give Viola a better fate?

SFC: Will we see a sequel to 'Lords Of Rainbow' with Ranhe coming back from her journey of personal exploration?

VN: Oh, what a great question, thank you for asking! ‘Lords Of Rainbow’ is completely standalone, an epic fantasy in a single unheard-of volume and yet, I left a tiny loophole for another book and a continuation of the story...

OK, this following paragraph may give some spoilers for ‘Lords Of Rainbow’, please be warned.

Now - you know how a certain Regentrix we all love to hate goes off on her own little insane quest at the end of the book? Well, Ranhe, on her own journey, is going to run into her unintentionally and the two of them will end up in a strange alliance, in Qurth of all places - Qurth, the land of the former enemy invader. There, some major issues will be resolved for Deileala and when that is done, Ranhe - who in the meantime has been coping with some issues of her own - will return to Tronaelend-Lis where in her absence our two favourite hunky men are dealing with a very insane city now filled with colour and not knowing what to do with it, the Guilds Council, the courtesan Erotene Guild gone wild and just a whole bunch of other complications, some comic and some serious as life and death. All of this, I plan to tell in the concluding book, ‘Lady Of Monochrome’. So, yes, this turns out to be a potential duology.

SFC: Whilst you wrote both your books, did you have any particular actors in mind playing the main characters, should Hollywood call and want a new fantasy epic?

VN: Oh my, this is a scary thing to consider. First, I do believe that ‘Lords Of Rainbow’ would look gorgeous on the big screen with all the colour SFX and sweeping epic battles through the Tronaelend-Lis cityscape. But I absolutely hate the fact that Hollywood casts the same dozen of famous stars to play everyone. Since I watch hardly any television and almost no movies at all on the big screen, I don't know enough about current actors to really give a good pick here. And of the current roster that I do know, I cannot think of anyone who would fit my three main characters. Maybe the supporting characters played by familiar faces I can tolerate, but give me a clean fresh faced unknown actor any day. Maybe this is why I really like the fact that director Peter Jackson used so many relatively fresh faces in the LOTR trilogy, and why I think that really worked out so well.

So, given an ideal situation where I could cast my own movie version of ‘Lords Of Rainbow’, I'd hire all unknowns for the major parts and maybe have Sir Ian McKellen - whom I adore - play Nilmet the Philosopher and Orlando Bloom with blond hair do Alliran Monteyn. Vin Diesel would make one sexy and scary Araht Vorn. Anthony Hopkins would work as Chancellor Rollen Lirr. Also, both Feale the Tillireh of Black and Carlieserall Lirr could be played to perfection by the gorgeous and androgynous actor Jaye Davidson who played the scary god-pharaoh in the original Stargate.

As far as ‘Dreams Of The Compass Rose’, I believe Nadir could be played well by, of all people, Will Smith, while Ziyi Zhang from ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’ might be cast as Egiras and Queen Latifah would make a good Yaro. And Ris, one of my personal favourite characters ever? I have no idea - maybe Katherine Hepburn, if she were still alive.

SFC: 'Dreams Of The Compass Rose' dealt with a lot of issues concerning human morality and the journey of the human soul. Was it your intention when you wrote the book to make a statement about those issues or did they come about merely through the telling of the numerous characters stories?

VN: It may be unpopular and even poor form to have an overt ‘message’ in one's fiction, but screw that. I cannot help myself, I imbue all the things I write about with meaning. Things like dumb rocks and refuse. Everything. I once took one of those semi-silly online quizzes and it told me that I was an essay writer at heart. Really, more than anything I love to rant in the form of expository writing and just put forth philosophical, ethical and moral notions to connect things that seem to be irrelevant into semantic groupings - sort of like I am doing now in this interview. Why? Because why bother saying anything otherwise? Where there is no meaning, there is no being.

SFC: Both your main novel length books 'Dreams Of The Compass Rose' and 'Lords Of Rainbow' are both print-on-demand titles. How do you think this has affected their appeal to the consumer and would you encourage other authors to go down the print-on-demand route?

VN: Print-on-demand is seriously not for everyone. It is not for the beginner. And it is especially not for a shy individual who is unwilling to step forward and do a lot of promotion on their book's behalf. Having said that, my advice is to do research and then follow your instinct and take whatever publishing opportunities might present themselves, as long as you know exactly what kind of consequences may come as a result. And remember - distribution of your work is more important than presentation. Without distribution channels, nothing sells.

SFC: You are a creative individual, enjoying being a musician and artist along with your writing. How do you find being creative in many medias helps your writing?

VN: Well, thank you. One of the things I end up doing is writing about artistic and creative characters. People in my stories sing or dance or paint or make an art out of magic and wonder. I suppose this is my way of writing what I know.

SFC: You mentioned Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy, what did you think of his adaptation of the JRR Tolkien books?

VN: Not being a Tolkien fanatic, but still an avid fan, I say Peter Jackson more than deserves his Best Picture Oscar. He deserves all three for each of the three instalments of LOTR and he deserves a medal of honour from someone.

A beautiful, glorious, heroic film. I don't care what anyone says to malign or nit-pick, this is a masterpiece, lovingly intricate in its respect of the source material and choice of details and destined to be a cinematic classic of the 21st century. Peter Jackson, sir, if you are reading this, please consider filming my books. You, and no one else! I am only half-kidding, you know. Okay, maybe not even half but one third...

But really, what I like most is the intensity. It's the poetic delicate beauty of ‘good’ juxtaposed with gritty horror of ‘evil’. It's emotional depth and the treatment of the noblest elements of warrior spirit - valour, heroism, patriotism and self-sacrifice - momentous human issues that few so-called realist movies of the recent decades have managed to tackle.

Consider, this is just a phoney war movie about a fantasy conflict with a grotesque enemy and magical stakes and non-existent creatures. And yet, it is all profoundly real, human stuff that makes huge theatre audiences cry in the dark. The greatest metaphor, which in fact, a true epic really is.

SFC: Do you find inspiration from music while you write and if so what do you listen to?

VN: Maybe it's my inability to focus or concentrate but I need absolute silence to write. The moment I hear any music - instrumental, vocal, whatever - I start paying attention to it, either singing along or even dancing in my chair or even just listening in my own silence. Words just flitter away. So basically I cannot write to any logical progression of ordered sounds.

The other reason that music gets in the way is that when I write I actually hear the cadence of the sentences and the words and it has a very strong rhythm of its own. My prose tends to be poetic. Thus, any other external musicality gets in the way. To write under the influence of music, in my opinion, is a bit like writing under the influence of alcohol. When the buzz wears off, what's left is not always what you think.

SFC: Do you have a vast array of books in your own collection to draw from for your own writing, if so what kind of books are in your library?

VN: I adore books. They are tangible interactive works of art and I, probably like most other writers, am busily amassing a library. There are the obviously speculative fiction genre books, but there are also classics, both in English and Russian. There are art books, particularly the Pre-Raphaelites and their ilk, beautiful inspired realism, the kind that gives fantasy a tangible form. Greek mythology and fairy tales sit at the heart of my library.

SFC: What book are you reading at the moment?

VN: Pleasure reading is one of those snatched things and I am no longer fully able to do it before guilt about not writing sets in. My current writing project involves romantic ‘kickass’ adventure, so I am reading an odd mix of various romantic action-suspense novels such as works by Doranna Durgin and Virginia Kantra, comic and serious vampire books like the Laurell K. Hamilton ‘Anita Blake’ series and ‘Undead And Unwed’ by Mary Janice Davidson, K.J. Bishop's ‘The Etched City’, Catherine Asaro's ‘Skolian Empire’ books, Patricia A. McKillip's ‘Alphabet Of Thorn’ and re-reading Madeleine L'Engle's ‘The Time Quartet’ omnibus - all at the same time.

What's next? Whatever strikes my fancy on the huge to-read pile. I like to alternate genres, SF/fantasy, then romance, then who knows what. One thing I usually do not have on my to-be-read mountain is mainstream best-sellers.

SFC: Which authors or books are your favourite and why?

VN: The first that always comes to mind is a long-time favourite and that is the incomparable Tanith Lee. She is one of the few authors whose books I trust implicitly to be gloriously worth my while and will buy sight unseen. I am not a fan of horror, but I will read Lee's horror. If she publishes a book of seaweed cookie recipes, I would read it - thus, anything by Lee. She creates beauty in any form and that is what I primarily crave in my reading.

Other authors in the genre whose work I highly enjoy and admire are Charles de Lint, Gene Wolfe, the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, C.J. Cherryh, John Grant, William Sanders, Ted Chiang, Paul Witcover, Jeff VanderMeer. Of the newer authors, I am particularly very favourably impressed by K.J. Bishop, Anna Tambour, Greg van Eekhout, Tim Pratt, Lisa Silverthorne, Jenn Reese, Tobias S. Buckell, Erin Cashier Denton and Theodora Goss. There are so many new and upcoming writers that I am afraid I am forgetting someone and, the more I read, the more new brilliant people there seem to be out there, to the point of being overwhelming. What a talented zeitgeist we live in!

SFC: Have you got any advice for writers who are just starting out with their craft?

VN: My advice changes from day to day, just as I myself change as a person and as a writer. The strongest advice I can give today is to focus on what excites you and ignore the trends of the market. Do not let yourself be distracted by other people's success or failure, but focus on getting your own writing done. And always, get to know the rules of publishing.

SFC: You have done quite a few interviews lately, I wonder are there any questions that surprisingly haven't been asked?

VN: Well, you seem to have done an excellent job of asking me things other venues have not, so I joyfully appreciate it. There are only so many ways you can repeat yourself and new questions are a pleasure. The one question that has never been asked and that I'd like to get into some day is: what role does humour play in my writing. It seems that lately I've become more of a humorist than I thought.

SFC: So that said, what part does humour play in your writing?

VN: All right! Here's the thing - I am a sneak humorist. So crafty and underhanded about it, in fact, that for the longest time it escaped even myself. Now, in real life, most people would say that I am a funny person, in every sense of the word. I love to laugh till I snort tears back up my nose, love reading funny books and seeing comedies. I'm a real clown on con panels and at parties. Humour - whether the witty kind or the wacky and silly slapstick - colours my expository writing, such as posts in online newsgroups and forums.

But for some reason, in my formal fiction, I lean to the angsty, sorrowful and poetic stuff, heavy tragedy. If you go by my earlier published stuff, seems like it's all one big, painful wallow in operatic grandeur - or so I thought.

But now and then, a funny image or turn of phrase would pop out, in-between all the drama. I think the first time people noticed it was in ‘Dreams Of The Compass Rose’. The book was suddenly getting comments from reviewers about the humour and comedic elements, when in my own mind I was still seeing it as a sort of sweeping high-style paean to the ancient world.

Then I decided to write a couple of YA stories for the Fictionwise switch.blade original e-anthology. And somehow I went to town with the silly and funny stuff. The first one was called ‘Hell Week At Grant-Williams High’ which featured Indian curry-sniffing students, vampires, werewolves, ghouls and Hindu Gods which was followed by an even more hilarious ‘Halloween At Grant-Williams High’ - both basically dealing with high school monster mayhem, a sort of Buffy meets the Three Stooges.

And now, seems like whatever serious work I begin writing, goes all funny on me. Even the current novel in progress, ‘Margot Phoenix Rising’, about a female kickass heroine with Elemental powers, designed for a category romance and action adventure line, started out deadly serious and now I've got a goddamn comedy on my hands. What can I say?

SFC: Where can we see any new work by you?

VN: Curiously enough, the folks in the UK will probably see a piece from me before anyone else does. That's because my latest is a long novella from the excellent folks at PS Publishing, titled ‘The Clock King And The Queen Of The Hourglass’. It is a far future ‘dying earth’ science fantasy tale about identity, erotic desire, flying water and a mystery of sorts, rolled into one.

The book is due some time at the end of this year or early 2005, in a signed limited edition, in hardcover and trade paperback format. And, it is an honour and a privilege to have the introduction written by master fantasist Charles de Lint. Believe me, I am still bouncing to the ceiling about that.

Be sure to look for it at the PS Publishing website: www.pspublishing.co.uk or at Shocklines: www.shocklines.com or do check my own website for updates: www.veranazarian.com.

SFC: Thank you very much for your time and all of us at SFCrowsnest wish you all the best for the future.

VN: And thank you, my friends for letting me carry on - it is always a pleasure.

Interview conducted by Donna Jones
(c) SFCrowsnest, Donna Jones, Vera Nazarian 2004
all rights reserved

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OTHER CONTENT - May 2004

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Dreaming Of The Compass Rose Fantasy author Vera Nazarian is quizzed by our Donna on making the Nebula Award Preliminary Ballot and how she was forced to flee the former Soviet Union during the Cold War. (AUTHOR INTERVIEWS) Out of the Labyrinth Howard Hendrix, author of The Labyrinth Key, on writing historically real characters, the political component of his fiction, and Howard's guide to quantum physics. (AUTHOR INTERVIEWS) Offworld Report: Science fiction - May 2004 Interviews with writers Stanislaw Lem, Thomas Harlan, and Neal Stephenson, James Patrick Kelly examines FTL online, a look at the ten best science fiction film directors of all time, and new trailer downloads for Alien vs. Predator, Thunderbirds and I, Robot. (NEWS) Offworld Report: Weird Science - May 2004 Exploiting the resources of the solar system, the U.S. army's next generation of robot soldiers, cloning your nearest and dearest, new developments in gravitational microlensing, and does methane on Mars equal the existence of primitive life? (NEWS) Hellboy (Frank reviews) Franks discovers that in director Guillermo Del Toro’s fantasy actioner Hellboy, there’s nothing generic or artificial about the movie's flame-throwing crusader determined to stamp out evil at any cost. (FILM REVIEWS) Hellboy (Mark reviews) Mike Mignola's comic book character Hellboy comes to the screen in high visual style but none too coherently. Our Mark considers that Guillermo del Toro does a better job directing than adapting this story from graphic novel to screen. (FILM REVIEWS) Kill Bill Volume Two The follow up installment of Tarantino’s ridiculously sensationalistic sword slashing cinema is welcomed by Frank with eager open arms. (FILM REVIEWS) Dawn of the Dead Frank sits down to watch Zack Snyder’s surprisingly winning remake of the flesh-eating fable Dawn of the Dead. (FILM REVIEWS) Cody Banks 2: Destination London The misguided adventures of the awkward junior secret agent continue in the mind numbing and anemic sequel Cody Banks 2: Destination London. Quite frankly, Frank reckons that Cody & company need to consider quitting the spy business altogether. (FILM REVIEWS) Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed America’s favorite cowardly canine and his crime-fighting cohorts are back for round two in the meager follow-up film, Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. They would have got away with it too, if it wasn't for you damn meddling cinema goers! (FILM REVIEWS) RSS and Science Fiction: The Definitive Guide There's a whole new universe opening up online for the SFF genre using the Internet's new RSS technology. But what the heck is RSS, how do you get it, and why should you care? (ARTICLES) Adolf Hitler: Man or Myth? Scots SFF author Ken MacLeod thinks it's time for the British to blush, as a new survey reveals that large swathes of the UK's population think Conan was real and The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells's fictional account of a Martian invasion, actually happened. (COMMENT)

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