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Interview with Vera Nazarian - Page 2

© Debbie Ledesma

As far as publication, I was supremely lucky that in my senior high school year I came upon an issue of _Writers Digest_ with a market listing for Sword and Sorceress #2, edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Before, probably around 1982, I had sent out some occasional poems to vanity contests (knowing nothing about the facts of vanity publishing and actually paying one of such poetry anthologies to "feature" my poem). I also sent out humongous and terribly overwritten stories to places such as _IASFM_ and _F&SF_ and _Fantasy Book_, and started acquiring rejections, with my very first one being a personal and very kind scribbled note from Shawna McCarthy. But here, Marion Zimmer Bradley took apart my first submission to her, covered the manuscript in red ink revisions, and told me to try her again. I had never been so reeling with authorial joy as I had been that day, holding Marion's letter and seeing that ravaged manuscript -- finally, it meant that someone cared!

And so I sat down and wrote a short story in two weeks and submitted it to her. And Marion bought "Wound On The Moon" for S&S #2. My first sale and my first pro sale rolled into one.

(See it reprinted here: http://www.fictionwise.com/ebooks/eBook5... )

Since then I've sold about fifteen more stories to MZB's various anthologies, and many other short pieces to other markets, not to mention the two novels to the wonderful small press owned by John Gregory Betancourt, called Wildside Press. However I will never forget what Marion did for me by accepting that first story from a stupid enthusiastic kid.

Of course at that point I had no idea that the adventure was only beginning and that the struggle and the rejections were to pile before me, a typical young writer, in an implacable mountain. But I was on my way.

DL: What authors, Fantasy or otherwise, influence your writing?

VN: At first, I would say it was all the Greeks and the Russian classics like Tolstoy, Goncharov, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain. Then came fluency in the English language and with it modern fantasists like Tanith Lee and genre icons like Marion Zimmer Bradley, CJ Cherryh, Andre Norton, Gene Wolfe, Charles de Lint, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny. If you ask me now, I think every single writer whose work I've read has had some influence upon me, and I continue to be influenced, subtly, by

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