DL: You've written short stories before your novels. Which length do you prefer?
VN: I am a novelist at heart. Short stories are like individual jewel stones on a necklace, wonderful in themselves like standalone gleaming entities of semantic intensity. And yes, they often burst to come out, and I certainly enjoy it when they do. But the satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.
DL: Your book Dreams of the Compass Rose is set in a desert. What do you find fascinating about a desert setting?
VN: Well, right now I technically live in the desert -- Los Angeles being an artificial oasis -- but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.
I also find the desert a wonderful metaphor for desolation and yet the exact counterpart of the ocean with its hidden depths. Both are vast, harsh, implacable, homogenous to the untrained eye, and beautiful. Both allow the wind to roam on the surface. And both serve as wonderful vehicles for human survival stories.
A made-up proverb from Dreams of the Compass Rose says, "In the desert, the only god is a well." I love exploring the intensity of such juxtaposition, the dangerous edge. In the desert, water gives life, while in the ocean an island stands to give anchor. Opposites are desirable and necessary. Once again, you see the theme of taking away a precious element of the world or making it rare and precarious.
Also, the desert is an ideal illusion of a blank slate -- so much mystery in endless layers is hidden underneath its bright, pseudo-sterile surface.
What more can you ask from a fantasy setting?
DL: Who is your favorite character in your books?
VN: The answer to this question tends to change, depending on what book or story I am working on at the moment. I usually focus on the whole group of characters in any given work-in-progress, and as a result they become particularly dear to me as I delve into their innermost motivations and live out their lives.
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