INTERVIEW: Vera Nazarian on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday

Vera Nazarian is a two-time Nebula Award Nominee, award-winning artist, and member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, a writer with a penchant for moral fables and stories of intense wonder, true love, and intricacy. She is the author of critically acclaimed novels Dreams Of The Compass Rose and Lords Of Rainbow, as well as the outrageous parodies Mansfield Park And Mummies and Northanger Abbey And Angels And Dragons, and most recently, Pride And Platypus: Mr. Darcy's Dreadful Secret in her humorous and surprisingly romantic Supernatural Jane Austen Series. Her latest work is the epic fantasy Cobweb Bride Trilogy set in an alternate Renaissance. After many years in Los Angeles, Vera lives in a small town in Vermont, and uses her Armenian sense of humor and her Russian sense of suffering to bake conflicted pirozhki and make art.


Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Vera Nazarian: There are no words sufficient to say how much of an impact Marion had on me as a young writer starting out. She bought my first story “Wound on the Moon” for Sword and Sorceress #2 (DAW Books, 1985), and my second and my third, and so on, so she gave me my “pro wings.” But that’s not all—her wonderful advice on storytelling, her supportive rejections—yup, there were tons of rejections, including the very first rejection where she graciously went through a novella with a red pen and gave me, a teenager just starting out, a detailed edit critique free of charge and encouraged me to rewrite and resubmit—all of this helped give me a focus and a direction and an understanding of the writing and editing process. And not only that, I also learned a great deal about shared world writing by writing in the world of Darkover. Basically I would not be the writer that I am now without her. I owe her everything, and am profoundly honored to be one of “Marion’s own writers” as so many of us went on to be.

INTERVIEW: Rosemary Edghill on Stars of Darkover

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TARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Rosemary Edghill (aka eluki bes shahar) has published stories in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine as well as MZB’s long-running Sword & Sorceress anthology series.  This led to her ghost-writing the urban fantasy series Witchlight, Ghostlight, Gravelight, and Heartlight under Bradley’s name. A woman of many, many talents, she’s also an anthologist and editorial mentor.  Her most recent books include the Shadow Grail series. 

Deborah J. Ross How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Rosemary Edghill: Of course she influenced me, just as she did all writers of my generation by the stories she chose to tell, and by the founding of MZB’s Fantasy Magazine.  Writing for MZBFM and for the Sword and Sorceress anthology series was an exercise in writing to market while putting aside the preconceptions still widely held in the F/SF field of the time: it stretched my imagination, and really showed me what I could manage to get away with in terms of plot.

But more than that, having been privileged to collaborate with her and to write as her, I had the opportunity to study her writing in depth: her vocabulary and sentence structure, her themes and her methods of drawing a character.  It was really a master class in the “bread and butter” aspects of storytelling, and I think it has affected the stories I choose to tell, and the way I tell them, ever since.

DJR:  Tell us about your story in Stars of Darkover.

RE: The title, SECOND CONTACT, is a play on the phrase “First Contact”, which is usually used to describe the first meeting of human and alien.  But first contacts are easy: it’s figuring out what comes after you learn to say “hello” that’s hard.  The story is set a couple of years after Rediscovery, and features one of my favorite themes: culture clash.  Jenny Lauren is doing her best to help Darkover fit into the Terran Empire: Armsman Zhenyar thinks she’s going about it all wrong.  It wouldn’t be a good story if both sides weren’t completely right, of course!

Rediscovery is my favorite period of Darkovan history, and I think some of MZB’s best tales were set there.  The mix of “sorcerous” Darkovans and blaster-wielding Terrans gives the stories a Leigh Brackett/Fletcher Pratt space opera feel, while Marion’s modern sensibilities kept the material fresh.

INTERVIEW: Elisabeth Waters and Ann Sharp on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Elisabeth Waters sold her first short story in 1980 to Marion Zimmer Bradley for The Keeper's Price, the first of the Darkover anthologies. She then went on to sell short stories to a variety of anthologies. Her first novel, a fantasy called Changing Fate, was awarded the 1989 Gryphon Award. She is now working on a sequel to it, in addition to her short story writing and anthology editing. She also worked as a supernumerary with the San Francisco Opera, where she appeared in La Gioconda, Manon Lescaut, Madama Butterfly, Khovanschina, Das Rheingold, Werther, and Idomeneo.

Ann Sharp, who edited The Darkover Newsletter for ten years, is known for her articles on writing. After the DNL was no longer published, she continued to write these articles for Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine. She is also known for her interest in genealogy and is active in the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of Founders and Patriots, the National Society of New England Women, and the Colonial Dames of the 17th Century.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Elisabeth Waters and Ann Sharp: We are both graduates of the Marion Zimmer Bradley School of Hack-Writing. Ann says that Marion was the first person to explain simply and clearly the elements of a plot. Great literature does not do this very well. Lisa remembers Marion saying that one editor told her to stop trying to show how beautifully she could write and just tell the story. Obviously Marion provided years of nagging encouragement.

INTERVIEW: Shariann Lewitt on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s work when she was a girl was part of what inspired Shariann Lewitt to become a science fiction writer.  Today she has published seventeen books and over forty short stories under five different names.  When not writing she teaches at MIT, studies flamenco dance, and is accounted reasonably accomplished at embroidery.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Shariann Lewitt: Marion Zimmer Bradley, and the Darkover books in particular, are part of the reason I became a science fiction writer.  As a young girl, Bradley was one of the writers who wrote about girls and women in a way I could identify—interesting, active women with agency, but who also chafed at the constraints of their society.  Many of the other writers I enjoyed reading growing up wrote entirely fantasy, and here Darkover was a wonderful exception because, while there was magic, there was also science.  At least there was space travel, and I was one of the kids who loved science and the space program.  Girls existed and sometimes got to act in fantasy books, but were entirely invisible in any books with space ships and star travel.  More than anything else, Marion Zimmer Bradley showed me that I could be a science fiction writer without erasing myself as a female from the time I was very young,

INTERVIEW: Diana L. Paxson on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Diana L. Paxson is one of the writers who was inspired by Marion Zimmer Bradley. In addition to the Chronicles of Westria and historical fantasies such as The White Raven and the Wodan's Children trilogy, she continued Marion's Avalon series, most recently with Sword of Avalon. She is also the author of 86 short stories, including contributions to most of Marion's anthologies. Her story takes place a generation after the events in "The Motherquest" and "A Season of Butterflies".

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Diana L. Paxson: I made the mistake of taking Creative Writing in college-- a mistake, because although it did teach me something about structure and style, the goal was to write literary fiction, which I found a dead bore, and my stories showed it. As a result, I gave up on the idea of writing for the next ten years. It was not until I had married Jon DeCles, who had been unofficially adopted into the Zimmer family, and gotten to know Marion herself, that it dawned on me that real people (i.e people who liked the same kind of books I did) could actually write them.  When I finally managed to complete a novel, Marion was kind enough to read and critique it. I cried. Then I rewrote it. Several times, actually. But Marion continued to encourage me, and so I didn't give up. Since everyone else in the family was writing too (except for my sister-in-law Tracy Blackstone, who was our agent) we ended up with a sort of extended-family cum writers' colony, with some amazing discussions around the tea-table.

New York report...a busy week!

Lambda Literary Awards, a micro-report: The award ceremony last night was filled with glamour, fellowship, humor, and tears (especially the video montage, "The Book That Saved My Life.") Saw a few friends, met some others. Did not win, but losing to Melissa Scott (who was pioneer and inspiration to a generation) (and Ann Griswold) counts as a honor. Now I can forever say I am a Lambda Award Finalist!

The Heir of Khored, the final volume of my epic fantasy trilogy, is now on sale! (At your local bookstore or the usual online venues.)





On SFSignal, I collected responses from some of the authors in Stars of Darkover about how Marion had influenced their careers. The "guest roundtable" is live today.

Stars of Darkover is available in print edition, with ebooks to follow shortly. I guess the different editions go live at slightly different times.




Over on Far Fetched Tales you can listen to a free podcast of my short story, "Nor Iron Bars," from Sword and Sorceress.

INTERVIEW: Steven Harper on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.


Steven Harper is the pen name for Steven Piziks, a name no one can reliably spell or pronounce. Marion Bradley bought his very first short story for Sword and Sorceress IX way back in 1990, and his keyboard has been clattering ever since. He's written some twenty novels over the years, including The Silent Empire series and The Clockwork Empire steampunk series. Steven also teaches English in southeast Michigan.  When not writing, he plays the folk harp, dabbles in oral storytelling, and spends more time on-line than is probably good for him.   


Deborah J. Ross:  How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Steven Harper: Marion forced me to learn how to write women.  Back in the early 90s, when I was a new writer, about the only short fiction market for the sword-and-sorcery stories I wanted to write was Marion, and she wanted strong female characters.  So I learned to write strong female characters, and I sold her more than a dozen stories over the years.  She also taught me how to be a professional--writing daily, accepting criticism, understanding how to deliver what a reader (and editor) wants, and seeing writing as a business as well as an art.  As a result, when I sold a novel, the first person I called was Marion.  "Help!" I said.  "I need an agent!"  She laughed and made a recommendation that led to the agent I have to this day.

INTERVIEW: Debra Doyle and Jim D. Macdonald on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Debra Doyle was born in Florida and educated in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania -- the last at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in English literature, concentrating on Old English poetry. While living and studying in Philadelphia, she met and married her collaborator, James D. Macdonald, and subsequently traveled with him to Virginia, California, and the Republic of Panamá. Various children, cats, and computers joined the household along the way.

James Douglas Macdonald was born in White Plains, New York, the second of three children of W. Douglas Macdonald, a Chemical Engineer, and Margaret E. Macdonald, a  professional artist. After leaving the University of Rochester, where he majored in Medieval Studies, he served in the U. S. Navy.

Doyle and Macdonald left the Navy and Panamá in 1988 in order to pursue writing full-time. They now live in a big 19th-Century house in Colebrook, New Hampshire, where they write science fiction and fantasy for children, teenagers, and adults.

 

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Debra Doyle: I was always interested in the clash-of-cultures aspect of the Darkover stories, and the space-opera/planetary stories flavor that a lot of them had.  When I went on to write my own stuff, I knew that this flavor was something that I wanted to include.

DJR: What inspired your story in Stars of Darkover? 

DD: Jim Macdonald was in the Navy for about fifteen years, and I was a Navy wife for a good part of that, so I couldn't help wondering what Darkover was like as a duty station for those hapless Terrans who got posted there, and what they told each other about how to make it through to the end of a tour.

DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead? (feel free to expound on your recent and forthcoming books!)

DD: Jim Macdonald and I have two novels forthcoming from Tor Books, The Gates of Time and Emergency Magical Services:  First Response.

INTERVIEW: Barb Caffrey on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Barb Caffrey is a writer, editor and musician from the Midwest. Though "At the Crossroads" is her first-ever Darkover story, she has written other things, including a humorous fantasy novel, Elfy that will be published in 2014 by Twilight Times Books. Previous stories and poems have appeared in Bedlam's Edge (with late husband Michael B. Caffrey), How Beer Saved The World, the Bearing North anthology, the Written Word online magazine, Joyful Online, the Midwest Literary Magazine, and at e-Quill Publishing. Find her at Elfyverse (AKA "Barb Caffrey's Blog") for discussions of all and sundry, or at Shiny Book Review.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Barb Caffrey: This is a three-stranded answer, which I hope won't be too confusing . . . you see, early on, like many readers, I was introduced to Marion Zimmer Bradley's fiction, most particularly the Darkover series, but also The Mists Of Avalon and some others. I remember reading Sharra's Exile first, and loving that, but then being completely blown away by The Shattered Chain . . . the whole idea that women would be able to find a way to be fiercely independent on such a feudalistic world as Darkover just enthralled me, the way it did so many other readers. And after that, I read all the Darkover stories I possibly could.

But that, of course, was just the first strand.

The second is that my husband, the late Michael B. Caffrey, was a friend of one of Ms. Bradley's sons. Michael lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay area, and he told me that when he first started to write, his friend brought him to his mother, Ms. Bradley, and they talked for a few minutes. Michael remembered Ms. Bradley as being unfailingly encouraging to him, which he needed, as no one in his family was interested in science fiction (at least, not then), so no one understood why Michael felt the need to write. (Note that by the time I met Michael, Ms. Bradley had already passed away. But he remembered her fondly.)

Had Marion Zimmer Bradley not been encouraging to my husband when she didn't have to be, I don't think Michael would've been as likely to keep after it. (Most particularly with such a positive attitude.) And in that case, I would be a very different writer now . . . that is, if I were still writing at all.

Finally, my first writing mentor (aside from my husband) was -- still is -- Rosemary Edghill. And Rosemary worked with Ms. Bradley on four books (the "Light" series), knew her well, and was positively inspired by her.

INTERVIEW: Rachel Manija Brown on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday.

Rachel Manija Brown's post-apocalyptic YA novel "Stranger," co-written with Sherwood Smith, is forthcoming from Viking in 2014.  She is the author of the memoir "All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: an American Misfit in India," and also writes short stories, graphic novels, poetry, television, and plays. She is currently a graduate student at Antioch University, Los Angeles, in the MA program in clinical psychology, with a specialization in trauma.

­Deborah J. Ross: What inspired your story in Stars of Darkover?

Rachel Manija Brown: My story, "The Fountain's Choice," was inspired by a brief scene in Stormqueen! which shows riyachiyas, who are genetically engineered to be living sex toys, always willing, always obedient. 

I wondered what would it be like if a person who had never had free will suddenly gained it. What would it be like to make a choice for the very first time? 

To play against that character, I wanted a character whose choices had also been constrained, and who had internalized that constraint: someone who could choose, but didn't know it. And since the female riyachiyas were designed be more stereotypically feminine than any ordinary woman could ever be, I wanted to set her against a character who didn't fit into ideas of masculine and feminine at all: an emmasca.

That plus some of my favorite Darkover tropes - delicious food, hurt-comfort, training sequences, interesting laran powers, Ages of Chaos decadence, the harrowing wilderness journey in bad weather - made a story.

INTERVIEW: Robin Wayne Bailey on Stars of Darkover

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, to celebrate Marion's 84th birthday

Robin Wayne Bailey is the author of numerous novels, including the Dragonkin trilogy and the Frost series, as well as Shadowdance and the Fritz Leiber inspired Swords Against The Shadowland.  His short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies with numerous appearances in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword And Sorceress series and Deborah J. Ross's Lace And Blade volumes.  His novelette, "The Children's Crusade" was a 2008 Nebula Award nominee.  Some of his stories have been collected in two volumes available from Yard Dog Press.  He is a former president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and co-founder of the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, now located in Seattle, Washington.  He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career? What inspired your story in Stars of Darkover?

Robin Wayne Bailey: Marion Zimmer Bradley was an early supporter of my writing.  I had just sold my first novel, Frost, when I saw an announcement that Marion was seeking stories for a new anthology called Sword And Sorceress.  I decided to take a shot at that and wrote a story called “Child of Orcus,” involving female gladiators in the Roman arenas during the reign of Caligula, which was a little-known or discussed historical fact at the time.

Marion loved the story and wrote an astonishingly complimentary introduction for it, stating, among other very nice things, that “I bought this story under the impression that this was a woman writing about a woman.  Only after deciding to purchase it did I discover that Robin Bailey was a man; but like all really good writers, gender is unimportant to the perceptive eye he brings to the study of his heroine.”  That’s a compliment I’ve always held closely.  “Child of Orcus” became my second professional genre sale and saw publication exactly one year after my first novel appeared.

I sold a good number of stories to Marion after that for further Sword And Sorceress volumes and for such anthologies as Spells Of Wonder.  Indeed, one of my favorite stories, “The Moon Who Loved the Man,” appeared in Spells.  I also sold to her magazine, too.  Marion was always very complimentary and supportive, even going so far as to provide a couple of nice blurbs for my subsequent novels.  But then came a very special anthology invitation.  Marion had decided to put together a special small-print hardback volume of stories by writers she considered “her literary children,” and it would be called Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Worlds.  That she considered me one of her children was immensely flattering, but by that time I was, I thought, leaving the kind of fantasy I had previously sold to her behind and exploring other directions. 

INTERVIEW: Janni Lee Simner on "Stars of Darkover"

STARS OF DARKOVER – not just the glorious night sky over the world of the Bloody Sun, but the authors who have been inspired over the decades by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s favorite world. It will be released on June 3, 2014, in honor of Marion's 84th birthday.

Here is the first of a series of interviews with these fabulous authors.

Janni Lee Simner sold her first short story to the anthology Leroni of Darkover more than two decades ago. She's gone on to publish more than three dozen short stories and eight novels, including the post-apocalyptic Bones of Faerie trilogy and the Icelandic-saga-based Thief Eyes.

Deborah J. Ross: How did Marion Zimmer Bradley influence your writing career?

Janni Lee Simner: I'd been a long-time Darkover reader when I first came upon Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover anthologies. I was just beginning to try to write professionally at the time, so I decided to try to write a story for one of them. I sent off for writer's guidelines -- this was in the days of snail mail, and I didn't know to include a self-addressed stamped envelope, but Marion sent me guidelines anyway, along with a page of advice for new writers. (I wonder how she knew? :-)) So I wrote my story, rewrote it about a million times, sent it off -- and was stunned when it sold! Knowing I'd made that first professional sale helped me stick with it as I worked on becoming a better writer and selling more consistently.