January 2008

Another interview! Thanks to Zoran for taking the time out of his day to answer my questions. Enjoy! SD: Could you please introduce yourself to the audience and talk a little about your history in the writing/publishing world? ZZ: I was born in Belgrade, the form Yugoslavia, in 1948. In 1973 I graduated from the Department of General Literature with the theory of literature. I received my master’s degree in 1979 and my doctorate in 1982. I am now professor of creative writing at Belgrade University.I started to write prose in 1993, when I was 45. In the next decade and a half I wrote sixteen books of fiction: The Fourth Circle (1993), Time Gifts (1997), The Writer (1998), The Book (1999), Impossible Encounters (2000), Seven Touches of Music (2001), The Library (2002), Steps Through the Mist (2003), Hidden Camera (2003), Compartments (2004), The Bridge (2006), Miss Tamara, the Reader (2006), Amarcord (2007), and The Last Book (2007).I am about to finish my new novel Escher’s Loops. SD: What are you currently reading, what do you plan to read, and what have you just finished reading? ZZ: I am currently re-reading Erasmus Roterdamus’ masterpiece In Praise of Folly. Prior to that I read with great pleasure Peter Woit’s excellent study Not Even Wrong. In early February I always read the same book: Jaroslaw Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk, one of the greatest novels of all times. SD: What are some of your writing influences? Who is your favorite author and/or what is your favorite book? ZZ: Any book by Mikhail Bulgakov, Milan Kundera, Jose Saramago, Tamar Yellin, Umberto Eco, Kazuo Ishiguro, Orhan Pamuk, Haruku Murakami… SD: What were some hurdles you faced when you first began taking your writing seriously? ZZ: I wrote extensively about my initial hurdles in the afterward of the US edition of my first novel The Fourth Circle (The Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2004). Here is an excerpt: When apparently there were no more publishers to whom my agent could submit The Fourth Circle, he stepped forward with an ingenious proposal. I should change my name. What do you mean, I asked incredulously. He meant I should choose a pen name, preferably something that would sound English. Like what? Well, we could try to find an analogous version of your original name. What would that be? After a brief etymological consideration, he boldly suggested: Donald Livingston. Why would I be Donal Livingston instead of Zoran Zivkovic? Can you really imagine, he asked, that anyone called Zoran Zivkovic would ever be able to publish anything in the USA? I could. He couldn’t. So, inevitably, we went our separate ways. SD: Do you have any strange writing habits? ZZ: My only writing habit is that I am a morning writer. I write only between 9 AM and about noon. SD: Since you write both science fiction and fantasy, what do you like about both genres? What do you think are some problems, if any, within each genre, given that you write and presumably read SF and fantasy? Did you have any difficulty crossing over? ZZ: I write neither science fiction nor fantasy. These are mere labels invented by the publishing industry. I consider myself a writer without any prefixes. Quite simply, a writer. A humble practitioner of the ancient and noble art of prose. SD: You write what would be called by a lot of people ‘magical realism’. This is very clear in “Seven Touches of Music” as many of the stories ‘flirt’ with the lines between the real and the imagined. What about this type of fantasy writing is appealing to you and why do you write such stories? ZZ: The term ‘magical realism’ was invented to gather under a single umbrella a number of Hispano-American authors active mostly in the second part of the 20th century. Although I have the greatest possible admiration for their invaluable contribution to world literature, I don’t consider myself a part of that tradition. My literary roots are predominantly Middle-European. I am an unworthy successor of such prose giants as Hoffmann, Kafka, and Bulgakov. SD: “Seven Touches of Music” is a collection of short stories that each use music as a common theme. When you began this collection did you intend for every story to use music in some way or did it just happen that way? Basically, how did this collection come together? ZZ: It came together basically just as any other book of mine. I woke up one sunny April morning back in 2001 and it was there, in my head. The entire book. All I had to do was to sit down at my desk and start typing. As simple as that. In my prose writing there are never any preparations. That would be fundamentally wrong in my case. SD: Tiffany, of Aio, told me in an email that she envisioned “The Violinist” as a story about Albert Einstein in his last days. After I thought about that idea it occurred to me that there could actually be some validity to such a thought. Is there any truth to Tiffany’s idea or is it intended to be somewhat mysterious? ZZ: There are plenty of clues for an attentive reader. The “Violinist” opens in a Princeton hospital. Einstein died in a Princeton hospital on April 18, 1955. His last physician was Dr. Dean, mentioned in my story. There is also his last nurse, Mrs. Roszel. I only left the dying professor unnamed. With a good reason… SD: This novel is an English translation from Serbian. As a literature student I have an interest in translated works and the world of translation. Since you speak both English and Serbian, could you talk a little about some complications of translating your work? ZZ: I was extremely fortunate to have on my side Mrs. Alice Copple-Tosic, an excellent translator. She has translated from my native Serbian to English all but two books of mine. So far she has received nothing but

Here is another interview for all of you. Thanks to Karen Miller for taking the time out of her busy schedule to answer my questions. I look forward to finishing The Awakened Mage. Here it is: SD: Thanks for doing this interview with me. I was very glad to receive a response back from you. First, would you tell us a little bit about yourself, such as the basic history of how you came to be a writer, what you’ve written in the past and recently (fiction or non-fiction), and the like. This is sort of the typical first question just to introduce you to people reading the blog. KM: And many thanks for asking!Like a great many writers, I’ve been scribbling stories for years. Ever since I was a child. My favourite classes in school were English, Composition, Creative Writing. All that stuff. When I left high school I went to university and did a communications degree. One of my majors was Creative Writing. I also majored in Literary Studies and FilmStudies, basically wrapping up my three favourite past times — reading, writing and watching film/tv drama.I always always always wanted to be a writer, but it took me a long time to grow into the person I needed to be in order to achieve that goal. While that process was happening I did a lot of different things — I worked in the public service, the insurance industry, thetelecommunications industry, the publishing industry, I was a PR officer in local government, I worked professionally with horses, I was a college lecturer and I owned/managed by own sf/fantasy/mystery bookshop for several years. That was the last ‘regular’ job I had before making the leap to professional writing. And while it wasunnerving, not being able to settle, I did gain a lot of useful experiences over those years that have in turn helped my writing. My favourite mantra is: Nothing learned is ever wasted. Or, Who cares if you’re bleeding? It’s all good copy!My first professionally published work was in Australia. I wrote three YA light romances. Then I started working on my first fantasy novel, The Innocent Mage. In 2005/6 Innocent Mage and its sequel were published in Australia as the Kingmaker, Kingbreaker duology, and then went on to be published in the US and UK in 2007. They were followed by my first Stargate novel, Alliances, and my current fantasy trilogy –Godspeaker. Bks 1 and 2 are out in Australia, and they’ll be published this year in the US/UK. Bk 3 comes out in Australia in June, and in the US/UK next year.I’ve got a new series starting to release in Australia this April, under a pen name. That’s also been sold to Orbit, but I don’t have any firm release information yet. I’ve just finished my next Stargate novel, Do No Harm, which is due out in a few months. Once I’ve completed Godspeaker bk 3 I move on to the next in the pen-name series, and in December I’ll deliver the first volume of the sequel duology to the first Kingmaker, Kingbreaker books.On the whole, it’s a good thing I don’t mind my own company. *g*SD: Speaking of Stargate, what is it like writing for shared-worlds? For others out there that don’t know what that term means, a shared-world is basically one in which people other than the original creator are allowed to write stories within the world, provided some rules are adhered to. Prime examples would be Dragonlance and Star Wars. So, for you, what were some problems or issues you had in writing for Stargate? Was it hard? How much research did you have to do? KM: In terms of working with MGM, the parent company who licences the franchise, or with the editors at Fanedomonium — no troubles at all. My experiences to date have been wonderful. As far as the work being hard is concerned, yes. It’s hard work. There’s a school of thought in the genre community that says media tie-ins are by definition low-brow crap written by talentless hacks who are too pathetic to write ‘real books’. To which I say: really? Honestly — if you’re going to accuse someone of being a talentless hack because they write about worlds and characters they didn’t personally create then almost every single tv scriptwriter on the planet is a talentless hack. For the record? Not so much.I take the Stargate novels I write very seriously because I’m a fan of the show, and before ever I was a professional writer I was a fan. I try to the very best of my ability to get it ‘right’ in terms of characterisation and dialogue, because I feel my job is to give the reading fans an authentic ‘Stargate’ experience.Having said that, though, the single biggest problem with writing fiction based on a tv how is that while all us fans are watching the same show, none of us is ‘seeing’ the same show. We bring individual biases and beliefs and interpretations to the source material. Which means that for some people, I will never get it right. And I need to make my peace with that. I pretty much have. I’m sad if someone’s disappointed with what I’ve written, but I know I’ve been true to the show I see to the best of my ability. Whatever I do I make sure I can point to aired material in support of my story — and boy, I watch and I watch and I watch and then I watch again. I have the show on dvd and it’s my constant reference source. SD: Your biography on your website talks about your various moves in life. Could you talk about what the transition was like when you moved from Canada to Australia and then to England, etc.? What sort of cultural challenges did you face? Was it difficult to adjust? How did this part of your life affect your writing, if at all? KM: