7 Comments

Thank you for participating in this interview, Vanya!

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*WE* need a tangible, physical, real result of all those efforts made during the past year. Can’t wait.

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Thank you Mark for your great questions and featuring me here.

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Combine harvesters truly have a sci-fi feel to them. Having played Dune: the Battle of Arrakis on SEGA at a very early age, I always thought of them as spice harvesters :)

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I started reading Nova Nevedoma when it was called The Lifeboat (though I haven't started reading the novel yet), so it is quite interesting to get to know Vanya better. One of the pieces he wrote that really got my attention and which I shared with friends was written shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Thanks, Mark, for doing this interview. I subscribed to Will's newsletter after you featured him, so you are doing a great service for other Substack writers.

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"If I were always looking for ideal conditions to write, I wouldn't have written anything."

For so many years, I sacrificed writing because I had a certain idea of what the perfect writing environment was--and my life of raising kids and working and doing all the things didn't line up with that. Now I write whenever and wherever I can, often in the notes on my phone. I remind myself of all those social media posts my followers loved--the ones I used to thumb together on my phone. If that strategy worked back when I was actually active on social media, then it will work just as well now that I'm writing on Substack.

Interesting interview (as usual, Mark)! Very nice to "meet" Vanya.

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Wonderful interview. I like hearing about Vanya’s writing process.

It seems so simple(just reading and writing), and yet it seems to be effective by the way he writes.

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