Welcome to Nico Taranovsky's website! Nico is a fantasy author working on a new series of books tentatively known as the "Zastrian Trilogy". Here you can read new short fiction, poetry and memoir by Nico, check out his journal, or read about the Zastrian Empire.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 4:34PM The Summer 2011 issue of The Newport Review has just come out. In it you can check out "First Meeting", a snippet from my upcoming memoir about adopting children from foster care:
Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 1:16PM For ages I've been looking for just the right insult to describe a subset of people in the world of Zastria. These folks are not male or female or neuter, they are intersex. They refer to themselves as Myr, but the rest of Zastria is not so kind and I needed to come up with a derogatory term that would be clear, concise and easy to understand given the nature of these people. Well, I finally came up with it while trying to describe a completely different set of characters. I'm using the term "kink". Its clear, its not some strange medical or cultural lingo, and it gives the derogatory kick that I'm looking for. It only took six months to figure that out!
Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 9:30AM ;)
George R. R. MartinI had the pleasure to meet George R. R. Martin yesterday. He was very friendly and generous with his time. I'm looking forward immensely to the Game of Thrones release on HBO in 2011. Of course, since we don't have cable I'll have to wait till it arrives on Hulu or Blu-Ray. If you've enjoyed the books, I highly recommended getting a copy of The Art of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, it is beautifully illustrated and adds a richness to the original novels.
Friday, August 27, 2010 at 12:31PM World building seems relatively straight forward. Yes, there are a lot of tasks, but you just keep hammering away and eventually you have your own encyclopedia of world facts. For the novel I am working on now the world is known as "Aaka" and the empire that the story centers on is called "Zastria". For Zastria I compiled facts about:
Yet reading through this mini-encyclopedia to understand Zastria is kind of like trying to picture the hills of Florence by reading the Encyclopedia Britannica's entry on Italy. It leaves you wanting, to say the least.
To really get to know the world I am creating I had to visit it. For me, this means bringing it to life in short stories that have nothing to do with the novel I'm writing. By setting these stories in the provincial countryside I am giving a face to the people who inhabit Zastria. Although my protagonist will probably never meet most of these folks, just knowing they're out there has given me a profound sense of place whenever I write about this new world.
Aaka, Short Stories, World Building, Zastria Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 11:00AM I've got a whole pile of comments on the latest story set in Zastria ("Fear") and I'm having to force myself to just let them sit and wait. There is always that rush of desire to start editing as soon as you get feedback, but it is a silly temptation. Perspective doesn't come with a two day turnaround. I'll give it another week or so and then I'll at least have a better vantage point. In the mean time I continue to work on "Magic". Don't ask why all the recent short stories have one word titles. There is no answer for that kind of question...
Fear, Magic, Revisions, Short Stories