
Steven Nedelton
ED- The Publisher of The Eerie Digest is very excited to introduce an author who writes in the same genre that he does. Steven Nedelton began writing short stories in his teens and has become a very important author today. Steven, tell us about your early years in writing and how they provided you with the confidence in your career.
SN- Thank you very much for this opportunity to present my novels. I believe I became an avid reader after getting Tom Sawyer novel for my tenth birthday. And so, in a way, Mark Twain is to blame for all my later writing woes, including the nagging desire to become a writer some day too. They say Twain was a great writer, but I think he was a genius. How could a mere mortal write so many masterpieces? Actually, we were similar in some ways in our early youths, at least similar to his Tom and Huck. Just like those two, my friends and I used to go to the nearby river, though we never fished. We also ran along the sandy beaches, fought, got badly sunburned, smoked cheap tobacco, cursed abundantly, drank alcohol, and got sick from the evil combinations. Yet, unlike Tom and Huck, we were most often home on time. Those two had it easy, did not have to suffer the wrath of an infuriated parent waiting on them. I believe my friends and I started experimenting with the short story writing at the age of twelve or thirteen, definitely bitten by Twain’s bug. And one of my short stories did get published later in a literary journal, when I was in my twenties. But then I graduated from a university, and my writing nightmares began. I had to write job related technical reports at the end of each completed assignment. And that definitely put an end to all of my writing aspirations during the next three decades.
ED- Your first novel was ‘Fear!,’ you started it in the late 1990’s. Please tell our readers about this story and the theme behind it.
SN- Actually, it was my second book, and I completed it a few years ago. My very first novel or novella, some 30 K words total, ended in a shredder after I failed to come up with the central plot. In general, in order to get published, one should write in a genre that is at least partly popular, and provide a decent content. At first, I thought of writing an autobiography, but only the famous people use variations on their personal life in their first novels. I did not wish to write a novel based on my life alone and so I decided to present a view on life in general. Fear! is all about that. And so, this book, almost my first one, turned out to be my third novel. It should be released the next year.
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