Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: Crystal AJ Smith’s novel has been described as a fable, winding together all-too-real issues of the lack of justice for murders of Indigenous women and the need to find strength in community with supernatural otters and other beings outside of the everyday world. It’s a powerful tale, and I’m delighted to welcome Crystal here to introduce herself and her book.

Crystal: Crystal AJ Smith di waayu, Txatgiw adat Git lax maadam di wil ‘waatgu, Liǧʷiłdax̌ʷ di wil dzogu
, Gisbutwada de pdeegu. Hello, my name is Crystal Smith and I am from the Ts̓ymsen and Haisla Nations and I have been adopted into the Heiltsuk Nation.

Gitwaałtk is the story of a young Indigenous woman who loses her Sister-Cousin to the highway of tears and who embarks on a journey with her na̱xnox to find and bring to justice to the person responsible for her Sister’s disappearance.

It’s an exploration of how grief and loss can find strength in family, community, and tradition.

Zilla: What do you want to say to your characters?

Crystal: I love you, you are everything I wish I could be. Your strength and determination in our way of being is so beautiful. Your ability to use our language and connect to our ancestors is the dream. T’oyaxsut’nuun.

Zilla: What drives you to write? And what drives you overall?

Crystal: I truly believe that my ancestors are working through me. I write when I feel the story asking me to write. My children are my reason for breathing, I will do as much as I can for them.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Crystal: I am currently hoping to put together a poetry collection and I have already started on a sequel to Gitwaaɫtk. My poetry collection will be poetry I wrote in my early teen years up until now and will include sm’algyax and lik’wila. I am really excited to pull this idea together and I hope to be accepted into a couple different writing programs to support my writings.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find your book?

Crystal: You can find it here.

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: For fans of the dark and horrifying, we have Konn Lavery here! A Canadian author, Konn wrote Necroflora, which you can find in Spud Publishing’s Sequel anthology. Konn, tell us about your story!

Konn: Milo is an average student, a decent bartender, and an okay boyfriend, finding his chance at redemption at a mining operation in Northern British Columbia. All sorts of questions are raised after a miner falls into a shaft, but the only thing found is a mysterious, cross-cultural shrine. Milo joins his wayward professor Dr. Rossdale to study and make sense of these strange happenings, only to make one of the most important, and most frightening, discoveries of their careers.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Konn: A part of this story came from my first time flying an airplane. Raised in the flat prairie province of Alberta, when I saw the vast mountain ranges from high above, it made me wonder what could be hidden inside, lost in time. I’m also inspired by nature’s powerful, and mysterious, forces which play a role in the plot.

Zilla: Is there a visual image—a painting or a photo—that inspired you?

Konn: The mountains were a huge inspiration which I see each day living in Vancouver. But I’d like to note that the artwork within the novella done by Elise Byenkya illustrates the unsettling themes of the story.

Zilla: Do you surprise your readers? 

Konn: I believe so. Necroflora has a couple of really creepy scenes that have left readers unsettled.

Zilla: Why do you write?

Konn: I’ve been compelled to make art since I picked up a pencil. Drawing, painting, music, writing. Telling stories has the strongest grip on me, discovering where these characters will take me. Then, inviting readers to dive into the obscure worlds and give them something to ponder long after they finish the book is quite rewarding.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Konn: I’m writing the finale to my multi-genre trilogy, Ash Born. It mixes urban fantasy and supernatural thriller elements. The series blurb is below:

Lola Cabello is a fugitive after exposing the law’s connection to the notorious Crystal Moth gang who destroyed her life and family, igniting her need for revenge and descending her into a world of reptilian drug lords, demons, and the fantastic.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Konn: Necroflora is available at: https://spudpub.com/products/sequel

All of my novels, audiobooks, and short stories are available at: https://konnlavery.com/

Monthly Newsletter: https://konnlavery.com/newsletter-sign-up/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/konnlavery/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/konnlavery/

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: A star-crossed love—or in this case, a Star-Crossed Alliance—always gets our attention, and Monica Goertzen Hertlein has just the thing for us! She’s here to talk about her romantic science fiction novel—so Monica, take it away!

Monica: Princess Shawnia, heir and military leader of her prairie kingdom, intends to marry for love, but when her people are carelessly killed by invaders with unimaginably fast transport and deadly weapons never before seen, she must forge an alliance with the northern kingdom sealed by marriage to their prince. The northern prince is handsome and charming, but believes women and royals should remain protected far from the battlefield. Despite what the marriage will cost her in personal freedom and heartbreak, she resolves to see it through to save her people.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Monica: The romance portion of this story has been in my head for decades (which may reveal too much about my age). The character and her push back against gender constructions, hierarchy, patriarchy, and devotion to her people through leadership based in service rather than command, developed as I was writing. Some of those themes came from my recent degree in sociology, some came from my professional life in a corporate world with far too much bullying.

Zilla: What drives you to write?

Monica: I always wanted to write. As far back as I remember. It’s not for the money!

Zilla: What’s the secret to editing?

Monica: I love editing. It’s fun to make a change and go, “That’s way better, thank goodness no one saw it before!”. If you don’t already enjoy editing, set your most recent draft aside for months (not days, not weeks). After that cooling-off time, remind yourself of your original inspiration. Write a love letter to your draft. Then just read your manuscript (or listen to it). Tackle one issue on each edit pass. Start with the big stuff. As you see the story flesh out, you’ll probably be inspired to keep colouring in your original sketch.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Monica: I hope to release Hideaway this summer, another romantic science fiction story. 

Mary’s worst decision yet, stealing from corrupt law enforcement, could land her in jail long enough to grow old. She flees the spaceport streets for a remote rural outpost hoping for refuge with Finn, the only person she trusts in the world. Despite the strangeness of agricultural life and her prejudice against the family that abandoned her surrogate brother, she finds a chance for love as well as safe haven while hiding the truth behind her visit to the farm. Now she must decide whether to be honest with her found family and risk losing her last chance for a real home, or be exposed as a thief when the law catches up to her.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?
Monica: Visit me at monicagh.com. You can also find me on Substack or Facebook. Find this book through links on my website.

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: Matt Maxwell’s series defies easy explanation. Haunted houses, memories of Los Angeles, and a girl who wants to feel something real, trapped between life and un-life. This might be an impossible question, but Matt, can you tell us about Hazeland?

Matt: About it, I’ve started saying, “In 80s LA, the darkness eats well” and that’s as close to anything in terms of getting the vibe across. The current book in the series (though it’s also a good starting point) is called My Gifts Are Hungry. For that, I’ve been saying, “Not all houses are haunted by the dead.” A little more enigmatic. It’s about a girl who runs away from home to visit the coolest club in Hollywood and finds herself crashing at one of the old houses up in the hills, the kind built by silent film stars and liquor kingpins of the past. And she comes to find that the house has been waiting for someone just like her for a very long time.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Matt: I suppose inspiration for the book came from me wanting to play around with some expectations in horror/fantasy reading. For instance, the nature of the ghost in the haunted house in My Gifts Are Hungry is something a little weirder, hopefully unexpected. I’m always interested in injecting something new, not just being one-note scary or bleak over and over.

A lot of the inspiration for the book came from historical research, particularly old houses in Los Angeles. LA isn’t that old of a city, though it’d been established a lot longer ago than people think. A lot of money came west in the 1890s to build grand houses that don’t look like anything else, not just Victorians.

Zilla: Your take on ghosts and darkness isn’t like anything else. Do you surprise your readers?

Matt: Hopefully I’m surprising my readers. I even end up surprising myself along the way. When this book started, I had a very particular idea of what the haunting started as and stuck with it until I found myself bogged down in things. Then I came to the realization that it wasn’t what I’d originally thought at all, something completely different. This made the book make a lot more sense in terms of how the main character was navigating her way through things, but also the other girls staying at the Casa del Palomas, as the house was named. Gotta let yourself be open to this sort of thing, be able to let go of something you thought was cool and working so that you can change things up when needed.

Zilla: What drives your writing?

Matt:  I dunno, pathology I guess. I can’t not, even if I find the process of dealing with the book after the writing has been done to be frustrating at times. And I have no idea what I’d be doing if I wasn’t writing. All the creative fields have been clobbered by this new economy. Maybe I’d go into plumbing.

Zilla: What’s your next project?

Matt: My next book doesn’t have a title yet. I’ve cycled through a bunch. It’s about the specter of nuclear war in the ‘80s and a weird manifestation of it.

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Matt: You can find my work at highway62press.com. I’ve got books on Amazon and at Ingram. Working on an independent ebook solution as well. The crowdfunding campaign for My Gifts Are Hungry is here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/highway62/my-gifts-are-hungry

Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Zilla: It’s time for a new take on old classics. We have Claris Lam back with us, this time to tell us about her fairy tale retellings in her anthology Found. Claris, it’s great to talk to you again! Can you tell us about Found?

Claris: Found’s collection of eight short stories brings a twist to retelling fairytales from different points of view, such as the witch that kept Rapunzel in a tower, the titular Juniper Tree, and the hunter that refused to kill Snow White.

Fans of Grimm fairytales and their retellings will find themselves entertained with new perspectives on classic stories.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Claris: Rereading the Grimm Fairytales really inspired me to write this collection, as mentioned in the book’s blurb. I also was inspired by playing ebi-hime’s games It Gets So Lonely Here and its sequel The End of an Obsession. Playing the games really inspired me to write all of the stories in 2^nd person point-of-view!

Zilla: What’s the secret to editing?

Claris: If you think you’ve caught all of the spelling errors, grammatical inconsistencies, and other issues in your manuscript…check one more time before you put up that book for preorder. I found out the hard way when I found three spelling errors in my debut book, Winner Takes All, when first publishing it! 

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Claris: I’m currently writing a fantasy novel where three former Chosen Ones must train three NEW Chosen Ones to save the world! 

Zilla: Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?

Claris: Found can be, well, found on Amazon and Itch.io. Find all links to my socials here.