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

Sabitha: We love a good paranormal romance, and Elle Ire is here with just the thing! Elle, can you tell us about Harsh Reality!

Elle: Cali McCade is happy being the only female sheriff in the West until evil destroys her town of Oblivion and everyone in it. But when a magical creature sends her forward in time, Cali gets a chance for justice—and to stop history from repeating itself.

Now, on the set of Harsh Reality, a television show that challenges average people to survive in historical settings, Cali isn’t just the sheriff of Oblivion—she also plays herself on TV. It isn’t easy to find her path in this new world, but at least she knows what her “character” would do… even if it’s a little strange to be navigating a blooming romance with the woman playing Arlene, her long-lost love.

When the elementals show up to destroy Oblivion all over again, can Cali find a way to defeat the demons, keep her cover, and still ride off into the sunset?

Sabitha: What inspired you to write this book?

Elle: Harsh Reality is what happens when I go to a late showing of the movie Cowboys and Aliens and eat a big meal before bedtime. My subconscious brain swaps in women who love women for all the major roles and then takes the story on a crazy roller coaster ride into modern day.

Sabitha: That’s a great way to get the spark of an idea! Once you’ve got that, what’s your writing process?

Elle: Actually, this pretty much sums it up—cram my brain with sci-fi and/or Sapphic film content, actiony instrumental music, and whatever speculative fiction or Sapphic romance novel I’m reading, and then go to bed. My subconscious is much better at all this creative business than I am while awake. Often, I’ll wake up with an entire novel plot ready to go, complete with characters, their names, and sometimes even large swaths of dialogue. Then I start writing. I’m a plantser, meaning I plan ahead about three chapters, then write those, and then plan three more. I tend to revise/edit as I go, so the first draft generally ends up being the final draft.

Sabitha: What book do you tell all your friends to read? 

Elle: The book by someone else that I tell everyone to read is One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston. Amazing story, wonderful, diverse characters, some crazy contemporary fantasy, and a lovely, heartfelt romance. It’s so unique, and I wish I’d thought of it.

Sabitha:  If you could pick any author to read your book, who would you want to read it? Why them?

Elle: If I could pick any author to read Harsh Reality, it would be Casey McQuiston or Tamsyn Muir, the author of Gideon the Ninth (which I also recommend all the time for completely different reasons). These are very different writers, but I loved their work so much, and I have so much respect for them.

Sabitha: 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?

Elle: You can find Harsh Reality (along with my other novels) here. And you can find me on Twitter. Thanks for letting me chat with you all!

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

Sabitha: We’ve got something a bit different today! Mike Oswald joins us to talk about his nonfiction—useful guides to the US National Parks. Mike, what inspired you to write these books?

Mike: After getting mugged and cut (oddly, just the pinky fingers, nothing too serious), I found myself at a crossroads: return to doing someone else’s work or try to chart my own path. I chose the latter. While exploring Acadia National Park, I flipped over a copy of Nat Geo’s U.S. National Parks Guide and read “Our #1 selling title.” I thought, “I think I can make something better.”

Sabitha: It sounds pretty serious! So you self-published your passion project?

Mike: I made a book in InDesign and rather than pitch it, I thought, “Why can’t I find a printer and distributor to work with?” It’s taken some time (and trial and error), but now I feel like I’ve forged some great distributor/printer relationships.

Sabitha: And you started your working life as an engineer?

Mike: Yeah, I don’t know how this happened either, but I’m pretty sure a lot of readers think about writing at some point.

Sabitha: So you’re a reader as well as a writer! What book do you tell all your friends to read?

Mike: Probably The Death and Life of the Great Lakes.

Sabitha: When you took up writing, was there any music that inspired you?

Mike: Unfortunately they’re no longer together, but Jared and the Mill made a bunch

of songs that have kept me going through the years.

Sabitha:  If you could pick any author to read your books, who would you want to read it?

Mike: Oh my gosh, it would be torture, so I better keep this answer to myself.

Sabitha: From authors to readers—who is your ideal reader?

Mike: Inquisitive, curious, anyone who wants to make their time and money count while exploring the U.S. National Parks.

Sabitha: There’s a saying that we’re, “Loving the parks to death.” Are we doing that?

Mike: Well, we are and we aren’t. Humans never step foot on the vast majority of park land. The National Park Service protects about 85 million acres of land and something like 0.015% of that is developed as trails. Roads are probably a similarly tiny fraction of total park land. So, there’s plenty of public land in the United Sates, especially if you add in Forest Service land (193 million acres) and Bureau of Land Management land (245 million acres). The problem is, a handful of parks receive more visitors than they can comfortably accommodate a few months each year. Arches, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain national parks instituted timed-entry permit requirements to limit visitation, and, by most accounts, it’s made overall visitor experiences better, but, as you can imagine, it also upsets others. I guess the bottom line is, if you’re thinking about going to any of the “flagship” National Parks, you should do a little planning. Whether that’s purchasing a guidebook or scrolling the internet, that’s up to you 🙂

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

Mike: You can find Your Guide to the National Parks, National Park Maps, and The Dayhiker’s Guide to the National Parks on Amazon. I’m on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Sabitha: I have one last special request. In addition to all your human fans, I’ve heard you count two horses among your biggest supporters. Could you show us some photos of them reviewing their books?

Mike: Very happy to complete that assignment, Sabitha!

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

Sabitha: We have Terry Bartley with us, to talk about his queer fantasy adventures, Tyranny of the Fey. Terry, tell us about your stories of elves, goblins, and orcs!

Terry: A famed Elven researcher is worried about her home. When she discovers a new realm with massive magic potential, she believes she has found the answer. Will the Seasonal Fey Courts allow her to continue her research without interference, or do they have more nefarious plans?

An Elven princess runs away from her arranged marriage to a parallel world. Will she be able to find the adventure she seeks? While she is in search of battles with dragons and quests to obtain sacred artifacts, she finds that what she was looking for may have been a true connection with someone that understands her.

Two childhood friends, an orc and a goblin, have long dreamed of adventure. When a magic school dropout stumbles into their lives, they jump at the chance to realize their ambitions. This found family realizes the world of Galevyn is a much bigger place than the jungle they grew up in.

Sabitha: What inspired you to write this book?

Terry: I started writing seriously about four years ago. I started writing once a week, every week. This is what turned into my novel. I started trying to edit the novel in 2020, but I didn’t know where to start, and, if I’m being honest, I was so stressed out about everything else going on that I didn’t feel up to it. The following year, I set a goal to write 100 short stories in a year. I wrote short stories featuring characters other than my novel’s MCs. This was a really fun process, and I enjoyed building out my fantasy world through the characters that lived in it.

Sabitha: When you picture your ideal reader, what are they like?

Terry: Whenever I write, I very much try to write the book that I would want to read. What that means to me is a fantasy book with a good amount of action and cute queer love stories. So my ideal reader is probably someone that likes Marvel movies, is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and has always felt like they didn’t quite fit in where they grew up. 

Sabitha: Does the location the story takes place mean something to you or to the work?

Terry: My setting is written as a magical allegory for the world we live in. I like to think the primary setting of Anglachel is what America would be if it was colonized by elves rather than various European nations. It means something to me because I feel like there are people that just can’t see the harm things like colonialism and institutional racism have caused. I’m hoping that if I’m more overt about it in my fantasy, that maybe some of these people can see it more clearly.

Sabitha: 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?

Terry: You can find me on my website, and you can buy Tyranny of the Fey here.

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

Sabitha: For fans of the question “What if?” we have Erin Lale here, contributing editor of a series of time-traveling anthologies. Erin, tell us more!

Erin: Cassandra’s Time Yarns is the first anthology in a series of three multi-author anthologies in the Time Yarns Universe shared world. As contributing editor, I not only selected the stories but also have at least one of my own stories in each book. The next two anthologies are Anarchy Zone Time Yarns, with a theme of anarchist and libertarian societies, and Cat’s Cradle Time Yarns, with a theme of cats. There is also a single author Time Yarns anthology of my stories, Universal Genius. Time Yarns is a universe in which time travel exists, and some of the stories are about time travel, some are about unsuccessful attempts to invent time travel with dire consequences, and some are about non time travelers who have to live in the world the time travelers messed up. Watch the Time Yarns trailer to get a flavor of it.

Sabitha: We love anarchists and cats in this house, so we’re very much on board with these anthologies! What inspired you to create the Time Yarns universe and fill it with stories?

Erin: I love time-travel stories. I’m also fascinated by the idea of non-time-traveling people who have to live in the world that time travelers generated, and I wanted more stories like that. There were also two novels in the Time Yarns Universe, Punch and Planet of the Magi. The anthologies were published under my own label, Time Yarns. The novels were both snapped up by publishers that then went out of business, so both are out of print. I’m hoping to find a new publisher for them.

Sabitha: We have a lot of writers in our community. What’s your writing process?

Erin: The idea comes first. When I’m writing hard science fiction it’s always an idea that takes the standard hard science fiction form, “If x existed, how would it change society?” In the Time Yarns Universe, x is time travel technology, although there is often also an y and a z that also change things. I’m often inspired with dialogue when I first start writing a story. My published stories were a series of inspired scenes and dialogue which I then strung together in a logical order. After the experience of being Acquisitions Editor at Eternal Press and Damnation Books, I tried to change my process to start with a coherent outline and plot everything out in advance; I wrote a very long novel based on Norse mythology, which turned out to be an unpublishable mess, so I went back to seat-of-the-pants-style writing.

Sabitha: How did you choose the title?

Erin: Cassandra’s Time Yarns introduced the character Cassandra, also known as Aunt Cassie, who is one of the few characters who appears in multiple stories. In her introductory story she appears in her own time helping to solve a mystery, but in the other stories she is a mentor character to other time travelers. She pops into the story to tell a new time traveler how to do time traveling and to warn them about the antagonists. She is named after the prophetess Cassandra because characters often don’t believe her– until later, after they have had some adventures.

Sabitha: 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?

Erin: You can find me at my website. The Time Yarns universe has a website too, and if you want to start reading from the beginning, Cassandra’s Time Yarns is here.

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

We have A.J. Calvin with us, to talk about her fantasy adventures. A.J., take us away!

A.J.: The Relics of War is an epic fantasy trilogy, Hunted is a standalone urban fantasy, and my upcoming fantasy series is called The Caein Legacy. My books are meant for an adult audience.

The Relics of War is a multi-POV series, whereas the others feature single POVs. They all feature magic or paranormal in some form, as well as fantastic/supernatural beings. And a lot of my books feature dragons. I have a thing for dragons.

Sabitha: Relatable. Dragons are extremely great. We have a lot of writers in our community. What’s your writing process?

A.J.: I’m a plotter. I’ll come up with an idea, think about it for a while (sometimes years), make notes, define the cast, and then finally make an outline. It’s not the fastest process, but my worldbuilding takes time. Once the outline is complete, I’m ready to start the drafting process.

It used to take me a long time to write a book. Hunted took me the better part of 4 years. But as I’ve continued to write and create worlds, the writing itself has become easier. I’ve been averaging about 10 weeks from start to finish on my later books (not including revisions/editing, I’m just talking about the draft phase.) I usually let a draft sit for a while before I come back to it for revisions. Sometimes it’s a few months, sometimes longer, depending on what else I have going on. While it rests, I write new things, send earlier pieces off for editing/proofreading, and/or plan publication for finished works. 

It leaves me with a fairly substantial backlog when it comes to publishing. I’m about to publish book #5 overall, but I’m currently writing #14, so I’ll have plenty more to come in the future.

Sabitha: That’s amazingly fast! Do you still have time to read? And what book do you tell all your friends to read? Besides yours of course!

A.J.: I read a lot, and I’m not terribly picky about content, but I do love science fiction and fantasy the most. That being said, I read some books I wouldn’t necessarily recommend to some of my friends, because I know they wouldn’t enjoy them.

A few I’ve recommended frequently include Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons, Aestus by SZ Attwell, The Deverry Cycle by Katherine Kerr, and Dyrwolf by Kat Kinney.

Sabitha:  Which character do you relate to the most and why?

A.J.: From my own books, it’s Andrew from The Caein Legacy. He’s the eldest sibling in his family (so am I), and is very protective of one of his younger brothers. When I started writing Exile, the first book in the series, I was 36, which is the same age he is at the start of the series. It was a fun experiment to write a character of the same age. According to a couple of my beta readers, Andrew also shares a couple of my personality quirks too. He was one of my favorite characters to write so far.

Sabitha: 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?

A.J.: You can find me on Twitter or on Facebook. You can find my books on my website, my Amazon author page, or on Goodreads (though I’m not active on Goodreads)