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

Zilla: Brent van Staalduinen’s powerful novel The Peace Thieves is a tumultuous read, and we knew we had to have him here to tell us about it. So Brent, can you introduce us to your book?

Brent: The Peace Thieves is a sweeping novel of conflict and loss amidst a desperate civil war, and the long, fraught years that follow.

Francis, a reserve army medic, deploys to Croatia in the spring of 1993 and quickly discovers that peacekeeping isn’t the easy duty he volunteered for. All he can do is observe the country tear itself apart—there’s simply no peace to keep—and endure months of stress, danger, and hopeless inaction. 

Thirty years later, Viva drives halfway across the country to meet Francis, the father whose identity her mother kept secret until her deathbed. However, the Francis she meets isn’t the callous jerk she always imagined, but merely a heartbroken, troubled man holding his life together with frayed, borrowed threads. Who probably needs her help, though he’ll never ask.

Spanning decades, generations, and oceans, Francis and Viva’s alternating narratives delve into the secrets we hold, the hurts we try to hide, and the human bonds that sustain us.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Brent: Like Francis, my main character, I was a reserve army medic in the early 1990s, during a time when Canada’s reputation as a peacekeeping nation was in tatters. Though I was on the UN duty list, I resigned from the army to focus on my studies, so I’ve long wondered what my life would look like if I’d deployed, and the novel is in part an answer to that question. The Peace Thieves is also an imperfect pastiche and honouring of the stories that were given to me by friends who did deploy to places like Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and eventually Afghanistan, and who were forever changed. Finally, it’s an anti-war novel—we can never fully predict the full cost of going to war, either for our own people or those in the countries we say we’re trying to help.

Zilla: What would it be like to meet your characters?

Brent: Francis would tell me that although I’ve long wondered how things would be now if I deployed, he’d tell me that every life serves its own purpose and that I’ve ended up precisely where I’m supposed to be. Viva would say that standing up for what’s right in the world is incredibly important, even at great personal cost. She’d also tell me to give myself more grace, and to look for the goodness in everyone. Lorina would sigh and encourage me to make publicly known the folly of standing between armies that have no desire for peace, and that civilians and the marginalized/vulnerable always bear war’s greatest cost. Finally, Mackey would swear and shout a lot of nonsense, but amidst the slop there’d be jewels to discover. 

Zilla: Do you surprise your readers?

Brent: Somehow, yes, and hearing that something in my books surprises and pleases my readers is one of my greatest writerly joys.

Zilla: Why do you write?

Brent: I believe everyone who has a gift should use it to make the world better and a little more beautiful—that is what gets me in my chair and crunching words together most mornings. Also, if I didn’t write, the words would build in my brain-parts until my head exploded.

Zilla: Who did you imagine reading your book as you wrote it?

Brent: I love imagining a reader cracking open The Peace Thieves and being drawn in by my opening two sentences: “We arrive on a grey, filthy day in spring. The war doesn’t care.” 

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Brent: I’m writing a novel inspired by my grandfather’s activities with the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in WW2, centred on a broken character who is reluctantly drawn in to doing incredibly painful and difficult things with the resistance. My grandfather didn’t talk much about the war, but I knew I had the kernel of a story when I encountered the following words he wrote to my father about his resistance days: “Of course, this was all night work.” 

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?

Brent: On my website, Facebook, Instagram and Bluesky.

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

Zilla: Ellis Scott comes to us with an important and powerful story, Night Terminus, which memorializes his experiences of the AIDS crisis. Ellis, can you tell us about your book?

Ellis: Night Terminus explores the aftermath of the AIDS crisis and the fates of the survivors. The novel spans forty years and three continents. It mines the wreckage from the pandemic, set against a backdrop of late-twentieth-century political events, and features a cast of fugitives, young and old, all veterans of a war with many heroes but no parades. Night Terminus examines themes of agency over life and death, the existential role of art, statelessness and belonging, and the universal search for spiritual meaning..

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Ellis: My debut novel relies on my experiences as a survivor of the AIDS crisis. Though fictional, many of the characters are amalgams of individuals I have met or inspired by personal stories I have heard over 45 years. Time collapses as one gets older, and when death strikes so young. Few novels have been written about the people who watched their friends and lovers die but who lived. These elders possess the wisdom — and burden — of history. There will be no witnesses left to tell their story, and so I wanted to do it before it was too late.

Zilla: Do you have an artistic inspiration for the book?

Ellis: A theme in Night Terminus is the existential role of art, and the images of 19th-century photographer Édouard Baldus feature in the book. He invented the large-format monumental photograph, leaving out the people who created the buildings so the structures would speak for themselves. In doing so, he creates a “geography of absence” where traces remain of the individuals who built them. In the novel, the dead also create a powerful presence in the story because of their absence, which is reflected in the photographs.

Zilla: What would it be like to meet your characters?

Ellis: Because some of my characters are based on real people, while others are fictional but infused with the factual, I feel like I have met many of them. So writing the novel resembled a family reunion of sorts. I would say that I tried to honour their lives; to show the terrible times but also the levity, and the great joy and resilience they showed in the face of extinction. And that I miss them.

Zilla: Do you surprise your readers?

Ellis: There are staggering moments and twists in the narrative, yes. They shouldn’t be gratuitous or for the sake of driving the plot forward. The AIDS crisis was shocking enough in itself. It is better to circle around a catastrophe or view it from a distance. Calamity doesn’t need embellishment of any kind; indeed, it requires the opposite. The most startling are the metaphysical connections and strange coincidences that come from concatenation. 

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?

Ellis: On my website.

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

Rachel: Alex Grass is an independent horror author here to give you nightmares forever. Alex, tell us a little about your creative work.

Alex: Imagine David Cronenberg and Clive Barker smoking bath salts together and co- authoring a book of short stories. That’s what Infernal Tramps is all about. Phantasmagoric freakery, bizarrerie and body horror. I like the way one of my readers put it: “Think ‘Twilight Zone meets Hostel’.”

Rachel: Oooh, fun. If you could meet your characters, what would you say to them?

Alex: “You guys got to get it together. You can’t just be living out in the woods. And no more butt implants, or evil video games, or obese naked men fighting dogs. For Pete’s sake, maybe try therapy. People are starting to talk.”

Rachel: And how would they respond to that?

Alex: “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not even my real dad.”

Rachel: Hah. Do you surprise your readers?

Alex: God, I hope so. I understand the safety and comfort of airport bestsellers, but I think if a writer’s not giving their readers whiplash, the writer’s doing something wrong.

Rachel: Why do you write? What drives you?

Alex: I want to affect someone the way my favorite writers affected me. I want to, pardon the cliché, reach the reader’s heart. Though, I’ll settle for making them very, very upset.

Rachel: I too enjoy upsetting readers, but it’s not a living. If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d do instead?

Alex: Nothing productive, I’m sure.

Rachel: Do you have any lines you’re particularly proud of?

Alex: “Do you think Jesus had pets?”
“I’m not really sure,” Rezazadeh answered. “Certainly, he would’ve come across a good many goats and donkeys. Agrarian culture and all that.”
“I bet Jesus was good with animals.”
“He certainly had a way with fish.”

It’s weird and idiotic, which is fun. But it’s also something you can imagine hearing in a
real conversation.

Rachel: Words do more than convey meaning—they’re a way to express feeling. How do you select the right words?

Alex: It’s not any single word that will convey powerful imagery or ideas, but a special combination of those single words. The words “ate” and “mother” are, on their own, nothing special. But have your character say: “I ate my mother”. Well, then that’s something else.

Rachel: On that lovely note, what’s your next writing project?

Alex: Hookem Kookem. More short stories. I’m also working on editing an anthology, and a novella, both by other writers.

Rachel: Tell us where the Night Beats community can find you and find your work!

Alex: You can find my work at:

InfernalTramps.com
Amazon
Instagram
Goodreads

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.

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

Zilla: Coming of age is a fraught time, but how much more so in the world of the fantastical. We love dark stories, and Keith Miller has just what we’re looking for, with his tale of Mira in The Witch’s Journey. Keith, can you tell us about your story?

Keith: In a town beset by demons, from which the children are disappearing, redheaded Mira grows up wild and willful. When she’s around, soups boil over and flowers catch fire, and one night in her sleep she unwittingly turns her house around. The morning of her thirteenth birthday, Mira receives a gift from the river: a gold key. It will lead her on a journey, to seek the door her key will open. The Witch’s Journey is a dark fairytale embroidered with fairytales, full of sorrows and terrors, heartbreaks and delights, chocolates and mayhem and magic.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Keith: At one point, while I was teaching English in Egypt, I had a student named Mira, and I thought, “Good name!” Several years later, on a fall afternoon in Madison, Wisconsin, I was sitting on the porch working on something else when the first page arrived. I set it aside for a while, but Mira kept prodding at me, insisting her story needed to be told. 

There was a deeper inspiration, however: A historian friend had told me about the witch hunts of the early modern period in Europe and the United States, in which up to 100,000 people were killed, mostly women. Many of the women practiced pre-Christian religious rituals and healing methods. There are suggestions that the relative scarcity of red hair in Europe is a result of this genocide.

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

Keith: My wife had given me Essential Pre-Raphaelites by Lucinda Hawksley as a birthday present. I was entranced by the lushness and dense herbage. Lots of redheads!

Zilla: Do you surprise your readers?

Keith: I don’t know if I surprise my readers, but I certainly surprise myself! In order to keep my writing fresh, I don’t plot my novels in advance; I create characters and place them in propinquity. What transpires is often a bit of a shock to me.

Zilla: Why do you write?

Keith: I write to scratch an itch. My novels generally start with a character, and I want to find out what happens to them.

Zilla: If you weren’t a writer, what do you think you’d do instead?

Keith: I’d probably be an artist. I was an art major and still mess around with paints and chisels from time to time. My publisher, Elsewhen Press, kindly permitted me to include illustrations with The Witch’s Journey.

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?

Keith: You can find me at my website or my blog. You can find my book here.

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

Zilla: The most incredible stories start at home—sometimes in the depths of our own family history. Andre Narbonne fictionalized his family’s story in Those are Pearls, and he’s here to tell us about it. Andre, how does the story go?

Andre: From the seeds of an impoverished boilermaker’s adoration for a rich doctor’s daughter grows a sweeping story of a family whose personal passions are woven into the tapestry of world history. Harry Short first rides into battle at the beginning of the Boer War, in 1895, to win the heart of Margaret Roll. In 1914 he enlists again, to escape her. With Margaret, he sires a family that takes the reader through generations and across continents. They arrive in Canada as prairie homesteaders, witness the Winnipeg Riot of 1919, and survive the Great Flood of 1950 as well as marriage to bootleggers and communists, police investigation, unlikely heroism on the battlefield, and, all but one, a torpedo. 

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Andre: I was inspired by my own family’s history, which I have fictionalized. The most extraordinary parts of the novel are the parts that are true. My great-grandfather got a tropical disease after falling off a boiler in Cape Town, South Africa, for which his doctor prescribed moving to Winnipeg. My great-aunt’s gravestone reads, “Old Socialists Never Die, They Organize the Angels.” At the beginning of the Second World War, my mother spent her summer in the “Clean Air Camp” for poor children outside of Winnipeg where she won a medal for the child who gained the most weight. None of my inventions can top those that history.

Zilla: What would it be like to meet your characters?

Andre: My characters lived through three wars, the influenza pandemic, the Winnipeg General Strike and, later, the Winnipeg flood, they lived through the untimely deaths of family members, including the death by suicide of a favourite sister. All this and they still kept their religion. 

I expect they would ask me why I lost mine.

Zilla: Who is your favourite fictional character someone else wrote? 

Andre: Ishmael. It’s his emotional buoyancy I admire the most. He suspects the universe might be one colossal joke of which he is the butt and is willing to laugh at the joke. He can do that because Ishmael is a connoisseur of irony in the way that other people are connoisseurs of wine. The best line in Moby Dick is typical of his observations: “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” What other 19th-century sailor would use a coffin as a floatation device?

Zilla: What’s the secret to editing?

Andre: Here’s four:

Don’t edit when depressed.

Don’t be afraid of changing things—allow for play in your drafts. Important characters can become less important, as can passages of dialogue, actions, and scenes. 

Keep your first save. This is the ‘honest’ save. If you get sidetracked by your changes in subsequent drafts, the honest save will tell you what the story intends to mean. 

Know your audience. A work that’s done, is done. Why change it? The only reason I can think of is to reach an audience. Keep in mind that at this stage you are shaping your work according to the interests of people you will likely never meet and try to imagine them fully and critically.

Zilla: Who did you imagine reading your book as you wrote it?

Andre: My first audience was my wife, who was not my wife at the time. In that regard, the novel has proven a great success.

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?

Andre: You can find me here. My book is here, and my press is here.