Night Beats Extended Universe

Book Report Corner

By Rachel A. Rosen

I don’t know about you, but between Nolan’s Odyssey and my recent podcast episode on ancient epics, I’ve been on a classics binge lately. Wrath Goddess Sing, from 2022, is one of the more innovative takes on the Iliad I've seen. It reworks the episode of Achilles on Skyros to recast her as a trans woman. We've also got Helen of Troy as an immortal goddess who started the war on purpose to get more blood sacrifices, Briseiwos as a Amazonian trans man, and Meryapi, an Egyptian sorceress married to Patroklos (who is Achilles' cousin in this so don't get any ideas, although this version of Achilles remains a bisexual disaster). Meryapi turned out to be my favourite character interpretation, and there’s a scene with her involving dolphins that made me stop reading and crack up.

This is a messy, sprawling retelling, but I prefer a book whose reach exceeds its grasp than a book that plays it safe. And this definitely takes big creative risk and adds a cool new spin on a classic.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

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.

WRITING PROMPT

It’s back to school season (ugh). What terrible lesson will your protagonist learn this September?

August of wind swept me off my feet

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 10:03:36 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Naked Lunch as a swimsuit catalogue was suggested by Zilla. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Aurora Awards Ceremony: August 9th, 5 EDT

Want to find out if Rachel won in any of the three categories where her work is nominated? Or just learn a ton about Canadian sci-fi, fantasy, and horror? Watch the Aurora Awards ceremony live on Youtube on August 9th, starting at 5 pm EDT. There will also be a link on the CSFFA website.

Cold Blooded is in the SPSFC Semifinals

Rohan O’Duill’s Cold Blooded is shortlisted for the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition. To celebrate, it’s on sale for 99¢ on Amazon until the 4th of August and everywhere else until the end of August.

Show Cat

She can tell you your future.

LINE FROM A WIP

These two saw the same water, but I do not believe they saw the same ocean.

Book Report Corner

By Rachel A. Rosen

At this point I’ll read anything Naomi Kritzer writes and I haven’t been disappointed yet, but I’ll admit that I approached this with trepidation as I have a pregnancy and childbirth phobia. About the only thing scarier to me than having to give birth would be having to give birth against my will in an unsafe location. Like, say, a cult compound.

Which is where Doctor Liz, an OBGYN who’s just been through a high-profile trial and the loss of her job after terminating a dangerous pregnancy, finds herself. Kidnapped by a far-right, patriarchal Christian cult to care for the pregnant women and girls on their compound, she is a level-headed lead in survival mode. Her escape becomes the tenuous relationships she makes with the women and girls of the cult—who may or may not be there against their will—and her retreat into the 1980s paperback fantasy novel that she read so often she practically has it memorized.

If you’re looking for sci-fi elements, you won’t really find any; the reality of reproductive healthcare in the US has caught up with the creepy dystopia portrayed in the novella. But it’s a furious, harrowing read with solidarity and compassion at its core.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

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.

WRITING PROMPT

Why do we live like this?

Sun-sational July vibes

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:01:22 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo as a pulp mystery was suggested by Elizabeth. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Last chance to vote in the Aurora Awards!

Voting for the Aurora Awards closes July 12. Rachel is nominated in three categories:

Best Novel: Blight (The Sleep of Reason #2)
Best Short Story: “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?”
Best Fan Related Work: Wizards & Spaceships podcast

If you are a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA), you can vote for her (and the many other talented nominees) through the CSFFA website.

Rachel reads at the Canadian Fiction Fest!

Come hear Rachel read as part of Canada Fiction Fest—whether you’re in Canada or not! To register for this or any of the other great panels, click here!

Cold Blooded is a Self-Published Science Fiction Competition semi-finalist!

Cold Blooded by Rohan O'Duill has made it into the Semi-finals (last 10) of the Self Publishing Science Fiction Competition for 2026. This year’s event is adjudicated by 5 groups of volunteer judges and the winners will be announced in September. The full list of books still in contention can be found here.

The Devil You Know comes out July 22!

The Devil You Know is coming out July 22, and you can pre-order a signed copy (Canada, America)! This story is for anyone who loves soft demon vibes, forbidden desire novels, and craves a story featuring a second chance at love in historic New York City.

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?: Writing Dystopian Fiction with Rachel A. Rosen

If you’re in the Toronto area, check out Rachel’s interactive workshop where you too can create your own nightmarish hellscape. August 8th from 2:30-4:00 at Lillian H. Smith in the Merril Reading Room. Click to register!

Show Cat

Trials and Tribble-ations for Alice.

LINE FROM A WIP

Normalcy bias was real, and there’d been pockets of idiots who still thought that they could petition and protest their way out of it.

Book Report Corner

By Zilla Novikov

Man with the Long Hair: They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?
--Waking Life

This is going to be a weird review, but this is a weird book. Stay with me.

When I was in high school three of the movies I loved most in the world were Run Lola Run, Oldboy, and Waking Life. Disjointed realities. Broken connections. Who would you be if you weren't. This book reminds me of all of them. This book reminds me of all the things I've loved in the world that etched themselves on my body and mind like a tattoo, like a gravestone.

”Lord God, sometimes it feels like Tian’s whole life is sleepwalking through a graveyard, tracing the carved names of all the people and things that could never love her back.”
--Wake Up!

High school was like that, young adulthood was like that, repetitions of loss, reaching for things I couldn't grasp. Growing up doesn't spare you from loss but it changes it. Tian knew that her brothers knew she loved them, even if she couldn't say it. She carried them with her forever, tattoos and scars on her body, shared burdens and joys with their memories. And she let herself change. She let love change her.

Sometimes we get a second chance. To say goodbye. To find someone new. Does it matter if it's a dream or reality?

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: With us today is Joy Michael Ellison to talk about a book I’m so excited about. Joy, can you introduce yourself, and tell our readers a little bit about Sylvia and Marsha Start a Revolution!?

Joy: Hey there! I’m Joy Michael Ellison [they/them]. I’m a white, disabled, queer and trans person currently living on the traditional lands of the Narragansett nation. I am a writer, a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at University of Rhode Island, and a life-long grassroots, community activist. My approach to organizing is shaped by the three years I spent in Msafer Yatta, Palestine supporting Palestinian- led popular movements and my experiences working in transformative justice movements in Chicago, Illinois. As an author, I am interested in using stories, both fictional and true, to build community, document social movements, and imagine a liberated world. I believe that storytelling is integral to healing, transformation, resistance, and survival.

Sylvia and Marsha Start a Revolution! is my first children’s book. It tells the story of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two trans women of color who made history during the Stonewall Rebellion, kickstarting the movement for acceptance of queer and trans youth. Sylvia and Marsha help trans girls like them by sharing what they have in abundance: friendship. They show us all that beside our best friends, we can change the world.

Rachel: Tell us about the journey from concept to publication. What was your process, and how did you collaborate with Teshika to bring the story to life?

Joy: Sylvia and Marsha Start a Revolution! is an unintentional case study in what it takes for queer and trans people to break into conventional publishing. In fact, this book started out as a joke—one of those unfunny things you tell yourself when you’re afraid to try because you know how much systemic oppression is against you. I decided that I was going to write a picture book about the Stonewall Rebellion that would never be published. I had been reading every primary source I could about Sylvia and Marsha as a part of my graduate studies and I yearned to share what I was learning with a wider audience. So, I wrote and revised the text, took a class on picture book publishing, (the teacher seriously told me that I should write a book about “trans seahorses” instead), revised more, and submitted to a dozen publishers. After receiving as much rejection as I could stand, I decided to self publish.

I knew that my community would buy this book. I approached a local artist’s collective and hooked up with Teshika. Together, we crowdfunded the book. Naturally, as soon as we proved that there was a market for it, capitalists came knocking. Because I had discovered that self-publishing is a nightmare for my anxiety, we sold the book to a traditional publisher. Because of that, I was able to find an agent who turned around and sold four more picture books about queer and transgender history, the first of which is “Willi Ninja: Vogue Legend,” coming out May 2026.

Now I spend more time writing and more time…let’s call it “gentle-parenting” publishers into letting me do right by the historical figures I write about. My experience shows how much we’re trapped by capitalism, and what queer and trans people can do when we go outside of normal channels.

WRITING PROMPT

If you could do it again, would you do it differently?

It's the coldest summer of the rest of your life

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:02:13 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Memoirs of a Geisha as the cover of the Melania movie was suggested by Rob. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Tickets are free but you can reserve yours in advance!

Announcements

Upcoming talk: Dystopian Fiction In a Dystopian Present

Rachel will be at the Don Mills branch of the Toronto Public Library on June 3 from 7-8 pm to explore the intersection of politics with sci-fi and fantasy, and how authors of speculative fiction navigate writing dystopian and cautionary tales when the present threatens to eclipse fiction.

Aurora Awards voting reminder

Voting for the Aurora Awards opens June 6th! Rachel is nominated in three categories:

Best Novel: Blight (The Sleep of Reason #2)
Best Short Story: “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?”
Best Fan Related Work: Wizards & Spaceships podcast

If you are a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA), you can vote for her (and the many other talented nominees) through the CSFFA website before July 12. And hey, if you’re not, membership is only $10 CAD and gets you a package of a ton of books to read.

Reviewers needed!

The Sad Bastard Cookbook has 92 reviews on Goodreads. Because of our personality problems, we prefer round numbers. Reviews help readers find books, so if you’ve gotten something out of reading it and think that other people might too, why not leave us one? Click and help us get to a nice even 100!

Show Cat

Sunshine reading about winter romance

LINE FROM A WIP

When you are an author, nothing goes according to plan.

Book Report Corner

By Zilla Novikov

"This hell on earth killed the women and broke the men."

Hillbilly Grit by Marynell Autry opens with violence and transitions to acceptance. Recovery, for those who can recover. Life goes on because that's what life does. It clenches its teeth, steels its nerve, and milks the cows or sews a new shirt or goes back to its husband and has another child or leaves him and marries someone new and has another child. Life is cruel and relentless and somehow it is survivable. And there will be new life.

Some of the characters in Hillbilly Grit are kind and giving, and some are thoughtless and selfish, but, no matter where they move to or what job they take, the pattern finds them. Violence and childbirth. "The heart wants comfort, closeness, a sense of belonging." The heart gets what it wants, sometimes, for a while.

I was so lost in the story that it came as a shock to me when Sally mentioned a truck. A sudden jolt to remind me that time passed, persisted, that patterns repeat but people change and the world moves on. How many years had I been reading about this family, to go from horse and buggy to Model T farm truck?

The characters who stayed with me most are the ones who tried to escape the pattern. Annie. Ivor. They can't, anyone could have told them that, but they tried.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: I was blown away by Robin Wolfe’s new book, The Threads That Bind Us, and immediately contacted them to ask if they’d be willing to talk about it for our readers. Graciously, they accepted, so thank you for joining us today, Robin!

Can you tell our readers a little bit about the process? What is the book, and how did it come to be?

Robin: The most honest answer to “what is this book and how did it come to be” is that this book is my embodiment of community, and it came to be because I’m a nonbinary queer who struggled with finding community.

I’ve always been too much: too out for my very anti-queer area when I was growing up, too bi (biphobia from both sides of the aisle is very real), too woman-perceived for the leather community in my city, then too disabled for in-person queer community. And yet I kept looking, because I ached to belong.

About two years ago, I was lucky enough to stumble across a weekly online leather night. The host, a leather historian who works with the Carter/Johnson Library and Collection (the CJLC is a US-based library dedicated to preserving 2SLGBTQ+ and leather history), assured me I would be welcome and this wasn’t a men-only space. That first night I realized that I’d found the community I’d been seeking for decades.

And they found me, too. They quickly realized I was a skilled leatherworker and textile artist, and they ensured that Vi Johnson, who runs the CJLC, knew all about me. About half a year later, I was asked to be one of the CJLC Artists in Residence for 2025. The plan was for me to do a project to increase leather accessibility by making custom leather for four disabled people and then creating a how-to book for leatherworkers. (As a disabled person myself, the inaccessibility of leather is a constant source of frustration. It crushes me when people come to me for custom leather and they’ve been turned away unnecessarily by other leatherworkers.)

In March 2025 I realized that with the literal erasure happening in the US and elsewhere, there could be no project more important to me than recording our lives. Accessibility in leather would have to wait.

So with nine months remaining, I made a new plan: find 10 or so 2SLGBTQ+ and/or leather people who were willing to share their memories with me (kept in their own words). Do the editing and transcription required to be able to use their stories. Create an original embroidery for each story, inspired by their story. Photograph the embroideries and turn them into illustrations. Finally, turn the whole thing into a fully accessible ePub and a print book…

…and do all of that in less than nine months (before my artist year ends). Never let it be said that I lack ambition. I figured, “I used to be a small-press publisher and fiction author; I have the skills. It’ll be fine.”

(Now imagine me with a thousand-yard stare, because that’s how I looked during much of March through December 2025. The stress was epic.)

The book did come out on time though, and I’m so proud of it. This book is community itself; the foreword is by the leather historian who welcomed me, Vi herself donated a story, and the other stories are from eleven people who chose to gift me with their honesty, vulnerability, and courage. Yes, I created the art, did a lot of back-end work, and designed and formatted the book. But without the gifts of my collaborators, there would have been no art and no book to make. This was co-created by all of us.

WRITING PROMPT

How do you beat the heat? How do we collectively organize to beat the heat? The heat must be vanquished.

May Day!

Fri, 01 May 2026 10:03:24 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Divine Comedy as a bathroom joke book was suggested by Dale. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

An Aurora Awards Hat Trick

The Aurora Awards shortlist has been announced! Rachel is nominated in three categories:

Best Novel: Blight (The Sleep of Reason #2)
Best Short Story: “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?”
Best Fan Related Work: Wizards & Spaceships podcast

If you are a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA), you can vote for her (and the many other talented nominees) through the CSFFA website between June 6 and July 12. And hey, if you’re not, membership is only $10 CAD and gets you a package of a ton of books to read.

Catching up with Wizards & Spaceships

Speaking of Wizards & Spaceships, we recently dropped our second season finale, “In Praise of Difficult Women,” featuring the great Silvia Moreno-Garcia! Stay tuned this month for a very special season 3 opener!

And if that’s not enough of Rachel talking, check out her interview on Work In Progress, talking about dystopian and political speculative fiction!

Night Beats Goes to TriCon

We’re so excited for the very first TriCon in Halifax over the May 15-17 long weekend! A full schedule has been posted on the website!

You can hang out with Rachel A. Rosen at:

Saturday, May 16 @ 9:30 am: A Marxist Analysis of The Writing Industry

Sunday, May 17 @ 11:30 am: De-Industrialization of the Frontier: Proletariat Themes in Science Fiction

Hang out with Nicole Northwood at:

Friday, May 15 @ 2:30 pm: (At) Home in Speculative Fiction

Saturday, May 16 @ 8 am: Social Media Presence, Audience Building and Self Promotion

Saturday, May 16 @ 12:30 pm: In the Vendors Room

Sunday, May 17th @ 11 am: Reading

Show Cat

Liam and Felix watching the bird parade.

LINE FROM A WIP

“The fate of the revolution can’t hang on a butt dial.”

Book Report Corner

By Rachel A. Rosen

I am only adding to the chorus of praise for this book, but it deserves all the hype it’s been getting and all of the awards that it’s bound to win. This is a banger of a vampire novel. The taut dance of confession and revenge between the Lutheran minister Arthur and the Pikuni vampire Good Stab is brutal, visceral, and steeped in a history that America (and Canada, for that matter) would much rather forget.

The vampire, traditionally a stand-in for repressed sexuality or the decadent and parasitic ruling class, here becomes a symbol of the unquiet, unburied dead, a figure out of hauntology. The Buffalo Hunter Hunter has shades of Cormac McCarthy in the violence of colonialism and the bloodsoaked prose, with the slow burn creeping horror that Jones is known for. It’s a relentless read from a brilliant author.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: Nick Mamatas and I go way back on the internet, but it was only last summer that we finally met in real life. He was launching the first issue of a new zine, Billions Vs. Billionaires, which is so my jam it’s not even funny (unlike the zine, which is hilarious). The second issue is out now, and Nick is here to talk about it!

Tell us a little bit about the project. Why use a zine to fight back against the fascist billionaire class?

Nick: Well, there are forces at work. Forces inspired by DOGE and the weird nerds who enthusiastically signed up as Elon Musk’s anti-spending budget-cutting squad. While DOGE actually didn’t cut much out of the federal budget despite expansive claims about millions of dead people on Social Security rolls etc, plenty of damage was done. USAid for example, was all but destroyed–all the good stuff the program did was cut, but the imperial interventions (spying, funding dirty little wars etc.) were just integrated into the State Department without the public-facing vaccination programs or cultural programs.

The idea, from a former acquaintance of Musk, was to try to make Elon seem less cool to the sort of very online audience that he had cultivated. And the acquaintance had a little bit of money. So zines via itch.io, YouTube shorts, RPGs, bumper stickers and badges to be handed out at science fiction cons and the like.

WRITING PROMPT

What would inspire your character to march in the streets?

April Cool

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:02:48 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Creative Writing for Dummies as and AI slop cover was suggested by Zilla. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Show Cat

“I just can’t right now.”

LINE FROM A WIP

By the fourth winter of the war, with the Pickering reactor in meltdown and little left to conquer, their missions grew abstract, great looping flights to nowhere until they came to nestle in the half-crusted mud, their power indicators softly ebbing.

Book Report Corner

By Rachel A. Rosen

The foreword to this book describes Rich Larson as underrated, which is the understatement of the year. There's not a single weak link in this cyberpunk/biopunk anthology. It's like a good version of Black Mirror, focusing on the human and fallible. It had me by the first story when someone's eye implant is infected; this future is grounded and lived in and messy and sometimes beautiful.

It's hard to pick a favourite, and I haven't, but the standouts to me include "Animals Like Me," which is a delightfully horrifying take on Elsagate, "Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man," which takes us to a grimy, crime-ridden Nuuk with a tough-as-nails queer heroine and surprising compassion at its core, "Tidings," which is the most hopeful story I've read in a good long time, but in a cool way not a twee way, and "You Are Born Exploding," which is devastating and brilliant. If you like your sci-fi with an incandescent emotional core, this is an anthology for you.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: With us this week to tell us about her latest novel, The Chorus Beneath Our Feet, is Melanie Schnell! Melanie, can you tell us a little about the book?

Melanie: The Chorus Beneath our Feet is my second novel. Jes is a a grief-stricken soldier who accompanies his best friend’s body home after eight years away, only to find his non-speaking sister, Mary, missing and wanted for questioning by the police in the murder of an infant in the city’s central park. As Mary’s life hangs in the balance, Jes must follow the obscure clues she’s left behind, the only means to find her and absolve her of wrongdoing. In his labyrinthine search, the mystery of the park’s infamous Harron tree and its connection to his sister, and their community, is slowly revealed.

Rachel: As an artist myself, I’m immediately struck by the visuals here! Was that the inspiration for the book?

Melanie: Fifteen years ago, when my son was a year old, I joined several other writers for a weekend retreat at an ancient farmhouse in the country in the middle of a cold prairie winter. It was just the five of us women, no wifi, our burgeoning stories, and my baby. I was working on my first novel, which was in its final stages, but during this weekend it was interrupted by a vivid image of two women standing barefoot and hands-free on a tree branch, impossibly, in the midst of a violent storm. I sketched the image in my notebook and promised to return to it later. This image became my second novel, The Chorus Beneath our Feet.

That tree in the picture grew into a central character, and what I became immediately interested in was what lay beneath her: roots, soil, fungi, long-lost treasures, scattered bones of skeletons, and all the memories representing what has lived over millions of years before us. The question the tree was asking me as I wrote was, What is our connection to what came before us? How are we impacted by these previous lives? The answers slowly unfurled into my literary mystery, The Chorus Beneath Our Feet, which follows Jes, a soldier returned home from Afghanistan after eight years away.

WRITING PROMPT

What prank would one of your characters play on another one?

marching in the streets

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:01:06 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Grapes of Wrath as horror was suggested by Rob. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Completely Shameless Award Eligibility Post

It’s award season, and if you’re a member of any sort of organization that does them, consider Rachel’s 2025 works! In particular, nominations for the Aurora Awards open this month, so if you’re a CSSFA member, consider adding these to your ballot!

Show Cat

Pi gets lost in a good book

LINE FROM A WIP

It corrupts the soul, and it is a waste.

Book Report Corner

By Rachel A. Rosen

Every so often I come across a book that forces me to text half a dozen people I know and scream at them to drop what they’re doing and read it now now now. This is one of those books. It’s 12 memories, collected from 12 queer and trans people, in their own words. Some of them are funny, others heartwarming, still others, like the opening story of a 14-year-old who cares for the friends of his leather daddy as they die of AIDS, are devastating. After each story, Robin has embroidered a piece that stands as a symbolic representation of the story.

This is a piece that falls in the tradition of the quilts of enslaved people leading each other to freedom, the Chilean arpilleras telling the stories of the disappeared, the AIDS Memorial Quilt preserving the lives and deaths of people that the government wanted everyone to forget. It’s also very much its own unique thing. The care put into each story and each textile piece is incredible—it is a love letter to queer communities and a truly outstanding work of art. You can buy it here.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: With us today to talk about his latest book is Michael Mirolla! Michael, how about telling us about How About This...?

Michael: It’s a little after the middle of the 21^st century. Loving couple Elspeth and Marybeth are both shocked and excited when a stroller with identical twins is left on their back deck with a recorded message that warns them not to try to return the babies or they could face arrest for kidnapping. Using false starts, footnotes, direct approaches to the reader, lists, questions about who the author(s) might be, and even a dose of self-criticism, the story unwinds from that point as El and Mar work hard to create a family under the circumstances. This becomes even more difficult when they discover the babies come with unusual features that perhaps might explain why they were left in the first place. And it all takes place in a disintegrating world that may leave humans incapable of telling their own stories.

WRITING PROMPT

What would your houseplant say if it could talk?

love is in the air

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 11:01:34 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

A Court of Thorns and Roses as an LSAT prep booklet was suggested by Dale. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Billions vs. Billionares

The release of the first issue of the Billions vs. Billionaire’s ‘zine at last summer’s Worldcon was cause for celebration. It was a perfect storm of old school punk humour, insightful political commentary, and brilliant writers. So how thrilled is Rachel that not only will there be a new issue this month, but she got to contribute to it? Extremely thrilled. Check out “Solving Problems” by Rob Mound (text) and Rachel A. Rosen (illustrations), alongside a cast of fantastic writers who don’t suffer from toxic empathy but embrace every moment of it.

Oh yeah, and it’s free. Download it and print it yourself at Billions vs. Billionaires on Itch.io.

TriCon

The first ever TriCon will be held May 15th-17th, 2026 in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Nova Scotia, and we couldn’t be more excited. Two of the Night Beats crew, Nicole Northwood and Rachel A. Rosen, will be on panels, so stay tuned for more information, and make sure to get your tickets before they’re all gone.

Show Cat

Felix and Liam do a great job at being cats.

LINE FROM A WIP

Who would have guessed that the price of eggs determined the fate of nations?

OUR COOKBOOK HAS BEEN MEME’D

If you haven’t seen Slow Horses yet, you absolutely should, and not just because of this excellent meme.

Our dream in life is to be parodied on Tumblr, and a million thanks to timrousbeastie for making that dream come true! You can see her original post here.

Book Report Corner

By Zilla Novikov

I finished this book at the end of 2025, and the question of the year is “What does it mean to be human versus machine?” This anthology tackles the question in the most human way imaginable--through science fiction. We see humans fight self-aware machines, or become them. We see the good and evil in the artificial, and in the humanity that programmed it. And we see robots replicate the best and worst of us.

This anthology isn’t a philosophy textbook. Most of the stories are packed with action, showing dynamic fights with lethal consequences. There’s love here too--doomed romance and deep friendship. My favourite was The Lore of Seven, where the stories we tell about where we come from are what make us who we are--even for a gang enforcer.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Zilla: If you’ve followed the tumultuous writing projects of us at Night Beats, you’ll know we have a soft spot for anarchists and submersibles that overwhelms all of our good sense. Ben Zalkind’s novel Honeydew might not be entirely sensible, but it is a delight, so here’s Ben to tell us about it.

Ben: Honeydew follows a quartet of second-rate saboteurs that runs afoul of a mega-corporation and its celebrity CEO. It’s got everything: a billionaire tech bro who plans to pilot a submersible drill to Earth’s mantle, a criminal kingpin who bankrolls an anarchist collective, a Swiss family doctor moonlighting as a spook, and even a direct action splinter cell composed entirely of elderly activists. One of my blurbers, the novelist Ryan Chapman, described it as “a Monkey Wrench Gang for the frenzied, techno-dystopian now.”

WRITING PROMPT

Who are your neighbours?

Snow your January potential

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 11:00:49 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Speculative Whiteness as a Golden Age pulp sci-fi cover was suggested by Dale. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Can’t get enough orcas sinking yachts? Why not play Julian Gunn new game, Pod, inspired by Rachel’s short story, “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?” It’s designed to be played with orca beans but can be played with any counters.

Show Cat

Momo enjoys a Biscoff ice capp.

LINE FROM A WIP

Moss was patient, her mother had told her once, it had outlasted every age of animal, it was older than the rings of Saturn. It needed only to wait.

2026 NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS

Every year, we here at Night Beats make resolutions that we absolutely intend to keep and are not, in fact, breaking right now. This year, in 2026, we will definitely, absolutely, pinkie-promise…

Finish editing my sci-fi novel Abysm and see about publishing it… Also finish a WIP curio novelette (tentative title: Parenthesis)… Start a new novel (tentative title: Warbuyers) which will be immoderately bonkers and take ages to write… — Dale Stromberg

I will finish this damn draft! — Rachel Corsini

After I have finished this trilogy—with the exhausted triumph of a general putting down an enemy army—I will write something shorter, like a nice novella. — Rachel A. Rosen

My new year’s resolution is the same every year: I resolve to make fewer new year’s resolutions. — Zilla Novikov

I never make one, but I resolve to make one next year. — Tucker Lieberman

Book Report Corner

By Rachel Rosen

Shamefully, I had never heard of Charles R. Saunders or the genre of Soul & Sorcery before he was inducted into the CSFFA Hall of Fame last year. This speaks to not just my own ignorance but the fickleness of the publishing industry and the SFFH community.

A legend in his time, Saunders wrote groundbreaking fantasy about an imagined Africa and was a huge influence on many of the authors I’m obsessed with today. He was also a journalist and a fascinating person. And he died poor, obscure, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Tattrie, thanks to their own friendship with Saunders and the many letters that the author sent over the years to friends, fans, and collaborators, does an incredible job of reconstructing his life and works for a compelling, engrossing read.

Regular readers will note that this might be the first biography we’ve featured here; it’s because I don’t normally read them. This one, however, is well worth your time.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Regular Night Beats readers will know Marten Norr as the illustrator for the Sad Bastard Cookbook. But did you know that he also has a book out? And it’s amazing? The man is just too talented and we’re all jealous.

Zilla: Both Rachel and I are obsessed with your debut novel. Tell our readers all about it!

Marten: Demon Engine is my publishing debut—a genre-fucky, self-indulgent, gross pirate adventure full of Problematic™ queers and weird allegories (try as I might, I cannot stop the allegories from appearing in my writing. They haunt me). Said problematic queers include Salvador AKA Sally, a skrunkly trans dude who could beat Jack Sparrow in a rum-drinking contest and who my wife has deemed a “deadbeat brotherfather” to Dru, an eleven-year-old wunderkind who wields her extremely well-earned attitude problem to great effect. The two of them are business partners—Dru serves the ale at the tavern they own; Sally drinks it to drown out the 200 ghosts trapped in his skull and thereby spare everyone around him from his cursed magic. Their perfect lives are disrupted when two naval sailors come to town intending to recruit Sally for the famously-straightforward One Last Job. The sailors are Captain Chelsea Millard, former pirate turned team dad (his left arm is an eel) and First Mate Mary McCracken (she made a faustian bargain with an eldritch chaos entity to trans her gender. It had Unforeseen Consequences and she will make that your problem). They’re joined by a ~~self insert~~ silly little academic who uses their autism for evil. There’s also a tentacle that speaks in Shakespearean free verse.

The ruler of their country has commissioned them and their ship, the Steadfast, to hunt down an ancient sea monster so they can stuff it inside a battery and use it for imperialism. This obviously ends up going extremely well for them, and they definitely don’t encounter any meat rooms, sentient storms, angler fish gods, or ethical crises along the way. Certainly no found family, either.

WRITING PROMPT

What are your main character’s three favourite movies?

December's Traditions

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 11:03:29 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Song of Achilles as a “cheesy mantitty romance cover” was suggested by Magpie. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

On January 3rd, our friends at Not a Pipe Publishing will be hosting the Anti-Fascist Write-athon, and they want to make it the writer’s version of #NoKings. Imagine thousands of writers coming together (via Zoom) to work on their own WIPs, supporting the @antifali Journal, and letting the world know we refuse to lie down for a fascist takeover. You can join Rachel and others in writing against tyranny. If you’re interested, register here! Looking forward to writing with you on January 3rd!

Show Cat

LINE FROM A WIP

I dragged the point of my compass through the hem of my skirt until the gap was wide enough for me to pull it out, then similarly employed it to liberate a protractor, 45° and 90° angle set squares, an extendable ruler, and several papers containing half-completed equations I had likewise secreted about my person.

HOLIDAY BOOK BUYING GUIDE

Blight (The Sleep of Reason #2) by Rachel A. Rosen

What is it? The long-dreaded sequel to Rachel’s 2022 debut, Cascade. Blight is set three years into an eco-magical disaster under a fascist government, as the survivors regroup and rebel after their world has ended.

Who to buy it for? The burned-out leftist in your life.

Why they’ll love it? Hope in the dark. A magical climax set during the winter solstice. Giant bone tentacles emerging from the ocean to consume libertarian tech bros. You’re already living in a dystopia, so immerse yourself in a fantasy of resistance to gird your loins for the real thing.

Beneath the Starlit Sea by Nicole Northwood

What is it? A standalone romantasy about forbidden love, grief, and the courage to defy societal expectations. When a sorceress bound by duty collides with a human doctor haunted by loss, they must work together to solve a series of mysterious seaside murders while blurring the line between survival and desire.

Who to buy it for? Readers who crave heartbreak and hope in the same story.

Why they’ll love it? Atmospheric magic, lush worldbuilding, and enchanting details such as animal familiars and clever banter. Whimsy, but also high emotional stakes, a subtle coziness in every chapter, and the gentle allure of the possibilities that can come with second chances.

Gyre by Dale Stromberg

What is it? Abigail Patel is born for a second time with knowledge intact from her prior life, but no concrete memories. What she has instead is uneasy guilt—and creeping dread.

Who to buy it for? Literary fiction readers seeking small books with curious notions.

Why they’ll love it? Gyre is “a very tight, very dark Mobius strip novella with an astonishing amount of ideas crammed into it,” according to Briar Ripley Page, and Adrian Howell has called it “a deep, captivating tale of (past-)self-discovery and family bonds. The writing is flawless.”

Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht, edited by Chrys Gorman

What is it? A short story and poetry collection on themes of resisting fascism, including Rachel’s story about lesbian orcas, an ill-fated art major, and a billionaire on a collision course with justice.

Who to buy it for? Recently radicalized wine moms, people in inflatable frog suits, and anyone who is sick and tired of the current gong show.

Why they’ll love it? Maybe you can’t get on Santa’s list, but you can certainly get on somebody’s list by buying this book.

Book Report Corner

By Rachel Rosen

The release of a new Nick Mamatas book is always cause for celebration in my little corner of the world—his cynical, scathing, and brutally funny works always bring some new genre-bending surprises to the table. Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest is no exception.

A clever cyberpunk reimagining of The Tempest (yes, that one) for our age of oligarchy, Kalivas! leans hard into the anticolonialist interpretation of the play and gives us Caliban as the last human among augmented gods who can’t die. His peaceful, if bleak, existence on an island is shattered with the arrival of the Master, or the Prosperous One, and his daughter M., exiled from what’s left of San Francisco and hellbent on restoring his fortunes—even if it means the subjugation of everyone around him.

Kalivas is a Weird Little Guy, at once repugnant and compelling. The post-disaster world is sketched just enough for the characters to feel grounded in it despite their stylization and otherness.

It ends, naturally, with a play-within-a-play that turned out to be my favourite part because I’m turning into some kind of pomo snob. If you like your sci-fi with interiority and literary flair, this one’s for you.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: Tell our readers a little bit about the book!

Kelly: It’s got some tender parts, and some brutal ones. I wasn’t sure what we would pull in when we cast our editorial net, but we received some very beautiful and unflinching work. The theme of the anthology is Rebellion, and people interpreted that in so many different ways. It’s really a full spectrum of human emotion.

WRITING PROMPT

Which of your characters are getting a lump of coal in their stockings, and why?

Bonfires and blathering

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:02:33 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Book of Job as a memoir of personal triumph was suggested by Dale. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

It might be November, but Spooky Season doesn’t need to end just because we’ve started a new month. Check out Wizards & Spaceships episode on WITCHES! for your continued Halloween enjoyment.

Pre-Order Neosynthesis

Neosynthesis: 12 Stories of Code, Consciousness, and Survival drops Dec. 1st! Written by six independent voices in science fiction and speculative fiction, these compelling stories offer glimpses into all-too-plausible realities. Preorder your copy today.

Show Cat

Excuse me, can’t you see I’m doing a reading here?

LINE FROM A WIP

[She] looked drawn. Specifically, drawn in a manner more Otto Dix than Rembrandt.

Book Report Corner

By Rachel Rosen

I won’t shut up about Notes From a Regicide until everyone I know reads it. Griffon, a teenage trans boy living in a post-apocalyptic, flooded New York, is adopted by an older trans couple, Etoine and Zaffre. Both of them are artists and refugees from a city called Stephensport, which is frozen in time in something vaguely akin to, but not quite, Renaissance Italy. They do their best by Griffon, who has had to flee his transphobic and abusive father, but Etoine and Zaffre are brittle, damaged people, full of secrets, with no idea how to open their strange, private world to a newcomer. In their youth, they were part of a revolutionary movement that left them with both physical and mental scars, and it’s only after their deaths that Griffon reads through Etoine’s journal and learns the truth (or at least Etoine’s truth) of what happened.

I doubt Fellman set out to write something so perfectly tailored to my tastes but he sure did. This novel could have easily been heartwarming glurge about the importance of found family. It’s not. Notes From a Regicide is instead a haunting and elegant story about art, revolution, and the damage it leaves behind.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Zilla: What if the real horror was the friends we made along the way? What if it’s you? What if it’s me? … It’s probably me.

These and similar questions were why I knew I needed to have Romie Stott on the blog, and I needed to get all the details about Nothing in the Basement. So … tell me about it!

Romie: It’s a haunted house story about middle-aged people who have a lot of trouble believing anything could be going wrong on the level it’s going wrong. I’m a longtime editor at Strange Horizons and you may have seen my writing in Analog, Atlas Obscura, The Deadlands, and Tractor Beam.

Zilla: What inspired you to write this book?

Romie: Have you had long theoretical conversations about what makes horror horrifying, and what does and doesn’t count as horror? I spent a lot of time hanging around someone who insisted horror has to meet two criteria: (1) it has to include an element of the supernatural, and (2) it has to scare you. That’s tricky for me, because I don’t believe in the supernatural and therefore am not scared of it. My reaction to most horror fiction is grief.

Some years ago, I was spending the weekend at a friend’s house, which is built on a hill. When you’re in the back yard, it’s obvious the front of the house is on the ground, and the back of the house is up on poles. I grew up in houses with crawl spaces, but rarely thought about them while indoors. I started playing with the idea that you could live your life standing on something without realizing how little was supporting you, both literally and metaphorically.

I was visiting my friend partly to see him in the play Wait Until Dark; he was one of the villains. I enjoyed being frightened by his believable on-stage cruelty (and loved that production overall). But it didn’t change my core understanding that when he stepped off stage, he was my friend. I wondered how much it would take to convince me otherwise.

When it comes to what keeps me up at night, I worry I could notice clear warning signs and then use my excellent coping skills and reasonableness to stay in a situation that has become very dangerous. Similarly, I worry that I appear ridiculous to other people, with no evidence this is true. So in my book, what haunts the characters is nothing; it’s nothing. These things happen to everyone.

My goal while writing was for readers to think “oh no, is that what I’m like?” (The real horror is yourself.) The trouble when I finished was – oh no, what if my friends think I think that’s what they’re like? I ran it by my friend whose house and performance inspired the whole thing, and he was flattered. He asked me to be vague about the address so he doesn’t have to deal with tourists if the book becomes famous, which is a generous thing to worry about.

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

Well, that’s an unusual method to bring about regime change.

Give 'em pumpkin to talk about

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 10:01:19 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Pursuit of Love as a sci-fi was suggested by Kate, based on Rachel’s continual complaining about every cover for that book ever. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Rachel at Rainbow Space Magic…

Rachel will be speaking at the best-named online convention ever, Rainbow Space Magic! You can catch her twice on Sunday, first at How Do You Write When the World Is Falling Apart? at 1:30-2:30 pm EST, then at the reading from 3-4 pm. It’s free and you can join from anywhere!

…and at Can*Con

If you’re in the Ottawa area, come by the Can*Con launch of Blight on Saturday, Oct. 18th at 5:30-6:20, and to the One Ring to Bind Them: Writing Metaphors panel on Sunday, Oct. 19th at 11:30-12:30. She’ll be signing in the Newbridge Room from 2:30-3 on Saturday as well. Find out more on the Can*Con site!

Show Cat

LINE FROM A WIP

She says, it’s just a thing. And all things can break.

Book Report Corner

by Zilla Novikov

A propulsive read that I finished on the same day I started it. No one in this story is a good person, but they're such fascinating disasters that I couldn't help rooting for them. Louise and her matter-of-fact delusions. Cat and her selfishness, Henry and his possessiveness. Of course this can't end well. The flame that burns twice as bright and all that.

The heart of this book is about loneliness. What we'll suffer, what we'll put other people through, to survive it. The masks we'll wear and the lies we'll tell, our clothes off in an instant but so rarely naked, so rarely vulnerable. It's better to be liked for someone you're not, for something you can do for them, than to risk being alone.

Up to a point.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: I found this guide so incredibly helpful, and I’m sure our readers will too! Can you tell us a little about the book? What made you decide to write it (and was it the Rings of Power battle scenes)?

Suzannah: I’m absolutely thrilled to hear that so many people are finding the book to be helpful!

The book had its genesis in my writer’s group near the end of 2023, when a friend was tearing out her hair about the climactic battle scene in her WIP. I suggested scheduling a video call wherein I would give her a crash course on how to write a battle. I started making notes for what I wanted to cover, and the more I wrote down, the more I thought of. It was all gushing out of me at once. I remember being at the casual day job the day before the call, intensely making voice-to-text notes on my phone, and one of my co-workers asked if I was OK. What do you tell someone when that happens? “Yeah I’m good, I’m just advising my friend on how to go to war.”

My friend really appreciated the call and left me in no doubt that something like this, expanded into a book, could be super helpful to a lot of people. I took the notes I’d made for the call and expanded them into the first draft of How to Write a Fantasy Battle. Afterwards, I got hit by imposter syndrome. Was the tone too snarky? Did I really know what I was talking about? I’d been reading academic-level crusader history books for ten years and following the current Russo-Ukrainian war since its beginning, but I didn’t have any formal training in either history or strategy – all I’ve got is a law degree. Plus, if I published a book on military tactics as a woman, would anyone take me seriously? It wasn’t until early this year, when the whole author group demanded to see the draft and then unanimously agreed that it needed to be published, that I felt I should move ahead.

How to Write a Fantasy Battle contains exactly what the subtitle suggests: Medieval and Modern Military Tactics for Authors. I mainly discuss the basics of how battles were fought in the high middle ages, which is my area of expertise, but I also include stuff that I’ve learned about war from other periods, especially the present day in Ukraine. There are certain commonalities across history, whatever kind of technology we’re talking about, and it’s these commonalities that I think fantasy authors will find most useful to know about. The fantastical and magical elements in your work might not exist in real life, but chances are that they’ll fulfil a similar role in your fantasy battle as some modern technological innovation does today.

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

You are turned into a bat. Y/N?

It's going down, I'm yelling (Sept)-timber

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 08:01:14 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Story of the Donner Party as a children’s book was suggested by Dale. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Get in on the launch here!

Announcements

Bi+ Arts Festival

The Bi+ Arts Festival runs in Toronto from Sept. 18-21st. If you’re in town, come see Rachel read at the Author’s Showcase Friday September 19, 2025 at the new Glad Day Lit location at Queen Street West and Lisgar Street.

Neosynthesis Kickstarter

The Kickstarter for Neosynthesis is launching soon! Twelve compelling short stories by six indie Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction authors, exploring the myriad realms where humanity and technology intersect. Together, these visions take readers to distant futures where human and machine exist in uneasy symbiosis, in worlds both grim and wondrous, and where survival depends on getting the upper hand.

From authors T.K. Toppin, Nick Snape, J.D. Robinson, Bryan Chaffin, Rohan O'Duill and Jes Deaver.

Show Cat

Felix and Liam say that two heads are better than one.

A LINE FROM A WIP

We are sold Time as if she were a draft horse and promised she treads steadily in fixed rows, but if you look away, Time transforms herself into a salmon, swimming upstream to evade any net.

Book Report Corner

by Rachel A. Rosen

In the preface that opens this collection of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror from Palestinian writers in the diaspora, editor and contributor Sonia Sulaiman writes, “Someone once said that all Palestinian fiction is speculative; we are always grappling with the past and living in expectation of the future.” These stories are those of writers violently unmoored from home and belonging. What is more speculative than dreaming of the future, despite a past of dispossession?

There are many standout stories in this collection, which is the first of its kind to be published in Canada. From the unsettling horror of Ziyad Saadi’s “The Third Or Fourth Casualty,” in which a group of boys die while swimming as we are reminded of the insignificance of their deaths, to the triumphant DIY space project of Samah Serour Fadil’s “Gaza Luna,” to the heartfelt queer longing of Nadia Afifi’s “The Generation Chip,” this diverse and imaginative collection is at once a cry of rage and a flickering of hope in the darkness. It’s a must-read.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Zilla: Joining us today, we have Night Beats' own Rachel A. Rosen, talking about her title story in the Antifa Lit Journal Vol. 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire's Yacht? This is a story about whales and capitalism, so why did you choose to make the protagonist an art major?

Rachel: Because of my own background, there are a disproportionate number of characters across all of my fiction who care a disproportionate amount about art and art history. For this, I blame my own high school art teachers for making the subject far too interesting to my adolescent mind. You know what you did.

In terms of the story itself, I needed a “useless” major that would accumulate a student debt that Maria could never hope to repay by normal means. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a useless major, but I do find it interesting the degree to which Western governments focus on STEM and business as the only possible useful majors. (I say “interesting” in that these same governments are largely uninterested in funding scientific research or listening to what actual scientists have to say.) Studying visual arts has always been a path to poverty, but it is also a vital body of knowledge, as it teaches you, more than anything else, how to see what’s in front of your eyes. It’s why Maria is the only character who is able to see through Chase’s slick image to what he’s doing behind the scenes.

Zilla: Is "eat the rich" meant to be interpreted literally?

Rachel: No thank you, I’m vegan.

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

Write about someone you hate, in the first person, from their perspective.

Augustus Gloop

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 10:00:07 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as an Occupational Health and Safety Manual was suggested by Rob. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Rachel’s at WorldCon Seattle!

If you’re at WorldCon, here’s my schedule. Come by and say hi! I also have books for sale in the BookNook.

Thu 1:30pm-2:30pm: Beyond The Torment Nexus

Warnings provided by science fiction are often misunderstood and willfully misinterpreted by those who can profit from creating dystopias. Let's talk about science fiction's most misunderstood works. (We may end up casting aspersions at tech oligarchs who are intent on creating the next Torment Nexus.)

Fri 7:30pm-8:30pm: Why does the alt-right love science fiction?

Over the past few decades, there have been attempts to co-opt science fiction in support of racist, sexist, and classist political movements. Even works such as Star Trek, Neuromancer, and the Disposessed have been claimed by alt-right leaders as foundational texts for their awful worldviews. Why does the alt-right love science fiction, and what problematic assumptions are coded into the genre that cause it to be open to these interpretations?

Saturday (virtual): Edmonton in 2030 Virtual Bid Party: Celebrating Science Fiction and Fantasy from Canada (I’ll be on the Many Ways to Publishing panel at 4 pm)

Sun 12:00pm-1:00pm: Editing as An Art Form

Most authors know—and many quickly learn—that an editor is more than a simple curator of stories. A good editor can be the difference between a flawed gem and a brilliant masterpiece. What can we gain from viewing the work of editing as an art in its own right?

Sun 3:00pm-4:00pm: Table Talks 64

Show Cat

Bella (short for Isabella) was sent to us by a reader and we’re obsessed with her.

A LINE FROM A WIP

If they died doing so, it would not with rage at the circumstances that had dragged them from their homes and families to dash themselves against implacable nature, but with the understanding that had their belief been stronger, they needn’t have died at all.

Book Report Corner

by Tucker Lieberman

Some time ago, I discovered Cascade by Rachel A. Rosen.

The sequel, Blight, has awakened.

In the first book, the Earth’s climate has begun to break down, and magic bursts from the planet, entering people. Will the world end? “The world is always ending, for someone,” a wise eco-activist says.

The sequel Blight, has got more demons.

These are the things that, according to Blythe’s experience, kept away a demon: absolutely fucking nothing, if it really wanted to get at you. It would unhinge its jaws and swallow you before you could reach for your gun. It would have claimed your mind long before that. You would walk, smiling, into its rotting arms as it sang your name.

The world collapses by fire, by ice, by violence, by spellcasting, and if it — whatever “it” is — doesn’t get you, it’ll get someone you cared for.

“The first deaths had names, faces, memories attached to them,” but the ones that came after were “cumulative damage, termites in the wood unnoticed until the house collapses,” and then “whole neighbourhoods, small towns, entire ecosystems, tragedy writ too large to enumerate, let alone mourn…other people were shadows, sliding away too fast to register.”

But then, some of us are still alive.

Read the rest on Medium.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: With us today is Benjamin Gorman, editor and contributor to the Antifa Lit Journal, which, if I do say so myself, is a rad book. Tell us a little about the anthology, Ben! What is it, and how did it come together?

Ben: We had decided as a family that we would need to leave the US if Trump won the election, so between Election Day and Inauguration Day, we liquidated our possessions and Chrys (who wrote the introduction to Volume 1), our kid Franke, our three dogs, and our two cats relocated to Spain. In the midst of all the insanity of the move, I processed it by writing an explanation that started as a draft of a Facebook post, then a longer blog post, and became a whole book, Dear America: A Breakup Letter. It was published by Not a Pipe Publishing just as we were safely across the border, and it did surprisingly well. A lot of people were in the same headspace, though I understand not everyone can leave the country. Watching all that interest in the book while we were absorbing the daily nightmare of American news, Chrys suggested publishing an anthology of anti-fascist poetry and short fiction. Not a Pipe has published themed anthologies before, like Written with Pride, the all-LGBTQIA+ anthology, and Strongly Worded Women, by exclusively women authors. The response from authors and poets was overwhelming. So many talented writers were desperate to have a venue to speak out against fascism, to process their fear, and to provide readers with an alternate vision of the future. As we poured over all the submissions, we realized we could easily populate a regular journal with high quality short fiction and poetry. So the anthology became Volume 1. And our intention is to keep it going as long as there’s an appetite for it. I don’t foresee this regime going away nearly as quickly as some people expect, and I think we’ll see increases in fascism, especially in terms of would-be-autocrats leveraging anti-immigrant sentiment, all over the wealthy world as the people from countries we’ve made uninhabitable through our climate colonialism decide to move to the places where they can still live above water and below 130° F/ 55° C. There will be very real consequences in terms of housing, supply chains, etc., and I fear that instead of trying to be welcoming, a lot of countries will turn to demagogues. We’ll need people of conscience to speak out, and writers often fill that role.

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life.

July've got the power

Night Beats Extended Universe — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 10:02:19 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Metamorphosis as a children’s book was suggested by Dale Stromberg. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Amazon
Other online retailers
Direct from the publisher

Announcements

Blight launch!

The second book in Rachel’s Sleep of Reason series, Blight, is now available! If you hate fascism and appreciate gay wizards and eldritch horrors that claw at the shreds of your sanity, if you are looking for the faintest light in these dark times, this may just be the book you need.

And if you’re in Toronto, you can come to the first (though not the last!) launch party for Blight on Thursday, July 3 at Glad Day Bookshop (499 Church Street) at 6:30-8:30 pm!

If you read Blight and liked it, please leave a review somewhere! Small press books live or die on word of mouth!

If you’re a fan of the series or really into the history of the Spanish Civil War, check out the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion swag in a variety of styles and sizes. There are also limited-edition patches; if you want one, email us for details.

Reminders & updates:

Voting for the Aurora Awards closes at 11:59pm EDT on July 19th. so if you’re a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, and haven’t yet voted for Wizards & Spaceships, make sure you do so before the deadline! Learn more about CSFFA here. You can listen to our entire first season at our website, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Antifa Lit Journal Volume 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht? is out now! You can buy it here and read, among others, the story that’s going to get Rachel banned in the US for the next four years. Can’t get enough antifascist literature? Check out the Volume Two Kickstarter,
with rewards including t-shirts, hats, and the knowledge that you’re making the world a better place.

Show Cat

Sabot’s doing her part to sell books and fight fascism. Are you?

A LINE FROM A WIP

It is a clichéd, hackneyed trope for a chandelier to fall within an opera house, and yet, I admit myself to be so low as to resort to this device.

Book Report Corner

by Rachel A. Rosen

As you might guess from my latest book, I love sea creatures and hate capitalism. Which makes Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs the perfect sort of book for me. (I mean, my favourite part of Moby-Dick was the whale facts, even when they were wrong. This one won’t take you nearly as long to read.)

Undrowned book is a stunning, poetic tribute to Blackness, queerness, femmeness, fatness, resistance, solidarity, and love, told through the lens of marine biology. It brings together two of my great loves: activism and whale facts. This is a book that's all activism and whale facts, in the best possible way. What a joyful read.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Zilla: Transmentation | Transience is a novel of a science fiction multiverse that blew me away with the rich characters and deep worldbuilding. Its creators are collectively known as ‘Darkly Lem,’ a five-author collaboration consisting of Josh Eure, Craig Lincoln, Ben Murphy, Cadwell Turnbull and M. Darusha Wehm, who make up part of the larger writing collective Many Worlds. Being a huge fan of writing collectives in general and Darkly Lem in particular, I was delighted that they agreed to join us for an interview. Before we get into my questions, can you tell us a bit about the book?

Darkly Lem: Transmentation | Transience is the first book of the Formation Saga, a novel trilogy set within the Many Worlds shared multiverse. The trilogy is an introduction to the much larger Many Worlds narrative universe, which already consists of short stories by numerous authors, which can be found on the Many Worlds website and in the Many Worlds print anthology.

The publisher’s blurb for Transmentation | Transience is:

Over thousands of years and thousands of worlds, universe-spanning societies of interdimensional travelers have arisen. Some seek to make the multiverse a better place, some seek power and glory, others knowledge, while still others simply want to write their own tale across the cosmos.

When a routine training mission goes very wrong, two competing societies are thrust into an unwanted confrontation. As intelligence officer Malculm Kilkeneade receives the blame within Burel Hird, Roamers of Tala Beinir and Shara find themselves inadvertently swept up in an assassination plot.

Meanwhile, factions within Burel Hird are vying for greater control over their society in a war of cutthroat machinations–at a heavy price. Elsewhere, two members of rival societies lay their own plans for insurrection–with ramifications that will ripple across the Many Worlds …

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

What if you just let the prophecy come true?

June-tacular days ahead

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 10:01:03 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Macbeth as romance was suggested by @artcollisions. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Blight is out soon! In just two weeks, in fact!

Peter Watts calls it “A compulsive read: angry, articulate, and lyrical…In the unlikely event that we shake off our collective stupidity and cowardice enough to fight against the current trajectory of our society— not to mention that of the whole damn biosphere—I want Rachel Rosen leading the revolution.”

You can still pre-order Blight for another 15 days, after which you’ll have to settle for regular-ordering it. Find it online wherever you get your books, or direct from the publisher. Pre-orders and reviews help small press and indie books find a larger audience, so if you like the thing that we do here on Night Beats, check it out!

And if you’re in Toronto, you can come to the first (though not the last!) launch party for Blight on Thursday, July 3 at Glad Day Bookshop (499 Church Street) at 6:30-8:30 pm!

Reminders & updates:

Voting for the Aurora Awards will open on June 7th. CSFFA members have five weeks to submit their ballots. Voting will close at 11:59pm EDT on July 12th. If you’re a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, consider voting for Wizards & Spaceships! Learn more about CSFFA here. You can listen to our entire first season at our website, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Antifa Lit Journal Volume 1: What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht? is out now! You can buy it here and read, among others, the story that’s going to get Rachel banned in the US for the next four years. Can’t get enough antifascist literature? Check out the Volume Two Kickstarter,
with rewards including t-shirts, hats, and the knowledge that you’re making the world a better place.
Finally, we squeed in this very newsletter about the final book in Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra series, School of Shards. You can now buy it and read it yourself!

Show Cat

Pi is 15 books tall.

A LINE FROM A WIP

“What am I doing singing songs when the world is burning?”
“If there are no songs, what’s the point of putting the fire out?”

Book Report Corner

by Rachel A. Rosen

If you’re in education or academia in the age of austerity, you’ve likely had a moment or two where you’ve wondered what you’re doing there, and whether or not you’re doing more harm than good. I know that I’ve had more than a few of those moments. The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain, Sofia Samatar’s wonderfully strange and dreamy novella about education, class divisions, and the carceral state on a mining ship, gets this contradiction.

In the Hold, generations of workers are Chained, never seeing anything other than their miserable conditions. But a boy who is good at drawing is plucked from the Hold and brought up to the ship's university, where he joins the bluelegs, people like his professor, who get an electronic ankle bracelet instead of a chain. Some people even have no fetters, and get names instead. As the boy adjusts to his new circumstances and the professor navigates the boundaries of hers, they become embroiled in a struggle for freedom—not just for themselves, but for their entire society.

This novella manages to be at once intensely relatable and transcendent: a story of the power and the limits of academia, the compromises of political action, the relationship between labour and the state, and the promise of breaking free.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Zilla: I devoured C.L. Methvin’s gruesome, touching and grotesque collection of short stories Eusect. I was delighted when they agreed to do an interview with us so I could pick their brains (not literally). C.L., can you tell us a bit about your book?

C.L.: It is a collection of horror shorts all flavored with Southern Gothic dread, varying in tone from subtle SCP-esque horrors to explicit gore, and in length from ~500 words to 6k+. Blurbed as follows:

The end is scary. The perpetual is scarier.

A suicidal housemate’s property regresses in ownership. A father is tormented by his immortal infant son. A school of fish offers communion with the heavens. A woman’s dead body multiplies across the world. These fourteen stories of terror, gore, and dissociation present people facing themselves and the infinite―often both at their worst.

Zilla: Let’s start with an introduction—between you and your characters. What would they say if they met you?

C.L.: “How fucking dare you.”

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

The monster from the Black Lagoon came round for ice cream.

May Day everyday

Thu, 01 May 2025 10:02:29 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry M. Robert III as a pulp paperback was suggested by…I’m not sure actually. Maybe Rachel just thought it was cool. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Wizards & Spaceships is shortlisted for the Aurora Awards!

What a way to end the first season of a podcast! Rachel A. Rosen and David L. Clink’s Wizards & Spaceships has been nominated for the Aurora Awards, Canada’s annual English-language Science Fiction and Fantasy awards. If you’re a member of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, consider voting for us! Learn more about CSFFA here. You can listen to our entire first season at our website, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A Sad Bastard Extension

We’ve got a ton of new newsletter subscribers (Hi! Welcome in!) and we thought … maybe some of them don’t know that we’re writing a sequel/spin-off to the depressingly successful Sad Bastard Cookbook.

Not only that, but we’re crowdsourcing recipies to feed yourself and your family on your worst days!

If you’ve got a recipe to contribute, please share it with us here. (Or e-mail us at nightbeatseu@gmail.com if you don’t like Google Forms.)

We’ll close the form on May 8, 2025 so we can start writing!

Antifa Anthology Cover Reveal

Check out the cover of the upcoming Antifa Lit Journal Volume 1 from Not A Pipe Publishing. Rachel’s short story, “What If We Kissed While Sinking a Billionaire’s Yacht?” is the title story in the anthology, which comes out May 31. Check out the Goodreads page for links where you can buy it, and watch this space for a Kickstarter that will be launching soon.

Show Cat

Nicole’s book shipment is going through quality assurance.

A LINE FROM A WIP

Our lives are not novels, which, if we do not like the direction, we may close and choose another to read, but, beside that one difference, we have no more agency in creating our own histories than we do in consuming those printed in ink, whatever we pretend to the contrary.

Book Report Corner

by Zilla Novikov

The Audacity Gambit by B. Zedan is a gentle fairy tale, though the underlying themes are as uncompromising as any Fae could demand. Emily is the Chosen One, the one who can restore her people to the Fae Kingdom--but this is no accident of fate. Her life has been manipulated since the moment of her birth to fulfil the esoteric needs of prophecy, and the trusted adults of her life have been concerned only with preparing the way. But, while the world can put a person in a box long enough that she assumes its shape, she can still choose who she becomes when she steps outside.

The fantastical world is a character in its own right, full of whimsy in the style of Frank L Baum or Cat Valente, where Polaroid cameras reveal hidden mysteries and trees may--or may not--be trustworthy. While I never feared for Emily's life, I wondered what she would hold onto when everything changed.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Rachel: Nick Mamatas is a fantastic author and a longtime friend, and every time he puts out a new book, I know I'm going to love it. This one is no exception, and I'm thrilled that he's here to tell you about it. Nick, please tell us about yourself and 120 Murders.

Nick: I’m Nick Mamatas, an author and editor. My most recent editorial work is the editing of the anthology 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era. I asked top writers of noir, gothic, and horror fiction to write a story inspired somehow by the songs played on college radio and “alternative” music video programming blocks, and, boy howdy, did they!

It’ll be published by a new independent press, Ruadán (pronounced ROO-ah-dawn) Books, which focuses on all manner of dark speculative fiction.

120 Murders includes brand new stories by William Boyle, Selena Chambers, Jeff Chon, Libby Cudmore, Jeffrey Ford, Meg Gardiner, Todd Grimson, Cara Hoffman, Maxim Jakubowski, Alex Jennings, Cyan Katz, Josh Malerman, Michael Marano, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Zandra Renwick, Jason Ridler, Veronica Schoanes, Elena Mauli Shapiro, Brian Francis Slattery, Molly Tanzer, Chris L. Terry, and Paul Tremblay, as well as little notes about their musical tastes.

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

Why is the island forbidden?

April Foolosophy

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 10:03:23 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Selected Writings and Speeches of Maximilien Robespierre as an office equipment manual was suggested by the incomparable Zilla. For some reason. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

One Year of Wizards & Spaceships!

Rachel A. Rosen and David L. Clink’s Wizards & Spaceships podcast is celebrating one year of talking about wizards and also spaceships. We absolutely can’t wait for you to hear our season finale, which drops April 15. You can listen to it, along with any episodes you might have missed, at our website, or wherever you get your podcasts.

“Do You Love the Colour Of the Sky” in Trollbreath Magazine

Rachel’s short story, “Do You Love the Colour Of the Sky,” was featured in the March 2025 issue of Trollbreath Magazine. You can read it by subscription or follow them on your favourite social media platform for a new short story every Friday starting this month!

Show Cat
A Secret Third Announcement!

Alice is “helping” make the Sad Bastard sequels a reality, and you can too!

This is our very stealthy way of letting you know the official title of the Sad Bastard sequel:

The Sad Bastard Cookbook: 2 Sad 2 Cook

We are so excited to bring you even more recipes for food you can make so you don’t die. We are still crowdsourcing for two sequels (this one, for regular sad bastards, and another one that Rohan is writing for sad bastards with kids), so if you have a struggle recipe you’d like to share, please send it our way!

Feed sad people

A LINE FROM A WIP

‘People call me Slice,’ he said, as he pressed the button on the lift. ‘You’re going to work with me now, so I guess that makes you Dice.'

Book Report Corner

by Rachel A. Rosen

Some years ago, I had my brain melted and then rearranged by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko’s Vita Nostra, which still remains one of my favourite fantasy novels—and fantasy series—of all time. Its long-awaited conclusion, School of Shards, is haunting, moving, and absolutely perfect. It's one of those books that I put down and immediately wanted to reread, not only because it's stunningly written, but because there were layers of theme and character that I wanted to pick apart.

School of Shards picks up in the new reality that Sasha created in Assassin of Reality—a world without fear, without plane crashes, without child death, but without free will. Now the provost of the Institute of Special Technologies, she has become the same knd of inscrutable taskmasker who terrorized her as a student. But the Great Speech is falling apart, and with it, the world outside of Torpa. And so Sasha must pull from her own past—her half-brother Valya and the twin sons of her former lover Yaroslav—to fix what she's broken.

Even with the world closing in on the town and its strange magic school, this final chapter in the trilogy feels like it has a much greater scope. The post-Soviet malaise of the first novel expands to a global scale. Words, language, no longer holds the fabric of reality together. The central metaphor is so apt for our present moment, and maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I just found myself thinking that this is a book that does what I want fantasy to do. This is why the genre is meaningful.

I would be remiss if I didn't also note the elegance of Julia Meitov Hersey's translation. As is fitting for a book about language, the language of the story itself is beautiful, lyrical, and melancholic.

I am grateful to Kyra DeVoe at HarperCollins for sending me an ARC. For the rest of you, pre-orders are available wherever books are sold, and the book itself will be out on June 17.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Zilla: I am so ridiculously excited for this interview—I've been waiting (somewhat) patiently for Rachel A. Rosen to be read to share the second book in her Sleep of Reason series with the world. And it's finally here! Rachel, please introduce us to Blight.

Rachel: Reader, meet Blight. Blight, meet Reader. Blight is the sequel to Cascade, my first novel. Kind of a grim fella but I promise you there’s a sense of humour under there, not too far beneath the spiky surface. Cascade follows the attempts of the various characters, inside and outside systems of governmental power, to stop a climate-induced magical disaster from overrunning Canada and the world. Since there are three books in a trilogy, it’s not too big a spoiler to say that they fail at that, and Blight, which takes place three years later, is about picking up and living in the ruins.

Zilla: Among the many, many things that fascinated me about this book was how much magic derived from the power of true names, whether they protect us from demons or deliver us to sorcerers. What drove you to write your fantasy this way?

Rachel: I was Ursula K. LeGuin-pilled early in life, but of course she wasn’t the first person to write a form of magic in which one’s true name should be carefully guarded, lest the speaker end up with power over you. In Cascade, it’s established that several of the main characters have buried their true names, a type of curse that makes everyone incapable of even thinking of it; in Blight, we are about to find out why that’s important. My version of demons, people and animals who have been corrupted by magic to become monstrous, lure their victims to their deaths by whispering their true names. But humans are always worse than that, and we see what the power of a true name can be in the hands of a magician with malicious intent.

Identity is a form of armour. It’s not a coincidence that the far right weaponizes words—woke, antifa, fake news—twisting their original meanings to corrupt them. If we are going to survive the next few years, battles will not only have to be fought in the streets, but on the terrain of speech. I’ve just made it somewhat more literal for my characters, who risk being turned inside out should the wrong word get said.

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

Describe your favourite Eldritch horror that lives under the sea.

Lions. Lambs. Leopards eating faces.

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 11:01:20 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

The Parable of the Sower as a quirky childhood introvert comedy was suggested by @DrWhippersnap. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Upcoming book talk at the Welland Public Library

Rachel will be speaking at the Welland Public Library on March 22nd at 2 pm EST about the Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don’t Die. She may even be dropping some exciting news about future Sad Bastardry. (The exciting news can also be found here. Hint: please bring us your saddest recipes.)

Can’t make it in person? That’s okay! It’s on Zoom! And just like the ebook version of the cookbook, it’s free!

Click here to register!

Preorder Blight (The Sleep Of Reason #2)

Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo-award winning author of The Downloaded, says:

Rachel A. Rosen is a superb prose stylist and an incisive social commentator. Her post-apocalyptic Canada will haunt you forever. Predicting the future is supposed to be science fiction’s job, but Rosen shows that urban (and rural!) fantasy can do it, too, with sharp-edged commentary and real-world relevance. Look for this one on the award ballots.

Peter Watts, author of Blindsight, says:

A compulsive read: angry, articulate, and lyrical. […] Rosen is rapidly proving herself to be the twenty-first century’s answer to John Brunner.

In the unlikely event that we shake off our collective stupidity and cowardice enough to fight against the current trajectory of our society— not to mention that of the whole damn biosphere—I want Rachel A. Rosen leading the revolution.

Hyped yet? You can now pre-order Blight, the sequel to Cascade, in a bunch of different ways.

Pre-orders help summon the darkest of eldritch horrors—the Almighty Algorithm. You can pre-order here! It will be released in Spring 2025 through The BumblePuppy Press (and you can also buy it directly from the publisher).

Want to read it without paying money? I also need hype. You can sign up for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review somewhere that other people will see it. You can also download it through BookSirens, or find it on NetGalley!

If you haven’t read Cascade yet, what are you waiting for? I’m so excited for you to read Blight, but it’ll make much more sense if you read Cascade first. You can buy it anywhere online or through the publisher.

Show Cat

Mac, you big silly, the witch’s familar in Beneath the Starlit Sea has a fox not a cat!

A LINE FROM A WIP

However, while all Politicians are schemers in the shape of Men, there is as much variation within these beasts as can be found among the more natural creatures of the wild.

Book Report Corner

by Zilla Novikov

Transmentation—Transience: Or, an Accession to the People's Council for Nine Thousand Worlds is Darkly Lem’s richly woven tapestry of a science fiction novel asks us who we are, deeper than the flesh and memories that imprison us, and if we can ever escape the societies that we belong to. Characters jump from universe to universe, from shell to shell, seeking to hold on to core identity that they're not always confident exists. In lieu of the certainty of self, they lean on that of belonging to something greater than themselves–even when their society betrays them, they cling tightly to this sense of meaning in their lives. As someone who suffers from mental illness, I found the themes of identity fascinating.

And as a fan of expansive, thrilling science fiction, I was equally drawn in. There were universes of political scheming to match the White Tower, and others of fighting bug-eyed monsters with stolen swords. There was love, or friendship, or some ambiguous tangle that's both and neither, lost beneath ambition. Each fantastical world is as richly detailed as the characters that inhabit it, and they're combined to tell a captivating, satisfying tale.

DID YOU KNOW?

Newsletter subscribers get bonus content—a deleted chapter from Rachel A. Rosen's novel Cascade, and a prequel story So Human As I Am. A companion story to Instant Classic, “Have You Considered Self Publishing”. Plus, download the pdf e-book of The Sad Bastard Cookbook: Food You Can Make So You Don't Die.

Did you miss the download link? It's not too late! Find it here.

Author Interviews

Every Tuesday, the Night Beats blog features an interview with an awesome author. Are you an author with a cool new project? Apply for an author interview!

Zilla: Rachel and I both absolutely adored Gyre, Dale Stomberg's literary fiction novella about abuse, fate, the creative urge, and repeating our mistakes. We had to bring Dale in to talk about this work of art, so here he is! Dale, give us your best shot at putting the magic into words.

Dale: The story begins when Abigail is born with a fully formed adult consciousness and an awareness that she has lived a prior lifetime, albeit with no specific memories of her past life. As an adult mind in a baby’s body, she is physically helpless but also impossibly precocious. Her father, Raj, is overjoyed at how special she seems; her mother, Faye, is disquieted.

As Abigail grows up, scraps of memory from her prior life begin to return to her. She comes to understand that she did something terrible back then, and her wonder at being reborn clashes against her deep sense of shame and worthlessness. A family tragedy exacerbates the strain in Abigail and Faye’s relationship, and things start to spiral downward.

So the book ends up being a meditation on cycles of mistreatment, on the ways we struggle against our own pasts and ingrained predilections, and on how a sense of fate’s inescapability can come to tyrannise us.

Read the rest of the interview here.

WRITING PROMPT

Write your saddest survival recipe. (Then, if you want to share it with the community, you can submit it here for inclusion in the Sad Bastard Cookbook Sequel!)

Tis the season of love & then of half-price chocolate

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 11:00:42 GMT

Wrong Genre Book Covers

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a premade romantasy cover was suggested by Zilla. Have a funny idea for a Wrong Genre Cover? Just hit the big purple button below and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she'll make it in a future issue. Go on! Do it now.

Announcements

Preorder Blight (The Sleep Of Reason #2)

It’s lurking in the bombed-out suburbs that civilization has abandoned, in the frozen wilderness where shriekgrass has taken root. It’s singing from the depths of the god-infested rising oceans. It’s whispering your name in a cold, high voice. The sequel to Cascade is incoming!

It’s time to pre-order your copy of Blight (The Sleep Of Reason #2)!

What use is a revolution in a world ruled by magic?

A young wizard on the brink of burnout searches for her lost mentor. A bereaved mother, summoned to the sea by an ancient god, risks all to avenge her child. Her ex-husband smuggles weapons to a rag-tag resistance.

The Cascade ruined the world that was; the Blight nearly destroyed what remained. The magical catastrophe unleashed demons and shriekgrass, an endless winter, and a promise of worse to come.

In what remains of Canada, the genocidal Dominion government rules with an iron fist, while the libertarian Silicon Valley Autonomous Region chips away at the country's sinking west coast.

Can a restive coalition of revolutionaries, defectors, and magicians pick up the pieces?

Want to read it without paying money? I also need hype. You can sign up for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review somewhere that other people will see it.

Sad Bastard Expectations

It's 2025, and we're sadder than ever!

Maybe it's time for a Sad Bastard Cookbook sequel? Maybe a spin-off for parents of small children? Maybe both?

I'm new here. What's a Sad Bastard Cookbook?

Glad you asked! We wrote a cookbook full of judgement-free recipes you can make when you're suffering from mental illness, physical disability, poverty, or anything else late-stage capitalism throws up that makes basic self-care feel impossible. Some of the recipes were our own, some we collected from the community.

The ebook is free--you can download a copy here if you wanna check it out.

I'm a community! Or at least, a Person! Can I contribute my recipe for survival food?

YES PLEASE.

If you have a survival recipe that you make for yourself, or to feed a baby, toddler, or small child, please share that recipe here.

I’m a fan of the original Sad Bastard Cookbook—when will the new ones be here?

We really have no idea. We’re in the very early planning and writing stages of the two projects, but when we have more information, you’ll probably see it here first!

Show Cat

Momo shows her excellent taste in books, reading When We Had Forever by Shaylin Gandhi