Valkyrie Visionaries is so excited to introduce you to Night Beats and the team behind the community cultivated specifically for authors who are looking for a village to support them.
Below, you will find an interview with Zilla, Rachel, and Sabitha as they share more about Night Beats, the inspiration behind their newsletter, and what you can expect from jumping on it.
Trust us, the Wrong Genre Covers alone are a hilarious way to start your month!
Plus, at the end of this blog, we’re sharing all of the details on an awesome giveaway that you don’t want to miss.
Without further ado, let’s get into it ✨
Tell us a little bit about Night Beats! Who are you? What do you do? What’s the inspiration behind Night Beats?
Sabitha: We’re a group of friends creating a shared universe that’s Creative Commons and open for anyone to use. We’ve worked together brainstorming and beta reading various projects for a few years, and created Night Beats out of a need to have pop culture references in our projects that wouldn’t seem dated. When it turned out that actually, quite a lot of writers have a need for such a thing, we started referring to our various projects as the Night Beats Extended Universe.
I’m an activist and blogger who loves great books and terrible TV shows. The inspirations behind Night Beats for me were the low-budget, ridiculous TV shows like Forever Knight and X-Files that I watched as a teenager—the kind that you know are objectively awful, but are nevertheless the springboard for discussion, debate, and fan communities. I think in our hearts, all of us wanted to create something that would spark that level of engagement and being meta and ironic and self-referential about it just came naturally.
Rachel: I’m an educator, slacktivist, graphic designer, editor, and writer—not necessarily in that order. My first novel, Cascade, is coming out in the spring from BumblePuppy Press. It’s an adult, political fantasy set in what’s more or less our world, where magic has been re-awoken by climate change. Within the story, Night Beats is a cultural touchstone for my characters to describe their various relationships to a tumultuous, dangerous milieu.
Zilla: I’m a disaster bisexual. But then, it’s 2022, and I challenge you to find any millennial who’s not a disaster. I’m shopping around my novel Reprise, and writing about how miserable the experience is in a novella called Query.
When I wrote Reprise I kept running into the problem of quiet moments. I needed something for my character to do on a Thursday night so she could be interrupted by a significant phone call or something she could talk about on a first date. Night Beats was the answer. A TV show that fits perfectly into any plotline, because it was fictional.
Shared art is rad. The only thing we ask is that artists who use Night Beats tell us so we can scream about how much we love them on the Night Beats website. It’s so special to see a story grow in ways we would never have expected.
What inspired you to cultivate a community for authors?
Zilla: It takes a village to write a novel. Everyone needs cheerleaders, beta readers, editors, marketers, friends. Writing can be a really lonely place before you find your community. Stories are meant to be shared.
Rachel: For some reason, I’m incapable of being concise. I keep tackling these big ambitious projects that take over my life. The first draft of Cascade was 140,000 words, took me about five years to write, and it’s the first of a trilogy. When you have something that large and complex, you absolutely need other people to bounce ideas off of, people who you trust enough to criticize the parts of your story that aren’t working, and people who love your characters enough to push you through to the end.
Sabitha: Also we’re all a bunch of socialists, so we like to share.
Let’s talk about your newsletter!
What can authors expect from jumping on it? And how often do you send newsletter blasts out?
Zilla: Easy question first—we’re on a monthly schedule. Not always on the first day of each month, because it’s 2022 and life is a lot. But within the first few days of each month, you’ll get a newsletter in your inbox!
Rachel: Plus, when you sign up, you’ll get access to a deleted chapter from Cascade.
What sort of writing content will be included in your newsletters?
Zilla: Our newsletter is built for readers and writers.
Sabitha: And cat lovers.
Zilla: And cat lovers, of course. But besides the cat pictures, we have the Book Report Corner, where we tell you what we love about new and old favorite books. We have Announcements to let you know about delightful book giveaways, fantastic new releases, and free writing workshops.
You don’t have to be a writer to sign up for our newsletter, but if you are, you’ll find a lot to love! If you are in the midst of a WIP, we will beta read a snippet and include it in the newsletter. Valkyrie Visionaries offers paid beta reading, which is rad if you want deep feedback on a longer piece. If you want to share an excerpt to get some supportive comments and a bit of exposure, that’s us.
Our readers really love that section too. They like to see the fantastic writing in the Night Beats community and they like seeing the process of beta reading between friends.
Rachel: Writer’s block is a challenge for everyone, so we also include writing prompts to inspire you. Such as: You thought you’d lost this book twenty years ago. Your fingers tremble as you lift the cover. You know what you’ll find inside.
Do you have a favorite category/beat you enjoy writing about for the newsletter?
Rachel: Wrong Genre Covers. This is pretty much what it says on the package: Someone suggests a well-known book and a genre that it is definitely not, and I redesign the cover to fit that genre. February readers got to see Fahrenheit 451 as a steamy romance, where the only thing hotter than the books was their love.
Zilla: Rachel Rosen is a professional graphic designer who does covers for a couple of Canadian presses, so getting a first peek at what she designs before it goes in the newsletter is a gift. Anyone can suggest a Wrong Genre Cover on Twitter or by emailing us, so I get the extra bonus of being the first person to see all the suggestions.
Rachel: Valkyrie Visionaries challenged me to do Lord of the Rings as a Bachelor-style romance, which was a bit complicated as I’ve never seen the Bachelor.
Sabitha: You wouldn’t like it.
Rachel: I would not. But I’m always up for a design challenge, so I hope you guys like it!
Sabitha: I really enjoy the roundtable discussions. I interview Rachel and Zilla about a theme, and we all get to nerd out about some of our favorite subjects in fiction.
Zilla: As an unashamed lover of all things feline, my favorite feature is the cat photos. We’ve promised to take reader submissions of dog photos as well, but so far it’s been non-stop cats and I think that’s beautiful.
How can people sign up?
Zilla: The easiest way is through this link! But if you want to check out some of the other artists in the Night Beats Extended Universe, check out our website. And the newsletter link is there too.
GIVEAWAY: Enter to win a copy of the Author’s World Builder with Rainbow by Chapel Orahamm!
Because Zilla, Rachel, and Sabitha love the writing community so much, they couldn’t do this promotional tour without including a giveaway!
You can enter to win a copy of the Author’s World Builder with Rainbow by Chapel Orahamm (who wrote this book because they’re an editor and they wanted something to show their clients how to flesh out world-building in greater detail).
To win a copy of this book, all you have to do is follow @nightbeatseu and @valkvisionaries on Twitter AND enter your details via the button below 🙌