Zilla Novikov's Blog, page 27
April 4, 2023
Behind the Screens: Tuesday Author Interview
Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.
Anna: Emma Berglund is a co-editor of the sci-fi anthology Into the Unknown. She wrote another short story, “In Our Midst,” for the next anthology installment Beyond Human: Tales of the New Us. This is your second sci-fi anthology outing. Tell us what attracted you to this group project?
Emma: Lower Decks Press started with me, Rohan O’Duill, and Jason Clor having the idea to put together and edit our first anthology, Into the Unknown, within our online community, as we have so many talented writers there. It all worked out well, so we said, hey why not try again! And here we are!
Anna: Your story describes an Earth after an alien invasion. Tell us more about it.
Emma: “In Our Midst” starts off after Earth has been stricken by aliens, but no one knows how they look like or what their intention is. However, what’s visible is how they affect humans. People are turned into either what we would describe as zombie-like creatures, or a sneakier version, where it’s not immediately visible whether a person is infected or not. The invasion has created suspicion in people because of this.
Anna: Is there life outside of this planet? How do you think the contact will be established?
Emma: Out of pure probability, there has to be some sort of life somewhere. Chance is we totally miss any contact tried because we don’t have the right tools to detect them. In the light of that, contact will probably be made from the alien part rather from our side.
Anna: Your story offered hope during a dark time for humanity. Do you believe it is the mission of sci-fi to help us through the conflicts of our dark times?
Emma: In a way, but I’d say that goes for any form of culture. We need the distractions, the explanations, the alternative worlds to enrich our minds, but it also helps us to enhance or be able to cope with our daily life.
Anna: What is it like to work with dozens of writers? Tell us about your editorial process.
Emma: It’s a great, yet overwhelming feeling! But to be able to follow all the writers process from their first draft to the published version is such a fantastic journey. We started with smaller groups where the first draft of the stories was read and discussed, then all the contributors have submitted their story to the three of us as the editors of Lower Decks Press. Since there are twice as many stories compared to our first anthology, we had to add an extra editorial resource person to help us out. Right now, we’re line editing and assembling the layout of the anthology as soon as we get the corrected versions back from the authors. We’re also thrilled to have fabulous illustrations by Marten Norr and a brilliant cover by Rachel A. Rosen, and we’re hoping to set a pre-sale date soon!
Anna: Find both anthologies with Emma’s stories at our website!
Emma: And you can find me on Twitter.
Art for “In Our Midst” by Marten Norr
April 1, 2023
Query Stretch Goal: Punch the Sun
an environmental activist / aspiring writer’s query letters get increasingly unhinged as the rejections pile up
Not one, but two print editions of Query are coming your way soon. A Daddy Bezos-approved blackout poetry cover, and a probably NSFW, definitely not safe for Amazon cover, which is printed on a special edition paperback and comes in a goodie bag of unexpected swag items hand-foraged by the author.
These book boxes are selling like hotcakes, which means it’s time for STRETCH GOALS. If we sell more than 50 book boxes, when Zilla goes into the wilds to scavenge up more strange delights for the second run of boxes, she will celebrate by PUNCHING THE SUN.
Help show the daystar who’s boss. Buy your copy here.
A Sad Bastard Movie
The Sad Bastard Cookbook coming soon to the big screen!
This summer…A Film For Sad Bastards! We are excited to announce the upcoming cinematic adaptation of The Sad Bastard Cookbook, featuring culinary genius and TV personality, Gordon Ramsey!
In this heartfelt and inspiring film, Ramsey makes idiot sandwiches of the mopey and brings hope to the dejected. With his signature fiery passion and masterful skills in the kitchen, Ramsey explores the power of food to heal the soul and lift the spirits.
Based on the acclaimed cookbook, this movie is a feast for the senses and a moving tribute to the resilience of the human spirit.
March 31, 2023
Making a dog’s dinner of it paired with Wolf’s Hunger
Fiction To Sink Your Teeth Into, a feature from author and professional chef Rohan O’Duill!
What better way to impress the werewolf love interest in your life than with a dog’s dinner?
Not a lot of people know that tinned dog food is a cheap and plentiful source of protein and prepared in the right way makes a delicious dinner for everyone.
Ingredients
• 2 large potatoes
• 1 tin of premium dog food
• Dog treats to garnish
Method
Boil the potatoes and mash. Open the tin of dog food and place the contents into a baking dish. Top with the mashed potato and bake in the oven for 30 minutes at 180C. Garnish with some dog treats and serve with a classic tapwater. Enjoy a romantic night in with your werewolf lover.
March 29, 2023
Book Report Corner
by Rachel R.
Here is a review of Query by Zilla Novikov. This review, like the book, has words in it. It’s not merely a keyboard smash or ASCII characters in provocative arrangements. It takes substantial effort on my part to put words to my feelings about this weird little book, and I hope you will appreciate that.
Look, Gentle Reader. I am trying here. I really am. I credit myself as a half-decent writer and reviewer. One of the things that I aim to do when I review books is write not just about what the book does for me, a specific being with subjective feelings and tastes and preferences and strongly held opinions about semicolons and found family tropes, but to attempt to identify the kind of reader a book is for, what the book is aiming to do, whether it succeeds in these goals for that reader.
The thing is that this is a book in which I, an aspiring genre fiction writer, a once-baby, now burned-out elder activist, and a lover of strange, sparkling, difficult-to-define stories, am in fact the direct target audience. So of course I love it. It feels written for me. (And given the subplot in which some familiar characters appear, perhaps in part it was.) The question is whether you, Gentle Reader, will also love it.
I think that you very much will.
Query is an epistolary novel that tells the story of a city planner coming to the realization that she can’t solve the climate crisis from inside the system through her increasingly unhinged query letters to various literary agents. If you’ve ever tried to publish anything, the impersonal form rejections and the unending grind of trying to get someone, anyone, to take a chance on you, will be familiar. If you’ve ever tried to make a genuine difference in your job, if you’ve ever felt small and hopeless in the face of late-stage capitalism, that aspect of the novel will feel familiar too. This book is a scathing satire with genuine passion and heart at its core. Come for the wit and the blackout poetry, stay for the actual inspiration to fight the good fight.
All the book-purchasing links are available at the tRaum website. There’s going to be a limited run of special edition palm-sized print books in a swag-filled book box, and then print books and e-books will be available forever.
March 28, 2023
Behind the Screens: Tuesday Author Interview
Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.
Sabitha : Joseph Picard is joining us today, to talk all things science fiction. Joseph, what book are you going to tell us about?
Joseph: Rubberman’s Exodus is the third and final novel of my Rubberman series. Following Tara, the head Engineer, and her love and partner Sasha, the multi-generational bomb shelter is put at risk when fuel for the generator runs out unexpectedly. 2000+ survivors have been hiding from the after effects of war for over a century.
In that time, they’ve regressed into sub-cultures born from necessity, but have stagnated into ignorance and dogma.
In Rubberman’s Exodus, the blackout leads to events that force them out to the surface, and re-examine their way of life. From the Engineers who run the power generator, to the isolated workforce Subjects, to Citizenry, which was created to contain the worst trouble makers.
Everyone in the facility has had a taste of conflict over the years, but the Citizenry section has suffered the bloodiest of internal little wars, and most abusive little tyrants. (The previous book, Rubberman’s Citizens is all about them getting themselves sorted out… mostly.)
As the events of Rubberman’s Exodus unfold, across the facility, (not just Citizenry,) everyone will be facing threats they have no experience with. Threats from outside, where the big war happened, and the Enemy is known to patrol above.
I’m very pleased to have wrapped up the Rubberman series in a way I’m happy with, since the advancement of my multiple sclerosis (on top of my pre-existing paraplegia, whee!) makes writing very difficult these days.
Sabitha : What inspired you to write this book?
Joseph: The whole series was sparked from the notion of being trapped in a routine and job that feels meaningless, in near isolation. The characters took over, and the facility grew a life of its own, which demanded resolution. The Rubberman name comes from the Managers of the workforce, who wear rubber hazard suits, for reasons forgotten and misunderstood.
Sabitha : That is sadly very relatable. We have a lot of writers in our community. What’s your writing process?
Joseph: 1: Cool sounding idea/concept
2: Think of a way to make it plausible
3: Throw in likeable characters who have to deal with it. And not-so-likable characters to make things difficult.
I don’t do ‘proper’ outlines, but will make a point-form list of the big plot points I want to hit. I write through point 1, with the other points being suggestions. They’re all subject to total change if ‘uncovered’ events and actions of the characters take control.
As well, I’ve been sometimes labelled as ‘hard sci fi’, because I don’t use transporters or warp drives, etc., but I like my fictional science to be in the realm of very possible. And maybe soon.
Sabitha : What book do you tell all your friends to read?
Joseph: I’m frequently barking about Michelle Patricia Brown, who gives us characters with depth, and words with detail. She has a plot/character balance that’s similar to my own.
I’m currently in the middle of her After the Garden, set in a ruined future filled with shattered memories, uncanny ‘gifts’, and jerks who are basically a witch-hunting cult.
Sabitha : Thanks for sharing your story and your process. We’re looking forward to reading! Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?
Joseph: The fastest link to type in is www.ozero.ca. My books in various formats are at my Amazon page.
March 25, 2023
Book Report Corner
by Dale S.
Zilla Novikov’s wickedly funny epistolary novella Query (2023, Night Beats / tRaum Books) is told entirely in the form of query letter after query letter entreating literary agent after literary agent to consider a manuscript. And that’s it — that’s the book. How could this possibly be entertaining to read, you ask? Well, the author of these letters is slowly losing her shit.
Read the whole review by Dale Stromberg (author of Melancholic Parables) here.
March 24, 2023
Wrong Genre Covers
March 23, 2023
Cooking with The Sad Bastard Cookbook
Tucker Lieberman, author of the mind-bending Most Famous Short Film of All Time, cooks Lentils In A Pot from The Sad Bastard Cookbook. Watch the magic happen on his Youtube!
Get your free e-book PDF of The Sad Bastard Cookbook here.
March 21, 2023
Behind the Screens: Tuesday Author Interview
Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.
Sabitha : Tim Lieder is an expert in the weird and scary, as well as a good friend and great author. Today he’s here to talk about his collection of his Christmas themed horror stories, Sugarplum Zombie Motherfuckers . Tim, can you tell us a bit about this book?
Tim: There are three short stories in this book. The Xmas Video was a story about zombie porn that was directly inspired by Michael Hemmingson’s “Hardboiled Stiff” which I had published in Badass Horror. “Santa Claus Dies” was the kind of story I used to love when I first edited anthologies, the kind of hard-drinking loser stories that filled up Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre.
Sabitha : What made you decide to self publish Sugarplum Zombie Motherfuckers ?
Tim: The reason why I chose to self-publish was because of “The Man in the Red Suit”. This story was originally inspired by E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”, particularly the beginning when the narrator talks about his father telling him horrifying stories about a Sandman who steals children’s eyes. I had written one story in this vein and it amused me to write another one, only to make it about Santa Claus, whose mouth stunk of spoiled milk and sucked the life out of reindeer to make them fly. The second inspiration for “The Man in the Red Suit” was the Serbian genocide and the banality of evil. For some reason, I was having trouble selling it to the better horror magazines.
Sabitha : We have a lot of writers in our community. What’s your writing process?
Tim: I revise, give up, dig up an old story, try to revise that one. Sometimes I rip pages out of a public domain book of classic literature and steal phrases. If I’m getting confused about a story, I go back and revise it again to remember who is doing what. If I really hate an old story, I replace every “t” with a “g” and then run an autocorrect. Then I see what can come out of that. Basically, I am never going to give a word count because a productive day might involve getting rid of 1200 words as much as it would involve typing 320 words.
Sabitha : Do you have a “fan-cast” – do you have actors you’d cast as your main characters?
Tim: My favorite story in this collection is about a girl who grows up hearing horror stories about Santa Claus and when she’s an adult, joins a Serbian militia and helps to commit genocide. I’m not sure anyone would want to adapt it.
Sabitha : What book do you tell all your friends to read?
Tim: There are a lot of books that I tell my friends to read, but I am China by Xiaolu Guo is a beautiful work about expatriates, world politics and the ways that privilege informs political stances. I also love everything I read by Junji Ito. He’s either the scariest or the funniest manga artist working today, depending on your mood.
Sabitha : Does the location the story takes place mean something to you or to the work?
Tim: “The Xmas Video” takes place in an apartment in the 1980s and the college is the University of Minnesota. “The Man in the Red Suit” takes place in 1990s Bosnia where militias were murdering Muslims while the rest of the world ignored the genocide. I’m obsessed with the ways that humanity can justify and ignore its atrocities. Whether Florida is trying to censor all African-American studies or Poland criminalizing suggestions that it was in any way complicit in the Holocaust, we love to forget just how evil we are. In the case of the Serbian (and Rwandan) genocides, America didn’t even have to forget. Americans were too busy paying attention to Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan to bother about mass graves. Even today, the main takeaway from Bosnia is that it’s just another reason to hate Tony Blair for his interventionist policies.
Sabitha: These stories sound like they draw on some of the richest traditions of horror, where the greatest threat isn’t the monster outside the walls, it’s the monster within our hearts. Where can the Night Beats community find you and your book?
Tim: You can find me on Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and Facebook. If you want to read Sugarplum Zombie Motherfuckers, you can find the e-book here and audiobook here, or look wherever books are sold online.
