Zilla Novikov's Blog, page 4

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.

Zilla: Emotions run high at music shows, and anything can happen—which makes a touring band the perfect setting for David Kummer’s horror novel The Band . David, it’s great to have you back! Can you tell us about your latest book?

David: While my last two bestselling novels were part of a series, my newest book, The Band, is a new and exciting novel about a cover band touring in Appalachia. The novel is from one character’s point of view, Aidan, who follows the band as their sound guy. He’s in love with Kate, the lead singer, and when they all stay in Oakville for a week, they run into sinister and mysterious danger. To make matters worse, they brought their own with them.

Zilla : What inspired you to write this book?

David: I got the initial inspiration for this book after my wife and I took a trip to West Virginia. We explored the New River Gorge and one of the small towns nearby. This adventure and these places inspired me to write this story with a touring cover band and all the secret, dangerous history they carry with them.

Zilla : Aidan, Kate, and Johnny each sound like fascinating characters. If you could meet them, what would you say to them?

David: I would love to meet the characters, because they’re one of the best cover bands anyone has ever seen. I love concerts, and it would be a lot of fun. I’d probably just ask them about the tour. And how they’re still alive!

Zilla : And what would they ask you?

David: Probably, “Why did you try to kill us off?”

Zilla : Hah! So would you say that your books are character-driven stories, then?

David: My books are driven by both plot and characters. While tons of crazy stuff happens in The Band with a thrilling and unpredictable plot, the characters are the best part, and they’ll likely stick with you. I always wanted to focus on my writing style for this book and try to mimic some of my favorite authors who write such beautiful prose, especially Denis Johnson and other minimalist authors like him.

Zilla : What’s your next writing project?

David: My next writing project is to finish The House on the Hill trilogy! The first two novels have been bestsellers, and I’m super excited to finish working on The Empty Room, coming this October.

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

David: I’ve got a blog where I review lots of horror movies (and other types), as well as active social media pages on Facebook and Twitter. You can find me at davidkummer.com or check out my books on Amazon or Goodreads.

Wrong Genre 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? Email us at nightbeatseu@gmail.com, and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she’ll make it in a future issue. Or @ us on basically any of the socials.

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.

Zilla: Science fiction exists to show us an alternative future—and sometimes, an alternative past. That’s what we get in Peter Fatouros’ novel, Nine to One: A New Generation . Peter, can you introduce us to your book?

Peter: Nine to One: A New Generation is a story that takes place in an alternate universe where starting in 1965, the birth ratios changed so that instead of boys & girls being born in essentially equal numbers, from that point on, nine girls were born to every boy. The book follows several characters as they navigate their lives in a world that’s struggling to adjust not only to the changes of the 60s, 70s & 80s, but also the fact that the new generation is 90% female.

Zilla : What inspired you to write this book?

Peter: It started before the pandemic when I was riding the bus home from work. One day, I noticed that even though the bus was packed like a sardine can, there were only two or three guys on the bus. I ignored it at first, just a funny thing to notice. But then it kept happening, every night, five days a week. No matter what time I took the bus, it was the same thing, a bus load of women with a handful of men. I started wondering what was going on. That led to me imagining if the whole world were like this & what that would be like. That then led to me wondering how such a world might have come about. Before I knew it, the ideas for a book were coming to me.

Zilla : What a neat beginning! From there, did you do a lot of research?

Peter: A good bit. I spent a good deal of time looking up historical figures, election results, and government agencies that don’t exist anymore. Towards the end of the book & into the sequel that I’m writing, historical accuracy isn’t as important as things have changed wildly. However, at the beginning, a number of things happening in history would still be happening in the book, even with a change as wild as this book’s premise. So I wanted the beginning of the book at least to be as historically accurate as I could get it.

Zilla : Is your work more plot driven or character driven?

Peter: Character driven. There are a few subplots here and there, but it’s mostly a story about these characters and the world that they are living in. A look into how they’re changing themselves, trying to change society, or just growing up in a situation unlike anything that the world has seen before.

Zilla : What’s your next writing project?

Peter: The sequel to this book, which will pick up where it left off in 1985 and continue the story. I’m also working on a science fiction podcast called What Could Have Been.

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

Peter: I can be found on Bluesky, Instagram, Threads, and Tik Tok. My Book can be found as an Amazon eBook, Amazon Paperback, or read about it on Goodreads.

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.

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 …

Zilla : I was fascinated by the mode of travel between dimensions, where characters inhabit different bodies. I’ve often thought about the distinction between my “self” that is my identity and the chemical and physical “self” that is my meat prison. I come at it from the perspective of mental illness, but I’ve often had these conversations with disabled and trans friends. As authors of these characters, and as humans in your own right, how do you grapple with this duality?

Cadwell: I think this has been a big question for us, and something we’ve only cracked the surface of. In our stories and within the Formation Saga we’ve explored the cognitive dissonance of entering bodies that don’t quite match the traveler’s sense of self. Often the differences are more superficial: muscle mass, hair and eye color, height. But these differences can also be fundamental: ethnicity, gender, orientation, formative memory, even personality. We’ve done a lot with memory and personality, but there’s still so much we can explore with other aspects of identity. That sort of exploration can be tricky, so we’ve been very careful so far. But as the project progresses, we’ll be looking for more opportunities to push our boundaries.

Darusha: If I had to choose my single favourite part of the Many Worlds narrative, this is it. I’m obsessed with questions of individuality, authenticity, selfhood and how those intersect with embodiment and time. I feel like there is no one answer, not in our reality or in the reality of the Many Worlds multiverse, but it is in asking the questions and interrogating our experiences we can come close to glimpsing a grimy reflection of the truth.

Craig: I find the implications of traveling meaning you’re exposed to new environmental and chemical stimuli, from the world you enter as well as the new tailor-made body for you to inhabit, to be exciting and worth exploring. Part of my personal experience with this is also related to my son’s journey with ADHD, and how different medications vastly altered his demeanor until we honed in on one that worked for him. I imagine similar things can and will happen to people who get new bodies, whether it be subtle or overt and obvious.

Zilla : Your world building is stunning, with multiple distinct societies that cross dimensions, and each flavoured subtly differently depending on the universe where we encounter them. But one commonality is that most (maybe all) of your characters are compelled by a desire to belong to one of them—to be part of a society that’s bigger than themselves. Are all people susceptible to this? Would it be better if these characters could escape it?

Ben: I think this is partly a product of simply being the first book in a series, so we’re keeping the difficulty (relatively) low. As such, things like unaffiliated travelers or “city-state localities” just haven’t shown up yet–but they’re certainly out there! At the same time, you’re pointing to a topic that we explore with greater depth in subsequent books; these characters exist within the context and the schema of the “society,” and they don’t necessarily see all that many viable alternatives to it. In much the same way that the nation-state feels like a rather inescapable paradigm to many of us in our own earth-type locality, the society is likewise (seemingly) pervasive as the default unit to organize people in the multiverse.

That’s not to say it’s a rational way to organize people, any more than the nation-state necessarily is, but it’s hard for some of our characters to conceive other ways of being. Whether we’re all susceptible to that pressure I couldn’t say. As one of your previous questions suggests, it’s worth asking how much of our identities are a product of the chemical cocktail percolating in whichever meat-mech we’re piloting at a given moment, and whether such considerations are even meaningful. But I do hope some of our characters can find a place they’re happy–whether it’s within a society or without.

Craig: Some of our travelers’ societal memberships come about not so much from desire as it is that these societies are monolithic presences within the localities people travel to, so you have to interact with them frequently if you travel. Of course there are also plenty of true believers.

Josh: We do have a character in the Formation Saga who does not initially belong to any given society, but you’ll have to wait to read about them.

Zilla : I look forward to it! Looking at reviews of this book, one common element is readers commenting on how, despite 5 authors contributing, the story read as a seamless whole. I completely agree. What process did you use that resulted in a novel with such coherent plot, characters, and world building?

Cadwell: I’m curious what others of us might list here, but I think the big thing we did to create a consistent voice was simply spending a lot of time talking with each other. We planned the series together, outlined together, edited together, and (especially in the beginning) wrote sections of the novel together on a singular Google document. That process was as chaotic as it sounds. But because we were motivated by the same/similar goal, we played off each other really well. When we didn’t align, we debated, talked it out. Sometimes that process was challenging, but almost always it resulted in a more synchronized view of what the story and characters needed.

Ben: What Cadwell said. We’re conditioned to think of writers as lone, towering geniuses, but there’s no reason the process of writing can’t be as collaborative as making music. It’s just a very, very, very slow form of improvisation.

Craig: Slow improv is a great way to put it! I’d say our process also evolved from lessons learned, and we weren’t afraid to change things when things didn’t work as well as we hoped.

I also feel like having an odd number was a real boon for us. Debating some things can take a long time, and if we’re under time pressures we can simply take a vote on it. Ultimately, though, we try to satisfy everyone’s concerns as much as possible, even if someone gets out-voted.

Josh: The band analogy is the most accurate for sure. We also evolved the process over the years to the point where we give each other grace re: writing tendencies which aren’t singularly our own. One of us may tend to write with more or less commas, for example. Or one of us uses character interiority while another tends to drill down into setting detail. We let the fullness of our writing selves bloom—creating a new self, I suppose.

Darusha: Oh, commas! How many hours have we lost to commas? The other thing no one has mentioned yet is that we all touch every word. It’s a demanding process but by the end of it there’s no part of the book that hasn’t been informed by each of us, creating what is ultimately a unique voice: Darkly Lem.

Zilla : Where can people find the book? And where can they find y’all on the internet?

Darkly Lem: Links to most stores are here and you can find Darkly on our website here. We post very sporadically on BlueSky.

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.

Zilla: Growing up is complicated—particularly when you’re a gay kid living in the Bible Belt. R.C. Dickens has given us a fantastic queer coming-of-age novel, , and we’re lucky enough to have them here to answer our questions about it. R.C., can you tell us the blurb for your book?

R.C.: Kayden Moses has worked for 15 years to be a good pastor’s son. He’s volunteered at every Vacation Bible School, never missed a youth group meeting, and tries to follow the example of his spiritually gifted twin sister, Delilah. However, all his diligent efforts are disrupted when he meets the biggest stumbling block of his life:

Alex. The new boy in youth group. Bubbly. Opinionated. Dizzyingly nice to look at.

Suddenly, Kayden finds himself caught in a spiral of confusion and asking questions he’s never asked before.

Who is Kayden Moses? Because he’s certainly not a good pastor’s son anymore.

Zilla : What inspired you to write this book?

R.C.: This book initially started as a short story imagining a young man protesting a pride parade seeing his ex-lover from across the fence. That conflict of faith and sexuality became the core of Crown of Blooms and it sort of spiralled from there.

Zilla : It sounds like a very personal story. If you could meet your characters, what would you say to them?

R.C.: Sorry not sorry, lol. But to be serious, I would probably tell Kayden that there is an entire world outside of the Bible Belt, full of people who will love you as you are. The world is not nearly as hopeless for a queer kid as it feels, as you’ve been told over and over again for your entire life. It’s cliche to say, “It gets better”. I think it’s more honest to say, “You can make it better.” You can break free of those chains, form your own beliefs, find your own tribe. Your Pink Pony Club is out there, somewhere, waiting for you.

Zilla : That’s really beautiful—thank you for saying that. Is there a fictional character who has been with you through your life?

R.C.: Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender (ATLA) was my first love. I wrote three novel length ATLA fanfictions between the ages of 12-16 about Zuko and my self insert Mary Sue OC. No one understands Zuko like I do. I genuinely owe my whole writing career to this character as I wouldn’t have discovered my love of writing if not for my obsession. He’s just such a compelling, well rounded character with endless depth. I could talk about the intricacies of his character arc for days.

Zilla : What’s your next writing project?

R.C.:  I’m currently looking for beta readers for the sequel, Crown of Thorns, which is very exciting. I’m also publishing a serial romance on the Radish app called Prince and the Gladiator if you’re interested in a high-heat trope driven romp.

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

R.C.: You can find me on TikTok @babyraythesadclown or on Instagram @rcdickens_author. If you want to go purchase your copy of Crown of Blooms, sign up to be a beta reader or read my other work, check out my link tree: https://linktr.ee/RCDickens

Book Report Corner

by Dale Stromberg

Start with ravenous corporations mining minerals on asteroids out past Neptune’s orbit, give those corporations private armies of mech-suited Marines to battle over control of these resources, and for good measure turn each brutal battle into the 24th century’s equivalent of a pay-per-view fight, and what have you got? It’s called a Cold Rush, and your chances of surviving one ain’t good.

This is why Mint, formerly a star of the system, is so reluctant to get back into the Cold Rush game in Rohan O’Duill’s novella Cold Blooded (2025, Lower Decks Press), the follow-up to the first book in the Cold Rush series, Cold Rising. (Don’t worry, the novellas share a world but stand alone, so you can read them in any order.) This tightly focussed, pugnacious adventure tale has a clear love for the high-tech gear and enterprising pluck of Golden Age sci-fi (bone-crunching mech suit beat-em-ups!) but is also animated by a clear working-class consciousness, a modern awareness of identity and social justice, and an unflinching recognition of the insatiable exploitativeness of capitalism.

We get corporate intrigue in a libertarian hellscape with strong world-building, all cycloning round the characters of Mint and Bjorn. Mint is a randy, tough, foulmouthed fighter with neither the time nor the crayons to explain shit to you, but her uncomfortable complicity with the system forms a dichotomy with Bjorn’s ethically driven resistance to that system, a resistance both courageous and quixotic.

When meaningful resistance seems almost suicidal, what in the world can possible drive us to resist, apart from love? Mint might just find out what a love that powerful can feel like, but there is no guarantee of anything turning out as you’d hope in O’Duill’s hard-bitten world. You’ve been warned.

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.

Version 1.0.0

Zilla: We have Peter Darbyshire here with a wild, magnetic fantasy novel, The Mona Lisa Sacrifice. Peter, can you tell us a bit about the book—and the rest of the trilogy?

Peter: The Mona Lisa Sacrifice kicks off the Cross series of supernatural thrillers, where the immortal rogue Cross moves through a hidden world of faerie, gorgons, ghosts and more to stop a war among fallen angels. Cross is no hero but he may be the only one who can stop the end of the world.

Zilla : What inspired you to write this book?

Peter: When I was in university I read an Old English poem called “The Dream of the Rood,” which told the story of Christ’s crucifixion from the cross’s point of view. It was such an interesting angle that it stuck with me. Years later, I was thinking about it again and I had this idea: what if Christ’s body was like that cross? Something that held his spirit but then remained behind when he left our world? And what if another soul somehow came to occupy that body after the Ascension? That’s how I came up with the character of Cross, an immortal, drunk, thieving murderous angel killer who’s the one you really want to handle your supernatural problems.

Zilla : Were you inspired by an image when you wrote this?

Peter: I’ve long found the Mona Lisa painting to be rather eerie — to me it’s like a portrait of someone not quite human in an alien landscape. So when I was looking for the first story for Cross, I knew it had to involve the Mona Lisa but with a magical twist. I made the book The Mona Lisa Sacrifice centre around the weird entity the painting is supposedly based upon in Cross’s world. There are actually a number of paintings that appear in the book, and Cross even manages to get himself trapped inside one of them!

Zilla : Did you do much research for this book?

Peter: I did a lot of research for The Mona Lisa Sacrifice and the other books in the Cross series (The Dead Hamlets and The Apocalypse Ark). They are set in our world and involve key moments in history as well as real people from history — Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, for instance. So I wanted to make sure I got all the details right, so that when people read my version of Shakespeare wielding a magical quill that gives him the power to change reality or ink that grants immortality, they’ll be willing to buy that magical element because everything else is so real.

Zilla : What’s your next writing project?

Peter: I’m about to tackle the edits for the fourth book in my Cross series, which is out later in 2025. After that I’ll be starting the fifth book in the series. Hopefully there’s many more books to come!

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

Peter: You can find me and links to buy my books at peterdarbyshire.com. I can also be found at the usual social haunts with the handle @peterdarbyshire.

Wrong Genre 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? Email us at nightbeatseu@gmail.com, and if Rachel likes your suggestion, she’ll make it in a future issue. Or @ us on basically any of the socials.

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.

Zilla: Whether you’re in the mood for science fiction action or dark fantasy, Nick Snape has you covered! Nick, can you tell us a bit about your serieses?

Nick: Weapons of Choice has 8 books in an action science fiction series with an emotional storyline. Join Finn, Zuri and Corporal Smith (deceased) as they explore new worlds and face hostile alien contact during their desperate search for a pathway home, in this thought-provoking, scifi thriller series. And my humorous but dark science fiction thriller, The Scorching, has this tagline: On a devastated Earth, the Drathken arrive promising to heal the planet. Joshua Nkosi, joker, vlogger and sea-cop and his modded octopus partner find themselves between the Earth’s future and the terrorists looking to break the alien/human accord.

Sabitha : What inspired you to write this book?

Nick: I love the Saturday afternoon 1970s/80s American science fiction series and the old black and white Flash Gordon serials. Amazing memories, and that ‘tune in for the next episode’ approach where the storyline is complete, but the overarching nefarious plans are yet to be resolved.

Sabitha : Do you have a playlist for your book? 

Nick: Beat the Devil’s Tattoo by BRMC, and the Welsh artist Ren whose storytelling is superb–especially Hi Ren.

Zilla: If you could meet your characters, what would you say to them?

Nick: We always have conversations and the internal monologue often adds unexpected plot twists. If I met them, I would ask them to read the ‘mirror’ book I wrote – Bk7 – where clones of my main characters go through emotional and physical hell. And I’d say, “See, it wasn’t so bad.”

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

Nick: Tom Lloyd’s The Stormcaller—dark fantasy ratcheted up to eleven—leaves you raw.

Zilla: Have you ever killed off a character your readers loved?

Nick: I killed off the two clones of the main ‘love and bullets’ interest. They fell out of love—an emotional disconnect due to the horrors of war, ending with the funeral attended by their originators—powerful stuff.

Zilla: Do you have any suggestions to help people in our community become better writers?  

Nick: First, write, have it read, and listen to those readers, whoever they are. Secondly, write the first line of the next chapter when you finish the previous one—keep the mental momentum going for just one more line.

Zilla: What’s your next writing project?

Nick: A Dragon of the Veil, where artifice dragons arise in a world where magic has been suppressed. First of three, with a soul-eating enemy to follow.

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

Nick: On all socials and my website is www.nicksnape.com. My books are on Amazon, the newer ones will be on all retailers.

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.

Zilla: When things feel hopeless, fiction can be the place to remind us that the community has the power to resist. That’s why I have Richie Billing here, to tell us about his fantasy novella, Together We Rise. Richie, can you start by sharing your blurb?

Richie: In the crumbling city of Pietalos, where corruption and poverty reign, the fires of revolution burn hotter each day. An oppressive government has bled its people dry for the benefit of the elite, but the citizens have had enough.

Eight lives—each scarred by loss, betrayal, and violence—intertwine as they fight for their own futures and that of the city.

Zilla : What inspired you to write this book?

Richie: Together We Rise is a story of a people’s revolution against a corrupt government—very timely given today’s political scene. I’ve been fed up with the state of politics for a long time. I’ve seen the worrying shift to the darker reaches of the right and felt quite helpless about things. Writing this story was my way of fighting that despair, and it provided a welcome escape too. Being something I’m passionate about, I loved every moment of writing and editing it and I can’t wait to share it with the world.

It’s a nice, short story (about 150 pages) with a unique structure. It’s split into eight parts, with each part featuring a different character. Working like a sort of literary relay race, each character takes the story up to a point and then hands it onto the next character.

The idea behind this was to explore the issue of rampant, unchecked capitalism from the points of view of the many different people it affects. My favourite TV show is The Wire, and part of the reason for why is its ability to look at a single issue critically from different perspectives (in that case, the war on drugs).

In Together We Rise, you can find the perspective of a healer, a worker, a street kid, a drug dealer, a guard (the equivalent of the police). It’s all set in a fantasy world, which gives it a unique spin, and something else I’ve done is incorporate an original soundtrack. Each character has their own song which mirrors their emotional journey in the chapter. You can scan a QR code at the start of each chapter to listen. Hopefully, it adds another layer of immersion to the experience.

Zilla : With such a wide-ranging cast, who’s your favourite character? If you can pick!

Richie: The roots of this story lie in a character called Tillia. I created her many years ago when I first started writing. She was a key part of a fantasy novel, set in the same world, and her part of the story was actually my favourite. I’d taken another big chunk of that novel and used it in another story I’m working on, leaving just Tillia’s story. I decided it was too good to waste.

You don’t see all of this in Together We Rise, but learn of it. Tillia is the daughter of a blacksmith (and also a master swordsman), but becomes ensnared by a deceptive evil man, named Vaso, whom she ends up wedding. Over time, he beats and abuses her, destroys her will, and the evil bastard also kills her father and destroys her childhood home. She’s trapped, powerless, helpless, until one night she happens upon a city guard assaulting a woman. She intervenes and ends up killing the guard, and she feels power like she hasn’t felt in a long time. It sets her on a path of vigilantism, taking out the bad guys on the streets and cultivating a murderous alter ego named Shadow. After a while of doing this, she realises it isn’t enough. She has to do more to fight the problems corrupting the city. And that’s when she decides to start planning a revolution. Together We Rise is the story of Revolution Day.

Zilla : I am so here for characters standing up to abusers and abusive systems. Would you say this story is more character-driven, then? Or plot driven? 

Richie: This particular story is very much character-driven. As mentioned, there are eight unique characters in this story, and while the plot is very much about a revolution against a corrupt regime, the thrust of the tale is about the internal revolution that each character goes through. That’s one of the key points of this story, that even when the world is rubbish and doesn’t feel like it won’t get any better, we all have the power to change things, but to see the change we want in the world, we maybe have to change some aspect about who we are first.  

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

Richie: You can learn all about Together We Rise on Goodreads, or get it at this link.

Here are some other helpful links:

YouTube – @richiebilling

Website: www.richiebilling.com

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/richiebilling/   

Facebook – @richiebillingwriter

Instagram – @richiebilling

X – @Magpie_Richie

Tiktok – @richiebillingwriter