Creator Spotlight: @XytaMidnyte

Good morning deviants, and welcome again to Creator Spotlight-our community interview series. I finally decided to sit down with the amazingly talented Xyta Midnyte, someone I have known and worked with for quite a while now. Enjoy!

I feel like introductory questions with these things are always so cheesy. It’s always some variation of “hi, how are you”-so we’re going with something radically different. Xyta, lets say you are in peak physical condition. You encounter a vampire, a werewolf and (insert folkloric creature and/or cryptid here). Who are you fighting first? Who, if any, would you lose to and why? Who would be the last person standing? There’s no rules, so feel free to fight dirty. 

LOL! Okay, so that’s a fabulous way to kick us off. 

Hmm, okay… this all hinges on whether or not I hoped to win.  Y’see, the werewolf would no doubt kick my ass, unless it was heat season or something else like that (though… I’d probably still get my ass kicked in an entirely different way, right????). 

So perhaps if I started with the vampire… 

Yeah, so here’s my reasoning. If by some crazy fluke I managed to defeat (not kill mind you, just defeat) the vampire and survive, my display of wiley survival skills might inspire the werewolf to leave me be. If I lose and get eaten… well I suppose the other creatures are much less of a problem, right? If I lose and get turned… at least I have vampire powers on my side to help me tackle the rest.

Yup.

That. That seems reasonable.

Besides… I really dig vampires, so I wouldn’t mind losing to one. :p

Okay, with all the ultra-violence out of the way…Xyta, I’ve forgotten how we met at this point. But I do remember what drew me to you. You consistently create some of the most heart warming and endearing works I’ve heard through our respective peers. While you’re not limited to SFW material, it seems to compose a large swath of your catalogue (unless I’m mistaken). What do you enjoy about creating emotionally stimulating and fulfilling works?

D’awwww, thanks honey!

Okay, so the reality is; the NSFW works are fun and will probably be something I always crash land on in times of trouble/creative block. HOWEVER, I consider myself a story-teller first and foremost and sometimes NSFW work doesn’t lend itself as freely to that. 

So I love, love, LOVE telling stories. I love addressing a problem and solving it via character, circumstance or weird coincidence. I love putting people in ‘a situation’ and seeing what comes out the other end. These loves are what end up turning into series (like Beyond The Battlemat & Unearthed). They were a chance to flex and take my time over telling a story about real people (despite the latter of the two featuring elves and orcs!).

But outside that kinda ‘writerly’ answer, most of my SFW work seems to touch on things that people need and are incredibly meta. I record a short 3-5 minute audio every single week and have done for nearly two years now; and the exact point of those is to give listeners a boost of cheer/confidence/support/love/reassurance at the start of their working week.

Being able to touch a listener in a real, (hopefully) helpful way means a lot to me and it’s only over this year that I’ve realised how I’ve been able to do that. There are other creators who have done similar things for me with various forms of art so paying it forward is the least I can do, y’know? The warm fuzzy feeling it leaves behind is pretty rad, too.

So I have a craft related question: The British accent is so incredibly hard to do, especially with so many regional variations. As a yank, do you perhaps have some advice for Americans looking to try their hand at sounding like they’re from the UK? The closest I got was cockney-annnnnd most of that was swearing, hahah. 

Bwa h ah ha ha hahhaha!

Okay, so I feel like I should have lots more advice about that, but I’ll freely admit that the intricacies of why some words sound the way they do in various accents is beyond me.

We can be comparatively more precise than a native English speaker from the States. We ensure our ‘Rs’ are there rather than dropping them into ‘D’ sounds and our vowel sounds in general seem to be shorter; we’re lazy with them. Does that even make sense?! I mean, it took me ages to realise Idris Elba is British since I discovered him through The Wire so perhaps he’s someone to study.

Seriously though; I think the first step is to decide where in Britain you want to touch on; Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Ireland. That will at least tell you who to look at for guidance. After all, a North London accent won’t help you if a script wants someone from Abergavenny (Wales),Glasgow (Scotland) or even East London (yes, I’m afraid they’re very [VERY] different).

Then, and this might sound odd, but bare with me: watch streamers. If you can narrow down roughly where somebody is from and you watch them naturally speaking in their streams, it’s a good place to pick up local tics, cadance and examples of slang. From there it’s a simple (kinda) job to mimic what you hear until it feels natural to your ear.

Speaking of which-language is inherently a beautifully transformative medium. Slang and regional phrases especially play into that. There’s been a few times I’ve been requested to play a southerner, only to stumble delivering lines due to the vernacular being totally off kilter for NC. Have you ever experienced similar problems?

Yes. Heckin’ yes.

I’m lucky enough that (so far) nobody has asked me to go too far beyond my natural speech. And nobody has asked to try an accent though pronunciations often jarr because… yeah… I’m a Brit.

Example, one job I did back in Spring made a specific point about my pronunciation of the word ‘the.’

Seems simple right, but no; they wanted ‘thee’ and my brain repeatedly spat out ‘thuh’ until I was smacking my forehead against my popshield. 

When following a script it’s not too difficult because the words are there, nice and clear for me to simply read, but during improv (which is the majority of my work now) I can end up in a big ole mess. Especially if I don’t catch problems in my own weird mix of North London, Midlands, South Wales, Black Country,  and occasionally Jamaican vernacular until after recording.

For instance, balancing a simple word like cob, with roll, with bap, with bun, is fun. They’re all the same thing, but a cob is northern, a roll is southern, a bap is the Midlands and a bun is freakin heresy. Oh, and if that’s not clear at all (totally unapologetic Brit that I am) then I’m talking about a bread roll (damnit, I grew up in London!) or a burger bun.

Wow. That made my head hurt.

You upload on several different platforms. What’s your experience with audience reception differing between them? Do you notice people drawn to specific styles of works more on one platform than another?

Actually, yes. I should pay far more attention to my metrics than I do (oops) but I find that Literotica audiences seem to go far more for the harder/rougher audiowork with an especial fondness for non-con. Which is a pity as I really don’t record non-con any more.  I’m hoping as I upload more recent works there, the audience will respond positively to the overall tonal shift of my work.

Reddit audiences (on the larger subs, before I stepped away from those) seem to enjoy the less story focused, more real sounds. Ramblefaps I think they’re called? Though I can count how many of those I’ve done on two fingers.

YouTube audiences, perhaps simply because of what I choose to post there, really value the shorter, comfort/reassurance audios which are by far and away my SFW uploads where I choose to speak directly to a listener.

What I do find most interesting is that my most vocal listeners (insofar as comments and various interactions) appear to be female identifying and that the uploads that receive the most engagement are those with longer plots or extended scenes.

I’ll readily admit that the storyteller in me is thrilled by that.

What inspires or drives your work the most? Personally speaking, seeing the way people gloam onto my characters keeps me going, but there’s also the challenge of making things sound great. Is there perhaps a different reason for you?

It varies if I’m wholly honest.

Some days it’s because I’m desperate to tell a story or explore a character/idea. There are times when a concept hits me so damn hard that I have trouble resting until I at least speak the bones of the idea out loud into my phone’s voice recorder.

Other times it’s a specific life event. I look at something that has recently happened to me and think; ‘if this is me, at this moment, I know that someone else out there somewhere needs kind words for the same reason.’ In those moments I am driven hard to be the voice that someone needs.

Prime example being the amount of family loss I’ve seen this year. I needed someone to say those words to me and since they weren’t always forthcoming, I said them to myself. And then I decided to share them because I knew I couldn’t be the only one in need of hearing them.

I don’t have characters quite like you do, Jack, but there are personalities/roles that pop up repeatedly, and seeing what I can do within the boundaries of ‘The Dominant’ or ‘The Monster or ‘The Leader’ or ‘The Fighter’ is also fun.

…then again it could just be that I’m an absolute slut for pretending and make-believe. Given that my hobbies include TTRPGs and LARP that’s not an unfair thought, haha!

One last question-over the pandemic, ASMR and more soft, loving and romantic style audios have exploded in popularity. I think many people have found tremendous comfort in the genre, especially as many of us are separated by loved ones. It’s firmly rooted in our craft in the collective discourse of the media. How do you see things going from here?

More. Much more.

I mean, true ASMR (or at least what I call true ASMR—more than happy to talk about that another time if you wish!) is huge, not least for the relaxing and intimate nature of it all, but it’s a simple way to feel something physical if one is prone to the actual response. In a world where it’s currently difficult to feel something physical at the hands of someone else, the ability to do so remotely is incredibly powerful.

And of course, we can’t forget that the softer, romantic boy/girlfriend experiences many ASMRtists offer are chasing the sexy, rauncier ones. It’s no secret that sex and war are major drivers of industry and technology, so why should that not be the case here? And on the tail of those sexy bits will come the more ‘socially acceptable’ softer, intimacy-based audio.

I feel almost that we’re seeing the resurgence of books on tape. Do you remember those? Don’t mind me while I show my age here, but I remember going to the library as a young’un, and picking up stacks of cassettes through which I could listen to my favourite stories, often read by the author. What we’re seeing isn’t new, just a next step. 

First we offered stories and now we offer experiences (something else I could talk about for ages if you let me). And, if humans are anything, we’re a species that chases new experiences. And imagine how this type of technology can tie in with others (!): a boy/girlfriend experience playing in one’s ear while a VR unit offers a visual. Can you see it? An image customised to consumer specifications, smiling and reaching out to you as their lip motions match those of the audio in your ear.

We already have Vtubers, we’re really not too far away.

Xyta, please feel free to tell people where they can contact you-and thank you for your time!

Thanks for having me, Jack, this has been fun.

To the rest of you fine folk, I hang out on Twitter the most (@XytaMidnyte) and keep my website reasonably up to date at xytamidnyte.com.

If you’re feeling super brave then my Patreon is where you can see every darn thing I produce the second it hits the interwebs (patreon.com/xytamidnyte).

Thanks, pets. MWAH!