Pirates, Squirrels, and a Half-Sidhe Anti-Hero: An Interview with Lilith Saintcrow

Your new book is Trailer Park Fae which is a genius title. What was the inspiration?
You’re going to laugh. My writing partner’s husband had a dream. He sat up in the middle of the night and announced “the elves are dying.” All at once I had the Technicolor vision of this guy, Jeremiah Gallow, who works construction and wants to be anonymous…but he can’t be, because of who he is. He’s half-sidhe, and he loathes himself for it, and he doesn’t want any part of it—but there’s a plague, it’s killing the sidhe, and he gets involved. Everything opened up from that one sentence, that one moment. Sometimes the story bursts in on you like that, a chance phrase or sight triggering an entire complex, fully realized world inside a writer’s head.
After Trailer Park Fae you released Blood Call, and you have two more scheduled: Agent Zero, and Roadside Magic—give us a hint about what’s in store for us.
Blood Call and Agent Zero are both quasi-romances I wrote for my writing partner. There’s this thing where I write things she likes, to make her happy, and I send them to my agent and somehow they sell. It’s a very benign magic.

Blood Call features a contract killer whose ex-girlfriend calls him with a problem, and then, because it’s me, they find out the problem involves a lot of bloodshed and people searching for immortality. Agent Zero actually began as almost-fanfic, and it grew into a marvelous little superspy-virus book that ended up selling to Harlequin. Roadside Magic is the sequel to Trailer Park Fae, and the stakes just keep getting higher.
Speaking of your novels, your fans loved Steelflower, but you canceled the sequels—what’s the story there?
It was a mathematical decision. I could not write more of those books without taking a severe financial hit, both from the publisher being a small-press and from the level of theft (from e-piracy) that was involved. I was honest with readers about it, which caused somewhat of a…discussion. People tried to justify the theft, or tried to shame me into writing the sequels because “it’s not supposed to be about money.” As if creators and their children are supposed to live on air, or something.
I periodically run the numbers. I will say—and this is the first time I’m announcing it—that there have been developments on the Steelflower front. I can’t be more specific just yet, but I have always been working to find a way to bring those books to the readers while also mitigating the loss of paid working time they represent.
How would you say your writing (style, sensibility, approach, anything) has changed over the years?
Oh, God. I cringe when I look back at things I wrote six months ago, let alone a decade! If you’re not looking at things you wrote in the past and flinching a little, you’re not growing as a writer, and that’s most unwise.
The biggest changes have been professional, I think. Way back in those days I was desperate to support myself and two young children, since my soon-to-be-ex-husband didn’t consider supporting us a priority. I couldn’t afford childcare, writing was one thing I could do and bring in some money, since the Internet had opened up this wonderful freedom and experimentation for writers.
My approach to the writing itself hasn’t changed. This is still my job, the thing I was created to do and am lucky enough to earn a living at doing. Frankly, after writing full-time for so long, learning to attend to the business side of it, and being both highly self-driven and an introvert as well, I don’t know what else I’d be fit for.
Anyone who reads your blog will understand when I say these next two words: “SQUIRREL TERROR.” Discuss.
It was a very dark time in my life. Divorce, uncertainty, crippling clinical anxiety, all sorts of stuff. One day, there was this squirrel who refused to die. First he was just this zany animal I saw while running on the treadmill and looking out into my backyard. Things really got started, however, on the rainy afternoon I found him dead and limp out in the backyard and went to bury him, but he revived halfway through.
You can imagine the shock.
After that, it was personal, and I kept an eye on him. I blogged about the antics, which always seemed to end up with me shoeless and screaming obscenities. The squirrel stories became famous among my readers. So when I decided to dip my toes into self-publishing, it was SquirrelTerror that happened first. I even did a Kickstarter for it, and people were generous. They wanted their squirrel stories back, dammit.
We then found out that someone had plagiarized the stories and was passing them off as her own on Daily Kos. It’s amazing that those hilarious little stories, the lifeline I was writing when I honestly couldn’t see how I was going to survive, are probably my most famous pieces of writing.
Trailer Park Fae is available now. Blood Call was released August 4.