Natalie Zina Walschots: I’ve Always Treated Writing as an Act of Discovery
In this interview, author Natalie Zina Walschots discusses the challenges she faced when writing her new speculative fiction novel, Villain.
Natalie Zina Walschots is a writer and game designer whose work includes LARP scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game lore, weirder things classified as “interactive experiences,” and, unfortunately, experimental poetry. Her first novel, Hench, was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. She plays a lot of RPGs, participates in a lot of emotionally harrowing LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies, and reads a lot of speculative fiction. She lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and four cats. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky.
In this interview, Natalie discusses the challenges she faced when writing her new speculative fiction novel, Villain, how reader satisfaction impacted her creative process, and more.
Name: Natalie Zina Walschots
Literary agent: Ron Eckel at CookeMcDermid
Book title: Villain
Publisher: William Morrow
Release date: May 19, 2026
Genre/category: Speculative fiction
Previous titles: Hench
Elevator pitch: Villain is about what happens when a diabolically brilliant henchperson looks back at their already storied career and thinks, I can be so much worse. Once called Anna, now known as the Auditor, should be reveling in her recent success, now that her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp. But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she'll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge.
What prompted you to write this book?
I have always loved superhero stories and been fascinated by villains, so I wanted to write a story from the perspective of the dark side of the cape. But even more that the supervillains themselves, I found myself obsessing over the relatively ordinary people who worked for them. Because ordinary people have to work for them, as every evil lair needs someone to answer phones, fill out spreadsheets, order the catering, and just in general keep the place running. I wanted to hear their stories, to figure out what would lead a person to take a job (and often a very dangerous one) working for someone unquestionably evil. I got tired of waiting for someone else to write this story, and eventually did it myself. The result was my first novel, Hench.
Now Villain is the continuation of that story, as a data analyst slowly embraces her worst qualities and become a villain in her own right. I really wanted to invert the idea of the redemption arc and follow the narrative of someone who was actively rejecting every opportunity to make amends and instead was actively digging themselves deeper in the pursuit of their greater goals and self-actualization.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Wow. Oh man. Hoo boy. Yeesh.
Writing Villain was a nightmare. I started the book very shortly after Hench was published in 2020; by early 2021 I was actively working on it. It was hard going, as I was going through a rough patch personally, struggling with a chronic pain condition that ultimately forced me to quit a day job I loved, but it was going. I struggled through the work and after about a year I had a full draft of the novel. And I absolutely hated it. It was just not the book I wanted it to be, not the story I wanted to tell, and I knew I needed to scrap it and start over. A few scenes survived, and the ending itself was great, bust most of it would have to go.
On the (very good) advice of my partner, I went back to the drawing board in terms of my process and tried a completely different approach. I’ve always treated writing as an act of discovery, and just sort of let whatever was going to happen on the page happen. Later I would try and make a whole manuscript out of it, and eventually it took shape. This time, I tried planning. I had a carefully crafted A, B and C plot. I planned out all of the scenes and character arcs individually; I knew what had to happen and where I needed to end up. After all that work, I started writing, and much quicker than the first time, I had another manuscript.
I hated it even worse than the first one. It felt dead on the page; none of the characters were doing what they wanted to do. I was just dragging them all through the motions I had set out for them. It just felt stilted and wrong. So, after wallowing in a pit of despair for a while, I tried again, the way I had always written, just exploring and figuring out what would happen next.
It was going better, but not great, and as I was closing in on the end the work really slowed down. I was struggling. I could not squeeze good words out to save my life. And finally, I had the awful realization that as good as the ending was—I loved it, my editor loved it, it felt —it wasn’t the right ending for this book. So, I did the terrible thing and threw it out and started over, again, for the fourth time.
This is the book that you see before you. The fourth incarnation of Villain, finally something I do not loathe. I sincerely hope people who enjoyed Hench like it, because holy hell was it a journey and it is a very different book than the one I thought I would write, but I did it in the end.
So, to answer the question, six years, give or take?
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I learned a lot about how deeply patient and endlessly supportive my editor David Pomerico and agent Ron Eckel can be, I can tell you that. They were so deeply kind to me and profoundly helpful. David talked me through some story difficulties I simply could not have navigated on my own, and I really learned how lucky I am to get to work with them both.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Lots of them, most of them profoundly unpleasant. A couple stand out, though. One that really shook me was learning that I was capable of really, deeply caring what other people thought about my work, and that it could impact my creative process. I wrote Hench for myself; that was the book I personally wanted to read and it became the book I wanted to write, so it was its own sort of personal wish-fulfilment before anything else. I didn’t know how that would resonate with other people, and I was completely dizzyingly shocked by how well it did and how much other people liked it.
When I started writing Villain, I found that suddenly there was a new set of expectations in my head. I was genuinely worried the entire time whether fans of Hench would enjoy this, and it genuinely fucked me up for a long time. I wanted to hold and honor the positive emotions readers had for Hench and give them something they would also enjoy, but I also had a damn book to write. It took me a long time and a lot of rough conversations (special shout-out to my friend JP for talking to me for hours one day while I sorted through this, if any Canadian writers need a therapist do I have a recommendation for you), but I processed it enough to do the work.
The other thing I learned is that trying to make my characters do something they do not want to do in a scene is literally impossible. My job is to create the scenario, place them inside it and see what happens. Any more control than that is impossible.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Above all else, I genuinely hope they enjoy it. For all the weird and grotesque and challenging things I write about, I want my readers to take pleasure in the process and feel they spent their time with something worthwhile. I hope that fans of Hench feel like this is a worthy follow-up, and that it gives them the satisfaction they are looking for in continuing the story another step. I hope it gives them a lot to think —like hating capitalism and the horrors of intimate surveillance and institutional violence and how public perception can be manipulated and controlled—but most of all I hope readers like it.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Most writing advice is garbage and you shouldn’t listen to it, and anyone saying they know the one true way to write well is full of shit (and probably trying to sell you courseware or something).
There is something that really helped me, a challenge set out to me by my partner than ended up rewiring my brain: When you start a new project, make two lists. In one list, write down everything you love about books in that genre. Like when a book contains that thing, or that kind of thing happens, or that style is employed—literally whatever—it makes you enjoy the book more. Just everything you love when they happen in books. In the second list, write down everything that you hate when they happen in books. Do everything on the first list and nothing on the second. You will end up with a book you love, and really what more can you ask for.
