Author photo credit Caitlyn Paxson

C. S. E. Cooney (she/her) is a two-time World Fantasy Award-winning author: for novel Saint Death’s Daughter, and collection Bone Swans, Stories. Other work includes The Twice-Drowned Saint, Dark Breakers, and Desdemona and the Deep. Forthcoming in 2025 is Saint Death’s Herald, second in the Saint Death Series. As a voice actor, Cooney has narrated over 120 audiobooks, and short fiction for podcasts like Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Tales to Terrify, and Podcastle. In March 2023, she produced her collaborative sci-fi musical, Ballads from a Distant Star, at New York City’s Arts on Site. (Find her music at Bandcamp under Brimstone Rhine.) Forthcoming from Outland Entertainment is the GM-less TTRPG Negocios Infernales (“the Spanish Inquisition… INTERRUPTED by aliens!”), co-designed with her husband, writer and game-designer Carlos Hernandez. Find her website and Substack newsetter via her Linktree or try “csecooney” on various social media platforms.

Welcome back to the Hive, C S E Cooney! Let’s start with the basics: tell us about Saint Death’s Daughter & Saint Death’s Herald – why should readers check this series out?

Do you love road trips? What about road trips on the backs of undead flying tiger rugs? What about road trips with your best friend to help save the world from a soul-eating narcissistic ghost? With, you know, side quests amongst skinchangers and flying ice palaces. And maybe a dragon. Kind of.

 If you like those things, you’ll probably like Saint Death’s Herald. And if you like Saint Death’s Herald, you’ll probably also like Saint Death’s Daughter, since it’s the first book. With the addition of undead wolf cubs, sympathetic villains, armies of the undead, tender revenants, and the most adorable re-animated mouse skeletons. 

Why read them? Because maybe you, like me, were tired of fantasy heroes always solving problems through violence. So, I asked myself: what if one couldn’t? What if she was so allergic to violence, so allergic to death, that her power was literally raising the dead? What if her superpower was empathy with all things, dead and alive—and with the ones suspended in the third of the three states: undeath? What if our hero was actually the beloved priestess of the god of death Herself? 

In a violent world, even in a world full of politicking and machinations, someone who abhorred violence and had the power to oppose it would be significant spoke in a wheel of retributive or inherited brutality.

Plus, footnotes. If you love footnotes…

You’ve mentioned that it took twelve years to finish Saint Death’s Daughter. Tell us a little something about your writing process – do you have a certain method that works for you? Did this process change while writing Saint Death’s Herald?

It’s true that it took twelve years to write Saint Death’s Daughter. It’s also true that I finished it twelve times. I’m an inveterate reviser. I started in my late 20’s and submitted it in my late 30’s. I was still learning my craft (still am), and I learned more with every draft. The book changed with every reader, agent, and editor whose opinion shifted the direction the next draft took. 

During that same time period, I finished several novellas, lots of short stories, a collection, some plays, a couple of albums, and a whole book of poetry. It wasn’t the only thing I was doing.  And that was with working one or two jobs, sometimes uprooting my life and moving across the country, doing theatre, dating, moving again, getting married, that sort of thing. Life. 

One of the big differences is that I wrote Saint Death’s Daughter because I wanted to write it. With Saint Death’s Herald, of course I wanted to write it—but this time I was writing to deadline, from an outline, because I’d signed a contract with a publisher, because readers want to read a second Saint Death book. 

When I started Saint Death’s Daughter, I didn’t know if anyone would ever want to read it, aside from my mother, my best friend, and my husband. When you’re writing a book just for curiosity’s sake—and for love!—you can take the time to relish every discovery, wander around the world a bit, be silly, write throw-away scenes that the plot need not concern itself with, make huge and costly (word-count wise) mistakes, wallow in your despair, put the thing away, write something else, wander back to the original manuscript, give it the side-eye, sigh, and start again. 

With Saint Death’s Herald, it didn’t matter whether I felt like writing or not, or if I needed time to think, or time away, or time to wallow. I had to write it anyway. And I think that’s very good practice. I got better at it, and I’m not sorry for it. I always wanted to be more disciplined as an artist.

Saint’s Death’s Herald is considerably shorter than Saint Death’s Daughter. You’ve mentioned that this was a deliberate choice, how difficult was that to achieve? 

With Saint Death’s Herald, as soon as I got the contract, writing it was my main job—aside from my audiobook narration work. My efforts to push through to the other side of the draft were more concentrated. I had to make a lot of virtual writing dates with other working artists as my accountability demons… I mean, partners… to ensure that I would sit my butt down in the chair on the regular. 

I still overwrote—my process is still very discovery-oriented, and delights in tangents and worldbuilding. I cut the first 10K out of the first draft on my agent’s advice, wrote another 10K outline, then started again. My next draft was a 180K book (which was many, many, many more Ks than I promised). I was a few months late turning it in, and by the time I got my edit letter, it was almost a relief to cut 60K out of it. I’d had months to think about what, exactly, I’d cut—and my thoughts matched with the editor’s. Revision-wise, it meant that sewing my second draft back together in a way that still made sense, kept within the prescribed limits, and that I was happy with. I was grateful for a further chance to polish and revise during the editing and copyedit phase.

My process still takes longer than I’d like—but I comfort myself that it took eight times less long than the first book. And, between writing Book 1 and Book 2 of the Saint Death books, I also finished a novella and novelette, added 25K each to two novellas I’d previously published, and released all of that in a new collection called Dark Breakers, which is set in the same world as Desdemona and the Deep, my novella published in 2019 by Tor.com. (Secret: if you read closely enough, you’ll recognize it’s the same world as the Saint Death books, but in a different part of the timeline and on a different continent.) Also, my husband and I were finishing the final rulebook of a TTRPG we’d been designing. Phew! The time flew!

But wouldn’t it be fabulous to produce a book a year??? That’s how my hero writers do it. I live in hope.

The world of Saint Death is delightfully cutthroat and spooky, what inspired its creation? 

Once upon a time, my best friend looked at me and said, “You’re a writer. You may have to write about guns one day. Therefore, you should learn to shoot a gun, at least once.” (Can you tell we both grew up in Arizona?) So, she took me out to the desert to shoot at tires. We both wore noise-cancelling earphones, but either mine weren’t working that day or my superpower is sensitive hearing (I’m guessing the latter). After shooting the first time, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger again—because I didn’t want to hear that noise again. My palms were sweaty, my heart was racing, I was extremely reluctant. I sort of joked, “I’d be an excellent assassin if only I had a silencer!” 

Which is when I thought that a character who grew up in a family of assassins, but who herself had an allergy to violence, would be a really good premise for a book. The world grew around her. Initially, I tried to write it as a science fiction short story, with the character of “Graves the Butler” as a robot. Obviously, there is little that remains of that idea in Goody Graves the Revenant except the name and her position in the house as a domestic servant. (Or, really, in her case, slave.)

What sort of a world needs a family of assassins, and can sustain their rates, generation after generation? What sort of world produces a necromancer from their line, and why? How could I reconcile, as a writer, my love of the macabre, of comedies like Sweeney Todd and the Addams Family and the Gashlycrumb Tinies and Grosse Point Blank, with my own (hopefully maturing) set of ethics, as I grew both as a human and a writer?  Even my feelings about gun ownership changed in that time period.

Gods grew out of these thoughts. Political systems. Opposing nations. A whole colorful parade that, nonetheless, but palely echoes the world around me that I struggle to understand every day. Our own world is cutthroat and spooky, but rarely delightfully so. To write with a light hand, of heavy matters? That was a trick I wanted to learn.

As well as an author you are also an audiobook narrator, a poet, and a musician, were you conscious of any of these roles influencing your work while writing either Saint Death’s Daughter or Saint Death’s Herald? 

Certainly, when worldbuilding, it’s good to remember that poetry and music help make a world. You can say a lot about a character by the poet they choose to quote, or the song they hum to themselves when gardening, or nervous. A scrap of prayer remembered from antiquity, or an ancient practice or ritual that is part of someone’s daily routine can reveal much not only about an individual but about their culture, as well as the ones that came before them.

Language is a common way we all communicate—but even when everyone’s speaking the same language, communication is still an act of translation and collaboration. So, in a fantasy world, what if my cast of characters each approach language differently? What if even the sentence structures one of them might think in differ wildly from the sentence structures of another character? How a person acts in the world, how they interpret it, is so heavily influenced by the languages they’ve learned, and the lessons they were taught in that tongue. 

It’s all so complicated, and I can barely think about without my skull exploding, so I just write fantasy instead. 

On the sentence level, part of my process is to read aloud as I write. Every few chapters, I’d read to my mother, who loves everything I write; my husband, Carlos Hernandez, an award-winning writer, who’d read to me from his WIP “The Cyberpunk Microseason Pillowbook” in his turn; my friend Caitlyn Paxson over in Prince Edward Island, who was busy writing her Romantasy A Widow’s Charm (coming out next year!). Carlos and Caitlyn would read to me, and I’d read to them, and in so doing, we all saved ourselves several drafts. 

If the words get stuck in the air, if I stumble over them, or notice I’ve been repeating the same word over and over again, because it’s the easiest one within reach, then I can hear it when I read aloud—or the person listening hears it, and points it out for me—and I can fix it on the fly. It’s so useful! And it’s probably a theatre thing, or a music thing—but a lot of writers do it too.

The cast of the Saint Death series all have brilliantly peculiar names, what was the thought process behind these? Was there a method to their selection?

Well, it all started with Miscellaneous Immiscible Stones, because I thought it was funny. So, all the characters who surround her—mostly her family, at first—have a similar nomenclature. Then I had to justify it to myself, so it became a Stones tradition to give strange names to each other, or even re-name people who marry into the family. (On a personal note, it’s how I like to remember obscure words that give me delight: assign them to a Stones family member. Give them a footnote.)

One of the notes an agent gave me once was that humor is… difficult. And that what I find funny, not everyone will. So for instance, even though it’s an idiosyncrasy of mine to often refer to people by their full names in conversation, it’s easier on the eyes, when reading, to have a short form of that name. So “Miscellaneous” became “Lanie,” and “Sacred Datura” became “Datu,” and so forth. I think it was the right decision, but I don’t think I’d have come to it on my own.

As the cast grew, and the world blossomed around them, I had to think about other cultures, other nations. Why were names in Liriat one way, and the names of Quadiíb another? I thought it would be interesting if the difference initially sprang out of a deliberate effort on the part of immigrants who’d purposely left Quadiíb out of religious differences and started a new nation for themselves in Liriat. They wanted to have a distinct identity from the country they came from, and so re-named themselves, giving themselves surnames that were wilderness or nature-based. Like Stones. Or Bracken. 

If I ever set a book in Umrys-by-the-Sea, I’ll probably go more nautical with the naming game. I love to look up Arabic words to inspire the Quadic words, and Scandinavian words to inspire the Skaki, but I’m not a linguist. It’s mostly sound and sensation that I borrow.

Or the short answer is, um, “vibes.” 

Can you tell us a bit more about Lanie? Where did her character come from? If she had to find a home in a different book/film/TV show, where would you send her?

I think I addressed some of this in an earlier question, but as to the latter part: I think the gods would keep wanting to put her into HBO’s Game of Thrones, and she’d insist that she’d much rather live in Shondaland’s Bridgerton or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film. But she’d probably end up shying away from film entirely and tugging on Ann Leckie’s sleeve to ask if she could please hang out with Breq, i.e. the starship “Justice of Toren” in the Imperial Radch books.

Lanie would love helping Breq build a post-Radchaai society, with the AIs of starships and space stations as full citizens. She would also get a kick out of chatting with the Presgar translators—being of a curious and diplomatic disposition herself, and often hungry to try new foods. She’d maybe like space travel okay? She hates flying and heights, so maybe not? But she would absolutely adore helping restore the corpse soldiers’ memories of themselves that were ripped away when they were installed with ancillary implants.

But if she’d have to choose a fantasy series to cuddle with, she’d make her bed with all the paladins of T. Kingfisher’s Saints of Steel books, because they’re hot, and she likes to be around all the god-touched lovely ones, so long as they’re generally kind and decent—which all Kingfisher’s berserker paladins are, so she’d be beside herself—in a paradise of paladins.

You wrote a piece for us at the Hive about your goals for writing this sequel. What can readers expect from Saint Death’s Herald? Can you confirm if there’s a third book on its way?

I can neither confirm or deny the third book yet, though all fingers crossed and strong hopes for one! From what I’m reading of readers’ reviews, they can expect a laser-focused, action-packed, linguistically acrobatic, exuberantly playful, and very weird adventure in Saint Death’s Herald. It’s a shorter book than the first (this is often emphasized), but it delivers! And that, friends, is all I could have asked for it.

We always appreciate a beautiful book cover! How involved in the process were you? Was there a particular aesthetic you hoped they’d portray?

I just love Kate Forrester’s covers. Sigh! Early on in the process—while I was still writing the first draft—my editor asked me for some iconographic descriptions that Kate might use to entwine in the silhouette’s hair. 

Even though I wasn’t finished with the book, I did have an outline, and I had some descriptions in place, so I sent David and Kate many, many options. I especially emphasized “eggs” and “ice crystals” and “bioluminescent animals”—as well as Lanie’s companions on the road: the kestrel and the tiger. Those elements, I thought, wouldn’t change with the drafting process… although my bioluminescent jellies did have a smaller part to play by the end.

The world shifts, and you find yourself with an extra day on your hands during which you’re not allowed to write. How do you choose to spend the day?

If I could do anything, I’d teleport myself to the ocean and go swimming, or a beautiful hiking trail in the woods, leading to a waterfall—or a place in the high desert, on a cloudy, windy day. I’d spend the day outside, walking with family or friends, and eat picnic foods. Or take a bike trail somewhere! I’d love that. Outdoor activities.

But often, on days I don’t write, I read. I try to take walks. I do chores. There’s lots of other things to do besides write. The trick is to actually, you know, WRITE!

One of our favourite questions here on the Fantasy Hive: which fantastical creature would you ride into battle and why?

The Glatisant! AKA, the Questing Beast! Because it would confuse everyone, and make them wander off in different directions. And then I’d get away clean—thus stopping the battle and saving me and anyone else from injury! 

Tell us about a book you love. Any hidden gems?

I’ve gotten to read so many great books to blurb in the last year. But right now, I’ll just mention Caitlyn Paxson’s A Widow’s Charm again—forthcoming in spring 2026, from Del Rey, Doubleday Canada, and Quercus Books.

A Widow’s Charm is officially a “romantasy,” but Caitlyn and I have taken to calling our books “necropantasies,” since our characters are so very fond of raising the dead AND kissing people. Not kissing dead people. Or even undead people. But still. You get my drift. 

I love Cailtyn’s magic system of “charmers,” and I love her wit, and her theatrical, pristine plot structures, and her incredible grasp of historical “how-tos.” Her writing cracks me up, makes me cry, and turns me all—all in the same chapter sometimes. I cannot wait for the world to read this!

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

The most moving thing I’ve heard from readers about Saint Death’s Daughter was how it comforted them in times of their own loss. I didn’t know—I could never have guessed—that writing about the friendly priestess of a gentle god of death might hold the same meaning for other people as it did for me. I love the idea of any gods of my mind bringing comfort to anyone else. Icons of emotional complexity wear many different faces, and I’m happy to contribute a few new aspects—visions of a terrible, tender splendor.

But mostly, I want my book to leave you with a friendly feeling. Like you’ve made a friend. Like it’s something you can trust. Like it’s there when you need it. Like you can argue with it and still feel loved, no matter who wins the argument—or if there aren’t any winners at the end of the day, just a damn good conversation, and a lingering need for a pastry.

Thank you so much for joining us today!

Saint Death’s Herald is available now. You can order your copy HERE