Assistant to the Villain
Assistant to the Villain
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Hannah Nicole Maehrer on Assistant to the Villain
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A nanny, a phone camera, and a viral afternoonLong before the book existed, Maehrer had been turning over a single question: what is a villain actually made of, and what would happen if you made that villain funny. That fascination preceded the TikTok series, the book deal, and everything that followed.
I had always wanted to write about villains, I thought about their depth, I thought about how they earned that title. But mostly, I thought about how I could make them laugh.
The outlet she found for that fascination was improvised and low-stakes by design. Working full-time as a nanny in State College, Pennsylvania, and managing anxiety and depression, Maehrer turned to a phone camera because a live audience felt impossible. What she built, one unscripted clip at a time, ran past 200 installments before she recognized it as a book.
I began the videos simply. I just wanted to walk around my small college town home and get the creative juices moving. Most of the skits were improvised so often I would just turn on my camera and see what came out of my mouth, I’d often surprise myself actually!
The moment the project changed scale arrived not at a desk but mid-workday. Maehrer had put the children she was watching down for a nap, come back downstairs, and found that the algorithm had found her.
I put the twins down for a nap, came back downstairs, looked at my phone, and the video was going viral.
The skit series kept building from that afternoon. When it finally outgrew what 60-second videos could hold, the book was the only place left to put it.
Underneath the comedy, the project was carrying something heavier. Maehrer had spent years using reading to stay connected to her own emotions when depression made that feel impossible, and she wanted to hand that same lifeline to someone else.
I’ve struggled with depression for most of my life, and books have been such a great outlet because they help you feel in moments when you feel really numb. I’ve had books be a saving grace for me, so I really wanted to make something that could make other people feel like those books made me feel.
How she wrote it
Ten thousand words, one sitting, never againMost writers sit down to draft a novel with characters they have only imagined. Maehrer had spent months performing hers daily, improvising their voices, and privately hearing what the off-camera characters said back. By the time she opened a document, the usual early-draft work of discovering who these people were was already done.
By the time I was ready to sit down and write the book, I felt like I knew these characters. I knew their backgrounds, their stories, their hopes, and dreams. A skit format can be limiting, but putting words to a page is boundless. That first day I sat down to write their story, I could not get the words down quickly enough.
That first session produced 10,000 words, the most she had ever written at once, and a mark she has not come close to repeating since.
Her apartment in State College was plainly not a fairytale kingdom, so the page gave her the first real chance to build the world she had always pictured behind those skits. She reached for the films she had grown up on, treating the setting less as world-building exercise and more as a place where readers could feel at home.
I grew up on so many quirky fantasy movies. Like Ella Enchanted, Stardust, The Princess Bride, Ever After (I could go on and on and on). In a way the setting was a love letter to all my favorite comfort movies. I wanted it to be fresh, but familiar. A safe place for our characters to lead our story.
The skit series could run indefinitely without resolving, but the book needed shape. Maehrer’s structural solution was one central mystery threading through the story, with skit storylines folded in where they fit. Her drafting method for everything else owed the same debt to improvisation that the original videos did.
Much like how I improv most of the skit series, writing books is no different. I plan as much as I need to and just let the rest of the chips fall where they may. It’s more creatively fulfilling, and I always enjoy seeing where the story goes naturally.
One character arrived not from the skit series but from the cover. After developmental edits began and Maehrer saw Elizabeth Turner Stokes’s cover art, she and her editor started discussing what role the frog depicted on it could actually play in the story. Maehrer knew the tone she wanted immediately: dry, deadpan, and briefly present, modeled on Salem the cat from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
He fell into the story. It was like he was always supposed to be there. [paraphrased from audio]
She went back through the manuscript to find every pocket where Kingsley the frog could appear, and he fit into almost all of them.
The personal thread
Immortalized in a stage of lifeThe TikTok audience Maehrer built during the skit series did something practically unusual for a debut author: it meant readers already loved the story before a publisher acquired it. She was careful, though, to frame what that actually meant for the path to publication, separating the practical benefit from the deeper one.
From what I’ve observed of the industry, you don’t need a huge platform to be traditionally published. The benefit of it is it exposes you to the readers that would be interested in your story. And I was really privileged in that regard because I had been doing these skits for so long and I had built up an audience that loved this story just as much as I did.
The characters in the book were not just fictional people Maehrer invented; they were the company she kept during a specific and difficult stretch of her own life. When asked about that relationship in a Fresh Fiction video interview, she described something closer to processing than to craft.
They’re all a bit of a reflection of what I was going through at that point in my life. So I’ve sort of immortalized that stage in my life within these books and I’ve processed it through the characters, which is really special. And Evie’s a character that I play or I write when I need someone to pick me up or someone to escape to. She is all the best parts of me. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Where you’re standing changes everythingThe skits had always been playful, but the book was quietly asking a harder question beneath the comedy. Maehrer’s favorite line from the novel, “We’re all monsters in the end, but at least mine lives in the light,” led her to explain at Romantasy Illustrated what she actually wanted readers to carry out of the story.
The reason that I really love that quote and the emphasis that I wanted to put on the story is that we look at some people as villains, but are they a villain? And sometimes they are. But sometimes, it is just where you are standing and what perspective you have.
The humor was always the delivery mechanism, not the destination. When asked what she wanted readers to feel, Maehrer named the physical, immediate response first, but that surface pleasure was always in service of the emotional access she had once needed from books herself.
Hopefully to laugh! This story is a campy quirky tale of a Villain’s office and the slowburn romance between him and his sunshine assistant.
The skits that started everything are still, by her account, where the story’s heart lives. The book grew from them, but the feeling they first captured is what she set out to preserve.
When the book was finished and the series was underway, Maehrer looked back at what the skit series had actually been: not a marketing strategy, but the place where she found the story she was always going to tell. She wanted readers to feel that the book carries that origin rather than simply references it.
The skits will always be where this story was born, where it evolved, where it became real, where I fell in love. The skits allowed me so much creativity and so much fun, and the book will always be a branch of that feeling.