Metal Slinger
Metal Slinger
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Rachel Schneider on Metal Slinger
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A world that lived in her head firstShe can’t point to a single creative lightning bolt. What she describes instead is a lifelong habit of inner narrative that eventually had to find an exit. The ocean and her daughter’s fixation on a beloved animated series were, in her telling, background conditions she didn’t consciously register as influences until she looked back.
I don’t have like a moment that I can pinpoint, like that it was like, oh, this. Uh, it feels like it’s always lived in my head. But if I had to like trace it back, my daughter was obsessed with Avatar for a period of time. I love the ocean. Um, those types of things maybe played a factor that subconsciously I didn’t realize. [paraphrased from audio]
Even before motherhood and the ocean shaped the material, the compulsion to write came from somewhere more ungovernable. She frames it not as ambition but as psychological necessity, a mind too active to stay quiet.
I always accredited it to like my maladaptive daydreaming. Like, I just have a really active imagination. Lots of thoughts going on. Just having an outlet to get those out. You know, stories live in your head, you have to find a way. [paraphrased from audio]
She had been writing since adolescence, but the shift from venting dramatic scenes onto a page to committing to a full novel came with a specific life change. Becoming a mother at twenty-one reset what she thought she could attempt.
As a moody teenager, I loved writing dramatic romance scenes between angsty teens. First kisses and breakups and all the tension that comes with young love. It provided me with the escapism I needed at that time. It wasn’t until I had my daughter at twenty-one that I decided to sit down to write my first full-length novel.
How she wrote it
A manuscript abandoned, then unlocked by its endingThe book sat unfinished for close to five years. What finally broke the stall was not a new scene or a restructured opening but the realization of how it had to end. The twist, the plot development that would later drive the book’s viral spread, gave her a reason to return to her desk every morning.
I was so excited to get to the plot twist. I was like, ‘Can’t wait for all this to fall apart!’ And I was excited to sit down every day and write. [paraphrased from audio]
The framework she uses sits between a rigid outline and pure improvisation. She plants fixed markers at specific word counts, then lets character dynamics fill the space between them. The result, in practice, is what gives the book its combination of momentum and organic-feeling relationships.
I typically plot by word count for the major plot points. So I want to hit A, B, C, and D at certain word counts. And then I try to let the relationships and, uh, everything else kind of unfold organically in between. [paraphrased from audio]
Most writers add foreshadowing in revision; she went the other direction. After she had a complete draft, the twist still surprised her most trusted reader, her best friend, who received the manuscript with the final two chapters held back. When those chapters landed, the reaction validated a counterintuitive editorial choice she had already made.
If anything, I took out more hints. I had more foreshadowing that I felt were too obvious and I took out. [paraphrased from audio]
Her filter for what stayed in the book came down to her own experience of writing each scene. She connects this explicitly to the short chapters and fast pace that readers comment on, treating her own boredom as a diagnostic tool rather than something to push through.
If I’m bored to write it, a reader’s gonna be bored to read it. So I really only truly wrote what I felt like I enjoyed writing. [paraphrased from audio]
The ocean drift sequences, the slower middle stretch where protagonists Brynn and Acker, the book’s central love interests, are marooned together, were a deliberate exception to the book’s usual velocity. She wrote them anyway and kept them against reader complaints, calling them structural rather than incidental to the love story.
The personal thread
An unknown author betting on an unknown worldBefore Metal Slinger, she had written contemporary romance, a genre she knew. Fantasy, the genre she had always wanted, was the one she wasn’t sure she could pull off. The decade the manuscript spent unfinished was partly a confidence problem. When readers finally took it up, she had no framework for the scale of the response.
I’ve described it like winning the lottery as in the sense of getting it, people to read it, cause that’s hard, you know, especially from an unknown author, like the fact that people took a chance on it from the get-go. [paraphrased from audio]
The book was written in the margins of a full-time job, not at a desk during working hours but in a thirty-minute window at the end of the day when the rest of the house had settled. That constraint shaped the pacing as much as any craft decision.
Typically I got home, did all my stuff, and then 7:30, if I was lucky, I’d climb into bed and just write until my brain stopped. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Love that is real and still does thisThe reaction she hears most often is that the ending feels like a betrayal of who Brynn appeared to be. She doesn’t dismiss the feeling, but she draws a precise line between an unreliable narrator, someone whose reported interiority is false, and a character capable of acting against the people she genuinely loves. Her defense of Jovie, the name given to Brynn’s fuller identity within the book’s twist, is also an argument about what the novel is actually asking.
I think that people once they get to the end, they’re like, what was real and what wasn’t real? Um, and that’s, I can understand that, but it’s more of, why would, even though she does love him, all those things, why would she still do this? Um, so I don’t know if I, I understand that the readers feel a little cheated sometimes, but I don’t think Jovvie is an unreliable narrator. [paraphrased from audio]
The question she leaves open is the harder one: not whether the love was real, which she insists it was, but whether real love is enough to override the choices a person was built to make. Metal Slinger is designed as the first half of a two-book unit, so the unresolved hurt at the close was never a loose end; it was the point.
She describes the book plainly before she theorizes about it. The description doubles as a statement of intent: she built something that moves fast, keeps two people in tight proximity, and then pulls the floor out.
It’s a journey. Full of action, adventure, and plenty of forced-proximity from our love interests. And, not to fail to mention, a shocking twist.
Reader satisfaction and authorial integrity were the same target for her, not competing pressures. She made choices that drew pushback, including the drift sequences and the ending, and her answer each time was the same: what the characters required and what she needed as the person telling their story had to come first.
It was so important to me that I stick to what I wanted for these characters and their journey, as well as what feeds my soul as the storyteller. At the end of the day, I wanted to write something super satisfying, so I focused on that.