Quicksilver
Quicksilver
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Callie Hart on Quicksilver
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The book she kept postponing until she couldn’tAfter fifteen years and more than forty self-published novels, Hart had reached a point where continuing as a writer was no longer a given. The question she was weighing was not which book to write next but whether writing was still a viable path at all.
It got to the point where I was like, okay, I’m going to have to seriously think about, what else can I envisionage myself doing here if this next book doesn’t do well?
The romantasy idea had been sitting in a folder on her laptop for years, fed privately by reading she did purely for her own enjoyment. When she finally decided to act on it, she went to the roughly 8,000 people in her Facebook reader group for a signal. The result was unambiguous, and she ignored it.
I’ve been thinking about this story for years and finally wanted to tell it, so I put a poll in my reader group asking if they wanted to read a fantasy romance from me and 8,000 people said no.
The poll was nearly unanimous in favor of more dark romance. She wrote Quicksilver anyway, framing it to herself as the book she would write if it were the last one she ever wrote.
Detaching the book from her existing audience turned out to free something in the writing itself. With no expectation that her readers would follow her into a new genre, the usual pressure of writing for a waiting crowd dissolved.
I wrote Quicksilver under the guise that it was just a story for me and there weren’t any eyes on it.
How she wrote it
Six weeks, 205,000 words, and one unmovable sentenceAlchemy had been a private obsession long before Hart had any professional reason to use it. When she finally built a fantasy around it, the magic system came first, and she wanted it grounded in the thing she had actually been reading about for years.
I have always been fascinated by the concept of Alchemy and transmutation, so I knew I wanted to create a story that revolved around that at its center.
The male lead, Kingfisher, arrived before Hart had much else figured out. His psychology, his secrets, even the way he would push against the protagonist Saeris were worked out well ahead of his physical appearance, which was the last detail to settle.
He was a very persistent kind of niggling voice in the back of my head. He became larger than life in my mind very quickly. [paraphrased from audio]
For Zilvaren, the harsh desert city Saeris comes from, Hart drew on a specific literary precedent. Herbert’s Arrakis gave her a template for how extreme geography shapes the psychology of people who live inside it.
Dune had a big part of how I constructed Zilvaren and the landscape of it — very desolate and kind of haunting. I think everything finds a way of coloring how you write and what you create.
Hart has described herself as a habitual pantser who wrote her dark romance novels without a plan. Quicksilver was the first project she plotted in full before typing a word, mapping key beats across all three books in the series. The reason was structural caution, not a change in temperament.
I didn’t want to find myself in a position in book three where I’m like, ‘Oh man, I’ve really backed myself into a corner here and I don’t know how to fix this.’
When an agent read the finished 205,000-word manuscript, the feedback was that it needed to be cut by at least half and that characters would need to change. Hart had written the book as the one she refused to compromise on, and that position held.
This is my story. This is the story. I’m not changing a word.
She self-published in June 2024. The book sat at #101 on Amazon for six weeks before a late-night outreach to thirty BookTok creators changed its trajectory entirely.
What she wants us to sit with
Dark, gritty, and written for the story’s own sakeWhen the Netflix adaptation entered the conversation, Hart’s stated priority was not audience size or commercial reach but fidelity to the tone that made readers respond in the first place. She was specific about what she did not want diluted.
My main goal here is to make sure that the basis of the movie isn’t lost, that the book isn’t lost. I really want any adaptation to stay true to the story, for it to be dark and gritty and sexy and all of the things that readers fell in love with.
Asked to account for the book’s breakout response, Hart pointed to the shape of the central relationship rather than the world-building or the magic system. Her answer was direct about what the enemies-to-lovers arc actually delivers for readers.
I think people just love a push-and-pull, enemies-to-lovers story. That is so iconic. People just love that. It’s so satisfying when that evolution in a relationship happens and the romance finally sparks.
Writing Brimstone, the sequel, meant facing a readership that had grown to a scale she couldn’t have anticipated when she drafted Quicksilver in near-total privacy. The principle she applied the second time was the same one that had produced the first book.
I literally ignored everything. I’m always going to write the story that is in my heart, and I’m not going to be colored by other people’s expectations.