Rachel Koller Croft: On the Thrill of Villains

Rachel Koller Croft is an author and screenwriter in Los Angeles, where she has scripted projects for Blumhouse, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Comedy Central, among others. She lives by the beach with her husband, Charles, and their rescue pitbull, Juniper.

In this post, Rachel discusses the process of writing her new thriller novel, Stone Cold Fox, what surprised her in the writing process, and more!

Name: Rachel Koller Craft
Book title: Stone Cold Fox
Publisher: Berkley
Release date: February 14, 2023
Genre/category: Thriller
Elevator pitch for the book: Gone Girl meets Luckiest Girl Alive in this page-turning debut novel about a young woman who’s worked her way into one of the country’s wealthiest families—armed with the skills she learned from her con artist mother.

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I absolutely love villains, both in books and on screen. Sometimes they are the main character, but it’s rarer than it should be in my opinion, so the biting voice of Bea came to me first. I leaned on some of my snarkier impulses, along with inspiration from my best girlfriends, and grew the character from there, making her as big and bold as I could without making her a caricature.

Despite and because of her flaws, I do think Bea is enormously relatable, which I thought would make her intriguing to readers along with her undeniable sense of humor. And then I put her in a world that both fascinates and repels me—the world of the one percent—and thought about how a beautiful young woman could get ahead there, motivated by her less-than-ideal background and accompanied with intelligence plus an aptitude for manipulation.

The story was a blast to plot, but first and foremost was making sure every single thing related back to Bea and how she would move throughout the world I was creating. She was always my priority.

Admittedly, my first draft was not super pressing at the time I started it back in 2019. I was working on paid projects in TV and film, so I would work on my novel here and there, but I did get a full draft complete in just under one year. It was a pretty different iteration of what Stone Cold Fox ultimately became. Bea remained the constant, though.

I really dug in when I found my amazing agent and essentially did a page-one rewrite with her astute notes as guidance, strengthening the characterization of everyone, a new focus on Bea's relationship with her mother and, of course, upping the cat-and-mouse game between Bea and Gale. That rewrite process took about another year.

When we sold it at auction shortly after, it was about 18 months before publication date, so in sum, the whole process was about three and a half years.

Just about everything was new and surprising to me because I hadn’t published a novel before. Coming from the entertainment industry, where it can take a lot of time to get answers, sometimes if any at all, I found the publishing process super fast when it came to overall decisiveness.

Since the auction, it’s basically been full steam ahead, which has been so exciting. I’m lucky that I have a really fantastic team in my agent, my editor, and the whole Berkley team. We’re having so much fun!

I’m constantly surprised when I’m writing, but also after the fact. I’m sure other writers feel this way, too, but sometimes it’s like I’m touched by something, and I can just go, go, go, without really laboring over what I’m writing. And when I reread it later, I’m delighted that it’s pretty good even though I don’t remember creating the exact sentence or scene that just struck me. (Sometimes the opposite happens, too, but that’s also part of the process, I suppose.)

I am a pretty broad outliner to allow for these surprises because it’s my favorite part of my process. A new character will arise out of nowhere (Wren Daly in Stone Cold Fox for example), or I would think about the obvious choice Bea would make next, but then think about the craziest choice she could make instead and how to make it work with her character so I can keep the reader on their toes without losing their trust in what I’ve established (there’s many instances of this in SCF).

Those are the scenes that almost never come to me when I’m in the outline phase, it’s always when I’m clacking away on my computer and some force comes through in the moment. It’s incredible how that can happen.

In everything that I create, I feel a huge responsibility like that of a stellar party host. I want to make sure my readers are entertained the second they open the book, that they meet some interesting people in the time they spend with my book, that they laugh a lot, that they feel an emotional response or think about something in a way that maybe they haven’t before. But above all things, I want readers to associate my books with a good time.

Stone Cold Fox is going to be the first of many for me, and I want readers to trust that they will always have fun reading a Rachel Koller Croft novel. That is my north star.

Be your own biggest fan! If you aren’t excited about your stories, how is anybody else supposed to be amped for them? Love your work, love the process, love the promotion, love talking about your book. I think it’s fine to have frustrating moments and parts that maybe aren’t your favorite, but on the whole, I highly recommend stanning your stories.

And if that feels weird to start, make like Bea in Stone Cold Fox and fake it till you make it. I promise it’s way more fun than that whole tortured artist thing.

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