Livia T. Hatch is a gothic romantic horror writer living in NYC. A Mist Falls Over the Castle is her debut novel.
NL: A Mist Falls Over the Castle releases November 10th. What was the timeline of conceiving the idea to publication?
LH: The full timeline took two years. I started writing it on November 9th, 2024. I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen in the story when I started writing, I just knew I wanted to write a gothic romance novel. So I made up the first draft completely as I went along. I didn’t even make the final decision about where it would be set until I started the second draft. The second and third drafts were absolutely brutal because I changed so much and I had to keep rewriting things to make everything match up and make sense. My beta readers read the third draft. My husband actually read the second half of the third draft out loud to me sitting in our living room late at night, and it was really fun to watch him experience it in real time. I sent the fourth draft to my editor, then when I got it back from her I actually went through two more drafts fixing small things that bothered me. I’m a very compulsive editor. Finally I made myself stop, and I opened the ARCs in August of this year. It was all kind of a whirlwind, to be honest!
NL: Can you speak to your pre-publication experience? For example, did you have years of slogging through submissions to agents for the traditional publishing route, or did you decide from the beginning that you wanted to independently publish?
LH: I decided pretty early on that I wanted to self-publish. I’m the kind of person who likes to do everything herself, for better or worse, and I wanted the freedom to make 100% of the decisions. I like learning about cover design. I like thinking of marketing strategies. I like coming up with my own genre blends. I like deciding what I’m going to do at the time I think is right to do it. Writing is fun for me, and I want to keep it that way, and the only way I can be sure that will happen is if I self-publish.
NL: How did your cover design and art come about?
LH: I made the cover myself, and it was definitely a lot of work and gave me a lot of respect for cover artists! I’ve always enjoyed playing with photoshop and digital art, and I figured I should be able to find some art in the public domain that would fit the vibe. So I downloaded Gimp and went through a bunch of museum archives. I tried a lot of different ideas and my first five or so were really ugly and amateur-looking, to be honest. I ultimately settled on a still life by Otto Marseus van Schrieck because it was painted only ten years apart from when my story takes place and it had this vibe that felt really sinister, but also intriguing and elegant and a little mischievous with the snaking vines, which is exactly the mood I was trying to convey. I picked a font that felt reminiscent of the 17th century and italicized it to give it more urgency to match the emotional tone of the novel. One piece of advice I saw online again and again was that the title had to be clearly legible on a thumbnail, and as you can see I really took that advice to heart!
NL: What drew you to the subject matter of Mist? Were there certain historical facts that wouldn’t leave you alone, or was it more of the psychological and sociological aspects that ignited your creativity to tell this story?
LH: Mist has some fantasy elements, so after I finished the first draft I had to decide if the setting would be a fantasy world or historical. I chose historical because there was no real reason for it to be strictly fantasy; nothing that happened in the story couldn’t happen in our world, and I didn’t want to make the book longer by adding extra world-building that I knew would ultimately not contribute to the plot—or that would just be things from our world with different names.
Also, I happen to really enjoy learning about history. So, I settled on Prague because it fit the vibe I wanted and it had an alchemical connection, and I picked the time period mostly because I knew the story had to start with a plague, but as I learned more about that time, so many things fell into place it actually felt weirdly convenient.
Something significant about the year 1680, other than the plague, is there were a lot of peasant rebellions. This political backdrop is really interesting, and it ended up forming the entire subplot of A Mist Falls Over the Castle. Ilona’s uncle is a merciless, greedy landlord who overworks and overtaxes his peasants, and she gets stranded at Ivštejn because he’s too busy handling a rebellion to come get her. Later, Wilhelm insists on overtaxing Ivštejn’s peasants to pay off their debts, and Ilona is the only one who recognizes the power the common people wield collectively, and the danger of making enemies of them. And that’s part of what drives her final decision in the novel.
If I had decided to set this story in a purely fantasy world, I’m not sure if I would have come up with that subplot by myself, and that’s something I think is really interesting about writing historical fiction.
NL: Did you take any interesting research “field trips” when writing this novel?
LH: Oh my god, I wish! But unfortunately I was stuck at home pretty much the whole time. I did do a lot of research though, and I even spent a lot of time scrolling through Křivoklát forest on Google Maps so in some ways I kind of feel like I went somewhere, haha.
NL: How do you stay disciplined to balance writing with a day job?
LH: Balancing writing with a day job is actually not the hardest part for me. I love writing, it’s my hobby and I do it because it’s fun. The hard part has come more recently, while trying to balance a new job, marketing, self-publishing, and writing. I’ve been sacrificing writing time in favor of marketing time recently, but I’m learning that there is always, always more marketing I could be doing, and ultimately I need to accept that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and it’s ok if I don’t move that fast as long as I keep moving. While writing Mist I wrote an average of 300 words a day—there were days I wrote more or less, and times I took breaks for a week or two, but that’s what it averaged out to. So that’s the goal I set for myself every day, and that makes it feel very attainable.
NL: And now for a fun question…If a director were to make a film of Mist who would you pick? Would you want to adapt the story into a screenplay yourself? Or would you not want to be involved at all?
LH: Ok, hear me out because this might sound insane, and it might just be because I was blown away by Send Help, but I actually think Sam Raimi would do an incredible job with this story. He really indulges in tension and melodrama, and he has this campy sense of humor that doesn’t take itself too seriously, as well as this way of pacing horror scenes that pulls you forward a little bit too fast for your comfort just to throw you headfirst into horrors you know are coming but still could never have prepared for. All of these things are core parts of the experience of A Mist Falls Over the Castle.
He also has this amazing ability to draw out intense character dynamics that I think could really vitalize the interactions between Ilona and Josef as lovers, and even Ilona and Wilhelm as enemies. Send Help and Drag Me to Hell are also such iconic female rage movies that I know I could trust him to execute that well too.
I think his aesthetic would also work surprisingly well—like the landscapes in Send Help had a really vivid, technicolor look to them that made them feel both ominous and surreal, and I think filming the forest that way in Mist would be so cool.
Even though he’s definitely a horror movie director, and I usually describe Mist as a horror romance or gothic romance, ultimately it’s a book about the horror of falling in love too fast and there are a lot of really tense scenes, so I think it would work really well in the hands of a horror director like him. (Plus, he did that upside-down kiss in Spiderman and that was, you know… very good. So I think he could do romance.)
NL: Do you have any events or upcoming publications you’d like to promote (that you can talk about)? Or, what are you working on next (if you are at liberty to say)? Or, would you like to shout out an organization or cause people should know about?
LH: The next thing I’m working on is the sequel, because this is actually the first book in a trilogy!
A Mist Falls Over the Castle releases November 10, 2026. Follow Livia on Instagram @livia.t.hatch
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