Elle’s not here.
Fine. She’s here. She’s just hiding behind a name that isn’t hers and hoping you won’t look too closely.
I looked. I always look, it’s sort of my whole thing. So I sat her down and made her answer for herself, because you let her into your inbox and you deserve to know exactly what you’re dealing with.
She squirmed. I enjoyed it.
— C.
Let’s start with the obvious. Who the hell is Elle Lincoln?
Not my government name, for one. That’s Sarah. Elle is a name I chose by mixing Elle from Stranger Things and Abraham Lincoln. Actually all of my pen names are a shout out to dead presidents.
Where’d you crawl out of?
Roxborough/Manayunk, Philadelphia. Allegedly. There’s a standing family argument over whether that even counts as Philly, and my cousins will fight you about it. Those cousins are in the books, by the way. Sabina’s cousins, Alicia (Ash) and Trish (Pepper), are real people. Trish still gives me grief that I got their heights wrong. Nessy is a blend of my friend Sam and a couple of my own alter egos. So if a character feels suspiciously real to you, that’s because some of them are.
You put the people you love in print where they can’t get out. I respect it. Keep going.
Catholic grade school, then we moved to central Pennsylvania, where I did my formative years and promptly went boy crazy. Normal-ish upbringing, a few bumps. I met my ex, fell in love, had four incredible kids, and changed careers more times than I’ll admit in writing. One of these days I’ll write about my high school friend group. Actually, I’m already working on it.
Here’s something that doesn’t add up. You write some of the most relentless banter I’ve ever been forced to live inside. And I have it on good authority you can’t make small talk to save your life.
It’s excruciating. Genuinely. Small talk makes me want to leave my body. So no, I have no idea how I ended up writing people who will not shut up at each other. Some days the dialogue just falls out of me. Other days I’m extracting it with the jaws of life. It’s a process.
You spent years convinced no one would ever want to read a word you wrote. Want to say that again? To the people currently reading your words?
I tried on a lot of masks over the years, and the whole time I was writing, I just never believed it would go anywhere. Who would want to read anything by me, right? And yet. Here you are. Reading. Noted.
Nobody’s here for a résumé and neither am I. What’s actually rattling around in that skull?
I’m an INTJ. I also ran CliftonStrengths, and the top five came back Intellection, Connectedness, Learner, Input, Context. Translation? I intellectualize all of it, all the time. It’s exhausting and I’m not even mad about it. Growing up, I wanted to be an archeologist, but only after I outgrew wanting to be a witch.
I’ve since decided witch is my race and archeologist is my class.
A multiclass build. Of course. You also move differently than you used to. What’s the story your body’s telling?
Fibromyalgia. Small fiber neuropathy. EDS. All the drama that travels with each. I love tattoos and can barely get them anymore, which is its own small tragedy. For a few years my body was locked in one long flare and we tried everything to break it. Turns out I just needed a divorce. …Too soon? Never.
Funny, how the body knows where the exit is before the brain signs off on it. Let’s talk about what you do to people like me. Why dark romance?
Honestly? I wasn’t sure I wrote it. I’ve had readers DNF a book over how dark it got, or how much angst I’d buried in it. But the bottom line is that I write into the dark, I sit down, open my Word doc, yes I’m a dinosaur, and put down whatever the story tells me. A lot of writers who work this way never edit. I have to, because I lose track of whose head I’m in and suddenly Calypso sounds like Hadley and Leif sounds like Lazarus. So I give it one day of editing and one final read-through, and that’s it. Here’s the paradox I love, I almost never read paranormal romance. It’s just what comes out of me every single time.
I do not sound like Hadley. Favorite trope. Don’t think. Answer.
Enemies to lovers, hands down. There’s something erotic about all that back-and-forth hatred, and when it finally detonates? Yeah. That. Runner-up is friends to lovers, the man who’s all about her, who chooses her as she actually is and then falls. That one lights me up.
One of those I’m living. I’ll let you guess which.
That’s enough. She’s done squirming, and you’ve got the shape of her now: a Philadelphia girl with too many kids, too many diagnoses, and a Word document she’s a little afraid of. She writes men who are bad for you on purpose.
I’d know. I’m tangled up with several of them.
Stick around. It gets worse.
— C.
