Refinery 29: Mindy McGinnis: "My YA Books Aren't Here To Please Adults"

When my book A Madness So Discreet was released in 2015, I had the occasional reader ask, “Why would you write a book for teens where the main character is being sexually abused by her father?”

My answer?

Because that’s who it happens to.

While my books cover the gamut of genres, they are always looking deeply into the dark corners of our world, places that some prefer not to go. My answer to that question would set the occasional person back. Others would nod knowingly. That’s who I’m writing for.

As a former high school librarian, I fully support reading for escape. I worked for 14 years in a rural, economically depressed area — the same area I grew up in and still live in. Some of my students needed to read about fantasy and fairy tales, and were desperately looking for the happily ever after that many romances promised, but reality failed to deliver.

But others needed to see themselves in the pages of the books they read — be it an alcoholic parent, an abusive relationship, a sexual-assault survivor, or just a hardscrabble kid down on their luck looking for a way out. Where I’m from, luck runs thin, and there aren’t many ways out.

I began writing for teens in 2010 after years of handing my students books set in the glitz of big cities, often following lives of the famous or wealthy. Characters in these books had handbags that cost more than my students’ entire wardrobes, and they certainly didn’t walk to school or have to worry about not having a coat to wear when the temperatures dropped. I wanted rural kids to see themselves and their struggles in fiction, so I set out to do just that.

When I wrote The Female of the Species in 2016 — a rape-revenge, vigilante-justice story — I fully expected it to be banned. Instead, my inbox filled with upraised fists, shared experiences, and heartfelt thank yous. A woman in her forties told me that if she’d had that book growing up, she would have reported her attacker. The grit in those pages was hard for many readers, but for many more it was an abrasion they have felt before and known too well. To see it play out differently this time — and with a note of hope at the end — was a balm.

Writing Heroine, which is about the opioid epidemic, was no different.

I pride myself on not pulling punches, but this was one story where I didn’t know what to strike out at. Anger drove The Female of the Species, but tales of addiction don’t have an obvious villain. Holding big pharma responsible for their role in the epidemic will be key in reality, but for fiction I needed a smaller picture, an emotional foothold rather than an agenda. As it turns out, that foothold was easy to find. Too easy.

In the late spring of 2017, I was visiting a school in southern Ohio — an area hard hit by the opioid crisis and considered by many to be the epicenter. As I spoke with the librarians and educators over lunch, they told me that their local economy was struggling. No one carried cash any longer, they paid each other in pills. If you lived there, I was told, you had a few employment opportunities — the school, the prison, the hospital, or...you sold drugs. You can guess which one paid the best.

This wasn’t said judgmentally, but with true grief. They were watching their students overdose and their own friends and families succumb. A complicated mix of sympathy and confusion clouded their words, along with a sense of urgency and need for hope. I drove home thinking of them, their students, and of the people in my own life who have been pulled into the vortex. A phrase they used at lunch stuck with me, and I’ve heard it repeated multiple times when I meet educators, reviewers, librarians, booksellers, and readers: Everyone knows someone.

That someone is an every person — not a different race, not a homeless woman on the street, not the rough guy hanging out in the parking lot. It’s the girl sitting next to you in math class, the parent who runs the carpool, or the athlete who needs to push past the pain in order to perform.

When writing Mickey, my main character in Heroine, it was important to make her goals the reader’s goals. I’ve had readers tell me they were almost rooting for Mickey to get her next fix because that is what she needed to “be well” enough to walk out onto the softball field and catapult her team into the spotlight. The slippery logic of addiction is at work in Mickey and wheedles its way into the reader as well, creating the all-important element of empathy.

I’d like to see Heroine performing in reverse to my original goals as a writer. My readers may indeed see themselves in these pages. But more importantly, I want them to see Mickey in the people around them. And if they can feel for her, maybe they can feel for them, too.

Realism is a large part of what I deliver with my writing, and Heroine is no different. There is no neat answer, no happy ending. What I bring with my fiction is what I felt was needed at that lunch meeting, and in all of our lives right now: some hope.

As with my other works, there is darkness. As with my other works, I wrote it because it’s honest about what’s happening. But in this case, it’s not just for teens.

It’s happening to all of us.

“It’s Not Nancy Drew Out There": Writing Tough Topics for Teens

Rape. Murder. Suicide. Overdose. It might sound like the lead-in for a true crime show, but it’s a sampling of the traumas my students dealt with in the more than a decade that I worked in a high school library. I’m from a rural community in Ohio, graduating under 100 kids every year. The grass is green, the wheat is golden, and hometown football games are the place to be on a Friday night. While the setting may sound idyllic, our lives often aren’t.

Almost 25 percent of our students live below the poverty level. Lines at food banks are long, and often those standing in them lack other essentials as well—like a good winter coat. But class inequality and nature aren’t the only things that harm us. Sometimes we hurt one another, and often we hurt ourselves. Even though I worked in a school serving a very small community, staff and students experienced the traumas mentioned above—in some cases more than once.

Teen literature as we know it today did not exist when I was growing up, and there was a very large gap between what I read as a middle schooler before making the jump to adult titles. I often joke that I went from reading books about hiding a stray puppy in the basement so that allergic parents wouldn’t know it’s in the house to . . . Cujo.

There were a handful of authors available to me as a teen—Judy Blume, Lois Duncan, Caroline B. Cooney, and Christopher Pike, to name a few—who did push the envelope as far as content was concerned, and I am eternally grateful to them. Even so, topics such as rape or addiction weren’t something many authors were willing to address or, when they did, were handled so carefully as to render the text vague and antiseptic.

When I wrote The Female of the Species as an adult—a rape-revenge, vigilante-justice story—I got in trouble . . . with my mother. She was upset that I would talk so openly in a book for teens about consensual sex, violence, rape, and drinking. I remember defending the book by telling her, “It’s not Nancy Drew out there anymore.”

Since the publication of The Female of the Species, I have received emails, tweets, and messages from multiple girls and women letting me know how much the story resonated with them. One woman in her 40’s said that if she had read a book like it when she was a teenager, she might have found the strength and courage to report her attacker rather than accept such behavior as the norm.

Heroine, my newest release that focuses on a female athlete and the opioid epidemic, has garnered much the same reaction. Early readers reached out, thanking me for writing about addiction in a way that empathized with the user, sharing how their loved one suffers and that the book helped them understand that struggle a little bit better.

If writing about difficult topics makes it more likely for people to feel comfortable talking about them, then I consider my work a success, even if I am not a household name. I have heard from multiple parents that Heroine helped them open up a conversation with their teens about prescription drug abuse, and I know that The Female of the Species is very often a mother-daughter read.

As a librarian I became good at finding the readership for a particular book, especially for my students who were dealing with tough topics. It’s a small town, and often I knew what their story was, without them having to tell it. I could pair a teen with a title, and felt the warmth of reward when they finished it and asked for another like it. It’s an unfortunate fact that a book like Heroineor Female of the Species has elements that will resonate with so many young people. As I explained to my mother—it’s not Nancy Drew out there anymore.The truth is it never was. We just didn’t talk about it.

Writing in the Raw

I think truly compelling fiction is incredibly realistic, whether it's set on a spaceship or in your own backyard. A book that makes the reader gasp for breath because they've just been emotionally gut-punched is real, and it doesn't matter that we're talking about things that never happened to people that don't exist.

It's those gut punches that I go for in every book I write. Whether I'm letting the reader in on some horrific practices in early insane asylums, showing a nine-year-old child defending her water source in order to survive in a parched world, or giving vent to the very real and often ignored world of female rage, I try to bring real life into every page.

I think this is true of my fantasy, GIVEN TO THE SEA, as well. Yes, the setting is foreign, but the people are like us - people. They are in extraordinary situations - whether asked to give their own life for the continuation of others', take their assumed place in the family tree, whittle the weak from their population in order to give strength to the whole, or fated to carry the last blood of a dying race - these are people that face struggles most of us can relate to in our own way. And if none of that strikes a chord, there's always the tried-and-true unrequited love that we all know (probably a little too well).

If you know anything about my writing, you probably know that SEA will make you cry at some point, cringe at others, and hopefully laugh once or twice.

Most importantly, it's going to feel real.

Jumping Genres

If you follow my books at all you know that I write all over the place. My first two books were post apocalyptic survival tales, my third a Gothic historical thriller, and my fourth a gritty contemporary. With my fifth book, GIVEN TO THE SEA, I wandered into the realm of fantasy.

When it was time to begin GIVEN TO THE SEA I was ecstatic. I had just finished A MADNESS SO DISCREET, my historical, for which I had researched for 18 months before penning a single fictitious word. At one point I couldn't finish a line of dialogue without doing a solid 15 minutes of research to learn what a cop would have been called in Boston in the 1890s. 

No more of that - it was time for pure fiction, a world of my own in which I could make up any word I would like to fill in the pesky blanks. This was the first time I'd ever written fantasy, and I went into it thinking this would be my easiest drafting process yet.

Wrong. So, so wrong.

The unique challenge in fantasy is that your reader can assume nothing. If I'm writing a contemporary and I tell you that my main character goes to a private school, drives a Mercedes, and only wears Prada, you can draw about 20 assumptions about her, her environment, and probably her past pretty easily. I don't have to fill in the blanks.

In fantasy, if I tell you that one of my characters is the last surviving female of the Indiri... you know pretty much nothing. You can't infer from that that she's the only person in this world with magic, as only the females of the tribe carry that gift. You don't know what her life is like - are in the Indiri a reigning class living in a castle with servants, or are they a wild, feral people? Are these royals? Are they cannibals? What is expected of this character in her class and situation?

You don't know. And so I have to tell you. And I have to do it in a way that is not a bullet point list, boring to read and onerous to write. I have to give you seventeen years of backstory while also illustrating the present, seamlessly giving you the entire picture of her life while making it, you know, interesting.

Not easy. And that's just one character. GIVEN TO THE SEA has four POV's and as many highly unique and different cultures. Delivering all four - along with the land, the layout, the animals, the legend and history of this fictitious place - er... yeah.

This Book Will Change How You Think About Rape

#RealTalk: The Female Of The Species by Mindy McGinnis, is changing the way we talk about rape culture. . . one page at a time.

Everyone who has read The Female of the Species can agree that this is one of the most powerful and important YA books of all time. Mindy McGinnis’s The Female Of The Species is making waves this fall as it sparks thought-provoking conversations and challenges the way our society thinks about women, feminism and rape culture.

Why I Wrote The Female of the Species

By Mindy McGinnis 

I’ve been asked a few times how you write a book about rape without it being too upsetting. To which I say, it should be upsetting. Deeply disturbing, in fact.

I just checked the news before turning off all my connectivity to write this. The top two stories from my local NBC affiliate dealt with rape. The ages of the victims were 10 and 15. The ten year old did not survive. On CNN there was an article about a high school athlete who sexually assaulted two girls while they were unconscious. He received two years probation.

Meanwhile, a man who shot a police dog while robbing a gas station received 45 years in prison.
I know it’s not easy to talk about, read about, hear about. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a reality for many, many girls – and boys too, don’t forget. In the US, one in four girls will be sexually abused before they turn eighteen.

I’m betting you know more than four girls under the age of 18.

When I wrote A MADNESS SO DISCREET I had many people ask me why I would include a subplot about the main character being sexually abused by her father, in a book written for teens. My answer was – and is for THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES as well – because it happens to them.

It happens to them and they need to see themselves reflected in fiction, so that they may process the enormity of their experience in a safe place, free of judgment.

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES is about a lot of things. Rape, vengeance, assault, but also friendship, community, and teens with aspirations beyond their small town. It won’t be an easy read, a beach read, or a feel-good read.

But it’s an important read.

The Strand Magazine: Desperately Seeking Nancy Drew

I’m a collector at heart, something that has caused me no small amount of trouble when it comes to books. I started young, maniacally memorizing the order of the Black Stallion series, double-checking that my many-colored Goosebumps books were in the right order, and constantly comparing the facial expressions of the Wakefields to decide which was Elizabeth and which was Jessica on the Sweet Valley Twins covers.

Far and away, the series that gave me the most amount of anxiety was my Nancy Drew Grosset & Dunlap editions. There was no Internet to access an amazing amount of information such as link: http://www.series-books.com/nancydrew/formats.html) to help me decode the printings, editions, and reprints. Yes, I probably could have asked a librarian or a bookseller for some help but… I fancied I was a bit of a sleuth myself

You could frequently find me on the floor of my local library or bookstore (R.I.P. Waldenbooks) underneath that ever-present row of yellow spines, copying down the titles on the back and making checkmarks next to the ones I had or didn’t have, depending on my mood and how much money was in my pocket. By the time I was in middle school, I felt I had the Nancy Drew issue mostly under control.

And then this happened. 

Yes, it was an updated Nancy Drew, with everyone wearing puffy clothes and sweater vests. This plagued me from 1986 onward, with a whopping 124 books to collect. I would occasionally drift away from the goal, then find a title I’d never heard of taunting me from the library shelf, usually with an obscenely high number (#111??!?! How did that happen? I just found #23!) By 1997, Nancy was using computers to solve mysteries— and so was I.

 Lists! Pictures! Titles in chronological order! The Internet was my friend… but unfortunately, Nancy didn’t rank for me anymore. I was going to college. My paperbacks couldn’t go with me and Mom was interpreting “empty nest” literally, and so I did some shelf sweeping.

 But not my yellow Nancy Drews, some of which were my mom’s.

So my books traveled with me, from college to first home, to second home. I don’t have a pristine book collection, by any means. They were dumped, dropped, stacked, and moved more times than I can count. All of my books are well loved, with cracked spines, yellowed pages, dirty thumb smudges, and curled corners. A true book collector might look at what I have and see nothing more than lost value. But a book lover would see what I do: books that have been loved, read, eaten over, cried with, and sweated on into the long hours of the night back when I didn’t have air conditioning and my reading lamp produced real, palpable heat.

I prefer them that way. My books have been read, multiple times. And that’s what they are for, to be interacted with and touched. I love my banged-up books, and The Secret of the Old Clock ranks highly as one of the most abused, since I was determined to one day read the entire series, starting with the first, straight through to the end. But I always lost my steam somewhere along the way, distracted by some other series or a new release. So The Secret of the Old Clock suffered many re-readings and handlings… whereas I’m pretty sure my copy of The Mystery of the Fire Dragon has never been cracked.

 I still have them, and yes, those gaps of missing books in my series still mock me. Someday I need to use eBay to fill those holes, but where’s the fun in that? I may have outgrown Nancy but a bit of her is still lurking inside, sending me to the easily spotted “yellow shelf” whenever I wander into a used bookstore.

And then I’m a kid again, staring at the artwork and getting some delicious chills from the cover of The Message in the Hollow Oak and The Mystery of the Moss-Covered Mansion. And of course, I flip the book over and scan the titles, trying to remember which ones I don’t have… and which ones I do.

Rural Poverty and The Female of The Species by Mindy McGinnis

Sometimes, it is indeed a small world after all. Shortly after moving to Texas, I learned that author Mindy McGinnis lived just 10 minutes from the very library I had spent the last 10 years working at in the state of Ohio. This town was my home, the place where my children were born. It was also, at the time, the county with the highest poverty rate in all of Ohio.

So while there were many aspects about Mindy McGinnis’ THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES that stood out to me, one that stood out most vividly is the depiction of rural poverty. THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES is set in a small, Midwestern town that is ravished by poverty and in my mind’s eye I could picture the very places around this small town that I thought Mindy might be talking about.

And while all poverty is bad, each type of poverty has its unique challenges. For example, one of the greatest challenges in rural poverty is transportation. Rural communities are often spread out and don’t have public transportation systems, which makes things like going to a grocery story or doctor’s appointment quite challenging. There are usually fewer options in rural communities, and less options means less competition and less price choices.

Although I currently live in Texas, I work in a public library in another rural Ohio community that is also fighting high poverty. Many of my patrons don’t have the money to buy current technology, and even if they did have the money the truth is, there are still parts of my community that have no providers offering wireless or DSL Internet. Like many other places experiences high rural poverty rates, drug use and drug related deaths are reaching epidemic proportions. So as I mentioned, THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES resonated with me in ways that I can not even begin to describe.

Today, I am honored to host author Mindy McGinni who talks about rural poverty and the part it plays in her newest release, THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES.

The Female of the Species addresses many issues within its pages; rape culture and vigilante justice being the most prevalent. A quieter issue raises it’s head though, one that is easy to overlook, shadowed as it is by the more controversial topics.

Rural poverty.Much of the time poverty is associated with urban life and that is certainly a truth that cannot go ignored. However, there is another face to poverty, one that looks picturesque. Farms with collapsed barns. Homes where no one lives anymore.

I was born and raised in a rurally impoverished area and now I live and work in one. For fourteen years I have been employed as a library aide at a local school where nearly forty percent of our student body receive free and reduced lunch.

During deer hunting season our attendance list shows double digits of our students are excused for the day to participate… and in most cases it’s not a leisure activity for them. They’re putting much-needed food on the family table.

Food pantry lines are long, faces are pinched, and during the summer months many of our students go without lunch because they depended on the school to provide it. Because it is a sprawling, rural community, people who have to weigh the cost of gas for the drive to the pantry against the food they will get there.

None of the characters in my book suffer the indignity of hunger, because I feel it’s an issue that deserves more space than there was room for within this particular story. But hunger breeds a specific type of desperation that calls for an escape, and this can open the door to darker things.

Upper and middle classes know the need for a vacation. We all feel the cycle of our daily lives triggering stress, causing irritation and anger, and even pushing us towards exhaustion. So we take a “mental health day,” call off work for little or no reason, or we cash in those vacation days and just “get away from it all.”

We have that luxury.

Many of the jobs available to the working poor pay by the hour, and to take a day off means to take a pay cut – one that the budget doesn’t allow for. Vacation time may be possible, but the idea of affording to actually leave is laughable. Escapes from reality are sometimes sought not in a getaway, but in drug use.

There is a major heroin epidemic in my area. We have lost students in my small school district to it. One Twitter user already thanked me for mentioning the epidemic in The Female of the Species, saying that she hopes it may draw more attention to the issue. If it doesn’t, this should; last weekend alone multiple people OD’d, two of them in a mini-van with a four year old.

It’s easy to point fingers, lay blame, criticize and judge. What kind of people do this?

The desperate. The addicted. The hopeless.

Such descriptions aren’t solely the realm of the poor, but there are correlations that can’t be denied.

On my worst days – and we all have bad ones, no matter who we are – I can get upset, feel like giving up or just ducking out of reality for awhile. Stress is present in all our lives, no matter our socioeconomic standing.

But on these days I remind myself that I have food. I have clothes. I have a working car that I can drive to my next school visit, library appearance, or book club talk. I can fill the gas tank and go to work without having to worry about paying for that stop.

The small luxuries of our lives are something that most of us take for granted until they are taken away from us – a cracked phone that doesn’t work, the car being in this shop for a few days, the heat and electric always being on.

When you do have one of those days, think about those who can’t afford a phone at all, and are literally holding their cars together with duct tape. In the past I’ve had students that heat their home with the kitchen stove, and the children sleep with the pets to share body heat.

Spare a thought for them on your bad days, and if you can spare more than that, please do.

On Rape Culture

In preparing to do a guest post about rape culture, I wondered what I had to say that could add to the conversation. The subject has been covered, and well, by others. So I told myself to wait for a couple of days, and something would come up.

I didn't mean for my thoughts to be taken literally.

Last week was our county fair. It's been hot and dry here. Thousands of cars and pairs of feet had stirred up a dust cloud, and as I was leaving the grounds I saw a minivan coated in a fine film of dirt that someone had decided to treat as a canvas. The ubiquitous dick and balls drawing was everywhere, along with FUCK ME scrawled multiple times.

I watched people walk past it, some pointing and laughing, some shaking their heads. Parents covered their children's eyes and rolled their own. But nobody did the one thing that made the most sense.

Nobody erased it.

There we were in a public place with multiple erect, demanding penises in clear view of anyone who walked past, along with a directive to perform a sexual act on it. And no one was willing to make it go away with a swipe of their forearm. Sure, it can be argued that they didn't want to touch someone else's personal property, but I wonder if such passivity sends the message that the dicks had a right to be there, or in the least, are an acceptable background in our culture, one deserving only of an eye roll and a quicker step to put it behind you.

Do I think people are being actively harmed by dicks drawn on dirty cars? I don't know. As for the FUCK ME, I can't argue against bad language without painting myself a hypocrite, as I have a sailor's mouth. It's the passivity that bothers me, the acceptance of a situation that young girls will see a dick as soon as they are old enough to open their eyes in public - and will never stop seeing them.

I did the only thing I thought I could do. I tucked my hand in my shirt sleeve and wiped the van free, uncovering a sticker family on the back, two little girls bringing up the rear. 

So that's two that didn't have to see a dick.

It's a start.

Down The Research Rabbit Hole

My muse is fickle and unreliable, which is really frustrating for me because I’m the type of person that is constantly busy. I knit while watching TV because being still is not in my body’s repertoire. So when Miss Muse shuts down for a little bit, I tend to get frustrated with her, and she usually responds by dumping three to four great concepts into my lap at once, declares her job done, and disappears again.

She pulled this trick on me in 2013 when the barren waste land that had formerly housed my inspiration suddenly said, “Hey, you should write a Victorian Gothic novel set in an insane asylum about a girl who assists a criminal psychologist in catching killers. Also, she has to pretend to be lobotomized in order to escape her abusive father. That should be easy to deliver, ta-ta.”

To which I said, “Hey, thanks muse. Nice. How do I go about doing that?” But she didn’t answer because she’d already jetted off to wherever she goes when not spouting difficult-to-execute concepts at me. But I already knew the answer: research. I needed to know a lot of things in order to even come close to doing this the right way.

How did insane asylums operate in the 1890’s? How was criminal psychology executed then? How often was it right? Was the science accurate enough that a well-trained person could conceivably have caught a killer based on what they knew about the criminal mind at the time? How were lobotomies performed?

OOPS—snag. Lobotomies weren’t a medical practice in 1890. That’s a pretty huge roadblock for me since the plot hinged on my main character being (supposedly) lobotomized. Shifting the timeframe to 1936, when the first lobotomy was performed in the US, would screw up my plot even more. So instead I needed a feasible situation where a doctor could be aware of the benefits of a lobotomy-like procedure, without…you know…actually calling it a lobotomy. This train of thought ended with me reading this book, and this one. Yes, I was really popular on public transit.

I also read this book, and this book, this one (it has pictures—ouch), and to get the other side of that story, this one. And finally a slightly more relaxing one so that I was familiar with my setting. Then just to be thorough, I took a trip to the asylum where the book is set because I’m a big fan of knowing what the hell I’m talking about.

A year after Miss Disappearing Muse dropped the concept on me, I figured I knew enough to actually start writing the book. Except, no. This was the first time I’d ever attempted to write a historical, and because I despise anachronisms I had to get things as correct as I possibly could. From what kind of lighting was in the room my character waked into (Fire? Gas? Electrical?) to what she was wearing, to the question of whether she was working side by side with “policemen,” “cops,” or “constables,” I found myself in the position of not being able to finish most sentences without a quick fact check.

It was painful, torturous writing – and not only because of what I put the characters through. To make thing worse, I’d spent so much time researching that I’d painted myself into a pretty serious corner in terms of deadlines. I won’t tell you how quickly I wrote MADNESS because you’ll question my sanity, but I will tell you I gained almost fifteen pounds doing it because I basically shut myself in my room and wrote while slamming cheeseburgers. At one point I would’ve accepted a catheter just to get the job done more effectively.

A Madness So Discreet released yesterday, and I’m pretty proud of it. It marks a genre departure from my earlier works—Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust are post-apoc survival—but not a departure from what I do best. Which apparently is write rather stomach-churning scenarios while eating.

Told you I’m a multi-tasker.

10 Awesome Authors Share Their Stories on YA Open Mic

Mindy McGinnis, author of A Madness So Discreet

For many people, creativity and depression go hand in hand. Becoming a published writer has been an interesting experience in so many ways, but the most touching is meeting people who get it. I’ve never been ashamed of dealing with depression, but in writing communities I have the support of people who know that a casual “cheer up,” or teasing “get out of the wrong side of the bed today?” can do much more damage than good. If it were as simple as cheering up, believe me, I’d do it, and if I could pinpoint the cause to something such as the geographical location of where I wake up, I’d change it.

Much like the inspiration for our books or songs, most creatives can’t tell you where our depression comes from. The only source is the jumble of chemicals in our brain that mixed badly on any given day, a toxic soup we can’t easily toss out to whip up a new batch. The writing community has been invaluable to me in so many ways, both as a support group for mental illness and to help maneuver the ups and downs of a forever undulating industry that, in some ways, feeds the beast.

But in the end my creativity and depression feed off each other. So I wouldn’t trade it—or the community I’ve found.

It's Hard to Write When You Can't Un-See Your Nose

Writers will find any reason at all to procrastinate. The house needs cleaned. The litter needs scooped. The laundry needs folded. My bladder needs emptied. I can't unsee my nose. 

Yes, really. 

It takes very little to get us off task, and when it's the shadow of your own proboscis popping up in your peripheral, it's unshakable. The house will be clean eventually. Same with litter and laundry. My bladder refills, but that's a pretty quick fix. But my nose is just kind of there, and once I've seen it I can't get it out of my mind - or my way. 

I write in bed, lying down, with my laptop propped up against my legs, and three pillows stacked under my head because I demand good altitude. It's the perfect scenario for my nose to ambush whatever word count goal I have. I usually aim for 1,000 words a day (that's just about 5 pages), and the nose usually pops up to remind me that it exists right around the halfway mark. 

And then it's a struggle. Cutting it off is obviously not an option. Ignoring it doesn't work either because it's already been brought to my attention and I'm the kind of person that pounds her problems down into the ground, and hitting myself in the face will only make my nose swell and therefore become a larger object I need to unsee. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad I have a nose. It's done a lot of good things for me over the years, and I even kind of like it in the aesthetic sense. (Although I would warn anyone against just sitting and critiquing your own nose in the mirror - eventually you lose perspective and it just looks horrendous. The same is true of your tongue. Never inspect your tongue. It moves of its own volition and will have you questioning whether or not you're in charge of it in about five minutes.) 

So what's a poor writer to do when your nose is in the way? 

The big thing is to remember that your nose has been there all day, and more than likely you probably were seeing it and didn't realize it because you had other things going on. In a lot of ways, unseeing your nose is the best gauge of how good the pages you just cranked out are. If I didn't notice the nose, it's because I was totally into what I was writing. If my nose was a big part of the evening, I probably need to take a hard look at the pages I wrote. 

A no-nose night is a good night. Here's to those.

BookShelfies With Mindy McGinnis!

When Epic Reads asked me to take a Bookshelfie I was immediately flummoxed because this meant I had to pick which bookshelf to use. I work in a library, and I come home to a library. Years of impulse buys, yard sales, library benefits, ARCS and friends-who-write-really-good-books-that-I-need-more-that-one-copy-of has turned my house into a living area / storage facility. I am contractually bound to die there, because moving would be a gargantuan feat.

So.. which shelf? Well, I picked two of my five (three are blocked by books stacked on the floor) and also a couple of shots of my TBR pile. There may or may not a be a nightstand under there somewhere.
How do I organize? Er… maybe I should’ve taken a shelfie from work instead of home.

You can see on my Short Shelf that I made an attempt to keep my James Michener together, but he ended up next to Stieg Larsson and S.E. Hinton, which might make for a great romcom, but doesn’t carry much logic shelf wise.

On my Tall Shelf it looks like I managed to put Edith Wharton and Barbara Kingsolver together, which makes its own kind of sense, but Lady Chatterley’s Lover is also hanging out next to The Gates of the Alamo, plus I have no idea what is right over my head because I didn’t even put them spine-out. I also spot a book about how to speak Latin (forgot I had that) and it seems my Complete Shakespeare might be about to take a tumble off the top. I should probably go home and rescue Will.

Oh… the TBR Pile. We have a such a love / hate relationship. You keep telling me you need more attention and I keep saying I need time. One day I’ll be taller than you and we’ll work out a good snuggle height.
And my only tip on reducing the TBR pile is – take the cat off the top.

How To Survive The Apocalpyse While Also Road Tripping

When I sat down to write a companion novel to Not A Drop To Drink, I was a little flummoxed. I’d always intended it to stand alone, and I’d said what I had to say within the confines of that first book. Inspiration can be tricky, but a seed was planted when I considered the fact that DRINK takes place in a tiny space, only a few square miles. What does the rest of the country look like? And what would it take to drag Lynn away from from her beloved pond?

I knew only one thing was more important to her than the pond – Lucy. But… a post-apocalyptic road trip with a little kid? No way. I try not to make my characters do anything I wouldn’t be willing to do myself, so I ix nayed that thought – and another grew in its place. What if Lucy isn’t a little kid anymore, what would she be like as a teen? And what would Lynn be like as an adult?

Answer: A smartass and a badass.

What a fun pair to hit the road with.

Without too many spoilers, I’ll tell you that they set out from Ohio because the pond is no longer safe, and Lucy’s safety is threatened. With home behind them and the horizon very far away, their feet get tired, their skin gets burned, and their personalities find ways to meld and jar – just like any road trip with family.
Except, most of us don’t have to pack weaponry alongside our sunscreen.
 

5 Things to Pack for the Post-Apocalyptic Road Trip

 
1) Good shoes. Got a blister? awww…. Except, yeah, that could actually become a huge problem when it gets infected, you get gangrene, and your foot falls off.

2) Ye Old Witching Stick. You’ll need this. Find one that looks like the flux capacitor and you’re good.

3) A map. Yes, like a paper one. There’s not an app for that anymore. But you should definitely use THIS MAP.

4) Honey. Wait, what? Yes, it has healing properties that will come in handy when you get, you know… shot.

5) Extra clothes. Because you’re going to smell. Really bad. And you might use that extra t-shirt for sopping up blood. Ahem.

 

Why Yes, Orwell Would Enjoy This

A lot of people ask me how I came up with the idea for NOT A DROP TO DRINK. The scary answer is that I watched a documentary. The scarier answer is that was in 2010, and here in 2014 all I have to do is turn on the news.

Yep. A scant four years after watching a documentary titled Blue Gold which sent me to the ceiling and spawned awkward ice-breaking conversations from yours truly, most people know exactly what I’m talking about whenever I use the word water, followed by the panic-inducing words like crisis, situation, or scarcity.

California is staring down a mega-drought that could last into the next generation. The Colorado River appears to be drying up and the Southwest is depreciating underwater aquifers at a rate that they can never recover from. And that’s all gleaned from one article.

Recently in my home state of Ohio, half a million people lost their water when poisonous algae in Lake Erie made theirs taps unsafe. Ohio residents drove across the Midwest to purchase water, filling their carts Michigan and turning around to drive over 200 miles back home. And in this case, the Wolverines let the Buckeyes have their water because they had some to spare.

But what if they didn’t?

That’s the world of NOT A DROP TO DRINK, and by extension, IN A HANDFUL OF DUST. A world where the one thing that you and every person you care for will die without in three days, is scarce.

Does that make you think twice about picking up the book?

Then you should probably skip the news, too.

Read Like A Writer

So, you've got an absolutely fantastic idea to write a romance set during the potato famine in Ireland. Maybe you just like the accent, or are drawn to rolling green hills, but the idea is stuck in your head and you can't get it out. So what's stopping you?

Maybe the fact that the accent and rolling green hills is the sum of what you know on the topic?

I don't think the first step is buying a plane ticket. I'm a thorough researcher and I like to exhibit that in my writing, but I don't start by traveling internationally or finding out the bacterial origination of the black rot that wiped out the potatoes in Ireland all those years ago.

Because that's not what I need to know in order to write this story.

I love non-fiction, but reading a dense book (or two) about the immigration statistics and cultural backlash that arose from the potato famine probably isn't going to fire a lot of creative synapses in the brain. It definitely can inform the story, but you're still on square one and drowning this little seed of an idea with 200 gallons of water isn't the best way to nurture it at the outset.

My advice? Go to the kids section of your library or bookstore. Find a very basic book about the topic you want to learn about in order to start this story. Right now your seed needs simple building blocks of life to get a good start—water, sunlight, soil. It's the Who? What? Where? When? of your story, and a non-fiction book written for children will point you in the right direction without the unnecessary equivalent of chemicals and growth additive type facts that are just going to burn the tender roots of your seedling idea and make your brain switch off.

In A World Without Water

The seed that grew into Not a Drop to Drink was planted nearly fifteen years ago as I sat through a required geology class in order to get my liberal arts degree. Yes, rocks are important. Yes, air is nice. I didn’t expect this class to rattle me, but I’ve found that inspiration usually strikes out of nowhere.

Even though I was bored, I’m a good girl and I did all the required reading. One chapter in particular sat me back on my ass—hard. It was about aquifer depletion, and you’ll notice that the article I linked to is from July. Yep, it’s even more of a problem today than it was when it first scared the crap out of me.
It wasn’t aliens, velociraptors, demons, or even a natural disaster that had my attention. It was something very simple—there were too many people and not enough water. I sat through the next class waiting for someone to jump up and say, “Oh my God! Did anyone else go out and buy a bunch of bottled water yesterday!??!” But that didn’t happen.

It seemed that I was the only one absolutely terrified by my geology book.

A few years ago the fear was reawakened when I watched a documentary called Blue Gold. The numbers hadn’t improved. There were still too many people and not enough water. The seed that had been planted in college was rejuvenated. I went to bed absurdly thankful for the small pond in my backyard.
That night I dreamed about teaching a young girl how to operate a rifle so that we could defend our water source. I woke up and thought, “Hey . . . I wrote a book in my head just now.” The book made the journey from my head to paper, and soon it will get to travel from paper (or screens) into your heads. Just keep a glass of water nearby while reading. . . . Early reviewers claim that paranoia made them thirsty.

How likely is it that the world of Not a Drop to Drink could happen? Despite the A in my one geology class, I really don’t know. But keep in mind while reading this piece of fiction that the inspiration came from a college textbook and a documentary.

Also, buy bottled water.

—
 

5 Quick Tips for Surviving in the World of Not a Drop to Drink

1) Purify your water! Cholera is not a pleasant way to die, plus you’ll smell like diarrhea in the afterlife. Be familiar with the SODIS method. No boiling, no chemicals—let the sun’s UVA rays work for you.

2) Grow your own food! Seeds want to turn into plants. Stick them in the ground and stand back.

3) Can it! Even if you aren’t expecting to be killed any day, eating your garden vegetables in the dead of winter is incredibly satisfying.  The Ball Blue Book is a must have and appropriate for beginners.

4) Girls, want to even out your chances? Yes, being a chick is hard; it’s even harder in a lawless land. Wear Carhartts to hide your body type and jam your hair up in a hat for a quick gender disguise. Walk with confidence. You look like a dude now.

5) Practice with flint! It’s not as hard as you think, but it’s also not as easy as it looks. Sure, you can get a book of matches at any restaurant or bar for free . . . today.

Fiction Freak: Get Your Debut On

There are two different reactions to telling someone you write for a living. They are:

1) Wow. I'd love to sit at home all day and get paid to make stuff up.

2) OMG. That's amazing. How do you DO that? I can't even write two pages!!

The truth is somewhere in between, nestled snugly between the impossible and the improbable. Yes, it is incredibly hard to put word after word in a sensible, aesthetically pleasing manner over 60,000 times (or over 100,00 times, depending on your word count). But I have to admit that I totally have days where I sit down in front of the laptop and say to myself, "Dude. You get paid to tell stories about things that never happened to people that don't exist. That is soooo cool."

But - I have to actually sit down and DO IT first.

Welcome to every writer's worst enemy - themselves. 

Procrastination is the the monster under my bed, and he's got nasty sharp teeth. Actually that's a lie - those teeth aren't sharp at all. They're very small and have rounded edges. They don't slash into me, they grind me down over the course of the day and tell me I need to do the dishes, mow the yard, take a shower (Ok, that one is important), read, watch TV or (gasp) take a nap. Those teeth wear at my motivation and tell me it's OK, I can add to the word count tomorrow when the dishes are done and yard is mowed and I don't smell bad anymore.

And I can, technically. But what about that little spark of motivation that is unique to today? The one that might fire a scene in my pantster brain that won't have a chance to exist tomorrow, because tomorrow's spark of motivation is it's own individual flame, one that wants to do something else entirely and completely neglects yesterday's inspiration?

I remind myself of this every time I think about that nap - even if it's well-deserved. My non-events happening to people that don't exist might ACTUALLY never happen if I don't make use of the synapse that is firing today, right now, in this moment. I'm not perfect - I cave to the temptation of my nap, or a longer shower than usual fairly often. And there's a little scene that dies every time I do.

So yes, there is that space in between the amazingly easy job of getting paid to write, and the impossible task of ACTUALLY doing it. I reside somewhere in there, dodging some responsibilities while accepting others, and performing CPR on yesterday's ideas when I indulge myself in a little procrastination.

Banned Books Month: When Rape Becomes a Bad Word

In addition to being a YA author, I’m also a librarian in a public high school. In that role I have carefully taped back together multiple much-loved copies of SPEAK by Laurie Halse Anderson. When a copy is so tattered that it can’t remain in circulation anymore, I toss it out on our plentiful Free Books table, and it quickly, quietly disappears despite its ragged condition. In my tiny high school that graduates under 100 students each year, we have 10 copies of SPEAK. Yet we can’t keep it on the shelves.

This is not only because it circulates widely, but also because I unfailingly have a few “walk away” from the library without being checked out. And I don’t mind. If a kid needs to read a book about rape but is too embarrassed to come up to the desk with it, I understand. I’ll buy another one.

But the fact that they don’t feel like they should be reading it, or even worse – that they’re ashamed to be reading it – bothers me greatly. In a sense, it’s directly in opposition to what the book is about. These girls (and boys!) shouldn’t feel awkward about wanting or needing to read an important book about a social condition. If it were about starvation, shop-lifting, or drinking, they wouldn’t respond in this way.

Katherine Tegan Books, September 2013.

Sadly, they’ve been taught that rape is a bad word. When they come up to the desk asking for books on the topic, they drop their voices, blush, whisper, or even talk around the word because it’s too difficult for them to pronounce the one simple syllable. SPEAK is about exactly the opposite – they should be able to say it, loudly and confidently, accusingly or sobbing, in whatever way they can squeeze it past their throats. It needs to be said.

Despite being banned in some places, SPEAK continues to be a cornerstone in my library, and many others. I always take the opportunity to tell the kid on the other side of the desk when they’re stumbling through their request that it’s OK – you can say it.

And if that means something to them on multiple levels, SPEAK just opened up the conversation.

Remembering the Challenger

I was only in kindergarten when the Challenger exploded, but I remember it clearly because it was my first experience of chaos. 

When you're five, you believe that adults know everything, control everything, and can fix anything. I got off the bus on January 28, 1986 to find my mother crying, which was shocking enough on its own. The worst thing my child-brain could conceive of was that one of our pets had died, but she explained what had happened over my snack.

I remember what kind of jelly was on my PB&J. I remember what my juice box looked like. I remember that my tiny tummy folded up on itself and refused to eat anything else. 

I suddenly understood that adults could die. Even worse, a teacher - a type of adult I thought of as being super-human - was just as susceptible to a random accident as anyone else. I peeked at the TV while the Challenger exploded over and over, at a complete loss to wrap my thoughts around what had happened. There was nothing to recover, no one to save. Nobody could do anything to help.

For the longest time this is what space meant to me - danger, chaos and helplessness. I couldn't believe that anyone would ever try to go into space again, after seeing the shuttle explode.

But people did... and my perception of space began to change. As I grew older it represented amazing courage and human ingenuity. It meant that there were people brave enough to strap themselves onto a rocket in the name of science, secure in the knowledge that the people who had built it were confident that it was safe.

I'm still never going to get on a shuttle, I admit. Even if that option were open to me, my fear of heights has ruled space travel out. I think the experience of seeing our planet from space would be so surreal that my mind couldn't grasp it in any case, and so I'll settle for subscribing to National Geographic...

... until we use up all our freshwater and have to go find another blue planet.

Inspired Openings: The Truth about Opening a Novel with Life or Death

As writers there’s nothing more terrifying than File>New Document - except maybe that big white space underneath the words “Chapter One.” Filling that space with something meaningful, gripping, and full of voice will be our biggest challenge, much greater than finally being able to type “The End.”

So how do we do that? There is no magic formula or easy route that any writer can point another one to for instant success. But what I can do is tell you what I’ve done wrong in the past, and some of the most common well-intended trip-ups I see.

InstaAction – We’ve all been told that we need to grab the reader’s attention with our first line. That doesn’t mean you squeeze their trachea shut and hold tight. Way too often writers take opening action so seriously that the reader is instantly dropped into a life or death situation. And while that’s definitely action, the question remains – is it compelling? 

Think for a second about flipping through channels. In any given moment you can probably land on a handful of scenes where someone is dying, someone is being killed, or violence is being threatened. Do you care? Do you instantly stop on every single scene just to see if the character is going to make it? Um… probably not, or else you’d still be sitting in front of your TV right now, having wet your pants and died of dehydration.

Now think about your favorite character in your favorite show. Is Dexter on his own table? Does someone have a gun to Daryl’s head in The Walking Dead? Did you just grab the arm of the person next to you and say, “Dear God, go back to that!! I have to know what happens!!” And why is that? Because you care about the characters, you’re invested in them before we get to this point in the narrative.

Opening with a character that nobody cares about yet in a life or death situation doesn’t mean much.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time – Wow! You’ve got a stellar opening that cuts to the chase and grabs your reader right away. It’s snappy! It’s original! It’s… the beginning of Chapter Three. 

I can’t tell you how often a merciless self-edit has shown me that I wrote two chapters worth of not-so-helpful drivel before I got to the point. Sometimes our beginnings are already written, but not located in the right place. Take a hard look at your first 10-20 pages and see if you need them, then look at page 21 and see what it has to offer.

The opening for NOT A DROP TO DRINK worked that way. Even though my opening line remained the same from first draft to copyedits, (Lynn was nine the first time she killed to defend the pond) everything following went through some pretty serious surgery. The final version of my opening has cut and pastes from as far forward as Chapter Four, with bits of Chapters Two and Three sprinkled in, then I passed through with a narrative needle to stitch it all back together.

My favorite opening lines:

I’m sharing three of my favorite openings. They encapsulate voice and grab me. I want to know what the heck is going to happen next. 

The first thing you find out when yer dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say. – THE KNIFE OF NEVER LETTING GO by Patrick Ness (Candlewick, 2008).

I've buried nearly everyone I love. – DUALED by Elsie Chapman (Random House, February 26, 2013).

Simon Glass was easy to hate. I never knew exactly why, there was too much to pick from. I guess, really, we each hated him for a different reason, but we didn’t realize it until the day we killed him. – SHATTERING GLASS by Gail Giles (Simon Pulse, 2003).