Dear Lovely Universe: A Real Look Behind the Success of Mindy McGinnis

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In this episode, I sit down with Mindy McGinnis who is a writer, published author, and podcaster to discuss what really happened behind the curtains of her writing career and how she got to where she is now. This episode is for you if you are an aspiring writer, podcaster, business aspiring/owner, creator, etc that is taking the route of personally making something of yourself.

Personally, I really enjoyed this conversation with Mindy. I resonated with what she said a lot, especially when she talked about how on this path if you don’t make it the only person who is really going to get disappointed is you. A lot of other people can cheer you on, but whether you fail or make it doesn’t affect them at all. I really hope that you find the time to listen to this episode because I think you will benefit from it. This description really doesn’t do the episode enough justice.

In this episode, we discuss: 

  • What self-starting means to Mindy and her real-life experience. 

  • Advice that she has for writers and entrepreneurs. (Mindy said that she believes anyone can be a writer. Of course, given that you put in the work.)

  • What she would like to say to people who ask themselves, “Why am I this way?”.

  • Why Mindy thinks it is important to persevere and accept your reality.

  • Where her inspiration for writing comes from.

  • And much more!

In

Author Chat with Mindy McGinnis

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YABC:  What gave you the inspiration to write this book?

I'm an avid hiker and ended up in a very remote Pennsylvania forest. I had an opinion about whether or not we should take a spur of the trail, and the person I was with had a different perspective. I didn't think we could get the spur in before night fell. He definitely thought we could. We ended up losing light fast, in an unfamiliar, extremely remote area, with dying flashlight batteries and a trail about as wide as your hand. We made it out around 10 PM and found the car, but there were some dark moments, including the idea that we might be spending the night out there, with no gear for that. I never thought we might actually get LOST, but it was a possibility. He was apologetic about the bad decision, and I told him I was okay with it, because I got an idea for a book out of the ordeal. 

YABC: Who is your favorite character in the book?

This is a great question because my main character, Ashley, is alone for 90% of the book. She's lost in the woods, and as a writer, there's no one for her to talk to, bounce ideas off of, or interact with at all. You get to know your character really well when it's just the two of you. In the past, people have asked me which of my characters is most like me, in real life. The answer used to be Brooke, from This Darkness Mine. Now, it's Ashley. She is very much me, in a lot of ways.

YABC: What scene in the book are you most proud of, and why?

Hmmm.... let's just say there's a moment of self-surgery that made me very happy, on a visceral level.

YABC: What do you like most about the cover of the book?

The cover is fantastic, because it carries all the elements of the Smoky Mountains... but then if you step back and look at it, it's actually a Rohrschach. And there's a skull in there!

YABC:  What’s up next for you?

I'm very excited about my release coming in 2021, The Initial Insult, which blends retellings of Edgar Allan Poe stories in a contemporary Appalachian setting. You can add it on Goodreads, here: https://www.goodreads.com/…/show/49200324-the-initial-insult

YABC: Which character gave you the most trouble when writing your latest book?

The most trouble for this book was the simple fact that Ashley is alone for 90% of the time. Not only that, but there are only so many things you can throw at someone when they are lost in the woods - injury, weather, animals, natural disaster. That's really it. So it's hard to keep things interesting and lively, when really what you're doing is narrating someone walking by themselves for 10 days. 

YABC: What would you say is your superpower?

Animals love me. Animals and babies. I will draw them all to me one day, and everyone else will die of loneliness.

YABC: Is there an organization or cause that is close to your heart?

I support a wildlife rehabilitation center that is near where I live. They are constantly providing medical care for injured wildlife, and releasing them back into their home environment after healing. http://wildlifehaven.tripod.com/

Source: https://www.yabookscentral.com/blog/author...
In

Frolic Interview

Note From Frolic: Our resident YA expert Aurora Dominguez got the opportunity to interview author Mindy McGinnis and ask her five(ish) questions. Mindy’s novel ‘Be Not Far From Me‘ is out March 3rd!]

What was your inspiration behind your most recent novel?

I am an avid hiker, and often take vacations in places where I can get some hiking in. One such vacation was near a particularly dense Pennsylvania forest. The person I was with thought we could get a spur of the trail in before darkness fell. I didn’t think we could, and said so, but curiosity outweighed caution and we tried it. Hours later, with no overnight packs and failing phone batteries, we were in pitch black with a trail as wide as my hand, mostly searching for faded blazes on trees to mark our way. It was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. We did break out onto the trailhead around 11 PM. And no, I didn’t rub it in that I had been right about that spur. I was too grateful that we’d made it back to our car… and that a novel had been born while we wandered. But me being right about the spur totally came up the next day.

What character do you most relate to and why?

People ask me often what character of mine I’m most like. Ashley is definitely the answer. I grew up pretty hardscrabble, and a lot of the stories from her childhood are only slightly adapted from my own experiences.

Please describe the content of your latest book and what can readers expect from the read.

I pitch Be Not Far From Me as “drunk Hatchet, with a girl.” That pretty much sums it up. You can expect an angry, female Gary Paulsen vibe.

What’s next for you in the book world?

I’m very excited for my 2021 release, The Initial Insult, which blends retellings of Edgar Allan Poe stories in a contemporary Appalachian Ohio setting.

Who is your favorite writer right now and why?

I don’t tend to have favorite writers. I will pick up anything and give it a shot. I will say that anything by Tiffany D. Jackson has my vote!

Source: https://frolic.media/mindy-mcginnis-you-ca...
In

Behind the Book Jacket

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By Grace S. , West Jefferson HS Student

Author, podcaster, book saleswoman, and overall fascinating person Mindy McGinnis visited our school on October 24th, 2019. Media Specialist, Mrs. Kearns, scheduled her to come and give 50-minute talks to the middle school and high school about her novels.

Because of this, we all sat in on her presentation. Anybody can google her. I am interested in the discrete parts of her; the person she is behind the jacket photo. I had the opportunity to interview her in between sessions. We talked for 31 minutes about canned tomatoes, meat processing plants, and lobotomies.

I sat with Mindy and my best friend, Cory Ratcliff, at the first round table in the library waiting for Mrs. Kearns to get back from her lunch run. Once she got back, the questions started. Throughout the interview, kids interrupted with books for her to sign and questions about how to make their writing better. She obliged everyone.

First we talked about emotions. Since her books tend to cause so many people cry, I needed to know if she cries when she reads books or watches movies. She said she does, “especially if it’s about dogs,” and that she doesn’t have “a problem with getting completely emotionally invested into something.”

Fall is easily her favorite season. She enjoys the weather, the breeze, and the noises. In true author fashion, she launched into a descriptive rant about her love of the autumnal noises. “Fall has so many sounds. The dead leaves skittering, but also corn, so when the corn is dry, oh my gosh, those noises that it makes. It’s very special and very specific to corn,” said McGinnis. “All of those things, cicadas, bugs...Just even the bugs, everything is different in the fall. There is something about it. It gets me every time. I love it.”

Another thing she loves about the fall is the harvesting season. She is a farmer’s daughter, so fall has been a big farming season for her whole life. Panic is the mindset of the season because there is a narrow window between ripe crops and rotting vegetables that a farmer must straddle. McGinnis has gotten good at walking that fine line. She said, “Controlled chaos is probably one of my organs.”  

Most of her stories take place in Ohio. She does this so that every type of kid can see themselves portrayed in a book. “I just like to write about regular people leading regular lives,” said McGinnis. She had been a librarian for five years before she started writing. She noticed a discrepancy in the socio-economic status of the characters in books and the kids reading them. “All the books that were really popular at the time were very much about rich kids and the sons and daughters of movie stars...Those were the books people were reading, those were the books that the kids liked, and they were all about really rich kids with rich kid problems. Where I’m from, we don’t have rich kid problems. [We have an] eighty percent free and reduced lunch kind of situation. I wanted to write a book that reflected their lives.” And so she wrote Not A Drop to Drink.

Her vocabulary when she speaks is obvious of a writer. She used big words such as “vignette”, “populating”, “burlesque” and “percolating” in our lax conversations. She said her favorite word is “circuitous” which means “round and round and round”. 

Speaking of favorites, I asked her about her favorite music to listen to. She said she listens to music “all the time”. McGinnis's music taste changes frequently. At the time of this interview, she was listening to music by Caro Emerald. She describes her music as “1920s burlesque music". While that's what she was listening to then, she said that "next week it will be something different." 

McGinnis is only still friends with one person from her high school. She went to a small high school similar to West Jeff and remarked how a lot of friendships made in small towns only exist because of the geography. She notes how that changes in college by saying, “When you go to college, you get to pick your friends. Geography isn’t dictating your friends. And the friends you make in college will be your friends for life. 

Just like friendships, McGinnis said who a person is can also be dictated by geography. “Take me, and raise me in California, and I’m a different person.” She said she likes the Ohio version of herself because she is, “super casual and I’m really laid back and I don’t worry about much...I’m very country and I like being that. It’s who I am. It’s what I enjoy.”

Another thing McGinnis enjoys is being an author. “I love my job...I love being an author, I’m so lucky that I get to do this. It’s just a blessing.” Thankfully she’s had a good payoff; she has won multiple Edgar Awards and has written many poignant novels.

Even though she loves her job, she finds herself falling victim to procrastination. She said one time she defrosted the deep freezer when she needed to revise one of her novels. She jokes, “I was like, ‘This needs to be done, this hasn’t been done in years. Somebody’s got to do this.’”

She recognized that she is lucky because she has achieved her dream. She advises anybody who wants to have a career in the arts to “make that your plan B.” This tough love advice sounds bad, but she concedes, “You have to eat and you have to have a roof over your head and you have to pay your bills. And art, unfortunately, does not do that for 90% of the people that produce it.” That being said, she believes that it is worth it to follow your dreams.

One of the best parts of any Mindy McGinnis novel is the diverse and developed characters. In one of her most popular novels, The Female of the Species, even the “bad” characters still have humanitarian and likable traits, most notably Branley. McGinnis said she didn’t mean to make Branley that human when she first started writing the book. “Branley became a real person and I think it says a lot that it wasn’t my intention. She did it. And that made me think. What was I going to do? I was just going to write a dumb cheerleader? No, she wasn’t going to let that happen.” She creates her characters, but they teach her lessons.

This article physically can’t cover every topic Mindy and I dove into; it would literally be 10,000 words and we would be here for years. Mindy McGinnis is like the cool wine aunt that your mom doesn’t want you to talk to at family events because she speaks too much truth. I would do anything to have her be my aunt. I’m not kidding.

Source: https://jhenry867.wixsite.com/mysite-1/pos...

Real Issues. Real Conversations. An Ohio Humanities Podcast

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SUMMARY

Rachel Claire Hopkin talks with Ohio author Mindy McGinnis about her new book, "Heroine."

SHOW NOTES

In this episode of Ohio Humanities’ Real Issues: Real Conversations podcast, Ohio author Mindy McGinnis talks about her latest YA novel Heroine(Harper Collins, 2019).

Mindy McGinnis is an Ohio-born-and-bred ninth generation farmer and an award-winning author of YA fiction. Mindy’s latest book, Heroine, has been described as “captivating and powerful exploration of the opioid crisis—the deadliest drug epidemic in American history—through the eyes of a college-bound softball star” and a “visceral and necessary novel about addiction, family, friendship, and hope.”    

Beside authoring YA fiction, Mindy also blogs and podcasts about writers and the writing process under the title of  Writer, Writer Pants On Fire.  

Mindy McGinnis is interviewed by folklorist/radio producer Rachel Hopkin

The podcast’s opening and closing music is provided by Sokolovsky Music

Real Issues: Real Conversations is a production of Ohio Humanities, the state-based partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment. This podcast is also made possible, in part, with support from The Ohio State University’s Humanities Institute.

Mindy McGinnis & Her Book HEROINE
Source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/73df3b89
In

Mindy McGinnis on Creating a Snow Globe of Writing Efficiency

Ep. 140

Mindy McGinnis is an Edgar Award-winning novelist who writes across multiple genres, including post-apocalyptic, historical, thriller, contemporary, mystery, and fantasy. While her settings may change, you can always count on Mindy’s books to deliver grit, truth, and an unflinching look at humanity and the world around us.

How Do You Write Podcast: Explore the processes of working writers with bestselling author Rachael Herron. Want tips on how to write the book you long to finish? Here you'll gain insight from other writers on how to get in the chair, tricks to stay in it, and inspiration to get your own words flowing. 

Source: http://howdoyouwrite.net/episodes/140
In

Six Questions: An interview with Mindy McGinnis

1) Do you think that personal experience with mental illness or addiction is necessary to write a book which deals with mental health or addiction?

I think a measure of it is useful, of course. And – if we’re being honest – pretty much all of is have that, either in our own experience or through loved ones. Having never been an addict myself (to substances, anyway), I wanted to be sure that I knew what I was talking about when I wrote this book. Research involved reading thousands upon thousands of pages about addiction, but also talking to counselors and addicts. The best compliments I’ve had for HEROINE is when a recovered addict tells me I got it right.

2) It’s clear that society is facing a massive addiction crisis, particularly when it comes to heroin. How much was your book inspired by that ongoing issue?

I got the idea for writing HEROINE after visiting a school district that had been particularly hard hit by the opioid crisis in southern Ohio. That, combined with my own experiences as a school librarian for fourteen years (and an intense love of softball + respect for female athletes) were the two sticks that struck together to create the spark for the story.

3) More often then not, when we’re dealing with books about young adult and sports, it’s written as a male character; yours obviously has a female lead. Why do you think that is?

I was a YA librarian for 14 years in a public school system. I could count on one hand books that featured female athletes, and needed both hands to count off male authors who only wrote about male athletes. As a former high school athlete who was also a reader, I had to wonder – why the disparity? There’s no real reason. So I set out to plug that hole.

4) I noticed that a few of the reviews noted that the book made readers uncomfortable because of the subject matter. Is that level of discomfort a basic requirement when dealing with a topic this heavy?

It depends entirely on the reader. I’ve written books where people get set on fire, or nine year olds are shooting someone to protect their water source. I don’t pull punches and I don’t shy from rough topics. I show teens using drugs – and liking it – in this book. I’m sure it will make some people uncomfortable. That’s reality. It’s not pretty or nice or kind or comfortable.

5) Your book comes with a trigger warning about how has “realistic descriptions” of opioid use, and there has been a good amount of debate over the subject of trigger warnings in recent years. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why you included one and what your thoughts are on the subject generally.

I’ve never used trigger warnings in any of my books, regardless of the fact they all do feature pretty intense content. For this one, I chose to include a trigger warning because of the honest depictions of drug use. It’s not an after school special with people doing drugs and immediately hating themselves or puking. They do drugs and love how it makes them feel. I didn’t want a recovered addict to read a realistic description of the high of heroin, and miss it enough to relapse.

6) If you could do it again – anything you’d do differently with the book?

Too early to say. I can point to things in my older releases that I would do differently because I have some distance and time has passed since I wrote them. HEROINE is still too fresh to have that perspective.

Source: https://mikeschlossbergauthor.com/2019/05/...

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.


Source: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/taboo-top...

“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.

Source: https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=its-not-n...

YABC Teen Read Week: Mindy McGinnis →

ABC:   What book or books were your go-to choice when you were a teen?

YA as we know it didn't exist when I was a teen, so I went straight from middle grade books to Stephen King. Learned a lot, real fast.

ABC:  What do you love most about the YA genre?

What I love most about writing for teens is the constant possibilities. Adults tend to lead somewhat static lives, usually moving in the same schedule and staying within the same social circles. Teenage live is much more volatile, for the good and the bad.

YABC:   What 3 YA books would you love to recommend to our readers?

MONDAY'S NOT COMING by Tiffany D. Jackson

ANGER IS A GIFT by Mark Oshiro

THE WEIGHT OF FEATHERS by Anne Marie McLemore

Bookaxe Grill the Author: Mindy McGinnis

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRaDITP2sg...

Writer to Writer: An Interview with Author Mindy McGinnis

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Pzmw6wZ_...