Mindy, what was your inspiration for writing THIS DARKNESS MINE?
I went down the rabbit hole of the internet one night and learned about mirror therapy, where inverted images are used to treat itching, pain and discomfort in missing limbs. I began thinking about the issue in a less physical way, as in, what if someone believed they had they wrong heart inside of them? This idea grew and turned into a short story called "Phantom Heart" which is in the anthology titled "Among the Shadows." My fellow editors on that project, Kate Karyus Quinn and Demitria Lunetta, convinced me that there was a novel-length story there.
What do you hope readers will take away from THIS DARKNESS MINE?
That the line of what we think of as "good" and "bad" isn't something you can define by how someone dresses, the social roles they play, or how they behave only when they know someone is watching. It's the core that defines us, and you have to honestly know someone before making that judgement call.
How long or hard was your road to publication? How many books did you write before this one, and how many never got published?
I wrote 4 novels before my 5th, NOT A DROP TO DRINK landed an agent and garnered a publishing deal. Since then I've released it's sequel, IN A HANDFUL OF DUST, the 2015 Edgar Allan Poe winner - A MADNESS SO DISCREET, a rape-revenge vigilante justice story titled THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES, and the first in a fantasy series, GIVEN TO THE SEA. That sounds like a lot of success - and I remind myself that it is - but I wrote for 10 years before acquiring an agent and 3 of those 4 early novels remain unpublished, as well as a few projects I'd love to get off the ground that aren't highly marketable. Achieving publishing doesn't mean everything you produce is automatically green-lighted. Rejection exists at every level.
I recently started a podcast for aspiring writers, hoping to inform authors so that they don't make the same mistakes I did when I was starting out. The podcast is free and can be found here: http://writerwriterpantsonfire.podbean.com/