Natasha Preston on The Island: Writing A Large Cast, and the Time Suck of Social Media

March 6, 2023 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.

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Mindy: We're here with Natasha Preston who has had a really interesting and amazing career. We're gonna be talking about The Island, which is her newest release coming on February 28th. But first, I wanna talk to you specifically about the beginning of your career because you have a very interesting career path in that you got started on Wattpad. And Wattpad was really something that launched you in a pretty big way. I think your name is probably the one that comes up the most whenever people talk about Wattpad and success in that arena. So, if you could talk a little bit about that and how that was so integral to your beginnings.

Natasha: Completely. I didn't even start writing before I found Wattpad. So I wouldn't be here at all today if it wasn't for that. It was about 2010, and I was just scrolling through the app store and I came across Wattpad. So I downloaded it and started just as a reader for quite some time before I decided that actually I have some ideas inside of me as well, and then I started to upload chapters.

Mindy: And Wattpad is one of those things where it really is driven by word of mouth. It's driven by readers really liking and engaging with that content and then telling other readers about it. For me, I really think it is just one of the best examples of true word-of mouth grassroots fan-based readership.

Natasha: Yeah, definitely, and I met a lot of people through Wattpad. Some of them I'm still in contact with now. So you build a lot of friendships as well, and these people recommend you and you recommend them.

Mindy: I know that you had such great success there on that platform. Did you then decide to move out of that realm and look more into the realm of traditional publishing? Or were you doing so well, the agents and editors approached you?

Natasha: My friend, who was also on Wattpad, Kirsty Moseley, she self-published her first book, and she encouraged me to do the same. So I actually self-published first, and then my publisher, Sourcebooks, in the US, they picked up The Cellar. So then they traditionally published that one.

Mindy: Yes, and The Cellar was your first book that came out in the US. Ridiculously popular. So, I was a YA librarian. I worked in a public high school for 14 years. So, The Cellar came out in 2014, and I just remember all of my students were so in love with it. I couldn't keep it on the shelves. Colleen Hoover before TikTok. That's kind of what The Cellar was like, and then your subsequent titles as well. Something else that I wanted to talk to you about was your cover art. In the US, they're very stark, and they're very striking. Very much look like thriller covers almost even for adults. Your covers are amazing, and I think that that has been part of the appeal. Of course, just getting the eye drawn to get people to pick it up. Are your covers the same in the UK?

Natasha: Yeah, they are the same. I love them.

Mindy: Yeah. They are really beautiful. Did that come about through your publishers? Or you had something in mind already? Did they just happen to strike gold the first time?

Natasha: Pretty much gold, yeah. So when it was on Wattpad, I had a flower image on the cover of that one. The characters are renamed after flowers, so it was kind of pretty organic to have a flower theme.

Mindy: It really is. It's perfect. And then your subsequent titles, they match. Your publishers do a great job of branding you. It's kind of like Stephen King or Jodi Picoult's... When you see the cover, I don't even have to see your name to know that it's your book because the covers are so distinctive.

Natasha: Yeah, yeah. They’ve done a phenomenal job of carrying that through.

Mindy: So your next release, your newest release, is The Island. It revolves around 6 teen influencers who have accepted invitations to an all expenses paid trip to a luxury resort and amusement park. And then of course, when they get there things suddenly go quite wrong. I would love to hear more about where you got the idea for this book. I love that you're operating with kind of that closed room mystery in the sense that the room is an entire island and there are rollercoasters on it.

Natasha: Yes, it's pretty much... I think I was flicking through Instagram, and I was seeing like all these influencers. And they are rich! The idea came from that. Putting them all together and seeing what would happen if they are in a place where they can't escape. And I feel like quite a lot of influencers would go to an island if they were invited.

Mindy: Yeah, definitely. It's kind of like the Fyre Festival. Do you remember that?

Natasha: I don't.

Mindy: Fyre Festival... It was a US thing, so it is possible it didn't hit the news so much there in the UK. But Fyre Festival was this really hyped, big party. They had these promo videos made and it was like, "you were going to be hanging out with very rich, very beautiful people. Buy your tickets now. It's gonna be amazing." And then people got there and it was like hot dogs on sticks. Drift wood for your pillow. There was nowhere to pee. It was really bad.

Natasha: Oh no.

Mindy: It was really, really bad. Tell us a little bit more about The Island. What are your characters like? Because influencers in particular... I go back and forth. I'm a difficult person. I'll just say that. I'm a difficult person. Traditional marketing just doesn't work on me. I'm always a little bit cynical, and I'm always suspicious. So whenever someone is trying to sell something to me, I immediately shut down, and I'm just like, "No. I don't like you, and I don't want what you're selling."

Natasha: I don't believe you.

Mindy: Exactly. It also makes it difficult for me whenever I'm trying to think about marketing my stuff, because the traditional stuff that does work, I never wanna do that because it doesn't feel genuine to me. So talk to me a little bit about your characters and where you got the ideas for each of them as individuals because you are writing 6 different characters.

Natasha: Yeah, so the gamer, two beauty bloggers, Paisley, who is like a main character, she reports crime - love her - and then we have Harper who is book reviewer. So they all have very different personalities. Some of them are pretty cocky entitled. And then some of them are a little bit more reserved, and they grow throughout the book. Obviously, when somebody is out there trying to kill you, you have to try and mesh all these personalities together so they can defeat the bad guy together and get through it. And also one of them could be the killer.

Mindy: I think that would be very challenging. I tend to keep my casts pretty small - two or three like maybe four, and then some peripherals. But I think writing six and trying to build them and, of course, give all of them their own layers as well, and still creating a little bit of suspicion so you're keeping that mystery going for each one of them... I'm sure that was challenging.

Natasha: I did kill one of them pretty early so... It took it down a little bit.

Mindy: Did you do much research into influencer culture and what it's like to be an influencer?

Natasha: I did a little bit. It is pretty hard because I think all of them have quite different experiences and how they're perceived and how people react to them. So I didn't want to do too much research. I wanted to be sort of quite organically just writing and then building how I see them. Do you do that? I should really research it, then I get stuck in this "I've researched too much" and it stops being my character. I try to make them something that they never were, if that makes any sense at all.

Mindy: Yes, it does. It makes perfect sense. Absolutely possible to over-research. You could almost get stuck in it, I think, cause you worry so much about getting it right. I write YA as well. But I have an adult book that I would love to get out one day, we'll see. I still have to work on it. But it is set in 1916 during the Spanish influenza. And I was writing a scene... It's set in the US, like in a rural area in a one-room school house. And I was writing a scene where the teacher... 'cause the Spanish flu could drop you very quickly. Your symptoms could just come on and you could become very violently sick and die within hours. The teacher very suddenly - she feels herself getting sick. She knows something's wrong, and so she doesn't want her students to get sick. She runs out of the building as fast as she can, and she's disoriented. She's ill. She also trips and falls, and she rolls down the steps and the kids come out and they're like, "Oh my gosh. What do we do? Should we even touch her?" And in my mind, her shoe had come off, and her shoe was sitting on one of the steps. But would her shoe have come off? What would her shoe have been in 1916.

So I go and I start researching women's footwear in 1916, but it couldn't be like high fashion. It had to be what a middle class rural woman would have been wearing in 1916. So I'm trying to figure all of that out. Eventually I decide no, her shoe probably would not have come off because it would have been a boot, And it would have been the kind that you literally use a crochet hook to finish tying, and it's like "no her boot is not coming off." I mean, I probably did two to three hours of research to figure out if her boot came off. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if her boot came off or not, number one. And number two, a reader probably isn't gonna notice or care, and I literally dropped everything and did not write for three hours 'cause I needed to know if her boot came off. And that is an example of caring a little too much.

Natasha: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And it's so easy to get pulled into that.

Mindy: It really is. Have you ever had that one thing that you just felt like you had to chase down and then you were like, "Okay. That was not worth it."

Natasha: Oh yeah. So, it was when I was writing The Cellar, and he weights bodies, chucks them in the river, and disposes of them. And I'm googling this for a very long time - getting a little worried that someone was gonna see what I'm doing, and I spent hours, "what weight do you need to make sure that they don't come back up?" And I think, "You know what. I could just write, 'He's weighted the body.' They don't need to know exactly."

Mindy: No, you don't. You're right. But that's exactly the kind of thing that will happen to you. That you just end up going down that rabbit hole of wanting to make sure that you're right, and essentially it doesn't actually matter. You're talking about the things that you Google, and then you have to worry a little bit. As a writer, we do end up looking at some things or wandering into parts of the internet or information that we might not necessarily want to be associated with. I can tell you that my ads that I get or on Amazon, when it's like "based on your recent search history you might be interested in... " and it's like, "No. I don't need that bondage material thing." Have you ever researched something like the weighting of the bodies and just been like, "Oh man. I am a little concerned now about my search history." Or also just... "Gosh, I wouldn't want anyone to stumble across this in my browser."

Natasha: Definitely. So when I was writing You Will Be Mine, the killer cuts out hearts. So, I'm googling "how you get to the heart." You ought to get through the rib cage and how you would cut it out. That was interesting.

Mindy: I have definitely searched some things that have skewed my ads. I actually have a friend who writes tech thrillers, and she needed to know how to get a bomb onto a plane. So she just Googled it and tried to figure out how to get a bomb onto a plane. She lived in California, and her husband was a TV producer. He also lived in California, but because of their work, they were at different parts of the state. One of them would fly to the other one every other week. She went to go see her husband, and she had been put on the no-fly list.

Natasha: No. Oh my gosh.

Mindy: Yeah, she couldn't get on the plane. She had a friend in Homeland Security, and she talked to them eventually. And they were like, "Yeah, dude. I can tell you exactly why you are not allowed to fly on planes anymore."

Natasha: Oh no! Did she get off the list though? Is she okay now?

Mindy: She did. She did, but without her friend inside the system to vouch for her who knows how that would have gone? But you gotta be a little bit careful.

Natasha: You do. Yeah, you have to be careful.

Mindy: So, tell me about what you are doing for The Island and press. Obviously, you're doing interviews and you're doing podcasts like this. Post covid... Are you doing much traveling?

Natasha: I haven't very much at all. I would like next year to come back to America. I've been a couple of times. Barnes & Noble events have been so much fun. So this time around, I'm doing an online with Barnes & Noble. Which will be really fun, but it's nice to go to in person, I think.

Mindy: Definitely. I miss being in-person a lot. I have a release in March, and this will be the first time since 2020 that I have done much in terms of actually doing a string of events or tour. I had a book come out in March of 2020, and we shut down over here... Third week of March in 2020 was when the lockdown started. I was touring with two other writers, and we had, I think, five cities right in the middle of March and at our first event, we had people. It was cool. At our second event, we had about half the crowd. At our third event, I think we had four people, and everyone was wearing masks. And at our last event that we showed up to... The book sellers, they were very kind, but they got a hold of us and they were like, "We're closing. There's not gonna be anybody here. Please come, and sign stock. Wear a mask, and go back home." We were like, "Okay." And then as soon as I got home from that tour was when we went on lock down.

Natasha: A similar thing over here. Everything just stopped didn't it? And it's still not picked back up, I don't think. There's still a lot more happening virtually.

Mindy: Yeah, there has been a lot more virtual events and trying to make things work online and doing zooms and Instagram Live. So, is that something that you have found success with? Do you enjoy doing the online stuff?

Natasha: Yeah, I do. It's still nice to connect with people and booksellers and readers. It's just not quite the same as being able to physically see them and you get to take pictures with people and sign a book for them in front of them.

Mindy: Yeah. I agree. I get energy from other people. That's where my energy comes from... Is from drawing off of others. And when I can get them excited, then they're feeding me back, and we just get a nice little feedback loop. And there is so much about that that is organic, but there's also... There's a real presence that is necessary in order to make that happen. I don't know. I feel like it's hard to get that same feeling and to build that same energy when you're doing it virtually.

Natasha: Yeah, when you're just on your own, it's not the same.

Mindy: Yeah. It's really hard to generate excitement for yourself. Well, and speaking of that, generating excitement for yourself... How was it for you writing over covid? I know a lot of writers struggled with being on shutdown, first of all just emotionally and mentally, but also just being creative and finding ways to write or things to write about. Suddenly we had all the time in the world, but we needed to have the drive.

Natasha: Yeah, no, actually, I was great during lock down. I mean, I had my children at home which I had to home school. So that was a little bit of a battle, but... No, it was great. I would get up at six. I would probably write a couple thousand words, and then the children would get up. I was on it. That hasn't happened since... It ended.

Mindy: So, is that your typical approach? Do you have a word count for the day that you like to hit?

Natasha: Yeah. Typically, I try to... 1500-2000 words, and I'm generally happy with that.

Mindy: I always say minimum 1000. If I can get two, that's amazing. 15 is a nice, nice little bonus. Do you write every day then?

Natasha: Every weekday usually. On the weekends I keep my children at home, so... Yeah, every weekday... Go drop them off and come home and just sit in front of the computer until I'm happy with my word count.

Mindy: Yeah, and that's something that a lot of newer writers or writers that are trying to finish their first book talk to me about. Tips and tricks. They're like, "How do you write a book?" And I'm like, "Well, unfortunately, the only answer is you have to sit down and do it."

Natasha: Yeah. You have to be quite disciplined 'cause when you are just at home, there's so many things you could do. You need to make yourself have that time.

Mindy: Yes. And writing is hard. I will do anything other than write.

Natasha: That's exactly what I do. I'll check social media, and I'll do some other things. And I tell myself I'm being productive by doing different posts here and there and answering emails, but it's really just putting off starting writing.

Mindy: That is exactly accurate. Yes. I have been working really hard for three hours, and it's like, No, you haven't... Actually you haven't done anything. So speaking of social media then... What has your experience been like with social media kind of changing? 'Cause you came out right around the same time that I did. The Cellar was published in 2014. My first book came out in 2013, and when we were first out in the world and publishing, social media was very text-based. It was tweets. It was Facebook posts. And then Instagram came along, and it was pictures. But now suddenly, it's videos, and it's music. And it's whatever the trends are. It's just more time consuming than I'm willing to put into now. It's like, I can have a thought, and I can have a one-off. And I could tweet that 10 years ago, and that was good. And people were like, Yes. And they would interact with that. And it's like, now I have to make a video, and I have to be using the right filter, and I have to have whatever song is popular right now. And for me, I've just kind of stepped back from that a little bit because like we were just saying, I can get too sucked into that and put a lot of time into it when I should be writing.

Natasha: I completely agree. My heart is still in 2014 where you could just pop a post up every couple of days, and that was great.

Mindy: Yep.

Natasha: It's a lot of work now. It's more interactive, I think, and I do like that. But you can spend hours where you used to just spend a few minutes, and it does take away from your actual writing time.

Mindy: I agree. I feel too that things are more crowded. I was on TikTok for about five minutes. I have an account there, but I very rarely post because I would put together something, and it took me so long to put it together, and then I would put it out there. And it's like if the algorithm doesn't basically choose you, you're not going to get a lot of reach with that. And it's like, man... And granted... Learning curve. I didn't really know what I was doing, and so it took longer. But I would just be like, "Oh my gosh. I just spent an hour making this 15-second video, and 40 people saw it." I say that as someone that definitely has not figured out how to use TikTok. I will say this though. The nice thing about TikTok and booktok... The readers are the ones that are generating the content. There's not so much responsibility on us to generate it. If they can do it, that's great.

Natasha: I mean, if someone out there just wants to do all that for my books, that would be fantastic.

Mindy: No, I agree. Whenever anybody is like, "Oh my gosh. I read your book, and I loved it." I'm like, "Cool. Are you on TikTok?" Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find The Island when it comes out on February 28th, and where they can find you online.

Natasha: The Island is to be in stores in America. So, it will be in Barnes & Noble for sure. Everywhere else, it's going to be online. So yeah, it's where you can get The Island. And you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. All of them. Just Author Natasha Preston.

Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.

Melissa Landers on How Mental Health Impacts Your Writing & The Hit Or Miss of SciFi

February 20, 2023 Mindy McGinnis

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Mindy: We're here with Melissa Landers who is a fellow Ohioan and an author that has had a really interesting career path. One of the reasons why I wanted to have Melissa on the show is because she has not had the traditional path in a lot of ways. She has experimented, and she has done offshoots, and she has had lapses in her publishing career. And I think it's very important to talk about those careers as well. It's something that aspiring authors always wanna hear about - the overnight successes and people that hit the list and continue to hit the list and always do well. And the truth is that that is a very, very, very small percentage of people. Even continuing to publish is very, very difficult. For example, in my debut group of 2013, which was both YA and middle grade authors... Recently I was having a conversation with someone who was also a fellow lucky 13, and they said, "Hey, have you ever gone back and looked at our group and the people that we debuted with and done the math on how many are still traditionally publishing? Quite a few have found success in other arenas, but in the traditional publishing world have you ever gone back and looked?" And I was like, "No, I haven't." And just out of curiosity, I did, and I'm gonna take a stab at the numbers because I didn't write it down, and I'm not gonna take the time to go do that again. But I'm gonna say there were roughly 65 of us that were in this loosely knit group of debut YA and middle grade authors in 2013. And at the time that I looked, which might have been two or three years ago, I think maybe eight of us.

Melissa: Oh. Seriously?

Mindy: Yeah... Were still in the trad pub world. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on here because you have had hiccups, as you refer to them, in your career, but you keep coming back. So if you would just like to tell the audience just like a brief overview of your career and what it's been like.

Melissa: Well, when I first started writing, Alienated was the first book I ever wrote. And I was very, very lucky that it actually sold and it did super, super well. But I also was publishing adult contemporary romance under a pen name at that time, and I couldn't decide which I liked more. I didn't know which would take off better, and so for a long time I tried to do both. I do not recommend that unless you're just a naturally prolific author who spews awesome words without effort, because for me, it did burn me out. Looking back, if I could do it over again, I would have stuck to just YA sci-fi and spent all of my time and my resources simply on creating Melissa Landers as a brand. Because by trying to launch Melissa Landers and Macy Beckett, I was dividing and conquering myself, so there's lesson number one. I think I am up to 14 novels that are out or slated for publication through 2023, but I might be miscounting. I've been busy. You just may not have seen the fruits of my labor, because again - two different pen names. That's the first lesson that I would impart. Choose a name. Choose a genre. Choose a market. Invest in that brand.

Mindy: You and I met at different various writers conferences around Ohio. Ohio actually has quite a few writers, and it's got many book festivals and conferences that happen a lot. And so we do have a pretty tight-knit group of writers. And I remember when you were writing under Macy Beckett as well as your real name as a YA sci-fi author, because I believe we actually met at a conference that was partially romance-driven because if I remember correctly one of the big draws of that conference was that they had dudes that were cover models there.

Melissa: Was it Lori Foster's reader author get together?

Mindy: That's exactly what it was.

Melissa: That conference was the best. I miss it so much.

Mindy: Yes, that was fun. It is not my genre. It's not my niche. It was just a conference that was nearby, and any kinda writing conference is gonna have something for you if you're a writer. And I remember showing up and there were just like… ripped dudes just standing in the lobby just kind of flexing their pecks on and off, and I was just kind of like "maybe I should write romance." I remember you trying to take that, that two-pronged approach, and while, as you're saying, you wish that you had not necessarily been trying to do that at the same time, you learn from it. But also, man, all the skills that you picked up as an indie author before indie was huge, I'm sure that that's useful.

Melissa: Well, I actually wasn't indie. My first three romance novels were with Sourcebooks and my second two were with Penguin Random House. Now, I did get all of those rights reverted to me, and I put them up on... What is it? Kindle Unlimited. I haven't done a very good job really pushing those titles 'cause I'm not currently writing them. The only project that I did that was kind of not full indie more like a hybrid, was United, the third book in the Alienated series. Alienated did amazing. It earned out its advance like twice over. Invaded... The last time I looked I was like a whisper away from earning out on that. Because trilogies were not doing so well in the YA market at the time, Disney said if you do a third book we're only gonna put it out in ebook only. No print. Not even print on demand, and that was a deal breaker for me. So I partnered with a small publisher to get United out in hard cover. Did the cover design. I contracted out editorial. It was a lot of work, but I was really, really pleased with how it turned out.

Mindy: For listeners, just to clarify, when Melissa is saying that she earned out on Alienated what that means is that she earned her advance back, and it sounds like then again. That tells you how extraordinarily successful Alienated was. And if you're a whisper away from earning out on the sequel, that shows your read through and the success of Alienated being so great. So yeah, you had great success in the trad YA world right out of the gate with your first book with your name on it in that realm. And you were also writing in sci-fi, which had a moment, and as you're saying, trilogies were suddenly like a bad word. At first that was all you were ever supposed to do is write trilogies, and then, you weren't anymore. I have multiple friends that came out 2013, 2014 who were supposed to have trilogies and were asked, "Hey, do you think you could wrap it up in two? Because trilogies aren't hot anymore." So talk to me a little bit about how things changed career wise for you after you came out of the gate so hard with the first two books in this series. You improvised and did your third one on your own, and then what happened next for you?

Melissa: Alright, so we have Alienated, Invaded, United - that series nice, tied up in a little bow. My next series was Starflight, and that did extremely well too. Starfall, which is the sequel... Not as well. And so Disney said, "No more in this series. Give us something new." So I did. I decided to take a stab at writing high fantasy, and I came up with a proposal for a book called The Half King which is about a failed oracle who has to leave the temple where she's lived at since birth and travel to the palace to serve the Half King - a charming man who serves his kingdom by day and turns to shadow at sunset. Now, I sold this proposal to my former editor, not my current editor, my former editor, on... Let's see, three chapters and a synopsis. So about 50 pages. And she loved it. The whole team loved it. They sold in a two-book, six-figure deal. Currently, it is my only six-figure deal, and so this felt like a big career high for me. Now, I had a phone call with my editor after selling the proposal. I always like to do that, just to ask if there's any changes they wanna see as I complete the manuscript. "We love it. Just one thing. Do you think you can set it in space?"

Mindy: Oh my god.

Melissa: There was a disconnect when it came to expectations. What I did not expect to happen and what completely knocked me sideways was for my editor to completely reject the manuscript. I gave my publisher two different books. I did IPs. The first one, Blastaway, which was my only middle grade release, and it's super cute. I'm very proud of it. It's basically Home Alone in space. And then I gave them Lumara, which just released last month, which was pitched to me as Crazy Rich Asians but with witches. And again, so fun. So fun. My first experience with an unreliable narrator. And so I gave them those two books to replace the books in The Half King, and then my agent eventually sold The Half King elsewhere. I've since re-written it as new adult fantasy with lots of sexy sex.

Mindy: Nice.

Melissa: And it works so much better that way, but this stumble in The Half King completely interrupted my release schedule. The Half King was supposed to release in 2017, but it didn't. And then after Blastaway released, my editor left - went to a different publishing house. I had to wait for a new editor and then Covid happened, and my new editor had just said to my agent, "Hey, does Melissa like witches? I might have a great idea for her." But before we could get it approved, Covid happened and there were so many editors on furlough that they literally could not form an acquisitions committee.

Mindy: Oh.

Melissa: So for all of Covid, I was stuck. I had a contracted book, but I could not move forward on it. It was maddening, and that created an even bigger gap. And so Lumara just released last month and Blastaway released in 2018. A four-year gap in releases! And because publishing moves so slowly and because projects that are contracted now will not see the light of day for two years, just the slightest little stumble and bam, you have a many year gap in your release schedule.

Mindy: Absolutely, you do. That's something that almost happened to me with my third book, not necessarily that large of a gap, but I would have had a year without a release. With only two books out, that would not have been good. Long story short, there was a miscommunication. As you were saying, editors leave. They hop around, and my acquiring editor for my third book, which was A Madness So Discreet, had left Harper and had gone to a different publishing house. And there was a miscommunication to me about the due date for my first draft. I was given a date, and I was like, "Oh great. I have plenty of time." And the date that I was given was the date that it had to go to copy edits.

Melissa: Oof.

Mindy: Yeah, and I thought it was my first draft due date. And when they did hire my new editor, who's Ben Rosenthal, who is still my editor - we've done, I think, 10 books together now. Ben called me, and that was the very first conversation I had with my new editor... Was that he called me and was like, "Hey, I'm Ben, and I'm really excited to work with you and I loved Not A Drop to Drink. And I'm ready to read this manuscript. Whenever you can send it, please do." And I was like, "Oh, well, I mean I will, but I haven't written it yet, buddy. It's not due until this certain date." And he was like, "Oh, that's not... That's not accurate." I was just like, "Wait, what?" I had three weeks to write the book. They were like, look, you're not in breach of contract. There was a miscommunication on our end. We are sorry. You are not in breach, but we do need the book in three weeks. Or we'll take... You take a year off. And I was like, "Uhh. Well, this is how I make a living. So not taking your off. Gonna write a book in three weeks." And so that's what I did. I understand that it's pretty good. I can't tell you what happens in that book. I wrote it in a fugue state. You're right. Those lags. You can have that happen. You can have those gaps in your career, and because of the fact that there is such a long lead time in publishing, in traditional publishing, that gap, even if you have one stumble, it's gonna cost you two years maybe. How did you keep your readers aware of you as an individual? And if you do continue to use social media and a newsletter, how do you keep your readers at least aware that you exist for those four years?

Melissa: Honestly, I kind of didn't. I focused on if I posted anything to the Gram, it was personal. Like, here's a picture of me on vacation. I wasn't just spewing monotonous pictures of my books because, for me anyway, as a reader of myself, I don't like to see too much repetition from authors that I follow. I know what your cover looks like. I don't need to see it 20 times in my feed. Plus, there's the issue that my readership were originally teenagers - 2014 when Alienated came out. They are grown now. In fact... Oh my gosh, what a mind freak. So on Instagram, I follow the original cover model from Alienated. He is now married with a baby. They're adults now. They're grown. I don't know how many of them are still reading YA as adults, but I'm gonna take a stab and say not a ton. So, I didn't see the sense in spinning my wheels and trying to hold on to a readership that was aging out of the market. I just kind of let things be organic. I posted some things about my ordinary life, and I let the rest go. And then I kind of just got started again once Lumara was in production to promote that. I watch other authors spin their wheels on social media trying so so hard to clutch at readers, and it's almost like the harder you try, the more inorganic it feels, and the more you lose.

Mindy: Absolutely. I just had a conversation yesterday morning with Beth Revis, and Beth and I were talking about exactly this because I personally have lost any affection or pride or connection that I ever had with social media. And one of the main reasons is because I went through a break-up, right? Oh, about two months before the pandemic. I went through a break-up of a relationship that had lasted for 12 years. So, it was very upsetting. I was gonna make it and I was gonna be okay, but I was not interested in tweeting about my book or my life. I was like, "Dude, my life is really shitty right now." It's like I don't have a lot to say, and I'm not gonna post pictures of my cat. I'm just laying in bed crying pretty often. So it's like, this is not part of my life right now. I'm not doing social media. And I had been someone that was very active, and if there was a new platform, I was like, "alright what's this?" and getting involved. I really invested my time into that, and I had two hours every morning blocked off where I just used social media and interacted with other people and was involved in conversations and making my own content. And I totally dropped, shut down everything. Not even a, "Hey, going through a hard time. I'm not gonna be around for a little while” post. Nothing for three months, and literally no one noticed. It did not affect my sales in any way whatsoever. And I was like, "Alright, then what am I doing here? What is the point of this?"

And so I had that happen, which was just right before the pandemic, and then in the years that have followed, social media has changed very much from when you and I first started using it. It is now very picture and video-based, and it didn't used to be. Facebook and Twitter were the first platforms that I was active on, and it was, how clever are you with words? What can you do with words? I can utilize that. I am not dancing. I'm not lip syncing. I'm not pointing to words on a screen. I am 43. I don't give a shit. I don't know what's popular. I'm not gonna pick the right music. I'm not gonna... There's like none of it. None of it. I have continued now to just be like, You know what? I'm not interested. And I agree with you completely, that if I were to try any way, it would just be pathetic.

Melissa: Yeah, you can tell when it's inorganic and it's, as my teenager would say, cringey. I'm kind of like you not wanting to share hard times. There was no way five years ago that I was gonna be on social media and say, "Hey guys, you haven't heard from me because I wrote something so broken, my own editor doesn't wanna work with me." No, I was ashamed. I was very hurt. And that really taught me a lesson about how fragile my self-esteem is and how tightly bonded my self-esteem is to my creative process. I was unable to write for the longest time, and then when I finally could write, I was just a black hole of need for validation. My critique partner, Lorie Langdon, she's been on your podcast before.

Mindy: Yes.

Melissa: She can tell you every time I sent her a chapter, I would follow up, "is it okay? Does it suck? Does it suck?" And she would be like, "Oh my God, Mel. No. It doesn't suck. This is awesome. Stop." I like to think that I was this big tough badass. I am so not a big tough badass. I am like a little fragile flower made out of tissue paper.

Mindy: That was something I wanted to ask you about - was how did you recover? Not only talking about a career or maintaining your social media or the financial aspect. How do you recover emotionally?

Melissa: Time, honestly. Time was the only thing. Time and being able to get into a new project and watch that succeed. And by succeed, I don't mean in the market. Blastaway didn't sell super well, but I am so proud of it. It is freaking adorable, and I hate that it didn't do as well. But sci-fi, it is what it is. When you write sci-fi, you kind of have your hits and misses. For the longest time, I could not touch The Half King. The thing with The Half King is it's a beautiful book. It really is, and I'm not just saying that 'cause I wrote it. I think that when it releases in 2023 people who love high fantasy romance are gonna connect with it. But it has so much beauty in it, and I just knew that it deserved to be out in the world. But every time I would open the file, I would freak out and shut it down again. I could not work on the book. Last year when it sold again, and then I had a call with the editor and made a plan, and even kind of getting started on it, it felt... Oh, this is gonna sound so stupid, but it felt like revisiting trauma. And it took probably a month before I really got into the flow of things and began to truly enjoy the process and reconnect with those characters. It took a long time for me to get my mojo back for that project. Paper flower, fragile.

Mindy: No, of course it did. That makes perfect sense to me, and I don't think you're using the word trauma lightly. I will share what happened to me just this past summer. Starting last Christmas, I made the decision that I didn't think I needed to be on anti-depressants anymore. I had been on something for 15 years, and I was feeling good. And I'm in a great relationship, and my career is good. And you know, I've got a dog. I'm fine, right? So I slowly weaned, and the weaning process was great. I got myself completely off of the antidepressants that I had been on for a very long time. There was a window where I was okay, and then there was a much larger space of time when I just... What? It was bad. It was really bad. And I did not realize how quickly it was happening, and I did not realize how bad it was. And friends and family were like, "Mindy, you need to go back on a medication." And I was like, "No, I'm fine. Everything's fine. I'm fine. This is still just withdrawal." I was writing my 2024 release while I was basically having a nervous breakdown, and I didn't know it. I was aware that things were very wrong, but I just kept saying to myself that I am okay and this will pass. And it didn't. And I wrote my 2024 release, which is called Under This Red Rock, while I was going through the worst mental health period of my life. I wrote the book, and I turned it in, and I hit my deadline. And I emailed it to my editor, and I was like "Ben, here it is. This is not good. And I'm sorry, but I'm probably going crazy. And this is the best I can give you right now." And he was like, "Okay, alright." And he was like, "I'm sure that your version of horrible is probably a lot better than you think, and take care of yourself."

I did end up going back on medication right around Thanksgiving. Ben had gotten back to me, and he had sent me my edit letter. And he was very kind, but my level of what I aim to turn in to my editor - that was not there. And I did give him a first draft. And it was a nine-page edit letter, and there were some pretty big problems. And, like you're saying, I can't work with this right now. And at that point, I had gotten back on medication, and I was going through the acclimation phase, which I still am. I can't do this right now. I didn't wanna read it. I didn't wanna open it up. I didn't wanna have anything to do with that manuscript because I felt so shitty while I was writing it, and I got myself into a much better mental space. I got back on medication, and I was able to do the edit. Like you said, even then, just the experience of reading it, it is almost a physical place that you go to and I had to go back there. For one thing, the book itself is heavily involved with a mental illness plot line. I was dealing with writing the fiction of it while also reliving how I had felt while I was writing it, and you're absolutely right. It's difficult.

Melissa: From the beginning, ever since Not A Drop to Drink, your brand is kind of dark and gritty, right? My brand is light, funny, and when you're in a bad mental place, guess how easy it is to write light and funny.

Mindy: Oh, I can't even imagine.

Melissa: My previous editor at Disney... One of the projects that I had pitched to her when I was trying to fulfill this last book on my contract was one of my 2023 releases. She rejected it because she felt like it was a better fit for the adult market, but my new editor at Hyperion absolutely loved it as much as I do. And it is very funny. It's basically like a Jessica Jones meets Veronica Mars. It's a murder mystery, and it is humor and sarcasm from start to finish. And I wrote it over the summer when the sun was out, and I didn't have seasonal depression. And I felt good, and life was good. And I was happy, and I was in a good place. And when I tell you that book just bloomed out of me effortlessly, it was the most fun I've ever had writing in my life. It's kind of miraculous what you can do when your mental health is in a good place.

Mindy: It is. It is. You're absolutely right about my brand and what I write. Obviously, I have no problem talking about mental illness, so I will just keep going. I've been thinking a lot about how I'm gonna talk about this book because it does have a major mental illness aspect for my main character, and I was not in a great place when I was writing it. And people have been asking me, "What do you have coming out next? What's going on next?" And I'm like, "Guys... " So I have a release in March of this year, of 2023, and it is my lightest, happiest - I mean, it's a murder mystery, don't get me wrong, and there's some dark things - but it is my lightest, happiest, and probably most hopeful book that I've ever written. And I wrote it, of course, while I was on medication. Just in a really good place. Things were... Everything was really good when I was writing it, and I actually remember working on that book, which is called A Long Stretch of Bad Days, when I was writing a darker scene or a more upsetting scene or something where my main character was not in a great place, I had to kind of work at it. You know sadness. You know how it feels, and I had to kind of dig for it. And writing my 2024 release, which is called Under This Red Rock, there might be three lines in it that are funny, because I do try to have a little bit of lightness somewhere in all of my books. My 2023 is actually funny. I just got my Kirkus review, and they made a comment about how funny it is. Yes, thank you. Because it's like I always try to have some funny in there, and that's not what I'm known for. My 2024 release I was in the total opposite place, mentally, where I was like, "Okay, you know what funny is, and you know what funny means, and you're able to make jokes, and you've made jokes before. So write something funny because you just wrote 30 pages of just deep dark black shit."

Melissa: The old advice - “butt in chair, hands on keys” - it's great if the rest of your life is also great. But if your life is falling apart around you, your emotions are in shambles, “butt in chair, hands on keys” doesn't yield the same output, and then that comes across on the page and all has to be re-written anyway.

Mindy: Let's talk about Lumara, which is your book that just came out last month. And that one is something, from my understanding, it has helped you get right back on to your trajectory and put you back on your path.

Melissa: Yes, yes, and Lumara is an IP. It was actually my editor's idea when she reached out right at the beginning of the pandemic and said, "Hey, does Melissa like witches?" I had just enough time to say Melissa loves witches and then the pandemic and everything went sideways.

Mindy: Yeah.

Melissa: But yeah, she said, I have this idea. It's an unreliable narrator. Magic. This island with living properties, and I was sold immediately. And so it was so much fun to plot the book with her assistance and to explore magic in a modern day setting. So Lumara is set in a world where magic is real, and everybody knows it's real. It's not hidden. Like in Harry Potter. Magic is real. We all know it. And people who can do magic are called mystics, and they are treated like modern day celebrities. There's Mystegram. There's mystecon - you know, kinda like comicon only just for magic - where you can go and you can buy spells and you can get healed. And so this is the world you live in, but the main character, Talia, hates mystics. Hates them because she had a really bad experience and was basically ripped off of her whole life savings from one. Everybody knows she hates mystics. She won't shut up about it, and then one day she learns that her boyfriend, who she loves very, very much, is not only a mystic, but the son and heir to the most wealthy, powerful, mysterious mystic family in the world. And his cousin is getting married, and he can bring a date. And he wants Talia to come home to his private island with him and meet the family. But once she gets there, all hell breaks loose. It's an unreliable narrator. So if I say too much, I spoil it. But it's a mystery. Murder, generational curses, magic, love, betrayal - all my favorite things.

Mindy: Would you like to mention your 2024 release?

Melissa: Oh, yeah. I would love to. My 2023 releases... The Half King should be coming along fall/winter - I'm not really sure - from Red Tower Books. Again, this will be my first new adult release. Sex on the page - explicit. So not for my younger teen readers.

Mindy: I'm ready.

Melissa: And then my Hyperion release will be December 5th of 2023, and that's called Make Me A Liar. And that's the one that I said was the most fun book I've ever written. Basically a teenage girl with the power of transferable consciousness hires herself out for side hustles, but while she's in the body of a client someone uses her body to commit murder in public. She has to prove that even though her body committed the crime, her mind was not in it at the time.

Mindy: Wow, that's fascinating. I love that.

Melissa: Well, you know, I can't just write a normal murder mystery. It has to have some kind of weirdness in it.

Mindy: So last thing. Why don't you let readers know where they can find you online, and then also where they can get Lumara.

Melissa: Perfect, yes. You can find me online at Melissa dash Landers dot com, and you can sign up for my email newsletter there. And I promise it's not spammy. I only send out a newsletter when I have a new release launching. You can find me on all the usual social media sites: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. As far as Lumara, you can order that from your retailer of choice. And right now, Make Me A Liar and The Half King should also be available for pre-order. So, if either of those titles sounded interesting to you, I hope you'll preorder them.

Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson on Co-Authoring, Writing Mysteries, and Plotting vs. Pantsing

November 14, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com . And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.

Mindy: We're here with Liz Lawson and Kathleen Glasgow, and we're going to talk about their new series, The Agathas, as well as co-authoring and writing mysteries. So let's start with each of you just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about what you write outside of this series that you have worked on together.

Kathleen: I write mainly contemporary, realistic teen novels when I'm not writing mysteries with Liz Lawson, and I tend to focus on somewhat sad books. And it was a joy to write The Agathas with Liz because we were determined to make it fun. What about you Liz?

Liz: Other than The Agathas, I have published one other book called The Lucky Ones. It is also like a sad emotional contemporary, and it came out April 7, 2020, which was the worst time ever. Kathleen and I have written two books and I'm working on a solo second book.

Mindy: I also write sad books. We're in good company. Yes, I also had a release right before the pandemic. That was a horrible experience. I do wanna talk a little bit about co-authoring. You each have written on your own, of course, and have careers outside of co-authoring. I also write underneath a pen name, and I do co-author with friends. And whenever people talk to me about that process, they're just endlessly fascinated by how it works, if it works, and also why you would decide to try it in the first place. So if you guys could talk to me a little bit about how you decided to come to a place where you wanted to work with a co-author and how you found each other.

Kathleen: Liz and I have the same editor, and we met online because I really loved T he Lucky Ones. We were messaging for a while, and then we met in person. And we have the sort of same dark anxiety written sense of humor. So we got along really well. And when Liz's first book, The Lucky Ones, came out, as she said, during the pandemic, plans were scuttled. Things shut down. All the great things that she had hoped for for her book didn't happen, and we were messaging back and forth. I think that we were both feeling very isolated because of lockdown. What if they wrote something just for us that no one knew about to keep ourselves active and busy during lockdown? And to just write something for the pure joy of writing it, and Liz is a big Agatha Christie fan. And I like true crime. And we just started noodling back and forth over messages and text. What would we like to write that would be surprising and engaging for us to write? That would be different from our sad solo books? And we sorta settled on writing a fun mystery. It wasn't even like a question, like how we would co-write it. I think that we just naturally sort of slid into making a dual POV. Do you think that's right, Liz?

Liz: Yeah, we had a very, very, very brief conversation of like, "Should we do this from one point of view or two?" Writing from one POV sounded really daunting. So it just naturally ended up, very quickly, we agreed to write from two.

Kathleen: And then it would be easier to trade chapters that way. And also we agreed that we would write quickly. I feel like if you're not gonna do dual POV and you're both writing the main text, things can move slower, and I think that we agreed that we wanted to write very quickly to keep the pace fast and to challenge ourselves. It was sort of obvious from the get go that Liz would be Alice Ogilvie and I would be Iris Adams. It's not that we set down ground rules, 'cause we've never done this before, but we had an element of flexibility built in. Liz said, 'cause she's really great at plotting, "You know, we're gonna need a spreadsheet in the beginning 'cause this is a mystery and we have to hit certain beats and we have to drop red herrings," and that really helped us keep writing at a quick pace. If you're gonna co-write with someone, I think that you have to have similar personalities and that you do need to set your boundaries. And you have to agree in the beginning about how you're gonna write the book... Like how quickly. Are you gonna have a spreadsheet? And also you have to be flexible so that Liz could come into Iris' chapters and change Alice's dialogue, not the context of it, but how Alice would say it because she knows Alice better than me.

Liz: And I think this is something you learn, you start to learn, with having an editor, and probably even before that, just having like other people look at your writing. You have to learn how to sort of let go of what you've done, particularly when you're co-writing. You have to allow the other person into your work. I think some writers are very precious with their writing, and I can be that way too, but when you're co-writing, it's really important to be able to say, Okay, this other person is also involved in this. They have opinions, and they have a point of view. And it is important that both of our voices are heard.

Kathleen: 'Cause you're sharing a story. It's not just like the story I'm writing. Liz and I came up with it together. So you're sharing a story. You have to get along well enough that you're like, "You're right, I need to change that whole chapter or that whole paragraph. You're absolutely correct." What matters is the story - not my ego or Liz's ego.

Mindy: I think it's a real place of vulnerability too, because like Liz said, you have to be open to... Not just as a solo writer - criticism. Because you always have to be open to that 'cause you're going to get it no matter what. Like you were saying, whether you have an editor, beta readers, or whatever it is, criticism is always gonna be there. But when it comes to someone literally going in and changing some of your words, or smoothing some of your words, or changing some dialogue that you wrote of the character that isn't necessarily your prime POV, there's a real level of trust there, I think.

Kathleen: If you don't trust the person that you're writing with implicitly, and you really need to think about that before you start writing with them, you should not write with them at all. It's a collaboration. You need to have that implicit trust in another person that they can share this story with you and the writing of the story.

Mindy: I think that's very true. My experience with being a co-author also comes in with knowing what my strengths and weaknesses are. I have a hard time writing warm, positive, fuzzy emotions. I struggle writing it. I can write sadness. I can write anger. I could write frustration. I can write any of those darker spectrum emotions. Writing romantic feelings or thoughts that - even just friendship. I struggle writing those warmer, kinder, lighter, lovelier moments. And so in the books that I co-write under a pen name with my friends, we have another writer in the trio of us that we really rely on to write those things. So do you find yourself dividing the strengths and weaknesses as well?

Kathleen: We were committed to making this a fun book - a friendship wrapped in a mystery. Every time I would start drifting into much darker territory for Iris, even though her story line is a little bit dark, Liz would say, "Kathleen, this isn't your solo book. You got to pull way back. Come back from the darkness." And I was like, "Oh right, you're right. I can't go there because this isn't that type of book." I can't write romance to save my life. I cannot write a good romantic relationship, and so I was really relieved with this book that we were not going to have a central romance and that we were just gonna concentrate on these girls and their friendship.

Liz: I enjoy the romance, so I think I keep trying to veer us in that direction and our editor's kind of like, "That's not what the book is." And I'm like, "Well, but it could be... " The biggest thing is, because we do have these solo books, Kathleen and I have worked on other books during The Agathas process. And so, because Kathleen writes such sad stuff, like she said, I could always tell when she was working on her solo book. Because it would be like all of a sudden, Iris is being real sad and I'm like, "Umm, maybe we need to lighten her up just a smidge."

Kathleen: You write your first book in a bubble 'cause no one knows what you're doing. It's just you and the book. Can you write a book? Things change because there are contracts and deadlines and marketing, and it's hard to get out of that space then when you're writing every book after your first book and to get as close to your writing as you were when you were in a bubble. One thing that was really great about writing The Agathas with Liz was that no one knew. We didn't tell our agents or our editor. We just wrote it by ourselves, and it was back to being quite joyful and a really lovely writing experience where it was just me, Liz, Alice, and Iris.

Mindy: Yeah, there is something really, really nice about that. I don't share my pen name for a few different reasons. It would skew my brand terribly, 'cause my pen name is very silly and funny, and we have a wonderful time writing very, very, very silly things. And there is a freedom to that. I don't have to stick to any one thing. I don't have to worry about a brand in terms of my name - my real name on my other books. Now, because the pen name has started to take off a little bit I do have to worry about that brand now, but that's a lovely problem to have. So I wanna go back to something that Kathleen touched on a little bit. You're saying that you're both also writing your solo projects at the same time that you're co-authoring The Agathas together. Liz was saying that she could see when you had been working on your own project, that voice kind of slipping then into The Agathas and affecting those characters a little bit. So how do you as individuals keep those things separated in your minds?

Kathleen: Well, for me, it was realizing really quickly that I cannot write two books at once. Especially two books that were so different. I put a hold on that other book and concentrated on The Agathas, and that was a good learning lesson for me. I know that some people can work on several different things at once, but I learned that I cannot. So that was a good thing to learn.

Liz: For me, honestly, I've had a journey with my second book. It's changed and it's morphed many, many times. And I do think there was a brief moment back at the end of last year... We were writing the first draft of The Agathas and I was writing a draft of that book, and it just did not work very well. The voices were too similar. There was just a lot of crossover. I kept trying to put The Agathas into that book almost, and so I would say it's really hard to write two books at the same time. I know people do it. Clearly people write Adult and YA - like, different categories, and publish two books a year. But that is a skill, and I'm not sure I have it.

Kathleen: I don't know how people do it who have kids, either. 'Cause Liz and I both have kids. I can't write when my kids are in the house with me. It doesn't work, and I wanna pay attention to them. It's hard. Some writers are so prolific. It's almost disheartening when you see it on social media and you're like, "How did you write four books in two years? What is going on?"

Mindy: Well, it is difficult. People ask me all the time, "How you do everything that you do?" And I always say that it's at the expense of my mental health and personal relationships. And that's a joke, but it's also not. Like, that's not a joke. Making a living as a writer is almost impossible.

Kathleen: It is almost impossible. I've always still had a day job, and I remember when my kids were smaller. They were sharing the bed with me 'cause they were little and sitting up between them with my laptop on my knees, writing in the dark to meet a deadline, because sometimes you just do what you have to do. If you're writing and you have that deep desire to write, sometimes it happens when you least expect it. You'll do anything to make it happen.

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Mindy: I wanna talk specifically about writing mystery. Co-authoring a mystery. So specifically with The Agathas, did you plot and plan ahead of time, or did you guys kind of write and discover what was going to happen?

Liz: We definitely did our best to plot it out because I think we both knew that writing a mystery is a whole different ball game than writing the emotional contemporary books. It's hard in a different way, right? With the books that we had written before, at least for me, I know it was so hard because of the subject matter. Putting yourself in that emotional space while you're writing can get really challenging after a while. For a mystery, it's almost the opposite. The emotion is still there and the characters still hopefully drive the plot, because I think those are the more interesting books, personally. There are certain things that you have to happen in your plot. You have to hit certain beats, and so plotting was very important to us. We had a whole spreadsheet on Google Docs where we tried to kind of plot out each chapter. I would say for the first book, we stuck to our outline pretty closely. Don't you think, Kathleen?

Kathleen: Yeah, we did, and it was very helpful for me 'cause I'm mostly a pantser. It was very helpful to have everything laid out in front of me so that we would know the direction we were going in and what had to happen in the next chapter. We left a little room for... Well, maybe that's not gonna work. Or little things that could happen in individual chapters, and then I would get to text Liz something like, "Oh, by the way, Iris is jumping out this window. Or this has to happen to Alice in the next chapter, because I did this." And Liz would be like, "Oh, that's fine." We had to plot it out beforehand because it is a mystery, and we had to know what things were gonna happen when and how we were going to insert them into the plot. And then we had to make sure that we had enough twists and where they would appear. It was good to plot it out, and I'm interested to see at the end of writing the solo book that I'm writing, having actually plotted a book now rather than being a pantser has affected my process of writing by myself.

Liz: Did you plot your solo book?

Kathleen: No, 'cause I had written a draft of it before we started The Agathas. As I'm revising, I did make a spreadsheet of things that I needed to...

Liz: Wow! Look at you.

Kathleen: I know. I feel terrible 'cause you know, I come from a poetry background. So I'm used to just going off and so this is a whole different world for me.

Mindy: Yeah, I also am a complete and total pantser. That can be difficult when you're co-authoring and one of my other co-authors claims to not be a pantser, but she will occasionally just very, very randomly have a character jump out a window or... She has even killed characters that we were not anticipating them dying. And then you open up the shared document and it's like, "Okay, so you killed the character we were going to use for something else."

Kathleen: Those things would happen to Liz and I too. I'm the worst at it 'cause I would insert something and say, "You know, you don't like this one character, but make them integral to the last twist of the books."

Mindy: I think there's a lot of strength to be found in plotting and then leaving room for discoverability.

Liz: Yes, I very much agree.

Kathleen: I think that's where the flexibility in co-authoring comes in again. You just really have to let what's gonna happen, happen if you think it's gonna make the book better.

Mindy: Once you had finished writing your draft, how did you then just approach your editor and say, "Hey, the two of us wrote a book together."

Liz: Well, I'll let Kathleen tell this 'cause she loves this story.

Kathleen: This is where I found out exactly how devious Liz is and how like her character, Alice, she is. I didn't tell my agent. We didn't tell our editor. I was just happy as a little bumble bee writing this book with Liz. And we got to a certain point, and I was like, "Well, this was really fun, but I gotta go back to my solo book now. Because I gotta revise this." And Liz was like, "I already told my agent. I showed it to her and she loves it, and she thinks that we should show it to our editor. She thinks it's gonna be really great." And I was like, "What?" I had to write a very sad email to my agent, 'cause I didn't tell my agent, and I didn't know how my agent would react that I had written something quite different than I usually write. The subject line was, I'm sorry. I didn't know what to say.

Liz: I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I wrote a book.

Kathleen: And my agent just called me and she's like, "Are you leaving me? What's going on? I don't even wanna read this." And I was like, "No, I just... You should read the whole thing 'cause I just wanna let you know I was writing this book with Liz and you don't know anything about it. And also it's like a mystery and it's kind of fun and it's completely different. And I know we hadn't talked about it, and so... I'm super sorry. And please don't be mad at me." Our editor also was like, "You did what? What now? The both of you? Hey wait." She read it, and she was like, "I love this, and I think it's a great move for the both of you." I think that Liz and I are really lucky in that respect that our agents and our editor were on board with us making the writing change. Because sometimes agents and editors are like, "No, you have to stick with what we represent you for. We're not into that other totally different thing that you're writing." We were really lucky that everyone on our team was on board and really liked it.

Liz: I assumed everyone would 'cause I liked it. So.

Kathleen: It can be a little bit difficult once you've written a few books that are one type of book to suddenly make a switch. And sometimes your agents are like, "I can't represent that," and sometimes your editor's like, "Oh God, no. I don't want that at all." We were quite lucky.

Mindy: Yeah, well, that's why I write under a pen name because I can be very silly and have a fun time and be a little bit ridiculous, and that is not what I write underneath my real name. And so when people meet me in real life and they've read my books, and they expect me to be a certain way. And then they meet me and I'm actually pretty funny and light-hearted, and I have a good time. And I'm quite silly. And they're just like, "Oh, this was not what I was expecting." So...

Kathleen: Are they... Mindy, are they like, "Wait, why are you smiling? You wrote The Female of the Species. What? This isn't you."

Mindy: They expect me to show up wearing all black and carrying around like a bag of detached testicles or something.

Kathleen: Right?

Mindy: I think the biggest reality check - it actually works the opposite direction - it's people that have known me my whole life. And I still live where I grew up, and it's a really small town. And I've got a super happy, normal, very Midwestern farming family that I'm from. Everybody knows everybody, and then I got published and people read my books and they're like, "Oh my god. Are you okay?" I very often, I can't tell you how many emails I have received where the subject line is literally like, "Are you okay?"

Kathleen: That's my favorite thing to do a response video of on TikTok. Anything I post inevitably three people are like, "Hey, are you okay?"

Mindy: Last thing. Why don't each of you share where listeners can find you online and where they can find The Agathas and then your individual books - the titles of your solo books as well, and also the sequel to The Agathas, which is coming up.

Liz: You can find The Agathas pretty much anywhere books are sold - bookshop, Barnes & Noble. There's a Barnes & Noble special edition, which was really exciting, and it has a very beautiful pink cover. The next Agathas is coming out May 31st of 2023. You can find me online on Twitter at LzLwsn. I'm also on Instagram at the same handle. I'm on TikTok on the same handle, except I'm currently locked out of my account. So I'm trying to deal with that.

Kathleen: The Agathas sequel, which is called The Night in Question, does come out in May 2023. So we're very excited about that. And you can get my books, Girl in Pieces, How to Make Friends With the Dark, and You'd Be Home Now, anywhere. If you wanna support my local indie store, it's called M ostly Books Arizona. So order there, and if you'd like it signed, put a note in the comment box. And I'm on social media at kathglasgow on Twitter, Miss Kathleen Glasgow on Instagram, and then Kathleen Glasgow on TikTok. You can always go to my website, Kathleen Glasgow books dot com and send me an email if you wanna ask me if I'm okay.

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