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 Alex Bracken, author of The Darkest Minds series and Lore. Of course, most of my listeners are going to be familiar with The Darkest Minds series, as it was also adapted to film and had an incredible amount of popularity. Alex's new book is called Silver in the Bone. It has a lot of different things that I'm personally super, super interested in related to it, such as the Arthurian classics, and also big, big interest for me? Genealogy, which I am absolutely fascinated with, and I want to follow up with you about the genealogy link in particular. But first, why don't you just tell us a little bit about Silver in the Bone?
Alex: This is my long cooking book, as I call it. It took a really long time to come together, and that's pretty unusual for me because once I have an idea, I'm running with it immediately. And I will brainstorm it, and I will figure out if it is like viable. And then if it's not viable, I drop it and it's on to the next idea. And if it is, I will immediately start writing it. But this book really took a while to just to cook. I'm trying to think of the best way to pitch it. I was really surprised by a lot of my professional trade reviews that cited it as being like dark fantasy horror. I was like, "I didn't write a horror novel." Like I'm... I'm such a weenie when it comes to anything related to horror. And it wasn't until I was talking to one of my author friends and kind of asking her how she would pitch this book... Because usually I'm pretty good at immediately identifying that, like, it's like X meets Y pitch. But for this one I had a really hard time, in part, because one of the obvious comps that I would use, I will not use because of the history with that author and all of that. So I made it very challenging for myself. This friend of mine was like, "Well, it's sort of like if Indiana Jones was a young woman and she set off to find something from Arthurian legend. So she crosses over into kind of this Arthurian mystical world, but it has like a dash of The Last of Us." And I was like, oh, so that's where the horror is coming from in all of these trade reviews. Because I hadn't really been thinking about it as a horror novel, but I can see now there is an essence of zombie, as I say, in the book.
But it's really the story of a young woman who's grown up in this kind of hidden world of treasure hunters. The one thing that she is desperate to find but she can't is something powerful enough to break this horrible curse on her brother that's just slowly but surely consuming him. And so as like fate and plot convenience would have it, one of these very powerful relics turns up and she finds out that her long missing guardian, who disappeared almost ten years before, may have vanished looking for this object - which is the Ring of Dispel from Arthurian legend. It's said to be capable of breaking any curse, any enchantment, and it was given to Lancelot by the Lady of the Lake, if you are an Arthurian person. But she immediately sets off to find this ring, and of course, has to work with her infuriatingly handsome and charming rival. Their search eventually takes them into the mystic Isle of Avalon. But Avalon is suffering its own terrible curse. And unfortunately for them, if they can even find the ring, they're going to be fighting to survive. So that is the very basic pitch.
Mindy: You mentioned a comp title that you don't necessarily want to use, and we will leave that unnamed. However, something that I think is a really interesting conversation, and it is something that I personally struggle with as well. When we talk about art and we talk about the artist, I can go either way with it. I have a hard time when the artist, be it an author, a musician, a filmmaker, whatever they might be. If the artist, as a human being, is perhaps reprehensible, can we still enjoy the art that they have produced without feeling some sort of guilt? So that is a death of the author. Big question. What I use as an example in my own life is that I grew up loving film. Absolutely adore watching movies. It was probably my favorite pastime after reading as I was growing up, and in the 90s, Kevin Spacey was everything. If you were a serious person about film, you talked about Kevin Spacey...
Alex: Right. Yeah
Mindy: And how talented he was and how amazing he was. And now we know a lot of things about him in his personal life that are unacceptable. So that is something that I kind of struggle with now. Like, I cannot think about Kevin Spacey in any terms that are glowing or positive or even in some ways enjoy his work without having that little like shadow of a writer after it. And so given you mentioning a particular comp title that you yourself are not comfortable associating with your work, and I do not blame you at all, how do you feel about that? But even when it comes to your own work, do you want your readers to simply enjoy your art and perhaps not look for traces of you as a human being? Or attempt to learn more about you as a person? Where do you stand on this?
Alex: This is such an interesting question. It's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately because I am like the prime Harry Potter generation where I think I was the same age as Harry when the first Harry Potter book came out. So I really grew up with the Harry Potter books. Peak Millennial in that way. And so it's been really, really difficult to see the author, J.K. Rowling, say the things she is saying about the trans community, which I just vehemently do not agree with. This really interesting dynamic where when somebody asks me, like, what books did you read growing up? And what were your favorite books growing up? It's like, "Well, that's my answer. It's Harry Potter," but I don't feel right talking about them anymore. I don't feel comfortable. I mean, not that Harry Potter needs my promotion here, but like, it's it's still so popular. That's what's so wild to me, too. Is that, like, as much as people are talking about the things that J.K. Rowling has said, you know, those books are still perennial bestsellers. They just go and go and go on the sales front. So I don't know if people don't care or people don't know, but I have a really hard time now recommending them to younger readers who are just starting out, and I don't know how to feel. Actually, I don't feel good. I… I do know how I feel. I don't feel good about there being a new Harry Potter show, which is something that I would have loved all of those years ago.
With this comp title that I don't want to name, it's not as popular as Harry Potter still is, and so I have made an effort not to talk about it at all, even though I've read it when I was... I think maybe a freshman in high school. And it had a huge impact on me. And I feel like many people who are listening to this will know what we're talking about. The author we're talking about has just like a horrible, horrible crime associated with her life. It just completely changed my relationship with that book, and it's not as popular as I was saying as Harry Potter is now. So I'm not going to, like talk about the book and give it a platform or anything like that. That's how I'm kind of choosing to address these things. So I personally have a really hard time separating the artist from whatever the form of artwork it is. I think because I put so much of myself in my stories, every character kind of has a little essence of me in it, even if it's just like my sense of humor or some random observation that I've had about life. I just can't divorce the creator from the creation in a way that I think some people are able to. For me, I know how much I put into my own work, and I assume that's very similar for other creators too. So yeah, it's, it's always, um, really sad when it happens. It's really devastating to me that I feel like I can't talk about the series that had such an impact on me growing up and made me... You know, really reaffirmed me wanting to become a writer. And so... But at the same time, I can't support her, and I can't support the things that she said. I support the trans community, and I'm not going to feel sorry for myself that I can't talk about these things when trans people are suffering every single day. So I almost think, too, it's like even a little different. I don't know if you would agree with this. Like when it's an actor, you can still almost enjoy the movie around them? I don't know, because they play a part? Whereas like with the novel, it's like the novelist has created everything in relation to it.
Mindy: It's a good question because when an author creates a piece of work, typically that is going to be a vehicle that carries their own thoughts or worldview or beliefs in them, and it is an all encompassing thing. Whereas a film is more of a team effort. Our whole conversation doesn't have to be about this, but it is really interesting because this has been present in my life recently. I am dating a person that is very much an outdoorsman and listens to a lot of different podcasts that are about hunting and fishing and like all those things. And recently sent me a link to a podcast called the Bear Grease Podcast, and they had done a series of episodes. At this point in time, there was only one episode available, but it was about a book that is called The Education of Little Tree. And The Education of Little Tree is a book that has been used in classrooms, and it's been touted as this great Native American semi-biographical story about a Cherokee boy. It was on Oprah's book list for a long time, and everyone was just like, "Yes, this book is a wonderful representation of the Native American experience." It turns out that the author of The Education of Little Tree was actually terribly racist human being that was George Wallace's speechwriter.
Alex: Oh, my gosh.
Mindy: Yeah,
Alex: How have I never heard of this before?
Mindy: It's one of those things that just kind of has flown under people's radar. Everyone now that knows that part of the story has had to rethink The Education of Little Tree. Oprah took it off of her book list, and universities won't teach it. The same question comes into play. Is The Education of Little Tree still a worthy piece of literature? My answer on that one is a lot easier because the author was posing as a Native American when they were in fact a white person and a horribly racist one as well.
Alex: Oh geez.
Mindy: So that one becomes a little easier to, I believe, answer but complicated question, right? As I said, it's been present for me, pretty widely present for me, lately. I was just... Saturday night was hang out with my boyfriend, and he's a person that likes to just like shoot through YouTube and find little videos to watch. I don't know if you'll remember this. You're quite a bit younger than me. Mike Myers had his Austin Powers movies. In the very opening, I believe, of the third one was like a farce where it's the Austin Powers movie, but they're on the set of Austin Powers being made into a movie. And Steven Spielberg is directing it. Tom Cruise is playing Austin. Kevin Spacey is Dr. Evil. Uma Thurman is the love interest, and Danny DeVito is Mini-Me. And I'm like, Gosh, like the only person that survived this that I don't look at them and go, "Oh yeah, that person..." is Danny DeVito.
Alex: Oh my gosh.
Mindy: Man, like it was this really funny, farcical, five to six minute clip. And my boyfriend was laughing. He was like, "Man, that was really funny." And I was like, "You know, it was. But I couldn't laugh." Every single person in this, like, incredibly hilarious in the mid-90s little scene has now become associated with really negative things for me mentally and emotionally. So it's like...
Alex: Yeah.
Mindy: Whether or not they are representing themselves or a piece of art, I'm bringing a reluctance to it just because I see them.
Alex: One thing I think a lot about is everybody is an imperfect person. Everybody... The goal is to continue to learn and to continue to better yourself and to continue to become a better citizen of society. To be more generous and loving towards others. To expand your knowledge and sensitivities and all of that. And I know like in The Darkest Minds series, there are certain things that I would never write now. You know, however many... Gosh, over ten years later, I have like thankfully learned that these things are insensitive.
Mindy: Another example, and we will bring this topic to a close. But another example is J.D. Salinger. We've learned some things about J.D. Salinger that aren't terribly attractive. And should we stop teaching The Catcher in the Rye? I know a lot of especially young men that became readers simply because of The Catcher in the Rye. So it's tough. I don't expect you to have the answer, that's for sure.
Alex: I know. I was like, "Oh, gosh." I know this is something I think about a lot, though, too, because in my effort to be a better person, to write more sensitively and all of that, I've definitely made mistakes in my own books, and I try really hard to acknowledge them when they come up in conversation. I try not to shy away from them, and I think maybe that's a difference that's important to me. I don't know if it's going to be true for everybody else, but I think creators who can acknowledge that they've made missteps in the past, that they had, you know, unconscious bias and all of that as they were writing or creating or TV shows and movies that are really a product of their time. I think if you can acknowledge your growth and acknowledge that they are in some ways problematic, then that's a little bit different than discovering somebody has this like ongoing viewpoint that you just cannot support and won't support financially, or by talking about the project or anything like that. I think that is a little bit different because I do think one thing that sometimes is missing from discussions is the allowance for personal growth and somebody going on that sort of journey of realizing that they were wrong, like that doesn't necessarily happen overnight. So yeah, really, really tough topic, something that I think is very worthy of discussion, and I'm sure people listening to us will not agree and some people will agree and that's important too. So...
Mindy: That's okay. That's why it's a tough topic. I'm a fan. I need to correct myself really quickly. It was not Uma Thurman. It was Gwyneth Paltrow.
Alex: Oh, okay. I was like, "What did Uma do?"
Mindy: No, Uma's great.
Alex: I was trying to... I was like, hmm.
Mindy: You're like "Oh, no. Now I have to Google Uma."
Alex: I know.
Mindy: I don't wanna know.
Alex: I'm muting myself typing.
Mindy: I'm sorry I misspoke. I got my wrong 90s blonde in there. No, I'm sorry. It was Gwyneth Paltrow. And again, what I said about Uma still applies. Gwyneth being the least offensive of the crew, and Danny DeVito, to my mind, being as far as I know, a perfectly wonderful human being. So...
Alex: Yeah.
Mindy: Great conversation. I appreciate you going down that route with me. These are the things I think about. And of course, like, as you said, we as ourselves, as authors, we live in a different world now. Our lives are very open to the public whether we want them to be or not. We have to always be aware of every word that comes out of our mouths. And I find that to be a positive because it makes me think a little harder before I run my mouth, which is something that, you know, 44. Still working on it. Um.
Alex: Me too. Still working on it.
Mindy: I enjoy hard questions, so thank you.
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Mindy: Speaking of, though, about putting ourselves into our books and our own personal experiences... A lot of the new book, Silver in the Bone, was inspired by a deep dive that you took into your own genealogy and you discovered the squire... Is it Richard Cabell or Cabell?
Alex: In my family, we say Cabell. This story actually has quite a sad beginning. So my dad was the reason I loved history, that I got into fantasy. He was someone who, you know, when I would go in to say good night, he was always reading like a mass market fantasy novel. He was a really big Tolkien reader and all of that. And he was a Star Wars collector. So he was all about sci-fi fantasy, and he loved loved history. So my dad had been recently diagnosed with terminal cancer. And so we were talking one day, and he mentioned to me that like one of the things he always regretted not doing was looking into our family genealogy. That had been important to him. He had some pieces of it that he had kind of inherited from my grandmother and from other family relations on the Bracken side. And so I offered to basically put together the family tree for him and see if there were any really interesting ancestors that came up.
It really is actually a privilege to be able to look into your family history. Not everybody is lucky enough to have these documents that go back and back and back through the centuries of just very basic, even birth and death records have been denied to many people. And there are certainly many branches of my family tree that I can't access because I don't speak Greek or I don't speak German or the church in Greece burned down with all the birth and death records and marriage records. It really reminded me, like how quickly we can lose our family history. Oftentimes within a generation or two, if we're not really sharing these stories and sharing this sort of research that we do. I went back through his side of the family tree, the Brackens, and I could not do the German side of that family. Unfortunately, because I think that would have been a totally different piece. But I then switched over to my mom's side and my mom's side turned up this really interesting ancestor. He's my eight times great uncle. His name is Squire Richard Cabell. So thankfully I'm not a direct ancestor. Um, he has his own Wikipedia page. I encourage you to read it. It's really actually quite funny because all of this is kind of presented as fact. But he was known as this very monstrously evil man.
He lived in the 17th century in Devon. At the time, the villagers were convinced he had sold his soul to the devil. And there were all of these stories that sprung up around his death about how the night he died or the night of his burial, these, like, phantom pack of hounds came running across the moors, howling and barking at his window or at his tomb. And how, like on the anniversary of his death, he would come back. Or the villagers would see Richard Cabell out walking with these hounds on the moors. And so I am immediately obsessed with this story. If you are a Sherlock Holmes fan, supposedly this is one of the possible origins of The Hound of the Baskervilles. It's one of the legends that guess fed into that story. And so this sent me kind of down this research rabbit hole of looking into the black dog folklore of the British Isles, the Wild Hunt. And then I sort of like backed into, I say, a lot of really early Arthurian lore from the Welsh tradition. And so I had all of these various pieces of really interesting folklore, but I didn't have a story idea for it. So it took a really long time for, you know, the characters to arrive and the plot conflict to arrive. And then once they did, it was... I was off and running. But it did take a long time, and it was sparked by that very strange ancestor.
Mindy: That's fascinating. I also have a very interesting, if not quite as illustrious, but have interesting stories in my genealogy as well that do tie into my fiction, although I did not realize this until after the fact.
Alex: Oh, interesting.
Mindy: My family's also difficult to trace because on my Irish side, in the great tradition of Irish people, a lot of people got drunk and had horrible fights with their father and then just was too proud to ever reconcile it. So...
Alex: Oh!
Mindy: That happened like 3 or 4 times.
Alex: Oh, no.
Mindy: Very quickly, within like three generations. My grandmother was adopted, and my grandfather on my dad's side was no longer speaking to anyone on his side of the family. I come to find out later on that my grandmother was in an orphanage because her mother died in an insane asylum.
Alex: Oh my gosh.
Mindy: And her father died in a prison.
Alex: Wow.
Mindy: Yeah. And I found this out after the fact. I had written A Madness So Discreet, which, of course, takes place in an insane asylum. The mother was just incapable because of alcoholism. Was she in an asylum for that reason? Or was there truly a mental issue? And interestingly enough, HIPAA laws still apply. So even though her medical records exist, and I am a direct descendant. I cannot access them. And it's something that I have had conversations with various people in the medical and also the historical community, and they're just like, "Nope, that's that's going to be closed to you forever." And I'm like...
Alex: Wow.
Mindy: You know what it's like as a genealogist.
Alex: Yeah.
Mindy: But I want to know the answer.
Alex: Yeah, that's interesting. I had no idea that the laws were quite that ironclad, but I guess it respects her privacy. But yeah, from, you know, a genealogy point of view... Even from a family health point of view, that's also very frustrating.
Mindy: Absolutely. And that's the avenue that it interests me for various reasons. But also, as you said, a family history point of view. I myself am a person that struggles with depression and anxiety. And so I was like, "hey, it would be kind of cool to know what specifically her diagnosis was." And everybody that I had spoken to that was any type of gatekeeper along the way was like, "Yeah, no." Going back to talking about Silver in the Bone, and you had mentioned this one cooked for ten years. I love that. I think it's a wonderful message for writers who are listening. I personally dislike the overnight success stories very much. They're hard to hear sometimes. So I really enjoy the fact that this cooked for ten years, but also your tenacity and hanging on to it for ten years.
Alex: I think if you can get an overnight success, that is a very wonderful thing to have. And I do not begrudge overnight successes. They are successes, but except in very rare cases, I think the overnight success is a little bit of a myth because even somebody who is right out of the gates, very successful with their first book, has spent years writing for the most part. This is obviously not true for absolutely everybody, but they've put in a lot of work that you don't see. And in my case, a lot of people thought that The Darkest Minds was my debut, but it wasn't my debut novel. My debut novel was a little book called Brightly Woven. It was like a very cute, kind of almost cozy-ish. Now I feel like it would be considered pre-teen because of how dark and and how mature YA has gotten just as an age group. But it was a very sweet book. It was published by Egmont USA, which was brand new to the scene and then closed shortly thereafter. Unfortunately, Egmont's US arm did not work out and so the rights reverted back to me. But it sold okay. It definitely was the sort of thing where because I had fans of that book, they were willing to follow me then to The Darkest Minds. So it wasn't like I started from zero in terms of trying to get readers interested in my book.
But I often tell debut authors that feel so much pressure to hit the list... There is something to be said about building your audience and your readership with every single book. That slow and steady pace of building and building and building is just as worthy of a path as immediately breaking out and having this huge success right from the get go. And obviously that huge success right from the get go comes with its own problems because then you feel the pressure to replicate that with whatever you do next and often times the success of that big series is down to a lot of factors that are pure luck. It's like the right book at the right time. Got into the hands of the right editor. Got into the hands of the right publisher. Happened to hit, like I was saying, an opening in the market that maybe the author themselves did not even predict. I think there is something to be said about slowly but surely kind of building that readership book over book. Although now that I've said that, I was lucky enough to enter the industry all the way back in 2010. So I think it is a little bit harder now that the market is so saturated. There are so many books out there. I think it is much harder and there is more pressure on debut authors. I don't know if you would agree with that or not.
Mindy: I do. I also think with the shifting ideas about publicity and marketing, you know, social media. You know. I mean, I.. I came up in 2013 and it's like social media has changed so drastically from what it used to be. And everyone's scrambling, and ARCs don't really matter anymore. And book trailers used to matter, and now they don't. Who fucking knows? It's such a dog and pony show. I just. I'm just going to write the book and hope it does well.
Alex: Yeah. Honestly, that's really all that you can do. That's something that I also emphasize a lot to debut authors. It's like TikTok is obviously been huge for the publishing industry, and I know when I was on tour recently, a lot of the Barnes and Noble managers I was talking to really credit booktok for creating a whole new generation of readers and really helping the whole retail chain, basically. And so I think it has its positives for sure. But one of the drawbacks I know is that if you are on that platform, it's totally gamified. So you have to like constantly be churning out all of this content in order for the algorithm to keep promoting your videos to then help you promote your books. And most authors I know do not have the time to do that, and they do not have the attention bandwidth. They do not want to spend a lot of their creative energy making these videos. I think if you find it really enjoyable and fun, it's absolutely worthwhile. But the best thing that you can do is just write the next book and continue to write the next book and pour your heart into that. And let the algorithm, the readers that are on booktok, do the work of promoting your book. I think that's ultimately what helps books go viral. It's not anything authors can really do on their end. It's what the reader... How the readers respond to it, and if they're posting videos about it, that's sort of, I think what ultimately helps promote books there. But yeah, the social media landscape has changed so, so much. It's really wild.
Mindy: Last thing. Why don't you let listeners know where they can find the new book Silver in the Bone, and also where they can find you online?
Alex: All right. Well, hopefully you can find it wherever books are sold here in the US, and I think in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, it's all out. And in Canada. And then if you want to find me online, I am at Alex Bracken on both Twitter, although who knows how long Twitter will be here with us. I'm at Alex Bracken on Instagram. I'm even on TikTok at Alexandra Bracken since somebody took my at Alex Bracken handle. So I was not quick enough to join TikTok.
Mindy: I know. I'm Mindy McGinnis author on Instagram because apparently there's like 38 of us believe it or not.
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