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 a a guest.
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Mindy: So we're here with Anna Meriano to talk about her book, This Is How We Fly. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the book? And it is very much a book about a fandom, So why don't you tell us about those roots?
Anna: I always struggled to describe it because it's basically a coming of age story. It's a Cinderella retelling, very loosely. It's a contemporary YA with no magic, and it follows the story of Ellen, who has just graduated from high school, gets grounded for her last summer before college. She joins a Quidditch team, a real- life Muggle Quidditch team. Muggle Quidditch is a real sport that is really played in countries around the world. It's an international sport. I have been playing it for eight years now. Just decided to write a book about those experiences a little bit. It's become its own, really weird community that's very athletic, but also still very nerdy, very close knit, just a lot of fun.
Mindy: There's a few things going on here that break a mold, and one of them is that your character is out of high school. She's in that gray area before she's going to college. And a lot of the time YA books are very firmly planted in that high school lifestyle and not that transitional period. So if you could talk about that a little bit, I know that, it can be like a difficult sell. So how did that come about for you? Was there any pushback on the age range?
Anna: I think not. In fact, I think I had some potential editors who we're very excited about it existing in that space because there is a little bit of a push for new adult. It's small, but it's there. And so there were a couple of places that were a little bit interested but were, you know, wanting Sequels that were also set in college. But I really wanted to write more high school after this book. I think it just made sense. Because Quidditch got started at Middlebury College, Almost all of the early teams were college teams and most of the population playing the sport. When I first started playing, it was almost all college students on my team, the Houston Cosmos. We have had some high schoolers join up for a year or two or for the summer before they go to college, but it's not super common.
I needed to have a reason for Ellen to be with this team of you know 18 19 20 21 year olds where it didn't feel like she was in a completely different space than they were, and then also for the Cinderella retailing aspect, that space that you described of being sort of in transition, or I think of it as being kind of stuck when you're like, Well, I'm done with high school, dot, dot, dot, dot. That just resonated a lot with the Cinderella story of being kind of stuck in a place and feeling like there's no escape from it, even though there clearly is and you're about to get to it. But you just can't really see that.
Mindy: For me, when I went to college those, like three months before I left. I mean, I was just terrified. It's like Stassis. You feel like you're not moving forward But holding on To What was behind you feels like there's no growth there. I struggled with it for a lot of reasons. I'm from a really rural area and so going to college for me was a little bit intimidating. I'm not gonna lie.
Anna: It's a wonderful time. It's a really scary time. It's definitely a time for a lot of change and growth. So I think it's really interesting to explore it and probably There's a need for books in that space. I would imagine that so many of our readers could relate To that particular struggle. I've started to hear people say that you could do YA all the way up to Freshman year of college As long as it's still “what is college?” I kind of like that that we're pushing the age range to include that, because that is still really young adult. Kids were still 17 and 18.
Mindy: I don't feel like I was actually an adult till I was 30. That's how I feel. So I mean, you're still floundering in your twenties. I mean, I was.
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Mindy: The other thing that I really think sets this apart that, I think is really interesting is as you were saying, This is a book that is really tied to a sport and, as you were saying, a competitive one yet at the same time having extremely dense roots in nerds and a geek collective. And those two things do not cross that often. Now, It is not necessarily a reflection of reality. I know I was always deeply frustrated as a teenager that there weren't enough books about female athletes because I am an athlete.
I was an athlete as a teen, and I was not finding books written by women about female athletes. Like they just didn't exist. So as an adult, I said, You know, I'd really like to write a book about a female athlete. There was some pushback about that because the belief is that athletes don't read and I got a lot of pushback. It was just like, Yeah, but how do we market that? I am an athlete. I was an athlete, and I read voraciously. I worked in a high school library for a very long time and athletes read books. Our homecoming king One year had it in his bio that he was the president of Book Club. It's just quite simply not true, but it is a pervasive belief. So can you talk about that a little bit? Because I do think that you're wandering into an area that some people would say is fantasy.
Anna: I completely agree with everything you're saying. I did want to ask - What did you play?
Mindy: Softball and basketball.
Anna: Nice. Okay, Yeah, I was really into basketball. Middle school kind of killed the joy for me because I really loved basketball as a kid to answer your actual question - So I think that I was also an athlete as a younger kid. My elementary school did like a giant schoolwide basketball tournament every year that everyone was really involved in. I was very competitive. I would get really competitive even for like, you know, medic dodgeball or whatever we were playing through middle and high school. I feel like I lost it slightly just because I didn't have the encouragement that like, I should be doing sports and competitive things or because there isn't that much representation of nerdy and athletic people. I mean, you know, we got High School Musical at some point there. But for the most part like you're saying it feels like or it's presented as two separate worlds like, Are you going to sit with the jocks? Are you going to sit with the nerds? Like you said, that doesn't reflect reality, but that can feel like you have to choose.
And so I definitely very full heartedly chose to be a nerd. I sort of like gave up sports, and even then I was being drawn to things like Tamora Pierce, Protector of the Small series which is really a sports book. The sport is just jousting and being a knight. Books that still kind of were sports adjacent. When I found Quidditch in college, I mostly joined it like a ha ha. It's gonna be so nerdy. It's gonna be like Harry Potter Club. And then it wasn't and I ended up actually loving the fact that it wasn't so, so, so nerdy more. I mean, especially now I'm not so into the fact that it's connected to the fantasy book fandom because unfortunately, that's a painful connection.
So now what I love about it is that it's an all gender, full contact sport at a level where anyone can kind of join up and start playing and not necessarily be the star of the show. But, like be competitive, get competitive pretty quickly, and then you can go around, meet all the other players and start learning all the strategies and get involved in the community. Like a lower barrier to entry than, say, basketball. And I think I love the fact that it does attract nerds. We talk a lot, and like my friends on my team, some of them came in through Texas football, sports culture. There's a kind of running joke about like, Oh, I'm just here to tackle nerds. And then there's also people who were running their Harry Potter fan clubs at some point in their life, back when it was less of a bigoted thing. The fact that we have both kinds of people really makes it a fun space and that we can all connect over like the sport that we play. The jocks can teach us how to throw balls, and the nerds could be like geeking out over the ref test. And honestly, again, most people are a little of both. There's not one type of person. It's just a cool place to exist.
Mindy: And sports can just unite and bring together so many different people like it just doesn't even matter. It's its own language in so many ways. I've told people before multiple times the one time I as an adult was involved in like almost like a melee group fight, like practically a riot was a church softball game. You've got a bunch of Christians. They got a little bit riled up and people were holding bats and coming at each other, and somebody called the cops. Like I mean, it's just you get to a point where that compulsion is there. And it is not necessarily everyone but that competitive spirit and something that I think is really deeply tied to sports that doesn't necessarily come up that often is justice, like what you just did is wrong. That is, against the social fabric of what we are agreeing to here.
Anna: I have never made that connection, but I love it. That's such a big part of what gets what people feel so passionately about with sports is the reffing. Oh my gosh, reffing in Quidditch is a whole thing.
Mindy: I'm sure. I come from a very... I know you do, too, In Texas. In Ohio sports, It's like pretty much everyone grows up playing something you just slough off a little bit afterwards if you're not into it. But pretty much everybody gets a shot at some point at something. And that's what we do. Like in, especially in the rural areas. If it's a Friday night in the fall, you're more than likely going to a football game. And in the winter you're going to a basketball game like it's especially in my community high school sports, because we're very, very tied to our schools because, quite frankly, it's very generational, and people don't necessarily leave. You go to the sports to watch your kids and your friends' kids and then, you know, in 20 years they're gonna be there watching their kids like That's just the way it is.
And people are passionate, and there is just this agreed upon social construct that you walk into the gymnasium or, you know, you come to the stadium and everyone knows what the rules are, and everyone knows what behavior is supposed to be and the arbiters, your refs or your judges or whatever your line judges. it can come back on them, too. It's like, No way, you're wrong. You did it wrong.
Anna: Quidditch has a lot of different refs because there's a lot of different games going on in Quidditch. I didn't really talk about that yet, but a game of rugby and a game of dodgeball and a game of like, I don't know, wrestling. There was a point in time where I thought I would like, try to become an assistant ref and try to, like, help my team out to fulfill our ref requirements. And then I got a really bad game with a team up in New York. The head ref had told us to do a certain thing. If a goal goes in but is not a good goal, and I did that exact thing that the head ref had asked me to do and players were screaming at me.
No, no, you can't raise your hands like that because it didn't go in, because it wasn't a good goal and I was like, I'm doing what the head ref told me! And they were just they were screaming at me. They just would not stop. I was like, Okay!
Mindy: I could say as someone that was a base coach for a T ball team of like, eight year olds, boy, you want to talk about passion? I again one of the only times I almost got in a physical altercation as an adult. Eight year old T ball! It’s just like, Get out of my face, Mama. Out of my face.
Anna: Oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, I mean, but that's the intensity. I liked writing Ellen, who didn't have that intensity to begin with because that, you know, that wasn't really my experience. I, like, went to my first practice, didn't know what I was doing, but still trying to bite someone. Um, but I liked writing of them, kind of like really not knowing that she had that in her. And then as she gets more into it, more into it, she's like, Yes, like I desperately want to do this thing.
Mindy: Well, it just takes a certain thing, you know, some of that one thing that flips that switch inside that person and it’s like, No, I will do this better than you!
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Mindy: Real quick, you've mentioned it a couple of times. Obviously, J. K. Rowling has become a problem for a lot of different reasons. And your book is like, really, really tied into the Harry Potter fandom. What has that experience been like for you?
Anna: Not great, Bob. So I started writing this book in 2014. It was my debut. I was writing it at the same time that I was writing my debut middle grade. So really, it was one of the first books that I like, sat down to seriously write. So it took me a long time because it's a little more character driven than plot driven. I didn't have a good sense of necessarily where it was going other than like and then there will be a tournament, and she will lose her cleat!
I guess it was a lot of exploration, and basically it took me a long time. But it means that in the time it's taken me to write this book, a lot has changed. And sometimes I look at the book and I'm like, Wow, you know, this would have been a little better if it had come out in 2016 2017 2018. But it didn't so I mean, I'm still proud of the book. I still really hope it finds its readers, but it has been kind of disappointing, especially this recent, like maybe the last six months, because JK Rowling, you know, she was kind of circling the TERF drain and then suddenly, like dove.
There had been a while where I was making sure to put in things like, Oh, you know, some people haven't read the book and that's fine. Things like That's where I was like, kind of trying to put a little bit of distance in the text and then in my final pass pages, it was like the week after she had gone full TERF on Twitter and I had to kind of like run in and just try and take out as many of the fun references as I could without losing important conversations.
This book has its roots in the Harry Potter fandom at a time when many authors were saying, I've gone through and scrubbed every reference of Harry Potter out of my new book. I really couldn't do that. It kind of sucked because I kind of wanted To at the same time. I'm hopeful that because there are so many of us who are in the same boat who are dealing with these feelings of disappointment or feeling like we've been really let down by something that was so important to us in such a big part of our identity. Harry Potter fans are hard core. It was a moment in history for some people. It could be nice to see the book that focuses on the fandom and the inclusive aspect of the fandom and the space that we are all making for each other. That also says fuck TERFS and like we don't need to be tied to what the series used to be. What we feel about it is the relationships we've formed, all of that stuff. It's still hard because even saying that I know there are some people who just don't want to interact with Harry Potter anymore, and I totally get that. I mean, I even sort of feel it. It's just that I don't really have a choice because I'm marketing a Quidditch book.
Mindy: Obviously marketing and just the existence of the book itself. I mean, that's all part of it just emotionally and personally, like you're saying. That's very difficult. And personally, my approach has been because now obviously JK Rowling is the biggest example. But you know, there have been authors that have really, um, disappointed me in the past, but there have been authors that are dead that disappointed me, right? Like I would find it, find an interview or something that they said or learn something that I didn't know and just be like, Oh no, right? And just be very upset by it. And, you know, personally, that I just feel betrayed.
And I think there comes a point where you have to separate the art from the artist. With JK Rowling That is particularly difficult. But for me, I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan. I enjoyed it. I had a good time with it. I moved on. So I know that with that particular fandom, it's more difficult. But for me, if there's a book or a movie, or even like a song, whatever. If there's something that I really like and the artist or the Creator is problematic, I have begun the practice of just being like, You know, I don't like you, I don't agree with you, but I can still interact with your art in a way that is meaningful to me. I don't want to be made to feel guilty about the fact that, like, for example, the Usual Suspects is one of my favorite movies of all time. Kevin Spacey sucks now. It's like you can't watch Kevin Spacey without thinking about it. I'm not going to never watch The Usual Suspects again.
Anna: We've seen with some very recent YA Twitter discourse that people get really invested in whatever I read and loved should be the thing that the next generation reads and loves. The way you were just talking about, you know, wanting to see you play on that sports team. And then you see your kids play on that sports team and then someday they'll be here watching their kids. We feel that about books and about movies and about art. It's hard to let that go. Sometimes it's hard to realize, like just because something was meaningful to me doesn't mean we need to replicate it for all the next generations. That was a big mental step that I think a lot of us had to take when Harry Potter, when J. K. Rowling went full on TERF. It was to say, Wow, what I found in the Harry Potter books. I have to now be okay with, like hoping that people find that somewhere else, which is how it works anyway. It was gonna happen anyway. There's just something very weird about that. It's like it goes against our instinct, which is like, Oh, this is great! Everyone should have it!
Mindy: I read War and Peace. I really did do a deep dive, like I loved it. It was a long winter. So I decided I was going to read War and Peace, and I went in on it like really hard. And I loved it and I was so excited about it. And then there's this line at the very end and it's like one of the married couples. And it's like “and she was a great wife because she knew just to be quiet and agree with her husband, no matter what.” Hey, fuck you, dude. No Tolstoy! No. And then got to reading a little bit of how he treated his wife. And it was not good and all these things on then I'm like, Okay, but does that repudiate War and Peace? Does this one line? I'm like, It sucks, And I had been highlighting passages. I always do this. I write in all my books and I highlighted that passage and I wrote ASSHOLE on the side like I'm just like I made a statement about how I feel about this one line. It tainted how I felt about the book. It was one of the things that I took away from the book. And then, of course, as I was saying, had that reaction where I just went and found out about Leo Tolstoy’s character and you know, But at the same time, he wasn't exactly living in the like least sexist area and time period of the world.
And obviously JK Rowling does not have that excuse. So I'm certainly not giving her. I'm not giving her any leeway or wiggle room. This conversation for me is about interacting with the art and not the artist. It's not an easy road to walk. It's a bit of a quagmire, and I'm like, I feel very badly for you. Think this was your first YA book And unfortunately, the roots are in something that is being repudiated.
Anna: I have more books coming. I have my whole, you know, middle grade trilogy that I'm really, really proud of, and I'm really, like I said, I'm really proud of this book, too, So I'm still hoping it will find readers who can find the good things in it. I've actually been really happy to see a couple reviews from people who just said like, I don't really know much about Harry Potter and I liked the book anyway, So I was like, Okay, good. Being able to see some people either find something happy to celebrate about the fandom or just say, Hey, this is a fun book and an interesting family dynamic and they're playing a weird sport. But whatever, it's still cool.
Mindy: Why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find the book?
Anna: I’m mostly on Twitter. I'm on Twitter way too much, my six year old tutor student said. I Googled you and I found your Twitter. You tweet a lot. Uh, I was like, Wow! Called out. So you can find me on Twitter at AnnaMisboring . Or my website, which is just Anna Meriano dot com. If you want to see details about the book preorder campaign, where you could get some cool headbands or if you want to see some live streams I've been doing as a lead up to the book launch, you can go to Anna Meriano dot com slash This is how we fly.
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