Today’s guest is Elsie Chapman, whose work includes the YA Sci-Fi series DUALED and DIVIDED, as well as the upcoming ALONG THE INDIGO. Born and raised in western Canada and a graduate of UBC with a degree in English Literature, Elsie Chapman currently lives in Tokyo with her family. 

Elsie joins host Mindy McGinnis  to talk about how so much of the pain of publishing goes unspoken, the luck of hitting a trend, the downside of that trend falling out of style, writing the book of your heart even when you know it might not get published, and putting together teams for theme focused anthologies.

Elsie's Links:

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Today’s episode is being featured on Podbean’s crowd support service. If you like what we do here, please consider supporting the show by visiting https://patron.podbean.com/writerwriterpantsonfire

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Today's guest is Tara Dairman whose debut novel All Four Stars, about an 11 y/o restaurant critic moonlighting for New York’s biggest newspaper was published in 2014, followed by The Stars of Summer and Stars So Sweet in 2015 and 2016. A new standalone middle-grade novel, The Great Hibernation, will hit the shelves on September 12.

Tara joined me to talk about how a contest helped her gain an invitation to query a closed agency, how to navigate social media when your target audience may not be there, and the question of who you write for when you write middle grade – the kids, or the gatekeepers? 

Episode Links:

TaraDairman.com

Publisher's Marketplace

Miss Snark's First Victim

Krista Van Dolzer's Blog

Author Tiffany McDaniel, an Ohio native whose writing is inspired by the rolling hills and buckeye woods of the land she knows, joins host Mindy McGinnis. She is the winner of The Guardian's 2016 "Not-the-Booker Prize" for her debut novel, The Summer that Melted Everything. The novel is a current nominee for the Lillian Smith Book Award, and a finalist for the Ohioana Literary Award and the Women's Fiction Writers Association Star Award for Outstanding Debut. Tiffany talks about eleven years of rejection, making sure that human emotion and characters trump the setting, being a female author who prefers to write dark themes, and the cons of using technology in your manuscript.

Links:

Tiffany's Site

The Summer That Melted Everything

Justina Ireland, author of Vengeance Bound and Promise of Shadows talks with host Mindy McGinnis about such topics as the real-life breakdown of big advances, writing for your audience versus writing for the gatekeepers, white as default for readers, and the question of whether authors should write outside their race. 

Links For This Episode:

Vengeance Bound

Promise of Shadows

Dread Nation

Three Sides of A Heart

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Writing In the Margins – Sensitivity Readers Database