In this riveting episode of Author Express, Kathleen Basi chats with Edgar award-winning novelist Mindy McGinnis. If you’re fascinated by the balance between a cheerful personality and dark, compelling writing, Mindy’s story will captivate you. Get a glimpse into her life in a small Ohio town, marked by historical tragedies and quirky facts. Mindy’s new book, Under This Red Rock, a dark-themed murder mystery involving LGBTQ and mental health topics, offers a raw and honest perspective borne from her personal experiences. Don’t miss this episode if you’re interested in mental health awareness, author journeys, or simply love a good literary discussion.

You can learn more about Mindy on her website www.mindymcginnis.com and follow her on Facebook at Mindy McGinnis and Instagram @mindymcginnisauthor

Support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of Under This Red Rock at Bookshop.org

A little about today's host-

Author and musical composer Kathleen Basi is mother to three boys and one chromosomally-gifted daughter. Her debut novel, A SONG FOR THE ROAD, follows a musician on an unconventional road trip. Bestselling author Kerry Anne King writes, “In a novel filled with music, heartbreak, and surprising laughter, Basi takes us on a journey that encompasses both unimaginable loss and the powerful resilience of the human heart.”

Meaty, earnest, occasionally humorous, and ultimately uplifting, Kathleen’s fiction highlights the best within ourselves and each other. She writes monthly reflections on life, writing and beauty on her newsletter. Subscribe at https://kathleenbasi.substack.com/. 

Be sure to follow or subscribe to Author Express wherever you listen to podcasts and to follow us on Instagram @AuthorExpressPodcast

Learn more about our hosts, the guests we've had, and their books -

https://linktr.ee/AuthorExpressPodcast

We feel it is important to make our podcast transcripts available for accessibility. We use quality artificial intelligence tools to make it possible for us to provide this resource to our audience. We do have human eyes reviewing this, but they will rarely be 100% accurate. We appreciate your patience with the occasional errors you will find in our transcriptions. If you find an error in our transcription, or if you would like to use a quote, or verify what was said, please feel free to reach out to us at connect@37by27.com.

Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know some of your favorite authors in a new light. I'm one of your hosts, Kathleen Basi, I'm an award winning musical composer, a feature writer, essayist, and, of course, storyteller. Let me tell you a little bit about today's guest. Mindy McGinnis is an Edgar award winning novelist who writes across multiple genres, including post apocalyptic, historical, thriller, contemporary, mystery, and fantasy. While her settings may change, you can always count on Mindy's books to deliver grit, truth, and an unflinching look at humanity and the world around us. Mindy, welcome to Author Express.

Yes. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. I've read, not all of your books, but a good number of your books, and it is really astonishing how you have managed to cross genres like that. We're not supposed to be able to do that. How did you manage that?

Well, my first two books were dystopian, and they came out in the early 2010s when Hunger Games and Divergent and everything had kind of blown up that genre. My first two, Not A Drop to Drinkin' and A Handful of Dust, came in right as that door on that genre was closing. So by 2014, by the time my second one came out, the sequel, that genre had kind of died off. And so there wasn't a lot of point in continuing to write in the same genre. Dystopian is very specific. So my editor was like, hey, let's just talk about other things. And the next idea I happen to have was a historical and a mystery. And so they were like, let's do this.

And that was a madness so discreet, which was what won the Edgar Allan Poe award, which was really cool. Winning awards is awesome and it feels really good, but it doesn't necessarily mean you sell more books. So, unfortunately, A Madness So Discreet did not sell well. So that was supposed to be 2 books, and first one didn't sell incredibly well. And so they were like, hey. Typically, you I'm sure know this, but 40% of your readership drops off moving on to a sequel. And they were like, hey. What else have you got? And I was like, let's do contemporary.

And they're like, yeah, let's do that. And so I just have been fortunate in that my editor at Harper, Ben Rosenthal, who has since moved on to source books, but I was with Ben for 10 books. He was just always open to, like, what else you got. And if it was different than what I'd had before, he was like, sure. Let's try it. So I just had a lot of trust and a really good partnership there.

Yeah. That's really good. Normally, we start by asking you a different question, so I got a little distracted today. So let's go back to that. Tell us what is the most interesting thing about where you're from, either where you grew up or where you are now?

So I'm in a tiny little town in Ohio. It's very, very small. We graduate about 68 kids a year. There's 2 interesting things about where I'm from. We were utterly destroyed by a tornado in 1981. We were flattened by, I think it was an F3 tornado. And also Abraham Lincoln's dead body passed through our town on the railroad. And they stopped the train, and people, like, came to look.

And it had been a minute because we're in Ohio, and apparently, it was a yucky situation. But, yeah, that's that's where we're going for. There is a distraction and death and then now me. So that's that's what we're known for.

That's great. Okay. So what is something about you that other people find hard to believe?

My personality in general. So when people meet me who have only read my books, because my books are really dark. My books are super dark. They have moments of levity because you need those just to pull the throttle back a little bit. But my books are really dark. Really horrible things happen in my books. And my books tackle tough situations and rape culture and addiction and murder and mental health. And really, really, I go to very dark places.

Mhmm.

I, myself, am a fairly happy, outgoing person, and I'm funny. And when people who have only read my books meet me in real life, they're just shocked. I don't know what they expect to find. Like, they meet someone that is sociable and personable and outgoing. And, you know, I like to laugh and I like to fool around and make jokes. And that just doesn't fit my books. But then people that know me in real life, because I still live in the tiny town that I came from, people know me in real life, Read my books, and they're like, what the hell? I've had so many, like, coworkers and friends from when I was in high school be like, oh, wow. I did not know that was in there.

And I'm like, oh, yeah. It's in here. It is in here. I am an onion.

You're an onion. That's awesome. Well, I think also you give people a ton of opportunities to meet you. I don't think I've ever been aware of someone who works so hard to go around the country and and especially because you're writing in You. You came to my town, I think it was a year or 2 ago, and the school brought you in. And my kid, actually, my oldest is now in college, and he just yesterday asked me, can you get water drop not a drop to drink from the library because you can't get it anymore otherwise? He was asking me to get that because he wanted to read it, and he had bought the second book from you when you were at his school.

That's so awesome.

So you really work hard to get yourself out there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I do. And that's a choice that I make because I do not enjoy social media at all. I don't like it. I like doing things like this. I like interacting with a human. I mean, I can talk to a person, just a single person. I can talk to a room of 800 people. I can do whatever you need me to do when I'm interacting with people and, like, flow and be good.

I pick up my phone and I'm just like, hey, guys. How are you? Like, it's really bad. I can't interact with a blank screen. And I don't like looking at myself either. Like, I don't. So I don't enjoy social media at all. I do it to a certain extent. But at the end of the day, I am a writer and I communicate with words.

I am not a visual person. I am a performer, but I need an audience and I need immediate feedback from a living human being. I do not want to go and see how many likes I got, or if I finally figured out the algorithm on whatever, I don't care. So that is just not something I'm interested in at all. And I I used to be when I first started my career, I would spend 2 hours a day every morning. That's what I did is I went through each platform, which at the time was Facebook, Twitter, and I don't even know, maybe Tumblr. And I would spend 2 hours every day interacting with people, writing things, responding to my stuff, posting. And I was like, yeah, this is great.

And then, you know, it got the oversharing. I hate it. There are aspects of my personal life that no one knows and never will. That people that don't know me in real life, they just I'm not gonna share that. It's not for you. I just don't wanna participate in selling myself as a product That is not interesting to me. I am a writer. So I travel instead.

I feel like I do better. It's a better format for me. I will drive. I drove from Ohio to New Mexico and back for a con one time. Because I was like, Yes, I will. And making money is nice. But, like, on that trip, it basically was like what I got paid. I burnt up in gas and food and lodging.

But I do about 90 to a 100 events a year. So pretty much every 3 days, I'm doing something.

That's amazing.

Yes. And I enjoy it, like, truly. So, like, yesterday, I drove about 2 hours north for an event. I don't have anything today, but tomorrow I'm driving North again for about an hour and a half. And then next week on Wednesday Thursday, I have back to back library visit. And those are all within the state, but I go all over the country. And I've had conversations, like, with my editor and I have a new editor now, but with my editor and with my team at Harper, I appreciate that this is what the world likes, the social media, but I'm not good at it. I can't be genuine.

I don't enjoy it. And it's gonna fall flat. I don't this isn't good. So what I do instead is I put myself, like, out there anywhere people will take me. Like, I will get there. And so the one thing that I do, I started doing this right after post COVID, and I wish I would have started it sooner. But, you know, Starbucks has their, been there coffee mugs. So I started buying the Starbucks mug every state that I'd been to because I wanted to visit all 50 states.

So I started getting the Starbucks mug for every state that I've been to, and I think I'm up to 35.

That's impressive.

Yeah. If there's anybody in Alaska that wants me to come see you, just email me. That's a big goal. Been to Hawaii, so I wanna have that. I wanna say that I I have done an author event in all 50 states. I just think that

Good for you. Okay. Well, today, we're talking about your book Under This Red Rock. So can you sort of sum up your book in one sentence for those who are not familiar with it?

Sure. It is a murder mystery set in a cave system with LGBTQ and mental health themes.

Okay. So tell us, what do you hope readers are gonna take away from this book that you're from under this roadblock?

I've just been through a series of events that later on had to change some medication about 3 years ago. I think I I think I probably had what along like, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, we would have called a nervous breakdown. Like, it was just not good. During that time is when I came up with the concept for Under This Red Rock. And that is easily my darkest book, my most disturbing book. It really goes there in terms of mental health. And I wrote it when I was in a particularly like low trough. And man, you can tell, it's a tough one.

It's a slog. And I just want readers to be able to read it. And I certainly wouldn't want anyone to be able to see themselves because I don't want anyone to suffer in that unique and horrible way. But I want them to know that mean, we say it all the time. We use that phrase, You're not alone. Like that's what depression does. And that's what anxiety does too. It just makes you feel like you were the only person suffering.

And you're the only no one can possibly understand. And it's like, no, like probably 800,000 people just in a your state understand. So, you know, I want people to feel like it's something that we can talk about and you don't have to be ashamed of. I think a lot of the stigma with mental health is lifting and people are talking about it more. You know, I openly, openly, openly talk about it. And I talk about medication and therapy and all the different things that I do to handle my problems. And I just want people to be able to do that. And when I talk, when I visit schools and I will talk about something that happened to me when I was transitioning medication.

And your brain, when you're transitioning, or you go off, or you're ramping on, man, your brain just doesn't work. Your brain doesn't work. You can disassociate. You're detached. You are just foggy to an extent that you're like, you're forgetting people's names in your immediate family. And I'll be talking about these things and I'll be looking out at the audience and there'll be, like, 15, 20 kids and they're just nodding. And they're like, yeah. Yeah.

No. Totally.

I know that sometimes the adults around us are like, woah. Why are you putting this dark stuff in front of kids? But the teenagers really they're all like that. They're nodding going, yeah. Yeah. This is what we deal with. Get on board, adults. This is what it's really like. So you've really tapped into something.

They deal with it, and then they're also expected to still be like, you know, I work for myself. So it's like if I'm waking up and I'm having a bad day or I forgot to take my bed or something, I can just be like, hey. You know what? 2 hour nap, I gotta recover. And, you know, it's like you have to take a math test. You have to go to softball practice. You have to go to work. And they're not in control of their own lives in so many ways. And then they have some sort of issue.

And I'm also not for the over medication of humans and kids in general. So, you know, there's a fine line. Not everybody needs to be on medication, but people that do, do.

Really do. Yeah. Alright. Well, this is really interesting. Thank you for sharing all of that with us. Mhmm. So as we start to wrap up, let's tell people what's the best place for people to find you. Obviously, it's not social media.

Is it website? Is that where people should go?

Yeah. Like, I am definitely there. If you post on one of my posts, if you comment, if you like, if you send me a message, I will absolutely respond to you. I respond to everyone.

She's very responsive.

Very responsive. I just don't post every day.

Very responsive. My world

is not that interesting when it really comes down to it. I am on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, x, whatever we're calling it now, Facebook, and my website is just mindymciginnis.com. So those are all ways that you can interact with me, and I will interact. Like, if you ask me a question, you will get an answer and it might be long. So

Okay. So we like to end with a book recommendation. So what book would you like to recommend to our listeners today?

Sure. So I recently blurbed 2 books that have come out by debut authors. So one of them is called Not Like Other Girls by Meredith Adama, and that one is really, really good. And it will be coming out soon. I don't believe it's out yet. There's a book called Here Lies a Vengeful Bitch, And that is by Cody Crowley. And so both of those books are relatively new or about to release. And those are debut female authors writing about teenage girls and everything that they face on a daily basis.

All right. Well, thank you very much for that. Thank you for coming on Author Express.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for joining us today. We hope you'll take a second to give us some stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform. We'll be back next Wednesday. And in the meantime, follow us on Instagram at author express podcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget. Keep it express, but keep it interesting.