The Write Time: Blog Ring of Power Interview with Susan Quinn

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Blog Ring of Power Interview with Susan Quinn

Today Susan Quinn stops in to discuss her current work. Here is the schedule for the other parts of her interview:

Part 1 @ Teresa - Thursday, August 2nd
Part 2 @ Emily - Friday, August 3rd
Part 3 @ Sandra - Monday, August 6th
Part 4 @ Here with me - Tuesday, August 7th
Part 5 @ Terri - Wednesday, August 8th

Susan Kaye Quinn, Author

Susan Kaye Quinn grew up in California, where she wrote snippets of stories and passed them to her friends during class. She pursued a bunch of engineering degrees and worked a lot of geeky jobs, including turns at GE Aircraft Engines, NASA, and NCAR. Now that she writes novels, her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" and she doesn't have to sneak her notes anymore. All that engineering comes in handy when dreaming up paranormal powers in future worlds or mixing science with fantasy to conjure slightly plausible inventions. Susan writes from the Chicago suburbs with her three boys, two cats, and one husband. Which, it turns out, is exactly as much as can handle.

So Susan, welcome to the Write Time, lets get right to it, lets talk about your current work.

Tell us about your new book and when it is out? Where can people purchase it?

My latest novel, Closed Hearts, is the second book in the Mindjack Trilogy—a story about a future world where everyone reads minds, except one girl. She quickly finds that she can control minds instead, and things get pretty dangerous after that. The tagline for the first novel in the series, Open Minds: When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep. I’m working on the final novel in the trilogy, Free Souls, and have a series of short stories (Mindjack Origins) coming out as well. You can find out more at the Mindjack website – the books are available in print and ebook at Amazon and Barnes&Noble.

Did you learn anything from writing this book and what was it?

In writing Closed Hearts, I learned how quickly I could write a novel, if that was the only project I focused on—before I always had multiple works going at once. Start-to-finish, I wrote Closed Hearts in six months. It was a hectic six months, so I think Free Souls will take a little longer—not least because my kids are out of school for the summer, and my writing always slows down then.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

I like to let readers decide what they take away from the novel—I think every reader has their unique perspective that they bring to it. But there’s a pretty clear theme from the beginning of Open Minds about intolerance: the main character (Kira), who doesn’t read minds in a telepathic world, is very painfully isolated from her mindreading peers. The intolerance of her world is even more extreme for the mindjackers hidden in their midst. The impact of their intolerance on Kira, and the effect that has on the society as a whole, is a large driver of the story.

Tell us about your book’s cover – where did the design come from and what was the design process like?

My cover designer, D. Robert Pease of walkingstickbooks.com, is amazing—he has 20 years of experience designing magazine covers, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the covers he’s done for Open Minds and Closed Hearts. Dale is great to work with as well (I highly recommend him). I usually come to him with an idea, and then we work together until it’s exactly what I want—I think I’m demanding, but Dale tells me he just wants to make sure I have a cover I love. (See how awesome he is?)

Is there anything new, unusual, or interesting about your book? How is it different from other books on the same subject?

People often tell me, after reading Open Minds, that they think the book is very unique. While mindreading and mind control are well-worn subjects in fiction, the thing that makes it unique in my stories is partly that everyone in the story is a mindreader or a mindjacker (so it has a huge impact on the entire story world), and partly that I’ve worked hard to make the mindreading and mindjacking into visceral experiences. Mindjacking is (supposedly) something no one has done before, so I wanted to give it a feel and a taste, so that we could (virtually) experience something no one has. People tell me it feels real to them (almost too real), so I take that as an indication that it’s working!

Find Susan on the web: