This week on my YA Feature is author Susan Quinn. Susan is the author of the Mindjack Trilogy with the second book in the series, Closed hearts releasing May 23rd. Check out my interview with the author below and please leave a comment for the author :)
Can you tell me a little about yourself and how you got into writing?
I’m an ex-scientist and engineer (Ph.D. Environmental Engineering) that left engineering to raise my kids, then managed to get bit by the writing bug before I could go back to work. Now my business card says “Author and Rocket Scientist” and I love writing novels for teens and kids. I had always loved writing, but it took reading amazing kidlit stories with my children to tug me back into it. I plan to die at the keyboard with a nearly finished novel – preferably many years in the future!
Can you tell us a little about book one in the Mindjack Trilogy, Open Minds?
Open Minds is about a girl (Kira) who can’t read minds in a telepathic world. She soon discovers that she can control people’s minds instead, and quickly gets tangled in a hidden underground of mindjackers.
Closed Hearts, the second book in the Mindjack Trilogy releases May 23rd, can you tell is a little about it?
If you’ve read Open Minds, you know that Kira’s story is just getting started, and there is more to tell about how mindjackers and mindreaders can co-exist. The title of the first novel is a play on words, not just because it’s a story about mindreaders, but because the world that Kira lives in is so intolerant of people like her (first a zero who can’t read minds, then a mindjacker that controls them). The second novel is a similar play on words, with hearts both open and closed playing a big part in the story.
Where did you get the idea for the Mindjack Trilogy?
I was inspired by an online contest to create a 1st paragraph for a novel that hadn’t been written yet! I had been playing around with the idea of a boy who was a touch-empath, but hadn’t turned it into a story yet. Then, while I was drifting off to sleep and wondering what in the world I was going to write for this contest, the image of a girl sitting in a classroom of mindreaders popped into my head. She was painfully isolated (like the touch-empath would have been in his story), because she couldn’t read minds. Her world was filled with an aching silence. And loneliness. I had to write her story.
Are you working on any other projects at the moment?
Right now I’m working on the third book in the trilogy. In between drafts of that, I plan to cook up a few short stories in the Mindjack universe, just for fun (and to release as singles).
Why should we read the Mindjack Trilogy in one sentence?
I’ll quote a reviewer for this one: “Being a fan of dystopian and sci-fi in young adult books this was exactly the type of book I was hoping to fall in love with and absolutely did.” – Danielle Smith, book blogger for There’s A Book
Buy the books:
Open Minds: $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes&Noble (also available in print)
Closed Hearts: Available May 23rd, add to Goodreads
Mind Games : A Short Story available now!
Places to find Susan: website, twitter, facebook, subscribe to her newsletter (for upcoming releases)
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