The amazing and talented Melinda Skye is here with me today to answer some questions about herself and about her brand-spanking-new release, Misdirection. She and I are great friends, critique partners, and writing partners, so I’m a little biased, but I think she’s made of awesome. Here, decide for yourself!

Have you always been a writer? What was the first story you wrote?

I haven’t always been a writer. In fact, I distinctly remember being annoyed at the creative writing portion of my 9th grade English class where we had to write a story. Gasp! Come up with my own ideas?  Never! I pretty much yoinked a story idea from a comic strip and called it good.  The idea of writing wasn’t super appealing.  I’ve always been a reader, though. I love books and eventually I came around to the idea of writing.

In my freshman year of college, I wrote a couple angsty things about darkness and loneliness which were absolute drivel, I’m pretty sure. Thankfully they’ve been lost to the annals of time and therefore can’t be dug up to prove just how obnoxious I was back then.  Misdirection is really the first time I wrote anything of length, at least as far as I can remember.  Oh, no, wait. For that same 9th grade English class, we had to write children’s stories, which an art class illustrated for us.  Mine was “Sally Sue’s Silly Wish.” It was pretty much all kinds of awesome and not plagiarized from anything.  :) Since Misdirection, however, I’ve written a bunch of other things. I guess once I figured out how much fun writing was, then it was worth doing.

Your acknowledgements in the front of Misdirection are pretty interesting. I noticed you thanked your beautiful and charming critique partner, Sonja Foust (ahem), but also that you mentioned Gretchen Moon and Willamette University. What did a professor and a college have to do with this book?

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