Mining Memories (Brenda Hiatt)

When I started writing YA fiction, I drew heavily on my own high school experience, much of it embarrassing and/or traumatic…which of course makes for the best fiction, LOL. I truly believe infusing my geeky heroine with so much of my high school self made that first and subsequent books more realistic and relatable. It also allowed me to reframe my own high school experience into something vastly more exciting and heroic than what I actually experienced back then—which was both cathartic and fun.  

This month’s topic of Mining Memories struck me as particularly appropriate now that I’m deep in revisions for what will be the 11th book in my Starstruck series. My heroine has to do a lot of “memory mining” to avert a potential crisis. Not only her own memories, but those of a ruthless (now-escaped) dictator, whose memories she inadvertently absorbed in a previous book. Taking her through that journey has been both enlightening and somewhat harrowing (he’s a really nasty dude), giving this book a rather more sinister vibe than most of the previous ones in this series. 

I’ll be very curious to discover what my readers think when I release Mindbound this summer!

Brenda Hiatt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the award-winning Starstruck series, which is now up to ten books, with #11 coming soon!