Something Wicked Returns: Indigo by Gina Linko: Guest Post & Giveaway

Hi everyone! I hope you're enjoying all our Something Wicked posts and entering the giveaways. Yesterday I posted my Something Wicked challenge so if you haven't had a chance to check it out, you should do so now. Everyone likes trivia, right?

Today I'm incredibly proud to welcome Gina Linko to The Nocturnal Library. Her first novel Flutter was one of my favorite 2012 reads, and the upcoming Indigo is... well, I have no words for how amazing Indigo is. Here's what Gina shared with us:

  

First off, I wanted to say a great big thanks to Maja for having me on her wonderful blog!  It is an honor to be here, and what I wanted to talk about today is what scares me.  In honor of Halloween and all those great books that really crawl into our minds and spook us, I wanted to talk about what freaks me out.  And really, it’s a question:  What if?

This is how I often start brainstorming for a new book/project idea.  And you might say, Well, duh.  And you would be right, but stay with me for a second, because I like to start with a scary idea.  Or if it isn’t scary, at the very least, I like unsettling.  Because to me, those have always been the best ideas.  The ones that hit a little too close to home, right?  The possibilities that you can’t quite explain away in the dark of your bedroom, when it’s just you and your imagination listening to the noises of the night and wondering if you locked the front door.

I love ideas like that, especially ones on the edge of science, where its edges blur into the supernatural.  Questions just beyond our understanding – like ESP and telekinesis and things that are almost prove-able, but maybe not just.  Ideas on the edge of the mainstream.  Things that might seem ridiculous in the daylight, but you can’t quite discount them.  Especially in the dark.  Because there is something there. 

A question.  What if?

Because science knows a lot.  We’ve figured lots of things out.  True.  We don’t believe in crazy, medieval superstitions.  But there are hazy edges.  Areas where we aren’t sure.  We’ve all seen those ghost photos that we can’t quite explain away, or the truly convincing video of what looks like a UFO, or we’ve read the articles about the kid in England who claims he’s had a past life and knows all there is to know about WWII fighter jets. 

It’s unsettling. 

So I like to brainstorm and live in that little pocket there.  That place of uncertainty.  That place of what-if.  So many great books pull us into that place.  And scare the heck out of us. 

Like, what if a girl could move things with her mind?  And that girl gets picked on in school and has a terrible home life.  What if that poor, ostracized kid wanted to get some powerful revenge? (Carrie by Stephen King)

What if animals were genetically altered to achieve higher cognitive thinking?  How could that go wrong? (Watchers Dean Koontz)

What if you could see into other people’s dreams?  (Wake by Lisa McMann)

Or what if a girl was having terrible seizures, but they weren’t really seizures?  What if they were something entirely different?  Some overdeveloped part of her brain that did something really, seriously cool?  (Flutter by me, but of course, I in no way mean to compare myself to the awesome authors above.)

And of course, my new book Indigo.  What if your touch was deadly?  But that’s not exactly it.  What if you thought your touch was deadly, but it was actually something totally different?  But just as powerful. 

And that, again, is another thing that I like in books and in movies, when something you think is true gets totally turned on its head, so that you have to re-examine so much of your belief system.  It’s scary.  That little pocket of scientific uncertainty.  The Area 51 of our collective minds. 

What if?

So what is it that keeps you up at night?  What scares you? 

ABOUT GINA:

Gina Linko has a graduate degree in creative writing from DePaul University and lives outside Chicago with her husband and three children. Gina teaches college English part-time, but her real passion is sitting down at a blank computer screen and asking herself the question, "What if...?"

Gina is generously giving away one copy of her upcoming novel, Indigo, internationally. Just enter the Rafflecopter below. Good luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway