Episode 5: Mia P. Manansala and how to kill someone slowly
About the podcast
Scared Lit-less is the podcast for readers, writers, and other fans of the crime genre. Hosted by a psychological thriller author, the podcast will feature:
Thoughts about writing and telling stories in this genre
Recommendations for new books, documentaries, movies, podcasts, and other media
Interviews with writers of crime, thrillers, mysteries, and suspense
Trivia games and other fun shenanigans
Scared Lit-less is hosted by Amy Suiter Clarke, author of the novel Girl, 11 about a true crime podcast host obsessively trying to solve the cold case of Minnesota’s most notorious serial killer, whose victims were each a year younger than the last.
Quick five with a killer
In this segment, I interview a “killer” aka an author who writes stories that demand killing a lot of characters.
This episode features Mia P. Manansala, a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture.
She is the winner of the 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck - Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. She's also a 2017 Pitch Wars alum and 2018-2020 mentor.
You can learn more about Mia on her website: www.miapmanansala.com
Author or killer?
For this last episode before we go on hiatus, Bethany and I discussed our recent book releases and the projects we’re working on next. We might not have done any trivia this time around, but we still found a way to make each other (and hopefully you) laugh.
Bethany C Morrow is an Indie Bestselling author who writes for adult and young adult audiences, in genres ranging from speculative literary to contemporary fantasy to historical. She is author of the novels Mem and A Song Below Water, and editor/contributor to the young adult anthology Take the Mic, which was the 2020 ILA Social Justice in Literature award winner. Her work has been chosen as Indies Introduce and Indie Next picks, and featured in The LA Times, Forbes, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and more. She is included on USA TODAY's list of 100 Black novelists and fiction writers you should read.
Her website is www.bethanycmorrow.com.
A nervous rec
In this episode, I recommended:
Sons of Sam: One of the newest docuseries on Netflix, it combines my fascination with stories about the Satanic panic with my interest in serial killers. There was so much more going on around this case than I knew about!
The Girls Are All So Nice Here: The debut adult novel from Laurie Elizabeth Flynn, this dark academia psychological thriller took the world by storm just a few months ago. If you’re interested in a concept that can be summed up as Mean Girls plus murder, this might be the book for you. (Content warning: discussions of suicide)