Spotlight on Mickey J Corrigan & "Girlfriends on Demand"

 This week's Spotlight on Author is on Mickey J Corrigan. She has a new book out, Girlfriends on Demand.

Originally from Boston, Mickey J. Corrigan writes tropical noir with a dark humor. Novels include Project XX about a school shooting (Salt Publishing, UK, 2017) and What I Did for Love, a spoof of Lolita (Bloodhound Books, UK, 2019).

Social media links:

www.mickeyjcorrigan.com

http://mickeyjcorrigan.tumblr.com/
https://www.goodreads.com/Mickey_J_Corrigan

 

1. What is a your day job?
I am the director of a small foundation, a private charity that funds organizations working to improve the food system. The nonprofits we support teach children about nutrition, help families and schools to build gardens, fight the establishment of factory farms in poor communities, protect the environment with regenerative and organic agriculture, improve food worker protections, and other such efforts to change our inequitable and unhealthy food system. This job introduces me to people doing good work around the world so is inspiring, giving me hope for the future.

 
2. How did you start this exciting venture?
The position was offered to me by someone I once worked with on justice issues in the field of nutrition. I didn't think I was the right person for the job as most of my career had been focused on writing. But the opportunity has proven to be educational and life-enhancing. 

 
3. How do you balance your different career goals as you are also a fiction writer?
I'm a juggler. It makes me crazy. I have two names, four email accounts, a half-dozen websites. It's not easy but somehow it works—although I have noticed my focus is less laser and more scattershot, which is not good for writing fiction.
 
4. Does your family and friends support you?
 Yes, which is essential. They encourage both my writing and my work for the foundation.

 
5. Please tell us a little about yourself and your writing?
I coauthored a textbook for health workers in graduate school and this launched my love for writing books. Big nonfiction projects continued to be my side job as I worked non-writing jobs, often using vacation days to write. Eventually I was offered a university position as a health writer. My nonfiction books paid royalties so I had two sources of income. When I left that job to write fulltime it was at a time when royalties could sustain the mid-list (not bestselling, just selling steadily) writer. That is no longer the case. Looking for new genres, I moved to writing poetry, then short fiction, finally novellas and novels. When I realized I needed another source of income again, that's when the directorship popped up.

Champagne Books has provided a reboot of the contemporary thriller Sugar Babies, including an update on online arrangements for sexual relationships. In light of all the attention one Florida politician is getting, the insights into the sugar life may be of interest to curious readers. Is agreeing to sex for pay (in the form of rent money, tuition payments, or travel and gifts) the same as prostitution? Or is it just what we do in economically unequal partnerships?

Three women: I broke one’s spirit, I broke another’s neck, I married the third.

This is how a mysterious narrator begins his story of three working women in their 20s living in a contemporary tropical city. He shares the intimate details about Maire, Esme, and Niki, smart girls using their bodies and their wits to pay and play their way to a better life.

Maire O’Rourke works as a girlfriend on demand for a Coconut City multimillionaire. But Maire has bigger plans: she’s about to launch an international business to help others seeking to trade sex for funding.

Southern gal Esme Grant came to Coconut City in order to find herself a rich man willing to fund her—as well as her hometown boyfriend and their Mayberry-gone-bad dreams.

Niki Stephanopoulos is a grad student and multicultural artist who struggles with guilt, poverty, and anxiety/depression fueled by her economic woes. She reaches out to Esme and Maire for help.

Niki, Esme, and Maire want what every woman wants: romance, safe shelter, a decent future. In the tropical paradise of Coconut City, one becomes lost, another faces desperate odds, while the third falls in love with the wrong man—over and over again.

 

Available from Amazon and Champagne Books.