Melissa DeLaCruz On Maintaining Creative Spark Through 50 Novels

Mindy:             Today's guest is Melissa DeLa Cruz, Number One New York Times bestselling author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning novels for readers of all ages. With her 50th novel, The Birthday Girl releasing earlier this month, Melissa joined me to talk about longevity in publishing, retaining the spark of creativity, and how writers need community.

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Mindy:             So your newest release The Birthday Girl is your 50th book. That is amazing.

Melissa:            Oh, thank you. I'm glad I'm younger than my book count.

Mindy:             Well actually that's a lovely way to put it. I myself have eight books out and I know that the bloom comes off the rose pretty quickly in publishing and it can be a drag sometimes because you do have to focus on the business side of it as well, and the creativity side can get a little drained sometimes. I think. So, any thoughts on that here at your 50th book?

Melissa:            Yeah, and I think as a fellow writer, writers kind of understand what it's like, right? I mean when you say the bloom comes off the rose, I think we all want to be writers. We want to be authors, but then how do we make a living at it? I think that is like the biggest question and I heard it's not even really about selling your first book, it's about selling your second. I think that there's not really a path to it. Everybody kind of finds their own way. I started out wanting to write adult fiction and wanting to write commercial adult fiction. You know, Terry McMillan was one of my favorite writers. I wanted to write fun books for women. And my first book was adult book, but my editor said, I think you need to try out this new genre that we're kind of promoting. It was called young adult. And she said, I don't know if you've read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants or Gossip Girl, but we kind of want to be in that genre. Do you think you want to try it? And I said, okay, well I'll try it. Because her other idea was a murder mystery. And I said, okay, I'm going to try a murder mystery. And she was like, yeah, you can’t write these.

Melissa:            And she said, my next idea is YA. I said, okay. So I wrote The Au Pairs and as I was writing this book about three teenagers and the Hamptons who are nannies by day party girls at night - that was our tagline. I just really enjoyed it and I thought, oh my God, this is what I'm meant to do. This is what my voice is meant to do. And I have written 50 books because I started out writing series. The books will either come out every eight months or every three months. We tell the stories through several books and I think J K Rowling made everybody think, oh, you have to write seven books. That's how it is. So I explain that it's not, you know, that I'm writing 50 huge long adult novels. Some of my middle grade books are only 50,000 words long and they would come out every three months. So that's how the count gets so high, so early,

Mindy:             Certainly. But 50,000 every three months, that is still a ton of work.

Melissa:            Yes it is. And it was a really difficult, because my career kinda took off right when I also became a mom. So I always joked that I never saw her. The nanny would say, oh, she's rolling over. Oh, she's doing this. I'm like, oh, that's great. You know, I never saw any of those.

Mindy:             Yeah, yeah. No, it's true. When you cross that line from writing being a hobby into being your career, that is part of where that bloom does start to come off the rose where it becomes not so much I want to write today, but I have to write and that's a distinction.

Melissa:            Oh yeah, no, definitely. And I think what happens sometimes is people forget about how fun it is. Try to always remember that you, you wanted this, this is your dream. And writers always roll their eyes saying, oh, we're living the dream. But we really are. I mean, I get to, we get to imagine things and play and even though it does sometimes feel not as fun as we imagined it to be, maybe more of a chore and a stressor. This fun, creative thing that we get to do. You have to find that spark in your work still, to be able to work, I think. Like it has to be fun and it has to be something that you want to spend time with.

Mindy:             I remind myself, I remind myself every day, whatever my complaint might be, if I am upset about, I don't know, Amazon not having my book in stock or if I'm upset about a bad review or like whatever. It's just like Mindy. You write for a living. Be quiet. You're all right. You're all right.

Melissa:            My friend Ally Carter said, you're not a $20 bill. Not Everybody's gonna like you.

Mindy:             You gotta roll with it. When you're a writer, you're, you are creating content for the public and your public is, it's the public. They are not a monolith.

Melissa:            Not your mom.

Mindy:             Not your mom. That is the absolute best way to put it. It is not your mom. You mentioned YA, and you mentioned a lot of titles that are really familiar to me because I was actually a librarian in high school for 14 years. Yes. Loved it so much. So you mentioned Traveling Pants and Gossip Girls and um, of course Twilight. And those all happened right at the time when YA just kind of blew up. And of course I remember your Blue Bloods series, handing those out to kids. I see on my handout here, there are 3 million copies in print now, which is amazing.

Melissa:            It was fun. And it was interesting when YA became YA and became something that people paid attention to because when I started out in the genre had like maybe one tiny stand in the Barnes and Noble, just kind of added to the children's section. And now you go and it's almost half the books are like YA. It's a little crazy.

Mindy:             It is. It's completely changed. It is a completely changed market. And when I was growing up, it didn't even exist. Like there were a handful of authors. Middle grade plus. They weren't touching most, not all - obviously some authors, Judy Bloom of course comes to mind - would touch things that others would not. But yeah, it is changed. It's a changed market. That is for sure.

Melissa:            50 books later you're returning to that initial push that you wanted to write adult and you're jumping in with The Birthday Girl, a domestic suspense. So why specifically domestic suspense as you're jumping into the adult market?

Melissa:            So my first novel was adult contemporary and then, Witches of East End was an adult urban fantasy. This is my fifth book for adults. I wanted to write in the genre that I basically read as my escape. So I try not to read a lot of YA and kid lit because I write in that and I want my reading to be just for me, just for pleasure, just for escape. So I usually read in a genre that I don't write in. So I read a lot of literary fiction and I read a lot of thrillers and I got really into domestic suspense genre. Basically I'm a Target mom. I go to Target, I buy whatever the books are at Target and they put a lot of these books out there and I read them all. I read Ruth Ware. I read The Wife, you know, While You Were Sleeping.

Melissa:            So those kinds of books that I was really drawn to and I always wanted to write a mystery but I don't think I had the chops for it 20 years ago. And I think after having written all these books and understanding plot and structure, I think I was like old enough and experienced enough as a writer to write the book I wanted to write. And it also came from an idea of wanting to write a mystery in Palm Springs because I think it's a place in America that has a little bit of historic uh, glamorous, mythical, Frank Sinatra, the Rat Pack and you can still go there and it is like going backwards in time. So I wanted to set it in Palm Springs. And then about 10 years ago when I was 38, we bought this house in Palm Springs and I joked that I bought it to throw my 40th birthday party in. I was going to have this massive elaborate extravagant 40th birthday and like it was a revenge party.

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Melissa:            I was going to show everybody who had been mean to me in high school. Look, where the bitch is now! It was just this huge monstrous kind of delusion. I thought, oh my God, that's so gross to want that much attention and that much validation. We don't need that. But I remember that feeling of being on the cusp of 40 and 40 meaning something that was like so big and terrible that you wanted to squash that and kind of celebrate this milestone in a way that was kind of in your face. So I thought, okay, I'm going to have this woman planning this huge party, but then everything goes wrong. This party that's supposed to meant to be amazing celebration of her life is also like a time when all the ghosts of her past haunt her. And the book really came alive when I realized I could write it in two different timelines because I do write for YA I was like, Ooh, I can sneak in kind of this dark YA book into it? So that made me happy.

Mindy:             The cover is amazing.

Melissa:            Thank you. I'm not good with covers and I never really know what a good cover is. And I remember when we did The Descendants books The Isle of the Lost cover with the big apple. They're like, this is so great. And I'm like, really? And my husband was like, you're crazy. That is a great cover. And with The Birthday Girl too. He was like, that's a great cover. Everybody's like, it's awesome. Like really? Are you sure? Like, I never know. So thank you.

Mindy:             It's great. Like as soon as I saw it as a librarian, my immediate reaction was, oh, people pick this book up.

Melissa:            Oh, I'm so glad. Thank you.

Mindy:             Yes, most definitely.

Melissa:            I cannot take any credit. My notes make the cover worse.

Mindy:             No, absolutely. And that's the kind of thing whenever I get any compliments on my covers, I'm like, well thank you. But it has nothing to do with me. You are also a co director of YALLFEST, which is a huge celebration that takes place in Charleston every year. I've been lucky enough to be invited and it's awesome. So thank you for all the immense amount of work. I'm sure it goes into that.

Melissa:            Oh my God, thank you! I was like, Mindy, we've had you! Awesome.

Mindy:             Lovely, lovely event.

Melissa:            We're very proud of it. I think we're almost at 10 years. I can't remember if it is our 10th which it might be. We will have big party, I think 10 years is next year. Actually. I think it's next year.

Mindy:             That's cool. It's emblematic of the YA community and how tight knit it is, and it really is truly a celebration and you can see authors interacting with each other, but there's also 30000 teens. It's an amazing kind of coming together of book minded people and a great love of, of course, the YA age range. So do you feel a similar type of community among the adult authorship or is it a different kind of setting?

Melissa:            We started YALLFEST because we wanted a book festival just for our genre, just for the people in our industry, who were writing our books. Because before there were all these teen book festivals, they would send you to these book festivals and you would be kind of the redheaded stepchild and you would meet these adult authors. They'd never knew what to do with you or like, What? You write YA? What is that? And you kind of feel a little bit not left out, but you not maybe really belong. And so we thought, let's have a festival that's just for us. It's just for teens. But Not even an age range. You know, it's a mindset. Youth and optimism and you can be a YA reader no matter how old you are. And so that's where it came from, from going to these other festivals and feeling like they don't really get me or my books.

Melissa:            And then the teen festivals are now so big that all the mainstream festivals now have a whole YA track. So that's kind of nice to see. We did start it because we wanted a place where the writers were celebrated. Writers kind of, um, make communities around genre. Thriller writers are kind of like, YA writers in a way where they all know each other and support each other. And it's a small kind of close knit community. I do look forward to that. People tend to band together with the kind of books that they write and there are communities in the publishing world, murder mystery. Thriller writers. They're always a lot of fun.

Mindy:             That's really cool. That's really cool. So when it comes to writing a dual timeline, that is always kind of challenging, I think. You're basically operating pacing, character building and everything within two different stories, kind of writing two novels to create one story. So how did you go about keeping yourself organized for one thing, but also just planning that out - or do you pants it?

Melissa:            No, I'm a plotter. I definitely am a planner. I like outlines. I think structure is really important. While the book was in my head, I also wrote like a pretty detailed outline of where I wanted to be because I wanted each chapter to kind of inform the other. So you would see something in the past and then something in the present and you would know that happened, uh, in the present because it's something that happened in the past and I wanted it to in the same time. I didn't write each chapter one after the other. I would write five Palm Springs in her forties chapters and then I'd write five Portland in her 16 year old mindset chapters. So it's like once I was in that certain POV, I would stick to it and kind of jump ahead. But then I also had to make sure that the chapters were still aligning in that way. Yeah. It was a lot of planning and then also like some kind of alchemy where, oh, it kind of all works. I don't know. I don't know how it works. When you're in it just kind of playing and writing and hoping, and then you rewrite it a lot and then you know, hopefully it's done.

Mindy:             Sometimes you step back and you're like, oh look, that worked cool.

Melissa:            Exactly. And it's kind of like, phew. Subconscious writing.

Mindy:             Totally. I feel that way often. So you're writing not only two timelines but you're writing someone as a younger person and then writing the same person in their forties so I am interested in the challenge of that because you have to have the voice there so that we know it's the same person. I'm curious about your approach. Were you imagining her first as a 16 year old and then wondering what kind of 40 year old person would the 16 year old evolve into or were you looking at the 40 year old and saying what happened to her when she was young?

Melissa:            I think when I thought of the character, I kind of knew everything. I knew that she had grown up poor and I knew that she had successfully built her own business. You know, kind of picked herself up from her bootstraps using her beauty and then I knew that something would happen at her 40th birthday because something happened at her 16th. But I didn't know I was going to do, like you said, two novels in one/ and when I realized, oh I could do that, that's how I'm going to show what happened in the past. It kind of clicked. I always knew who she was her entire life. I just didn't realize where I was going to put the camera. I was like, Oh yeah, right there at 16 and definitely at 40. She kind of was whole in my head. Like I knew who she was. I knew her background and her present.

Mindy:             Very cool. Very cool. Last question. What's up next for you? What are you working on?

Melissa:            So right now I'm taking a little bit of a break because I have a couple of books coming out next year. So I'm working on a couple of things that haven't been announced yet. This next year I have a new YA fantasy romance. It's called The Queens Assassin. It's coming out in February. They came to me in a dream. I dreamt about this assassin, this girl hiding in the bushes. And I was like, what are they doing? And I always joke when I wrote my vampire books, Blue Bloods, I would be on panels with Stephanie Meyer and Stephanie would talk about how Edward and Bella came to her in a dream. And I'd be like, please and roll my eyes. And now I want to apologize because now these characters came to me in a dream and I wrote a book about them. So you know, I guess it does happen.

Mindy:             My first book came about because of a dream and, and I guess you can't question inspiration right when it lands.

Melissa:            Oh yeah. You got to go with it. And then my next work after that's coming out in April is Gotham High, which is the first graphic novel that I've written. I've had my books adapted into graphic novels, but I've never written an original graphic novel. And it is the story of Bruce Wayne and the Joker and the Catwoman in high school. That's Gotham High.

Mindy:   Yes, that's exciting. Tell listeners where they can find you online.

Melissa:            I am at https://melissa-delacruz.com/

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Writing Tough Topics for Teens with Jamie Beth Cohen

Mindy:             Today's guest is Jamie Beth Cohen, author of Wasted Pretty. A writer and storyteller who works in higher education, her nonfiction has appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post and Teen Vogue. Jamie joined me today to talk about writing tough topics for teens.

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Ad:                   16 year old Alice Burton has a crush on a college guy, but the night he finally notices her, so does her dad's creepy best friend. Wasted Pretty by Jamie Beth Cohen follows Alice as she tries to protect her future, her body and her heart.

Mindy:             Wasted Pretty, that's your debut. It deals with some heavy topics such as sexual assault. I know that I get this question all the time because of my own content. Why write about dark topics for teens?I always say because it happens to them. So what is your answer?

Jamie:              Well, I like your answer very much and it's much more concise than what I generally say. But I'd add that my goal in any writing that I do is to connect with people. I spent a lot of time thinking that the dark things that were happening to me were only happening to me. And I thought other kids came from uncomplicated families or were better at dealing with trauma than I was. Um, but as an adult, I've come to believe that we're all just really doing the best we can with what life has handed us and knowing that other people are also dealing with heavy, heavy stuff can be really helpful when you're going through it. So my, why do I write about it? I agree with you. I write about it because it happens.

Mindy:             Yes, it does. And it happens to, unfortunately it happens across the gamut. It happens on all age levels and however, like you're saying, when you're young, you do make some assumptions and you do worry a lot about being different. That's something that pops up a lot. Like socially, you don't want to be different. Thinking you're the only one that this is happening to, that you're the only one who has suffered in this way is really common. Like that is a very, for younger people, that is something that contributes to them not vocalizing when there's any type of assault or abuse. And also of course the self-blame, which I think comes in at any age, but especially when you're younger and you don't know better and don't know about all of the baggage and the history that comes along with sexual assault and victim blaming. So what are your thoughts on that when it comes to the youth and how they have to process some of these harder topics?

Jamie:              I agree with you. It happens at all ages. And I think the victim blaming specifically is, I'm not sure if it's the way just women or girls are wired, but I know it's the way I'm wired. And also that the alienation makes it so much worse. I mean, I had surgery when I was in first grade on my ureters. Your ureters go from your kidneys to your bladder. So the surgery was in that sort of private part area and I was in first grade and I was petrified and I was embarrassed and I think I probably had some shame that went along with it and my parents couldn't figure out. I think they thought that I was maybe reacting more strongly than they expected me to. And when my mom finally drilled down to it, I told her it was because I thought the doctor had never performed this surgery before because I assumed nobody else had problems like that. This is all he does. Like this is the surgery he performs like 10 times a day. And then as soon as she said that, I mean I was still afraid, but I was no longer alone. And so to think that you're only one to think it's your fault to think I, you know, I had this problem that I didn't even realize the doctor knew how to deal with is very common at many ages.

Mindy:             Yeah. It's so true. And especially when it comes to dealing with anything in your private area or anything like that, that deals with something that perhaps some of us have been taught is gross or Yucky or bad or we've already been taught to be ashamed of. It contributes to the guilt and the shame and the, and the feelings of alienation or isolation. Your novel Wasted Pretty deals with sexual assault. And in the case of the novel, it deals with specifically a girl who is just kind of getting some positive attention that she's really been looking for from someone for a while. But then she also has attention coming to her from someone that is completely inappropriate. So if you could talk about that for a little bit and how your character is juggling those two things and comparing them.

Jamie:              I wanted it to be okay for it to be exciting that she was getting attention for her looks and this was something that she hadn't had for a very long time and then all of a sudden she did and how exciting that was and then to sort of have that double whammy of, Oh wait a minute, I'm not in control of how this affects other people, so nothing changes internally for the girl. All of her changes are external and she remains the same person inside but is now dealing with a whole host of different reactions to her. And so I wanted to look at that because I think that's true to life. I mean I think that happened, that happened to me, that happened to many of my friends. I worked in a high school, I watched it happen to other girls, but on top of that I was also looking to explore in the book the person she wants to be attracted to her is someone her parents do not want her spending time with and the person she doesn't want attention from is her father's best friend.

Jamie:              And so he has this unfettered access to her that he really shouldn't have. And I wanted to explore this area of things that look one way from the outside but are really something else on the inside. And so sort of a former bad boy who's really trying to clean up his act is actually someone much safer to be around. Then a sort of a famous professional athlete that has no checks on him whatsoever. In the book, the professional baseball player is her father's best friend. He's also bankrolling her mom's business. So he has money, he has influence, he has celebrity and he's been a family friend for a really long time. So he has unfettered access and I sort of poked at the notion that, you know, parents understand what their kids are going through because oftentimes they don't and certainly feels like they don't. More often than not.

Mindy:             Yeah. And parental trust in other adults is occasionally misguided. We'd all like to think that we know other people, especially our own friends inside and out. But that's not necessarily true. Did you see the documentary, um, Kidnapped in Plain Sight?

Jamie:              No. I've heard about that one. But I did see the movie The Tale. Do you know about The Tale?

Mindy:             I have not seen that or heard of it. No,

Jamie:              it wrecked me. So The Tale is, it is not a documentary, but it was a movie made by a documentarian about her life. So it's like a fictionalized version of her life. And in it she explores her memory of a situation and then she sort of goes back and fact checks it and realizes that in her memory, what she thought was a borderline inappropriate relationship went down, she was 16. But in actuality when it went down, she was 13.

Mindy:             Oh my. That sounds fascinating.

Jamie:              I saw it just in the last couple months. So long after my book was written and published, but listening to people talk about it in interviews, I knew I had to see it and it was, and again it was an adult, it was a coach, it was someone that her parents put their trust in who was completely inappropriate, but as an adult or as she was growing up, she basically told herself the story that it was okay because she was also basically an adult. But when she looked back on it and the actual timeline, that was not the case.

Mindy:             And there again you just have a girl who is making excuses and like even self editing for someone that she has been told that this person is safe, this person is okay. And so she's like, well I must be wrong. Wow, I will have to check that out. That sounds pretty fascinating.

Mindy:             Coming up, getting nonfiction pieces published - talent, hard work and luck.

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Mindy:             You also have nonfiction that has appeared in places like Teen Vogue and The Washington Post. So talk about getting smaller pieces like that place. That is a difficult thing to do is my understanding.

Jamie:              It is really difficult. It is talent and hard work, but it is also luck. I need to be really transparent about that. The way it was happening was I had written my novel, I was trying to get an agent and I wasn't having any luck, but at the same time I do live storytelling and preparing to do live storytelling because the stories have to be true. It's a lot like writing an essay, so while I was trying to get my agent, I decided to start sending out some of my storytelling pieces as essays and I basically educated myself on how one does that. There is not a central database of who's editing what, where. I don't know why. I don't know if it's because people move around so much. I don't know because people haven't figured out a way to monetize that, but basically I taught myself how to research on Twitter to find editors' email addresses.

Jamie:              There are also a couple of groups on Facebook that I'm a part of, mostly for women and non-binary writers that are great for sharing information like that. But I basically educated myself on this process and really went after it hardcore because I was, the novel was something I couldn't work on while I was trying to find an agent. I had sort of frozen it in time, but I still wanted to be writing and this I thought would be a great way to sort of raise my profile and have something to put in that bio paragraph at the end of the query letter.

Mindy:             That bio is a killer. Such a concern.

Jamie:              Yes. So I really wanted something to beef up that bio and I got really lucky. One of my first by-lines was the Washington Post on parenting piece and it really took off and I had been telling stories for several years, so I had a lot of material to pull from and it was a lot of fun actually for me to go back over.

Jamie:              When I prepare for storytelling, I write it out like it's an essay and then I practice it just verbally because we're not allowed to have notes. And so it was interesting to go back and look at the videos of the storytelling and then figure out how to craft a piece that would work better on the page. So that was a lot of fun. It taught me a new skill. The Teen Vogue piece was hilarious because I pitched it as a personal essay and got a response that said, oh, but you'd be interviewing teens for this piece. Right? And I wrote back and said, sure, yes I will. And so then I sort of taught myself about journalism and about, I mean, I hadn't done a reported piece since I was in grade school. You know, when I interviewed my classmates for something, I think it was their favorite song of the year or something. So I, it's like some really quick research on journalistic ethics and conducting interviews. And somehow I turned that piece in on time though I have not pitched a reported piece since, and it's not something I enjoyed. It's not what I like to do.

Mindy:             So tell me more about this live storytelling. What is it? I mean I think it's pretty self explanatory, but I, I'm curious about this. Tell me about your live storytelling and how this informs your physical writing as well. The act of moving those words onto the page.

Jamie:              So for anyone who's heard The Moth podcast or anything like that, I mean that's similar to what we do. So I live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and we have something called the Lancaster Story Slam. And the rules are five minutes, no notes, no props, no music, as true as you remember it. And that always gets a really big laugh when we're doing the rules because no one is up there fact checking with you. So that's a little bit different. When I turned in an essay, I need to be totally 100% sure that when it's fact checked, if it's fact checked, that everything's going to come out correctly. When you're up there telling the story on stage, no one is standing next to you, fact checking you. So that is a little bit different. But I do really aim for authenticity and honesty.

Jamie:              So we have a monthly story slam in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and a monthly stories slam in New York, Pennsylvania. I'm driving distance to both. I live between the two. What it's been great for over the years is actually prompts. Because every month has a theme. When I was querying and waiting to hear back from people and didn't want to be working on the novel, it gave me a writing prompt every month or two if I was going to both slams. That really helped me get words on paper and there's an, you know, a deadline, it's like show business, right? Like the curtain's going to go up whether or not you're ready. So there was a hard deadline, there was a prompt that's usually pretty open ended and that was a really great way to just keep writing while I was waiting between hearing back from agents.

Mindy:             So I want to return to the idea of your Lancaster group and your other writing groups. But first I want to talk a little bit about the fact that you have worked on both fiction, orally and nonfiction orally and written, so when you are approaching something, when you're approaching a piece of fiction versus a piece of nonfiction, do you have a different way of preparing yourself for those or is there a different writing procedure that you use or do you mix it up to put your brain in a different place? Like you were saying, when it comes to something like fact-checking, if you're working on nonfiction, is your brain in the same place when you're working on fiction versus nonfiction?

Jamie:              It absolutely is not in the same place. But I will say with both I'm always aiming for emotional authenticity, so Wasted Pretty, it's a novel. It's a young adult coming of age novel. Nothing in that book happened the way it happened in my life. The character is 16 and in Pittsburgh and goes to an all girls school. I grew up in Pittsburgh and was a 16 year old in an all girls school. Aside from that, the characters, the plot, everything is made up except for the scene - I always have to say this - in which the main character accidentally locks herself in the bathroom of a boy she has a crush on. I am talented. I did that. That was wonderful and horrible all at the same time. So that actually happened. But aside from that scene, that book is completely made up. But what I tried to do was stay true to the emotions and the feelings that I was having as a 16 year old girl in Pittsburgh.

Jamie:              So that emotional authenticity is there. When I'm writing nonfiction, when I'm writing an essay or like a hot take or response piece that comes from I have just seen something or experienced something and I need to make it make sense. I need to take that sort of real life, real experience and get my head around it. And the only way I know how to do that is by writing. So when I'm writing nonfiction, I'm often going for a message. I'm often trying to take something that's horrible and not necessarily find a silver lining, but at least make it worthwhile so that it's just not horrible. One of my pieces that I love is about taking my daughter to a rally in support of immigrants. It's hard. I mean, I think she was seven at the time. I hated that we had to be there. I loved that we were there, but I hated that we had to be there. I needed it to make sense, and so when I'm writing nonfiction, I'm going more for a message. Whereas when I'm writing fiction, there may be a message, but it is not what's central. The process, what's central to the process is creating an arc that is fun and that is engaging and that makes sense. I will say that I am a terribly literal person and very on the nose writer, so in fiction I'm always working against that tendency and in nonfiction I'm leaning into that tendency.

Mindy:             That makes sense to me. Myself, I've never attempted any essays or anything of that type. Do you have any advice for people who want to attempt essays? Particularly personal based essays?

Jamie:              Not from a craft perspective, but from a pitching perspective. Timely pieces are so much easier to place. I, it's counterintuitive to what I thought going into it. So there are two types of pieces or there are many types, but I write either evergreen pieces, so pieces that really could be published at any time throughout the year and timely pieces which are tied to a news event or something that has just happened in the news cycle. You can send a timely essay to more than one editor at a time, as long as you disclose that you've done that. An evergreen piece, you really have to pitch to somebody, wait to hear back from them, follow up with them a week or two later, maybe never hear back from them or hear back from them that they're passing, and then you can go to the next person. So with an evergreen piece, it could take you six months to get through 10 editors before you find someone to take it.

Jamie:              Whereas with a timely piece you can write to 10 editors at the same time and say, hey, this is timely because it's tied to an event that's happening next Friday. It's being pitched simultaneously and can you get back to me soon if you're interested. So I've had better luck placing timely pieces. So that's one facet of it. As far as the actual craft, it's sort of like what we were talking about, the dark themes. For me, the only thing that works is really leaning into the things I'd rather not think about, but the only way I know how to think about them is writing. That gut level honesty is what is going to make a piece resonate. And then I also got a great piece of advice from Jia Tolentino who just today I think her, her nonfiction essay collection came out and I was in a talk with her last year and she said if what you learn in one of my essays is about me, I haven't done my job. When I'm talking about myself in an essay, it is solely to illuminate a larger issue. I think it's what I'd been doing, but when I heard her say it, I leaned into that even further. So it's not, let me tell you about this horrible thing I experienced when I was 16 but it's, I experienced this thing when I was 16 and why is it still happening to girls and how can we get it to stop?

Mindy:             It's interesting, you were talking about timely pieces and evergreen pieces and unfortunately when we're talking about sexual assault, sometimes things can be both.

Jamie:              That is for sure, but if you can hook it to something concrete, it's more likely that you're going to get it picked up. It's a numbers game. It's more likely that one of those 10 editors will read it and take it as opposed to spacing that out over a six months. I mean, I was talking about luck before and timing my second piece in the Washington Post - I can't say it's solely happened for this reason, but I know for a fact that the editor wrote back and said, I love this. It's really clean. And I had to pull something from tomorrow. So you're going in tomorrow?

Mindy:             Oh my gosh. Did you just pee your pants?

Jamie:              Pretty much. I don't know what she pulled. I don't know why she had to pull it, but for whatever reason she had to pull something. She needed a filler and that's when she opened my email and thankfully it was clean copy. We didn't have to go back and forth on many edits and she just dropped it in. But again, that's the luck part. It's showing up. It's doing the work. It's great that it was clean copy. That was timing and luck and I have no idea why.

Mindy:             That's amazing. Well, and I love that you are so honest about the luck aspect because luck is a huge part. It's a huge part in, uh, the larger placement of novels as well.

Mindy:             Lastly, the dangers of embracing the myth of the solitary writer, how community can help and where to find Jamie online.

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Mindy:             I want to talk a little bit more about the writer's group you mentioned that meets once a month in Lancaster. I think it's really fascinating what you were talking about with the the free storytelling, but also if you could just talk for a little bit about what having a community like that means for you as a writer.

Jamie:              I founded Write Now Lancaster with my friend Michelle Lombardo, who's also a local writer back in 2015 and we are very different writers with very different situations, so at the time she was home writing full time and didn't really know anyone in Lancaster. She had recently moved back here after growing up, sort of in the general area. I had a full time job. I knew a bunch of people from the storytelling community, but I had no time to write. So I was looking for a time, a dedicated time to write and she was looking to meet more people who were writing. And it's interesting that when we founded this together, we sort of hit both of those needs and they've benefited us both and the community really well. So what we do is we come together in a coworking space, a local coworking space called The Candy Factory because it was founded in a candy factory.

Jamie:              And um, we come together once a month and we bring food and drink and we hang out and we chat for about a half an hour. And then I set the timer for 60 minutes and we write silently for 60 minutes and then we hang out and chat for about a half an hour after. So it really hits both of those needs for people who are just looking for the motivation, um, to, to sit and get their butt in the seat and write and also hits the need for people to be in community. So I'm an extrovert who is also a procrastinator. So being in a room with a lot of other people writing, I get energy from them, but I also get motivation because if I'm like surfing the Internet, they're going to see that. And so I, it's like positive peer pressure to know that everyone is working on their writing.

Jamie:              But a lot of things have grown out of that. So we met monthly for two years and realized we didn't know what anyone else was working on. The beauty of a silent writing time meetup is you can be writing poetry, you can be writing non fiction, you can be writing fiction, you can be writing... we had people writing comedy, we had people writing cooking blogs. You're not a fiction writer who is trying to critique poetry. It's not a, it's not a workshop group, it's not a critique group. So after two years we decided to host a public reading and it was the first time we'd ever heard each other's writing. And some of us knew each other better and had swapped before. But really we were so impressed with what everyone was doing. So now every other year we do a public reading so that we can see what everyone's been working on and and you know, give positive reinforcement and get really excited about it. But mostly we are there to write. It's great for beginner writers. It's great for seasoned writers because you're not measuring yourself against people. You're just there because you want to write and you want to be around other people who are writing.

Mindy:             It's much like going to the gym. So I go to the gym about three times a week and I really have to force myself to go sometimes. But once I get there, when I'm in my class and I'm around other people that are really pushing themselves to lift, it will really motivate you to kick up your own game. Being around other people is the same is true of writers. When I see other people writing and other people taking it seriously and sitting there and hitting their laptops, I'm like, oh, I should be doing that too. And it is great motivation, right?

Jamie:              I agree. And I definitely have some friends who are more on the introverted side get distracted easily. So I have a, I have a friend, I mean I love his writing, he's just doing really wonderful things. I met him through storytelling and I love what he's doing and I invite him every month and he's like, I don't want to be around other people when I'm writing. I'm like, that's?? No. Who does that?? And so I definitely get that. It's not for everyone. But it is so for me,

Mindy:             I had the experience of being at an event where a friend needed just kind of to have some space to herself and not have a bunch of people around her. Cause it was a large event and I happened to have a room at the conference. So I was like, you know, you can come up to my room and we'll just, you know, you can chill out here. And she was like, okay. And she whips out her laptop and I whip out mine and we're there and we're together and it's social in the sense that we're in the same place at the same time doing the same thing. But we're both in our own little worlds and we're doing our work. I find it tremendously motivating.

Jamie:              For me, it's important to push back against the idea of all writers are introverts, right? Oh, writing is so solitary. People are miserable. When people lean into that, I often feel like, well wait a minute, am I a real writer? If I like people and I'm generally nice and outgoing and so I know that there are outgoing, lovely, fully functional writers. I mean, and I love to be surrounded by them, but I also, I really like to, whenever possible talk about how much it is about community and how much it is about, hey, take a look at this for me or what can I look at for you? I was just listening to one of your earlier episodes about how, you know, getting readings is often from knowing other people. I mean, I'm from Pittsburgh. And so Kit Frick just moved back to Pittsburgh and I saw that you were there with her and I thought, oh, I wonder how that came about.

Jamie:              And then I was listening to your podcast and you talked about how that came about. So I had an event there two weeks ago and she came out to that event and I introduced her to my friends there. And so my writing is about connecting people. My sort of ethos is about connecting people. And so I guess I would just like to say to any writer listening who feels alienated when people say, Oh, writing. So solitary, it never has been for me. I would, I've written in hotel lobbies, like in my home town, I will go to a hotel lobby with my laptop because I need that background noise and that energy of people

Mindy:             Definitely. I've had the similar experience where I will just go somewhere public because I need that motivation of having people around me. And it really can be something different. And you know, you're right about the isolation too. It is, you know, I mean you can decide whether or not that's who you want to be or what you want to be doing. I know a lot of people that write in groups and they find that uh, you know, very motivating.

Jamie:              It's helpful to hear that there are lots of different ways to be a real writer. I think we get caught up in that a lot.

Mindy:             The poor tortured, starving artists thing is, it's not attractive to actually be that person. Last question, what are you working on right now and where can listeners find you online?

Jamie:              I am working on a sequel to Wasted Pretty, but I recently scrapped 40,000 words. That was really intense, but it was the right thing to do. I have trouble plotting, so I really write my way into the story and I had actually plotted a broad sort of arc for where I thought this was going, but the 40,000 words in it no longer matched the characters. So some people would say that was poor plotting or planning on my part, which it very well may be, but I just don't enjoy plotting. I got to know the characters as I was writing this, and I can't say that none of those 40,000 words are going to end up in the next draft, but I just, I, I paused, I opened up a clean document. I plotted a new arc that made more sense for who the characters had become and now I'm going to write into that and see if that happens.

Jamie:              So hopefully there'll be a sequel. I initially I had wanted to have a zero draft or a first draft by the end of this calendar year. I think that's still possible. Uh, but I do have a full time job and two kids and a husband and friends that I like to spend time with. So we'll see. We'll see what happens with that. I did spend all of July only working on the novel, which meant that for the month of July I didn't write any essays and I learned a lot about myself in that process. Mainly that I'm not a very nice person to be around when I'm not writing essays.

Jamie:              It's all of the stuff that I need to work through gets pent up in there. So that was fascinating. But I did find that when I was writing the novel every day there was much less sort of gear up time. You had asked about what it's like to get into the head space of fiction. And when I was writing the novel every day, I could just sort of sit down and write it. I didn't have to sort of remember where the characters were and get back into those characters heads. They were just right there. So I think if I didn't have a full time job and I could really write every day the way many people do, I understand the benefit of it. But it also, it did zap some of the fun for me. And so I really as a writer need to balance those two things. And as far as where people can find me, I am on Twitter. And I'm on Instagram at I have a Facebook page. And my website where you can find links to all of those things is http://www.jamiebethcohen.com/

Representing the Midwest in Fiction with J. Ryan Stradal

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Mindy:             Welcome to Writer, Writer Pants On Fire. Where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing industry, marketing, and more. I'm your host Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at MindyMcGinnis.com and make sure to visit the Writer, Writer Pants On Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques, and more at writerwriterpantsonfire.com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit writerwriterpantsonfire.com and click support the blog and podcast in the sidebar.

Mindy: Today’s guest is J. Ryan Stradal. His first novel, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, was published by Viking in 2015, and reached the New York Times Hardcover Best Seller list. His short fiction has appeared in Hobart, The Rumpus, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Electric Literature, and Midwestern Gothic, among others. His second novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, is available now. J. Ryan joined me today to talk about representation of the Midwest in popular culture, the rising importance of microbreweries in small communities, and the lost stories of the middle class.        

Mindy:             Let's talk about the book, The Lager Queen of Minnesota. One of the things that, as I said, really appeals to me about it is that it's about the Midwest and it's setting is in the Midwest and you grew up in the Midwest. I often see, and I imagine you probably do too, writers and TV show producers and movies, always trying to do the Midwest and not quite getting it... if sometimes completely missing the mark and really corn holing us. So if you could talk a little bit about that, I would love for you to let us know your opinion.

J. Ryan:             I totally agree. I've seen some over the years, like Butter for example, which I thought was extremely condescending. The writer of that movie, I'm not gonna name names, but he's from Maryland. He's not even from the Midwest, you know, we gotta make our own art. We've gotta represent our own people. So in a lot of ways this is a response to me not seeing our people represented properly or with enough depth or imagination, but also not just a course correction or a diatribe. It's the celebration of these people. Being a Minnesotan, I'm more inclined to praise what I love than denigrate what I hate. I'm more motivated to write stories about these people because I love them, than do it as some kind of retort to culture at large, but that does play into it. I wasn't seeing enough stories about the people I consider to be my people out there in the world, in any media. There are plenty of great Midwestern writers. Don't get me wrong. Peter Guy, Nicholas Butler, Lorna Landvik Vic Louise Erdrich, Jane Smiley. There's a ton of them, but in terms of writing about kind of contemporary working class suburban and kind of like the people I grew up with, I wasn't seeing a ton of that. That's kind of my sweet spot in terms of inspiration, subject matter, like people that live in these smaller towns on the outskirts of a city and live paycheck to paycheck. That's how I grew up.

Mindy:             Yeah, me too. I encourage you as an offside, check out the author, Donald Ray Pollock.

J. Ryan:           Oh, you bet. I saw him on a panel a while ago and he was really cool. I actually bought one of his books at that event and gave it directly to my brother. Said, give it to me when you're done and he's never given it back to me.

Mindy:             Take it back because that man is my idol. I mean, pure sheer Midwest. He's from the Circleville area up here, very southern Ohio, very Appalachia. Stunningly talented.

J. Ryan:           Cool. Yeah, I've heard people compare him to Dennis Johnson.

Mindy:             Absolutely. Yup. Absolutely. No doubt about that. So the other thing that you talk about, and you just mentioned it too in response to the question about the Midwest in general is middle class and it's so true that so much of our popular culture is centered on the Uber rich or Uber poor. That's what we talk about. It's like that's where the stories are and that's not true. I mean there is that grind and that struggle of just making it, it's so terrifying in itself in some ways. And I know it plays into the book. So if you could talk about that for a little bit.

J. Ryan:             Well, it's also so rich with conflict and I mean, when you're struggling to make it every day is some kind of conflict. Anytime you can't answer a problem with money, you've got conflict. And that's one of the things I find kind of amusing, uh, about the fact that so many books are written about wealthy people or, or at least financially stable people. It's like, boy, what problem do they have that they can solve with their wallet? And the people I grew up with couldn't say that. And my characters, most of them can't. Every situation could end up becoming septic for them. You know, like the smallest cut could kill them sometimes. I enjoy exploring that dynamic because you know, you grew up in a world where, you know, as Eda says in my book, you'd treat money like a motorcycle driver treats asphalt. It keeps you going, but one mistake with it can kill you. I knew a lot of people who are very risk averse, you know? Certainly very cautious, very, uh, if not stingy at the very least, you know, very conservative with money. Like I grew up in a family. We didn't eat out a lot. You know, I wanted to though, boy, I'll tell you that when I started working out out of the house and making my own money, I spent it almost all on restaurants and CD's.

Mindy:             I love that.

J. Ryan:             So those kinds of purchasing decisions, having opportunity costs when it comes to money, you know, and I explore that with my character, Diana, you know, she's got a job, she makes money doing something criminal on the side. But anyway, she's got money that she needs to sustain her and her grandma's life, but also looks at this money in her life and goes, what do I spend it on? I have a choice. I can't do both things. Boy, that's as dramatic as it gets. I'm surprised more people don't explore this realm. Talking to someone else earlier today, and, uh, we talked about this topic and it came up that, well, maybe not enough people come out of the working class to become writers. And that could be a part of it too. Is that you've gotta be in a fairly privileged situation to be able to afford the time off to write a book. At least have your mornings free. I mean, if you have kids and you're working a full time job, I mean, how many hours a day do you get to write? You can do it. I know people who do, it's a lot harder. You know, someone whose parents paid for their MFA and now they get to sit in an apartment in Brooklyn and write their novel. It's very different for them from what I came from.

Mindy:             Yeah. Exactly. Same here, same here.

J. Ryan:             And they're obviously gonna write a different kind of novel than you or I. I don't even think they should try to write a novel set in Ohio. I wouldn't want to read it.

Mindy:             No, not at all. And that's, yeah, that's the experience that I have. Um, I'm lucky enough I'm able to write full time now, but you know,.

J. Ryan:             Yeah me to too and I feel the same way. I feel lucky.

Mindy:             Yes. And always aware that it can be taken from you.

J. Ryan:             Oh yes.

Mindy:             Well, and you mentioned being risk averse as part of that middle class mentality. And I see that, I mean, you can't take a stand and say, I'm going to be an artist. I mean, that's all risk.

J. Ryan:             Oh my God. Yeah. And it was a risk my parents supported, you know, my mom's supported and understood because she always wanted to be a novelist herself. My Dad was slower. His burner on the stove is slower to heat up under that pot. He's into it now, you know. But uh, at first when I went to college, he was like, oh, you should major in, uh, in a skill like a trade. And so I majored in Radio, TV, film partially, you know, partially to make him happy, but also because I was scared shitless of the idea of writing prose at the time. I was a young dude. I didn't like to revise.

J. Ryan:             I didn't revise. Oh my God, what, what insanity was that?

Mindy:             You know, I didn't either. My very first book, I finished in college, I wrote a novel, finished it and was like, I'm sending this to publishers. And I did. And then, you know, that didn't end well. That did not work out.

J. Ryan:             Thank God. it didn't. Imagine if that had been your first book out there, you wouldn't be able, if it was still on shelves like right now you wouldn't to be able to look at it.

Mindy:             Thank God self publishing didn't exist then because, oh my God.

J. Ryan:             Oh yeah, yeah, I know. I know. I know. Just imagine. I talked to writing classes sometimes about that, but like I've sent out this story 50 or 60 times and it hasn't been accepted. Like, you know, maybe in five years you'll be glad it wasn't right? Also think of that.

Mindy:             I have a blog post, an interview with another author coming up tomorrow and she was querying for six years and I had over 500 rejections and you know, I was querying for 10 and I definitely had over 500 but I'm not sure how many, but then she says the same thing. It's like it was all on me. I was just so convinced that I was this little undiscovered genius. I wasn't revising, I wasn't putting in the work. I wasn't even rereading my own stuff. I was just like, this is awesome!

J. Ryan:             Oh no, Oh no, no. Yeah, Kerouac writing on the road. This is just my role of typewriter paper right here. I know I wrote a manuscript in my twenties that'll never see the light of day, but I was of course, you know, disappointed about that at the time. You know, like any writer would be. I didn't even get a response from agents. Yeah. I mean, once or twice I maybe got, we received it, you know, but certainly no one asking for a full. And then the cases I sent a full like no response. You know? And I look at it now and I perfectly understand it's an embarrassing piece of work, but it was the first novel I had to write more to develop the discipline of writing a novel.

Mindy:             Absolutely. I know I would get partial requests, then I would send them off and they would just be like crickets. And now I'm like, well, I mean I'm glad they didn't respond. I don't want to know what they thought.

J. Ryan:             Me Neither. I'm glad that some of these agents are no longer in the business and they're no longer around to besmirch my good name should they check their email archive.

Mindy:             So you've mentioned writing that bad first novel and getting out of your system. How many novels did you complete? How many books I should say? Did you finish before you got an agent?

J. Ryan:             Okay, well I got an agent with my second one, but it was 10 years later and then the intervening 10 years I took extension classes at UCLA, which were great because first of all I had an instructor, Lou Matthews, best instructor I've ever had who read my work and said, you know what J. Ryan, your work's going to get a whole lot better, once you start writing about things you care about. It's like, Oh snap. He was right. Lou was right. I was like all right, okay. Waddled out of there like in shame like a toddler. But then, you know, I thought, you know, he's right, I've got to take him up on this. And so that was one thing. The other two things were a ton of reading and a lot of writing. I published my first short story in 2006 after my mom died.

J. Ryan:             It was about four years before I had another one published and that four years it was instructive too. Cause I wrote, I was writing, submitting that whole time, you know. I was burning up, Duotrope, you know, like deadliest catch captains smoking, you know, it was, you know, I just didn't let it get me down. I could feel myself getting better. I took the, I took Lou's advice, started getting short stories out in the world again and one was published in 2010 and 2011 then a couple in 2012. And it was just slowly building up a little momentum. And in 2013 I started writing Kitchens of the Great Midwest. I mean I'd been thinking about it since 2009. I'd been saving money since then to take a year off from work. I'd been working in TV production, but I just couldn't help it anymore. In February of 2013 I was working on a show called Storage Wars, Texas. I just started writing it in the morning, you know, before going into work. And um, the rest is history, I guess. It took me about a year to write writing every day. And when Storage wars, Texas was canceled for some reason. Who knows?

J. Ryan:             I just thought, you know, most of the time I'd hop onto another production, but this time, you know, I'm gonna take this as a blessing and I'm gonna keep writing. I'm gonna use the full day now and treat it like a job. Yeah, that was another huge lesson. Was treat it like a job. Wake up, clock in, do your writing. I don't have any sort of word count or page count assigned to every day, but I do try to write every day.

Mindy:             I think what you're saying, you've got two like mini MFA courses right there - write about something you care about, which is great. And treat it like a job. That's, that's a big one. I read and I believe it was uh, Nick Cave, the singer who also writes novels and I believe that I read somewhere I have it stuck in my head that it was him. So if I'm, if I'm attributing this to the wrong person, then I apologize, Nick Cave. But, um, I read somewhere that even when he is just writing at home, he wakes up in the morning and he puts on a suit.

J. Ryan:             Oh yeah, I've heard that.

Mindy:             Yeah. And it goes to his office to write cause he has to treat it, he has to tell himself he's at work.

J. Ryan:             Yeah. My buddy Brian K. Vaughan, He rents, uh, like an office about a mile or two from his home that he goes to, you know, and so it's like going to work for him.

Mindy:             I think it's really smart because one of the things I see writers talking about all the time on Twitter, and I'm guilty of it too, is that we lay around in our pajamas all day because we can, and I think I will probably take myself a little more seriously if I had pants on.

J. Ryan:             I do notice my writing gets better if I, if I have pants on.

Mindy:             Yeah. As it should, I feel a little less sloppy if I'm actually, you know, got some support. So one of the things that actually the major theme with The Lager Queen of Minnesota is the emergence of brewery culture. And you talk a lot about how you visited breweries and you learned so much about all of the brewery process and the families and the communities that do pop up around a brewery, especially in small towns where they can be like a social hub. So if you could talk about that.

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J. Ryan:             Yeah, I've been noticing that since I was touring for Kitchens, you know, cause I did over 120 stops for Kitchens, mostly in the Midwest. That's where it so much or the brewery culture has been historically in, and is now, you know, and it's wonderful to roll into these smaller towns that were a lot less lively 10 years ago. Have this center have this epicenter. Uh, you've got some like local people working there that normally would be working elsewhere, be going to the big city or would have outright moved to the big city by now. And they're making something and keeping money in the, in the local economy, hiring locals to work the tap room and giving families, young families, couples, people with pets, quite often, a place to come hang out. That's not denominational, that's not a chain that doesn't funnel the money outside of town somewhere. It has a little bit more conviviality than a coffee shop. Also can be a little more raucous. You can have like, you know, musicians that aren't just a solo acoustic guitarist in the corner. I really love it and I love, I love seeing it and I love their uh, effect on, on small town America and the Midwest. I've been motivated to write about it since then and I wanted to marry it with this idea I had of writing the story of a, an unfairly divided farmland inheritance, which has happened a couple of times on both sides of my family. And I thought, oh, how could I marry these two things together? And Lager Queen is a result of that.

Mindy:             I find often when I'm traveling for work or I'm just visiting friends, like from college that are scattered usually around the state, they do, you know, most places have a, a semi local brewery. Everybody wants to show it to you. Everybody's proud and everybody wants you to try it and, and I'm like, no matter what, I actually think,I always tell them that it's good because you can't say...

J. Ryan:             Yeah, you got to see it's good. It's like, it's like going to your grandma's house and she makes you a pie. What are you going to say? Like grandma, your pie makes me cry. I'm going to cry to sleep thinking about this pie. No, no, funny to think of a brewery is pride of place, you know, for, for community.

Mindy:             But it really is, I went through a period of time where I was really into the microbrews and so I would tweet about it a lot. And I was traveling, I think it was a couple of years ago. I was traveling and I ended up out in California and I had a fan. She actually brought me like a six pack of the local brew.

J. Ryan:             Oh cool.

Mindy:             Yeah, it was really cool. But I, my signing ended at like 9:30 I had to fly out at five in the morning. I had like, you know, a six pack of this local brew and I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't, you know, slam these overnight.

J. Ryan:             I know. I know. That happens to me too. Sometimes people will give me beer, like tall boys or something. Like the end of the night when I've got a 5:30 AM flight or something. I'm like, well maybe I've got a buddy here that I can pass this along to and I'll take a picture of this can and next time I'm in this town I'll make a point of having this beer.

Mindy:             That is exactly what I did. I took a picture and I left it for housekeeping because I was like, I can't, I can't drink six beers tonight like that's not on the table.

J. Ryan:             Not at all. Boy. The demands on writers. Oh God, you drink all this beer. People give you so much beer.

Mindy:             Beer and coffee. That's the thing.

J. Ryan:             Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I'll take it. I love them both.

Mindy:             I do too. Do you have anything that you're working on now? What do you have coming up next or are you just still focused on pushing The Lager Queen?

J. Ryan:             I am working on another book tentatively titled Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club. So the setting is a Midwestern supper club, like of a northern Minnesota, Wisconsin ilk with the fish fries and the brandy old fashions. So that's the primary setting, but it's really, once again more about the people about the family involved. I was writing it yesterday at a hotel in Connecticut, you know, I don't know if I'll have time to work on it today, but yeah, no, it's a world I love being in and developed some brand new characters and, but it's still a Midwestern setting. I'm not, not one talking about the Midwest. It feel like it's, it's home to me in a lot of ways and also has presented me with a lot of puzzles that I need to unpack.

Mindy:             I hear ya. All of my books are set in Ohio, small town, small town Ohio, because I don't see enough of that. One more reading recommendation if you haven't already picked it up. Steven Markley wrote a book called Ohio.

J. Ryan:             Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard about it.

Mindy:             It's good.

J. Ryan:             Yeah. Good, good, good. That's good to hear. It's about a group of high school friends?

Mindy:             Yeah. It follows them in high school and then also in their adult lives and uh, it really captures the Midwest. specifically Ohio. Just really good. Really good. I was all over it.

J. Ryan:             Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for the rec.

Mindy:             Absolutely. And uh, thank you for the interview. It was awesome. I'll let you go. I know you've got another one to get to, but it was a great talk. Good time.

J. Ryan:             Yeah. Oh yeah. It was invigorating.

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