An Unexpected
Literary Podcast
Every week, host Adam Sockel interviews a popular member of the literary world about their passions beyond what they're known for. These longform, relaxed conversations show listeners a new side of some of their favorite content creators as well as provide insight into the things that inspire their work.
The sound of our lives with Isa Arsén
Isa Arsén is acutely aware of the rhythms of everything around us. She spends her life thinking about how sound affects us all. It even sparked the inspiration that became her debut novel, Shoot the Moon. We discuss how her passions started as a child with her father's music and turned into an entire career. And there is just a sprinkling of quantum theory and rocket science tossed in here... as a treat.
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[Music Playing]
Adam Sockel:
You are listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast. For each week, I interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work. I'm your host Adam Sockel, and today's guest is Isa Arsen, author of the debut novel Shoot the Moon, which came out October 10th. So, you can get it right now if you're listening to this podcast on the day it gets released or any time after.
Shoot The Moon is a wonderful, wonderful story, all about a woman working for NASA and her quest for both intellectual fulfillment and romantic love, and the price paid for a scientific progress. It is such a fascinating story, and Isa was such a wonderful person to talk to.
We discussed a number of things around the very broad topic of music. I've talked to a few people about music on this podcast, but what I really loved about this discussion is that Isa's “day job” is as an audio engineer for interactive media.
And this discussion dives really, really deeply into the fact that they seek out the music of life, if you will, the different ways that everything technically is musical and everything has sound waves and how they interact with us on a daily basis.
We get into a lot of different things in this discussion. We talk about some old timey music that we both loved when we were kids but just a really, really, again, wide ranging conversation. But it was really interesting to hear her talk about her musical background, the music that she was brought up on in her house, and then how it has quite literally affected her daily life.
And for this book, her debut novel, it was really interesting to hear her talk about the fact that she works with sound waves every single day. But she kind of had to teach herself quantum theory and a lot of rocket science and blend those things together in a way that she could make it make sense for the average reader, while also being deeply, deeply interesting, and also possible for her to discover.
So, I really, really, really loved this discussion. I really loved everything about this book, and I think you are going to as well.
If you ever want to get ahold of me, you can, of course, always reach me at [email protected]. You can find me on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok at Passions & Prologues, where I'm constantly giving book reviews, book recommendations, and just talking about all sorts of bookish things.
And speaking of book recommendations, I want to recommend a book that is one of the better books I have read in a really, really long time. In fact, I talked about this on my TikTok account, if you happen to follow me over there, The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer.
This is a big, heartfelt, and life-affirming novel about a person who is a death doula, basically someone who helps care for others at the end of their life. And she spends so much time talking about the regrets and the joys and the advice of these other people that she's kind of forgetting to live her own life.
She has had a series of things happen in her life that have caused her to become almost like a recluse, and she doesn't really know how to handle them. She spends so much time handling other people's traumas that she's avoiding her own.
She meets someone who kind of upends her life in a very, very fascinating way that leads her to have a series of very, very important personal relationships. And just the story itself is probing and clever and hopeful. And as someone who thinks a lot about personal relationships, I really, really loved it. So, that is The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikkie Brammer. Really, really recommend you check that out.
And I definitely recommend you check out Shoot the Moon, the new book by Isa Arsen. And I hope you enjoy this discussion with Isa all about music and the ways that it is interwoven into our lives every single day on Passions & Prologues.
[Music Playing]
Okay. Isa, what is something you are super passionate about that we're going to be discussing today?
Isa Arsen:
I am super, super passionate about music in all shapes and forms.
Adam Sockel:
Yes, this is a beautiful sandbox for us to play in. So, I guess first, most people in some fashion enjoy music, but what-
Isa Arsen:
I would hope so.
Adam Sockel:
Yeah, yeah. It's like when you go on a first date with someone, they're like, “I'm really into music.” It's like, well, thank you.
Isa Arsen:
If they say no, it's like, “No, okay, we're done. Thank you.” Even friends, anybody. If you cannot appreciate the magic of sound waves doing things, then I have no desire to know you as a person.
Adam Sockel:
So, what was it? Was it when you were younger, but I guess what took music from being something you were interested in to being something that is all encompassing in your life now?
Isa Arsen:
When I was a kid, obviously, it was sort of that one thing, you play the Raffi tapes and stuff, and it was like, “Oh, I want to get up and dance.” So yeah, I know all of sort of the kind of kids’ media I think is so niche, but music I think is a really special thing that kids media does really well.
So yeah, like Raffi tapes, books on tape that had music elements to them when I was in like kindergarten and early elementary school, music class was it, that was my favorite thing.
My dad is really into music. Back when Borders was a thing, he would, after work, go to the Borders, put on those little — the giant foam headphones that were still connected with the coil … and just listen to the album previews and see what sort of struck his fancy, and then just bring the album home with him and he'd keep them in his car.
And I took piano lessons from six-years-old all the way through high school. And he would take me to my music lesson every week. So, he'd be like, “I got a new album, let's pop it in the car.” So, I'd be listening to … one week it would be Peruvian folk music, and then the next week it would be super free form jazz. And then the week after that it would be like oh my God, what's her name? Her band is called Union Station.
Adam Sockel:
Oh boy.
Isa Arsen:
This is so embarrassing.
Adam Sockel:
Sorry. I'm looking it up in real time. Alison Krauss.
Isa Arsen:
Yes, Alison Krauss. And my mom's a huge Alison Krauss fan, so like whole spectrum of music. And then he was a patent illustrator, and he would bring his work home sometimes. And whenever he would work, he would blast the classical station, so I was exposed to opera and symphonic music and the whole spectrum of music.
And then I ended up studying composition in college. And so, I learned how to write music. I learned how to orchestrate and kind of how to get into the guts of it all, why music sounds the way it does, how music sounds the way it does.
And the school that I went to, I went to Temple up in Philly and a lot of professors there were sort of the early pioneers of the computer music movement in the 60s and 70s. And they ended up teaching at Temple. Super, super robust music tech program there now.
But when I was there, I really fell in love with how to make computers make sound. And it was a really cool mix of all the stuff that I loved. It was the puzzle solving and the problem solving that comes with computer science and also the artisticness of music and learning how to manipulate input from speech or song and make that interact with the computer.
So, finding a way to kind of make sound touch every little piece of everything. And that shows up in a way that I didn't expect it to. When I look back at Shoot the Moon is that everything is kind of hinged around the fact that sound waves push a lot of what the universe does.
And that was a fun puzzle that I had to solve, is like, I had to learn a little bit of quantum physics and sort of learn a little bit of rocket science, which is totally out of my depth. It was a lot of fun to research all of that.
And then come up with a reason of like, okay, I have to solve this puzzle box that I built for myself. Why? Why is all of this happening in the world plot-wise? What is the connection here? And to look at all of it and be able to trace the through thread of it could be sound, it could be something that I understand very well and kind of wedge that in among all of the rocket science and all of the quantum theory.
But it was a fun way to kind of bring it all full circle. But yeah, everything that I do for the rest of my life is going to be touched in some way by music, because really that's the way that I perceive the world most fully is hearing it and kind of having this musical element to everything is that everything does have a tune to it. Everything has a tempo, everything's got a cadence. It's all happening on an oral level first for me.
Adam Sockel:
So, first things first, I feel like — no one will know this. It's a podcast, and it was a visual reaction, but when you said Raffi, I lit up like a Christmas tree. Because I was like, first off, I won't ask, but I feel like we are of similar ages because we had … I'm the youngest of four, and we had a copy of The Princess Bride that was recorded on TV.
And the thing before it was a live Raffi performance that got partially recorded over. And so, we had the Oopples and Boo-noo-noos, like we had the whole thing. All of a sudden it would just cut to Colombo reading Princess Bride.
Anyway, that's nothing. I just couldn't let a Raffi reference go by without being like, “Oh my God, I know this-
Isa Arsen:
Raffi is the best, man. It doesn't pander. It's very silly. It's very whimsical. It's got a lot of heart. I have a lot of respect for Raffi. He knows what he doing, knew what he was doing. Alright.
Adam Sockel:
And then, so you were talking about how like you said, music really, it's like everything that you've noticed in life and interact with, you said you kind of approach from hearing things first, which I love.
And I want to ask about the composition of music and stuff, because something I've gotten really into since kind of like the pandemic was cocktail making because I missed going — and having fancy cocktails, and I've gotten very good at it.
And I remember when I first started, I was like, this is so stupid. Why do people pick one recipe from like Jeffrey Morgenthal? It’s the famous way to do this thing from this specific bar. And I've found out it's because the measurements of … there is a chemistry that — when you start realizing like, okay, one part, one part, two part, whatever.
And now when I taste a cocktail I can taste, I'm like, well, there's something off. And so, this is a long-winded way of asking, when you are listening to music, how are you approaching it as a person who is listening? Because to me, I hear a song I like or a melody I like, or lyrics that are catchy.
When you are listening to music, how are you approaching it? Are you thinking like, how did this get created or are you able to kind of enjoy it at large first?
Isa Arsen:
When I was in college and sort of in the thick of like, study, study, study, my degree depends on this trying to sort of … oh, sorry, my dog is barking. The stakes were higher when I was in college. So, it was very much like, oh my gosh, everything I'm listening to, I can never do this for pleasure again. I'm sure English majors have done the same thing with books.
But that fades over time. And I've found that like still, because it is such a part of me, I can never not be somebody who's into music. The love is always going to be there. Because it started first with love. It wasn't that I went into music for any reason besides the fact that I loved it so much.
So, for me, it's like, imagine listening to music, sort of removing any sort of knowledge from it. If it's just like, totally layman, I am approaching this from an audience perspective. I enjoy this. I'm listening to it. It's like two dimensions.
You're listening to it from start to finish. It's linear, music is how we decorate the passage of time. It's great.
But then when you study it and you sort of understand the mechanics of it and why certain instruments are used, why certain combinations of instruments are used, what's the history of this specific type of music? Was it used as a port dance? Was it like old, old, old folk music that just kept getting dragged forward and forward and forward through all these eras of humanity?
You start hearing it sort of with this extra layer to it. It gets a 3D element where you're not just listening to it from front to back, you're also able to listen to the pieces of it. You can hear where it came from. You can hear sort of echoes of what the music used to be. If it's a tune that's been used over and over again, or if it's a familiar sort of rhythm that tends to get used.
There's rhythms that are often used in music that comes from the British Isles. There's tons of rhythms that are used in Central and South America. And then you kind of stack it all together and it's really fun to listen to contemporary music because you have so much history behind you.
And it's the same reason I really like historical fiction is because you have so much material to work with. And you have just this plate of stuff in front of you. And as a reader or as a listener you get this amazing — you have all of this reference to use as you're reading or as you're listening.
And it's really cool to be able to be like, “Oh, that's that one thing.” Like you pick up little Easter eggs as you go. And it just makes the process feel really rich. And it's super cool to be able to be like, “Yeah, that's a different orchestration. It's the same piece, but it's played on different instruments and here's why.”
Or “I like this one better because it sounds more mellow.” It's a fun language to build throughout the life.
Adam Sockel:
Hey, you don't have to say if there is, but being someone that can appreciate how things are built out, is there still music styles that you just hate? That you just like, “Ugh, I can't,” or do you have-
Isa Arsen:
I can't say that I hate any music, but I think if it's what I hate is when it's so clear that somebody's just like totally phoning it in to cash out on it. Like it's commercialized schlock. This might be offensive, but I call it post 9/11 Country where it's like-
Adam Sockel:
Yeah-
Isa Arsen:
Yeah. It's like the uber American, I have my truck and I have my gun. I live in Texas, it's everywhere. But I can't get behind it because It's not saying anything. You really want somebody to say something like, listen to Johnny Cash, listen to pat Patsy Cline. Those are the people who are saying something.
So, as long as the music is really saying something with itself and not just making a quick buck, I'm going to enjoy the time I spend with it.
Adam Sockel:
I'll put it like in the show notes for other people. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but Bo Burnham the comedian.
Isa Arsen:
Yeah. I love him. He's great.
Adam Sockel:
It's very old now, but he did a country song parody. It's literally just called Country Song. And it is exactly what you're talking about. And he's so good at mimicking different styles of singing that there's this version of it where he does it live and it's just shredding those people who-
Isa Arsen:
That’s spot on too.
Adam Sockel:
For people who don’t know what I'm talking about, I'll put it like in the show notes. But so how does having this intimate very, very deep knowledge of how music is constructed and things like how did, or did that affect how you write?
Did it affect the process with which you wrote Shoot the Moon? You mentioned there being very integral parts of the story itself involving sound, but coming at a story, do you break it down similarly like you would listening to music? Or is it just two wholly different experiences?
Isa Arsen:
I wouldn't call them different. I think they are different tracks on the same thought direction. Because they're both creative and they're both me sort of making something from just an idea. And if I crack open notebooks, staff paper notebooks from college, it's similar to cracking open a prose notebook where I'm making notes to myself. I'm saying like, I want to write about X, Y, Z.
I always start with the ideas sort of broader. Over time I've gotten much quicker with my iteration process of ideas for stories. But I think the best thing that my knowledge in music has given me with writing is that my inner ears is really developed. I can sort of pull tunes out of the air. I can think to myself, how would this sound with dialogue?
I can kind of assign a character voice. I know how all of my characters sound in my head. Which is really trippy when it comes to audiobook stuff. Because sometimes it's like, “Oh my God, that sounds exactly like them.” Or like, “Whoa, totally different.” It's really cool.
And I think that the biggest boon is that it turns the creative process for me into … it lowers the stakes because I'm not this all-powerful creator that has this huge responsibility to birth this story.
I'm halfway an audience member because I have the idea and I sort of just spin the top. And then as I'm going and as I hit flow, it very much becomes that I'm seeing the scene unfold in my head. I'm watching these characters interact with each other and I'm sort of just dictating what's happening.
And I can hear them speaking to one another. I can visualize what's happening. I can sort of put myself in the space of like this little diorama of what's going on. And it does become like a performance. It's sort of whenever I sit down to write, I'm kind of shutting myself in my own private theater and getting a show.
And sometimes it's funny because if I go back and revise a scene, if it's just not working or clicking, or kind of, something happens a few chapters later that changes the way I want to approach it. I sort of just get to set all the pins back up and knock them down in a different way.
And I think imagining the process as iterative instead of like, I have to get this right the first time, this first whack at it has to be perfect. That's really crippling for me. And giving myself the expectation that the first thing that's going to come out of my brain is the most fully formed idea of it, that gets shattered when you have to change things. Because inevitably you have to change things.
And I think my education with music was really helpful there because so much of the process of writing new music is born between the composer and the players. Because you bring your music to them and sometimes it's like I don't play a bowed string instrument and I would sometimes bring my sheets to the violin players or the viola players and they'd be like, I physically cannot play this. Like, this is not physically possible. You have to change it.
And it's the same when it comes to just something not working on the page, I think I just have a better or not better, I think I have a broader idea of what it means when something isn't working. And it is easier for me to pivot and to adjust from there and make something that will end up working better.
Adam Sockel:
Yeah. This may be totally off the mark or off base, but I'm curious, one of the things I've heard many, many authors tell me all the time is obviously they have a deadline when they're doing edits, but without that deadline, they're like, I could tinker with the story forever, and ever and ever.
I have to imagine knowing that you have to tinker but eventually get to an end point with a piece of music or a piece of audio. Was that helpful knowing, just having gone through that process so much in your life? Did that help you when you got to the editing portion of your novel?
Isa Arsen:
I used to be really precious about all of my stuff. And I think when … I'm trying to think of like the timeline of it. I didn't take writing seriously until five, six years ago, at the earliest, I want to say. And even then, it was kind of a slow start.
But I had a lot of exercising the rejection muscle, I guess when it came to creative output because with composition, as early as high school, I think my juniorish year of high school, so I was like 16 or 17-years-old, I would be putting pieces together and submitting them to local choir calls or something. And set this piece of poetry and perhaps we will perform it for you and give you a hundred bucks. That sort of thing.
I was very into that because that was the way that I was attempting to build my resume for college and have a professional output. So, something to show for it so I could get into college and actually get good at writing music.
And then when I was in college, so much of the process of learning how the world works, I very quickly realized that the academia side of it was not for me. But it was still the process of like, I am consistent — every year, if not twice a year, I'm going to be juried by my professors.
So, I will be presenting all of this stuff that I've created throughout the year in front of them, they're going to critique me. And I used to have really, really thin skin. I used to be very sensi … I'm still a very sensitive person, but in terms of like rejection sensitivity, it used to be so much harder for me to hear that somebody didn't love something that I was making.
And now I've just gotten so much more comfortable with understanding that a subjective art is actually a really beautiful thing, that people not loving everything is good. If it was possible for somebody to create something that everybody in the world would love, that's sad, that means that there's no nuance, there's no room for somebody to bring their own experience to it.
Because if somebody dislikes something that I'm bringing to the table, it doesn't mean that I've made a bad thing. It means that someone else's experience has informed them to cherish and look for something totally different. And it's up to the industry to give them something different and bring people to the table that can table that can speak to those experiences.
So yeah, I'm really lucky that I was given a field, like bouncy castle. It was a really safe place to fail. University is the place where you're supposed to kind of stumble all over your face and figure things out as you go.
So yeah, in hindsight college was stressful and crazy as it is. It's your early 20s and you're everywhere, all over the place. But I think it was perfect, looking at where I found myself now, it was a perfect place for me to kind of learn how to be a creative person.
Adam Sockel:
Yeah. I will say for people who are listening and who might be a bit younger, I'm in marketing and I work for a tech company, and I work for a tech startup. And if you want to have another place that will actually pay you money to kind of fail and learn quickly, it's a tech startup because it's like fail fast, whatever-
Isa Arsen:
Yeah. I've worked for a couple startups and it is, yeah. Fail fast is absolutely the right way to work. Particularly in this day and age. Everything moves so quickly. If you are not prepared to fail quickly, you can't iterate quickly. You can't develop quickly.
And failure means you're growing. If I could tell myself one thing from looking back at 29 to somebody … 18, 19-year-old self just stop being afraid. Don't be scared of things, life is going to happen to you regardless of what you do.
Just go wholeheartedly into it because earnestness and authenticity is the only way that you're ever going to feel like you're making forward progress. Because otherwise you're just failing for nothing.
Adam Sockel:
Yeah. And I love that you also said stop being so precious. Again, I'm in marketing, anytime I write a piece of content, there's going to be … like what if you did it like this?
And I want to get into Shoot the Moon. We're kind of talking around it a little bit, but not directly about it. So, first things first, can you kind of give my listeners an introduction to the novel? Because this episode will be coming up basically the day after it gets released. So, they may not-
Isa Arsen:
Yeah. It's exciting. Yeah. So, Shoot the Moon is a story about a young woman named Annie Fisk. She grows up in Santa Fe, New Mexico in the 1940s. Her father works on the Manhattan Project on the bomb. She doesn't really know what's going on, but she loves her father dearly.
She is very mathematically minded just like him. She loses him pretty early on in her life when she's a teenager. And that informs a lot of the ambition that she develops for mathematics and astronomy.
And ends up going to college, sort of starts forging her life for herself for the first time and feels this undeniable pull toward Houston, to NASA for the moon launch. So, she ends up working at NASA on the Apollo 11 launch in 1969. And from there she discovered something that sort of blows the whole roof off of everything that she thought was possible.
Adam Sockel:
So, what was it about NASA and this specific type of story that made you want to tell it and focus your energy on creating a story in this particular space?
Isa Arsen:
It was twofold, really. The primary driver was I really wanted to write something that took place in the southwest. My mom grew up in Albuquerque. Her whole side of the family is in New Mexico. And she and my dad live there now.
And I spent a lot of time there when I was a kid. Because we'd go visit my grandparents every summer. And it's a beautiful place. It really does look like another planet. You have these incredible mountains. It's so flat. The sky just goes on forever. The quality of the light is totally different out there. It's an amazing place. I will probably end up there in a few years.
But it's an incredible setting and I think that the books that are set out there are very specific books. And I wanted something that had a little bit of a broader stretch to it that still spoke very deeply to the fact that it was indivisible from the fact that it needed to be set there.
And also, I've been living in Texas for the past five years. Five, yes. And I love it dearly, despite all of the crazy politics, it is a really, really lovely place to live. You find your community, it's a good spot. And to have something set there in the mid-century in particular the 50s and 60s were a huge, just like booming era for the whole southwest, largely Texas. Particularly the moon launch and all of the space travel efforts that were made in that time period in America.
And then particular to NASA and to the Apollo 11 launch in general computer science started as women's work. They saw it as like the secretarial busy work, oh, poo-poo. It's not special. We'll give it to the ladies; we'll give it to the ladies and particularly the women of color.
If you've read the wonderful story, Hidden Figures that is all about the women of color who are particularly working on the launch. And that aspect of it where it was like … you think of computer science now, it's like you have all these dude bros who are doing it and making millions of dollars doing it. And it's a very, very male heavy industry that's sometimes actively hostile to women, which sucks.
But it started out as women's work. And I think it's very special to look back at this period of history where it is not something that was kind of born from the male mind, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. We would not have gotten to the moon without women.
And I think that there's something very special about digging into that niche of history of this was the early stages of really figuring out what computers were and what they could do for us. And the atomic age in general was such a hopeful, exciting time where people were really just running for the fences.
And there was only ever really talk of what's possible, what's coming. The bomb had been developed and had gone off, but there was still — the Cold War was present. But I think that people weren't as jaded, I guess. And that might be a rose-colored glasses way of looking at history. But it did feel like there was this massive idea of looking ahead and looking forward and sort of peering into the horizon.
Adam Sockel:
Yeah. For better or for worse, I feel like that time of history was much more optimistic. You're right, I feel like now everything is just so … just the overall, obviously it'll depend on who you talk to, but like the overall attitude just seems to feel like deep sigh. Just like-
Isa Arsen:
Yeah. We know so much about so many things now. And I think like I have to believe that we are still moving in a positive direction for humanity. Because if I don't believe that, then I'm just going to get really sad. And I can't get sad because I have books to write.
I mean, I shouldn't say I can't get sad, I get sad. But I cannot get bogged down with the weight of existential crisis more than once a month. I have to give myself bounds of you can sit and dwell on the fate of humanity for like X amount of time, schedule it in and then move on.
Adam Sockel:
Have a little existential crisis as a treat.
Isa Arsen:
As a treat. Yeah, exactly.
Adam Sockel:
It’s like a little morsel of it because you don't want to gorge yourself on it. That's so-
Isa Arsen:
Exactly.
Adam Sockel:
So, you mentioned living historical fiction. Is this the type of book you would find yourself drawn to normally as a reader as well? One that's kind of a play on things that really did happen? Or do you tend to — was this just like a time period and a thing in history that you were super interested in? So, that's why you chose to write this sort of fiction?
Isa Arsen:
Everything that I write is me wish fulfillmenting things that I just want to read. I guarantee you give me like another two years to kind of cool off from being so steeped in this book, and I'm going to read it gleefully, I'll be like, “Oh, it's my favorite. I'm so excited.”
I genuinely am so stoked and so pleased with the books that I write because I am filling spaces in my bookshelf that I don't see filled by other things. And it's not to say that people haven't done the things that I've done before. Clearly, I mean, nothing is new under the sun.
But I think that there's a certain bliss that comes with being told yes. Yeah, go ahead, explore this. We will publish this book. Yes, you can use that plot point. Yes, we are excited about these characters. It is a very heady thing to be able to kind of just be set free into the pasture and write.
And my imprint Putnam has been wonderful with kind of letting me drive the ship. And yeah, I absolutely am writing things that I want to read. I do the same thing with short stories and stuff that I don't ever intend to publish that I just have to get out onto the page.
I keep those and I read them and it's really fun to kind of even pick something up from three, four years ago and see the progress that I've made and still enjoy it. And I probably have like — I don't know, there's a finite amount of like, themes and character types and dynamics and kinds of stories that I like to play with, which I think that's just what voice is, is like what do you like to do and what do you do well?
But yeah, I like speculative fiction. I like historical fiction. It was really fun to blend them. I don't think everything that I write will be speculative. I think there will always be a little wink of weird in stuff that I do because that's the sort of media that I've been brought up with. That's the kind of media that I love.
I'm very excited and interested in people sort of pushing boundaries and particularly with queer fiction, you can't write queer fiction that isn't weird because socially queer fiction, like queerness in general is just always seen as weird by at least somebody unfortunately, or fortunately. Because it's fun to be weird.
But yeah, I like twisting expectations. And I really enjoy books that do the same thing.
Adam Sockel:
Yeah. And I mean, it makes sense. I remember several years ago, I have a literary friend who she and I exchange book recommendations all the time. And I was like, I wish there were more books like X. And she looked at me, she's like, “So, write one.”
And I did. That's what I did. Literally wrote a manuscript that I'm querying. And it's literally because I was like, I wish there were more books like, insert plot line here. And she's like, “So, freaking write it.” And I was like, “Yeah, okay. You are right. I apologize. Thank you for …
Isa Arsen:
It's very empowering to feel like you're doing something for the right reasons too.
Adam Sockel:
Well, it makes sense because obviously like you said, if you want to write a book that you would want to read because you're going to spend so much time with it.
Isa Arsen:
If you are not jazzed as fuck about … can I swear?
Adam Sockel:
Yeah.
Isa Arsen:
If you're not jazzed as fuck about your manuscript, you are going to have a bad time because you will look at this thing over and over and over and over again. I mean, I wrote Shoot the Moon very quickly. I think I wrote it in like three months. I wrote the first whole whack at it.
I revised it, queried it, I got representation. My agent and I did a full revision of it. We took it on sub, it got acquired and then the revisions “started,” you do so many changes to it, even. And I think Shoot the Moon moved on a very short timeline, if you look at sort of in the grand scheme of books. But I still had to spend so much time with it. And-
Adam Sockel:
I know exactly what you mean. I literally, one of the agents that I queried like that actually sent me a real response and not just the robot response. She was literally like, “This all sounds great, this sounds fantastic. I really love your voice for the first few pages.”
But she's basically like, “It's too long for a debut.” So, I'm cutting 30,000 words from this book because it was a little meaty, but I was laughing, so I was like, it's literally like this is the revision before you revise. This is a revision to get someone's attention, so when we sell it, we can revise it again. Yeah.
Isa Arsen:
Exactly. Yeah. You get it in fighting shape and then you throw it to the wolves and then hopefully one of the wolf fights and then you take it back home to shine it up.
My second book is, I started writing it pretty soon. It was like my distraction manuscript when I had Shoot the Moon in the trenches, so I've had that one for a long time and it's changed a lot over the course of what it is.
The core of it is still the same, but that one has gone through a lot more iteration just by nature of having it in hand for longer. And knowing more of who I am as a person now as opposed to two years ago. That's kind of the boon of taking it slow. I'm not a patient person. I don't write patiently. I write really quickly.
And that works for me. I like it because I'll be surprised by something that I wrote a month ago because I won't remember doing it. So, it does keep it fresh in that way.
But holding onto something, that's kind of my next quest in writing at large is to slow down a little bit and to really live with my writing as an entity. And give myself permission to sort of grow alongside it and let it grow with me, because that's really the thing that I'm most excited about now going forward, is like I get to be this fully realized person now.
And I think the biggest change with having the book in the world is that just simply more people are going to know that I exist. And that's really cool. That's really weird. That's really scary. That's really fun. It's all of these things at once.
But it's exciting because it does give me the opportunity to sort of — I get to have this extra lens on myself and on my words and on the things that I intend to say with them. That is just really exciting because it's not an opportunity that I think anything else would've offered me.
Adam Sockel:
I love that. That's such a good answer and such a good mindset to have and I love it so much. I always end every conversation with the same question. I have the author who comes on, give a recommendation of any kind. It can be a book, it could be a show, it could be a recipe, it could be an album that you love. Anything you want to recommend.
Isa Arsen:
There's a Netflix show from like 2019, it's called Maniac.
Adam Sockel:
Okay.
Isa Arsen:
And it was featured … they advertised it. They featured it. But I have not heard anything about it since it came out. I don't feel like it really stuck very tightly onto the kind of the zeitgeist. I think it sort of happened and then went away. But it’s amazing. It's Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, which is a hell of a combo.
Adam Sockel:
I'm looking at the cast. Oh, my god. Sally Field.
Isa Arsen:
It’s stacked. The plot is so fun. It is like this cassette punk near future wamp, and it's like, talk about unapologetically weird. It's weird and it's really good. I don't know who the director is, which that's shame on me, but it is so fun.
You can binge it in a day. It's fairly short. The characters are amazing. The costuming is incredible. The set design is immaculate. All of it is just stunning. And I don't think enough people know about it. So, everybody should go watch Maniac.
Adam Sockel:
Love that. I love that. This was so fascinating. And I feel like every so often I meet an author where I can see how your brain is working. I'm like, we're similar people and I just enjoy getting to talk to people like that.
Isa Arsen:
Yay. Oh, I'm so glad.
Adam Sockel:
Yeah. So, Shoot the Moon is just fantastic. People are absolutely going to love it. Isa, thank you so much for joining me today.
Isa Arsen:
Thank you so much for having me Adam. I had a blast.
[Music Playing]
Adam Sockel:
Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen Podcast and was created by Adam Sockel. It was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen Podcast, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.
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