[Music] thank you [Music] thank you foreign I'm Heather Marie montia and you are watching PBS books thank you for joining us PBS books is pleased to partner with gbh on this exciting event to celebrate the 2023 Library of Congress National Book Festival let's take a moment to hear from the librarian of Congress Dr Carla Hayden I'm Carla Hayden Library of Congress and I want to give a thank you to PBS folks for supporting the national Book Festival hope you can join us in Washington and online for this year's Festival on Saturday August the 12th thanks Dr Hayden now through August 31st PBS books and PBS stations across the country will host a series of 10 virtual events with 11 authors this obviously being one of them these videos these films will be available on demand on PBS books and the also the national Book Festival website at Ella C dot gov slash book Fest now let me introduce my gbh colleague Tina Cassidy hi everyone it's so nice to be here I'm Tina Cassidy the chief marketing officer at gbh and it's my pleasure to welcome you to a remarkably bright conversation with Shelby Van Pelt I'm so excited to be hosting this special event in collaboration with with gbh and the Library of Congress to celebrate the library of congress's national Book Festival that will occur August 12th the Library of Congress National Book Festival is a highly anticipated annual event which draws the young old in any age in between appealing to a wide palette of tastes and preferences and genres ranging from adult fiction to Fantasy kidlet to political nonfiction it's free to the public and it'll be a one day event held on August 12th from 9 00 a.m until 8 PM in Washington at the Walter E Washington Convention Center a selection of programs will be live streamed online and videos of all the programs will be available shortly after the festival for more information you can visit the link you see in the chat in just a minute or so we'll be joined by New York Times best-selling author Shelby Shelby Van Pelt her debut novel is a beautiful exploration of friendship Reckoning and hope her story serves as a reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible told from the point of view from an unlikely character it's the best part of this book this book will tug at each and every one of your Heartstrings Shelby van Peltz was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest where this fabulous novel takes place and she now lives in the suburbs of Chicago with her family and now PBS books is honored to welcome Shelby van Peltz hey welcome we're so happy to have you here I'm so thrilled and honored to be here thanks for having me on absolutely all right well let's get right to the questions because I feel like I have about 10 pages of questions that are either mine or others that have come in in advance and we're having some in the Q a so let's just start at the beginning here your novel remarkably bright creatures is unique where did you draw inspiration and what made you want to write this novel I feel like unique is such a nice way to put it I feel like sometimes people say weird you know both are true um you know I I never I'm not a marine biologist I you know I'm a lifelong animal lover but you know if you had asked me when I was you know a child or a young adult like you're gonna write an octopus novel and people are gonna read it I would not have believed you um it really it came about kind of randomly um I was in my early 30s and I was kind of between Career things and I'd always liked writing so I thought I'm gonna take a stab at writing some fiction and so I was in this headspace where I was kind of on the hunt for characters wherever I went I was doing a lot of eavesdropping and coffee shops and restaurants and just trying to you know trying to find kind of crumbs of stories in the wild and I was around that time that I happened one afternoon to go down a YouTube rabbit hole about giant pacific octopuses um I don't even remember what got me started on it it was just one of those things where I was probably supposed to be doing something else and then you know got sucked into some sort of algorithm and uh ended up watching all these octopus videos and I remember thinking to myself that that would be a really fun voice and a fun character to explore and I started thinking of what you know particularly um some of the octopuses that were in captivity one in particular that was very determined to escape from its tank yes um and you know I'm I'm the kind of person who always gives voices to my cats I kind of for them so it's not that much of a stretch maybe to start imagining what an octopus might be might be thinking or saying if they could if they could use language um so I just kind of filed that away and um not too long after that I was taking a creative writing class it was actually the first creative writing class I had ever taken and it was just one of these continuing education you know anyone can sign up non-credit very casual type of classes but one of the writing exercises that we got um was to write from an unusual point of view and so I literally just started writing this thing like on a piece of notebook paper oh this octopus introducing himself to the world and keeping this sort of Journal of his frustrations of being in captivity and I was very fortunate that the instructor of that class really liked it and you know continued me to keep exploring that character and keep going with it uh it definitely wasn't an immediate thing a jump to like hey I'm gonna write a novel about this but you know I was really enamored with the character that eventually became Marcellus the octopus and you know over the years just kind of kept working on it and um you know then a couple years ago really kind of got some some steam in my engine to um to finish it and make it into an actual novel but um you know I always say it's funny like you know that moment of just being bored on the internet and coming across this thing that caught my interest you know that's what sparked this whole thing you just never know where those Inspirations are going to come from and sometimes you're not looking for them necessarily when you come upon them so what's really amazing as a writer myself is hearing that you came to the character first and then developed a plot around that that's that is unusual right for me it's very normal um right I I struggle with clearly it's working for you um you know the if I always kind of start with characters and um a lot of my plotting involves just taking two you know two three characters and putting them in some sort of situation together maybe something that's mildly frustrating you know they're stuck in traffic they're waiting in line at the grocery store and just kind of letting them interact and seeing what happens and then I get a plot point from that and then I also get a lot of plot points that don't end up working for the books if I throw a lot of material away uh but yeah I always kind of start with characters and let them let them point me in the right direction now we did have a question submitted in advance from um someone who is on this uh event who asks about where the name Marcellus came from did that name come when you first put pen to paper about the octopus or did it come after and where did that name come from um I think you know gosh this was our 10 years ago but the way that I remember it I originally when I was thinking of a name for an octopus and particularly this very cranky octopus that was in captivity near the end of his life and sort of reflecting on his life every day I originally wanted to name him Marcus Aurelius I studied philosophy in college I thought that was really funny um one of my critique Partners who I was working with pretty closely to to develop develop this stuff at the time kind of what guided me away was like no Shelby that's you know it's gonna sound like a philosophy book like people won't get it it just is a little bit like extra and so I just kind of mashed the two words up the two names up to come up with Marcellus and then I just you know I'm a person who really likes uh the things that you can't quite explain sometimes about a word or a name the way it rolls off the tongue you know you've got Marcellus and octopus it just seemed like it fit so um well it definitely does it's really fantastic um so um what was the most interesting thing you learned about the Pacific octopus when you were in your YouTube um Rabbit Hole um well you know I went down many subsequent YouTube rabbit holes um yeah and it's highly recommended there's so much great octopus content out there and I feel like it is an ever-growing library of content because we are still learning so much about cephalopods every day you know I feel like they are you know among the Lesser understood of intelligent creatures on on Earth um yeah so I I think it's really fascinating how their bodies are organized uh you know they are they have come about to have sort of a similar level of intelligence to the highly intelligent mammals um or vertebrates but their brains are not centralized like ours they cut their brains are kind of spread out among all of their arms and I just think that's so fascinating how nature can get to kind of the same place taking two very different paths um you know and again no one quote me on that I'm really not a scientist although I play one when I write sometimes um but yeah it leads to some fascinating things pop culture wise too um I mean they have seen octopus memes where you have an octopus that's doing eight different things it's like the ultimate multitasker um my favorite one is you have an octopus reading eight different books because if I could do that if I could like harness that superpower that would be fantastic that would be really fun yeah it's kind of fun that it actually is kind of true like octopuses really do have that kind of multitasking ability because of their decentralized um their decentralized brain system you know you can have an arm that specializes in one type of tool and another arm that has you know the different personality I just think it's very very cool so you said you'd like to take two characters and put them together in an interesting situation so tell us how it's if you chose the octopus first how you chose the foil or you know the other character to play off the octopus yeah so the next the first human character that came in after Marcellus was was Tova which probably feels right um she's kind of the main human character in the book um and so you know one of one of the things that sort of defines Marcellus is his stuckness like he is physically stuck in this place that he doesn't particularly want to be and so I think suction cups right that's the thing oh yeah you know what I've actually talked about a bet that's a great probably some metaphor in there that I that is unintentional subliminal brilliant um but yeah so I kind of wanted a human who was who was dealing with a metaphorical kind of stuckness and I remember being at the Georgia Aquarium very early in the development of these characters and we were living in Atlanta at the time um my daughter was a newborn baby at the time and so she was a horrible sleeper and she would only sleep when she was in the little like um Ergo carrier and so I would just go to the Georgia Aquarium and like pace around the aquarium and observe the animals um so that she would sleep but um I remember looking at the tank and there's a big tank that has a lot of different types of sea creatures in it at the Georgia Aquarium well I got a lot of aquariums in in the fictional aquarium in the book there's a tank like this where all the sharks are circling around and I remember just also a great metaphor well yeah and that's kind of you know I was watching these animals just do you could almost set your watch to certain individuals coming back around a particular point and like you know what they were going to be doing and how many hundreds of times a day they must do that yeah um and it kind of made me think of my grandmother um not because she looks like a shark um but because she was very very entrenched in her routines and her habits and uh very much like Tova could not sit still would just do almost anything to keep busy and keep moving and kind of keep going around in these in these Circles of her routines and so I leaned into that a little bit and sort of you know pulled some traits of my grandmothers into this character of Toba my grandmother was also Swedish also loved to clean that was her favorite way to keep busy was to clean um and it kind of went from there that's wild all right so backing up um you said that you were doing other things you had another career before you decided to really write fiction can you talk a little bit about what that was or did you ever did you start out wanting to be a novelist oh it was a very boring career it was there were a lot of spreadsheets involved um so this is quite different I'm not really a spreadsheet person I've learned that about myself um but yeah you know I mean I graduated from college with with a lot of a lot of student loans to pay off and you know I at the time just thought I've got to kind of go down this path and take this you know really good well-paying job that involves a lot of spreadsheets and that's kind of how I'm going to you know launch myself into the Adult World um I don't know that it would have been an option for me to sit back and say Hey you know I'd love to write novels or do something more artistic but I do remember um you know so as part of the job we did was kind of a consulting job there was the spreadsheets and then there were the um written reports that sort of went along with the economic models and I remember all of my co-workers because there was a lot of us young people who worked in these big consulting firms um we would almost have little barter economy going like I would kind of feed them my spreadsheet work and they would feed me their report writing work because I loved writing the reports I was good at that um and I was not as good at the spreadsheets so you know that was probably kind of the first inkling one like okay maybe you know a different career that is more writing heavy would be good for me I mean I did always love writing as a kid and I um I always kind of was more on the journalism side of it like I was editor of my high school newspaper I guess I thought if I would have had a writing job it would have been something like that I never thought of myself as being a particularly creative person and actually sometimes it's still hard for me to think of myself as a creative person okay so speaking of the massive success of your book um you did say you slipped it in that you were working on this for 10 years that's a remarkable amount of time it is and I I always say um you know it in by one measure the book took like you know six or seven years to write um by the other measure it was really about six months because I spent so many years um like writing and rewriting the first like two or three chapters um you know and I didn't really know what I was doing and I was kind of um you know fumbling around a little bit it was also the the season of life where I became a parent and you know I had two little two under two for a while so um there were definitely probably almost like an entire year where I just didn't touch it uh included in that time but yeah so I I kind of went and you also never gave up on the characters which is remarkable no um the characters especially Marcellus always stayed with me and I would occasionally get um you know communicate with writing friends who would say hey let's you know we're gonna meet for um pizza and do a little workshop he should come and so I would bring my first chapter with Marcellus you know saying Darkness suits me and that whole thing and I would Workshop it again and again um but I really had a lot of trouble moving forward past past sort of those introductory chapters really sort of into like the second act jumping from act one to act two was really scary for me um you know to make what got you over the house yeah it's a huge it over um I think what got me over the Hub was 2019 2018 or 19. um I have to say I read the book Soul of an octopus by Simon Montgomery which I don't know if you've read it it is yes yes she lives here in the Boston area and I think she writes about the New England Aquarium and his teachers prominently in her book but I remember picking that book up and reading it and just it was almost like a little bit of like a kick in the rear it's like okay this is so awesome I'm so inspired by this like she has really um you know gone so deep into this world that I had tried to make a fictional version of many years before and so I um was a little bit motivated to really make an effort at finishing the manuscript and you know the other thing that happened at that time and I can't discount it is that um my youngest kid like went to preschool you know it was aligned with a time when it's like okay I finally had a little bit of time to do something other than um you know be a primary parent for most of the day so yeah well another question we received was about your writing process um what does your writing process look like when writing about subjects rooted in place do you need to write in that place or do you have another method sounds like you weren't stuck in the Atlanta aquarium for too long oh so I wrote a lot of this you know the bulk of the of the draft um manuscript during covid and so I was would probably have been preferred to have been stuck in an aquarium yeah in a lot of ways um no I think you know for me I don't know that I ever considered setting the novel anywhere other than you know what I consider to be my home which is you know Western Washington and you know part of that is just for practical reasons it was really important to me for some reason that Marcellus be very close to his uh his home you know to just literally have the the place that he's came from that he is sort of rooted in be right on the other side of this wall you know on the other side of this pier so I you know that was sort of a natural fit but then you know I think just for me personally writing this book was was such a like almost therapeutic way to sort of reconnect with with my home and my roots uh in particular at a time when going home was not possible you know during response of the pandemic oh my goodness that is so powerful and kind of gives me the chills yeah so you were feeling the way Marcellus felt in the tank stop yeah you know we all felt during covid right we were all looking out from our tanks that's right wow this book is getting more profound by the moment um it's really it's really awesome to peel it away you know peel away these layers uh with the author um okay so there are we got lots of questions about voice and how you develop the character of the octopus and so forth um you said that that came naturally but then the book comes out and it becomes an audio book and there is an actual sound to the octopus's voice um so how do you feel about the the human who um you know anthropomorphizes Marcellus one time I was on a zoom call with I think it was with a book club and this question came up and my kids were home I think they were in the other room but you know they could hear me on my zoom call and I said something to the effect of I'm pretty sure that I owe Michael Yuri and Marin Ireland my firstborn for the fantastic job that they did with this audiobook and it actually upset my child a little bit she kind of took it literally um and I had to explain to her what that Turner phrase meant that it said actually I mean I was gonna give her away um but just that you know they I you know I've had so many strokes of luck along this journey and I think one of the biggest ones is I think Michael Yuri and Marin Ireland sign on to do the narration um you know they it things like and I'm sure you know uh audiobook narrators you know titles covers a lot of that stuff falls under the Publisher's umbrella it's their decision but they did we did have a collaborative process of trying to narrow it down to who we thought our favorite picks were and then they said you know just tell us who your favorite is of these uh suggestions and we'll go out to them and approach them in that order and see if they're willing to do it and it just honestly blows my mind that um you know that these very famous you know Michael Yuri is like a very famous actor Marin island is a rock star in the audiobook world that they were willing to sign on for a debut novel from an unheard of author about an octopus like it just I'm so lucky so but obviously they hit it out of the park that's great well I understand it's also been optioned for film as well what can you tell us about that and you know who might play the octopus how is that even going to work is it going to be CGI or AI um or real octopus with voiceover no I don't know um it has been optioned which was super exciting I mean that was a really fun afternoon for me to be sitting in my you know house in the midwest in the middle of my living room talking to Hollywood producers who want to you know buy your book and make it into a film um you know obviously at this moment in time uh things are on hold just due to the strikes that's fine I'm totally fine with that I support the strike um but yeah I think we've gone a little bit down the road of talking about how that would work I don't think there's been any real final plan for how it would work but um I know one of the things that the that the developmental producer and I had talked about was the fact that it's actually quite fortunate that marcellus's pages are are not that much of the book I mean he makes a big impact in relatively few pages so no one really seems to be concerned about something that I was concerned about which is like is this just going to be impossible to make because of budget issues because you've got to do a CGI octopus no one was really that worried about that of all the people I talked to they seem to think it was a narrow enough slice of the whole story that it would be be doable not like the Titanic something equivalent right yeah no one wants to be the movie that goes you know a bazillion dollars over budget but that's great all right well let's bring it back to the writing part um it sounds like you had an amazing writing instructor who encouraged you when Marcellus first popped out of your imagination um which is you know I think we all know how important having a good supportive teacher is right for everything that we aspire to be um but were was there a particular piece of advice either from that teacher or from others that you've learned along the way that you would want to share with other writers who may be on this event yeah well I mean I think her most basic advice which was you know in some ways the most obvious is just like you know don't quit like right keep going to keep going um but you know I don't really like that as advice because it's so obvious um I think one of the biggest things that I learned along the way and I sort of learned this along with my critique partner I had one critique partner in particular who we worked really closely together she was working on her book I was working on my book we would sort of train chapters every week we would have a phone call every week and um you know try to hold each other's hands through the process you know we're both in the same boat um right neither one of us had any real formal writing education you know outside of this continuing education class um and we were kind of learning along the way but you know we came to this realization that like sometimes you have a chapter or a section that you're working on and it is just like pulling teeth to drag yourself to the computer and write it and you kind of you're not enjoying yourself or you're writing it and you finish it and you know sometimes that sort of works itself out along the way and you get into it and it redeems itself but then sometimes you end up just like I really don't like this chapter and what we figured out is that usually means there's something wrong like something needs to be reorganized with the plot like this is a if I don't like writing it readers aren't probably going to like reading it um and so we kind of learned that the hard way after many uh episodes of sort of going through this and being like Oh I just you know I hate this this thing is a giant turd what's you know it's like oh that probably means that I need to take a few steps back and and figure out what is making me not excited about the story and figure out how I can reignite my excitement for it yes yes well will there be a sequel to this book or will there be something completely different this is a question from Jan who uh put her question in the Q a a reminder for others to do the same hi Jan that's a great question um I get that question a lot actually I you know I think I would have a hard time writing a true sequel um and I'm gonna say this without giving spoilers but um I I think it would be hard for me to try to replicate some of the magic with another character that is um would be a replacement for who is probably everyone's favorite character in this book so I you know I don't think I would try that but I do love it when authors uh kind of put Easter eggs in their books and you know make it so that the books are set in the same world you know the plots are not dependent on one another you can read them whatever whatever order you want but um but you know if people who have read the other book will recognize some of the settings and places and characters I I think that's just a really fun way to to link books together um Emily St John Mandel does that with a few of her books Frederick backman does it with his books some of them lots of them actually um so yeah I would love to do something like that that's probably my my take on a sequel so maybe another book set in the Pacific Northwest or maybe an aquarium but it could just be something completely different yeah so the book I'm working on now is actually set in a forest okay so that's specific Northwest d right very northwesty yes all right then great well that's a good tip well we can't wait to see what you produce um okay well I'm gonna combine two questions that are somewhat similar from Lisa and Libby in the Q a um Libby was asking about the Netflix film my octopus teacher and whether you had seen that just absolutely amazing film and Lisa was also asking if you had seen the PBS Nature film featuring a professor of marine biology in Anchorage who put a big salt water tank in his home and a small octopus in it and he and his teenage daughter studied it and she says that it was amazing to see the octopus do so many things oh you know I don't think I've seen the PBS Nature one but that's going to be the first thing that I Google once we're done with our chat here because that does sound amazing um yeah my awkward procedure I have I have my octopus teacher story um so my octopus teacher came out and it's fantastic it is I I highly highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it who if you liked my book you're probably gonna love my octopus teacher it came out in um I was like late summer of 2020 July August something like that and it was right around the time that I was finishing my manuscript getting ready to query it to agents which is a big step you know it's a big like scary thing to do as a writer you know you're really taking the first step of putting yourself out there and acknowledging that you're trying to make a go at getting published and I remember um I was in the kitchen and I think my kids were watching Netflix and I heard overheard the trailer uh for this my octopus teacher and my heart just dropped into my stomach devastated because I didn't I had no idea like someone made a movie of like my book idx it's all friendship between an octopus and a human and I think as as writers there's just always this primal fear that someone somewhere on the other side of the world you have a writing doppelganger that has written your story and is gonna beat you right beat you to the market with it um so I had a moment of that which I'm a little bit embarrassed about in hindsight but I definitely had a moment of panic um but then you know I went and actually watched the trailer and then subsequently watched the documentary and realized this was going to be such a benefit to me I mean besides just being an amazing uh you know amazing cinematography like amazing story amazing octopus it really stoked excitement about octopuses and I could not have asked for better timing I mean this is why my manuscript is landing on agent's desks yeah kind of the server yeah it's sometimes the universe just like hands you um you know hands you a really good hand I guess so yeah it's another very very huge Stroke of Luck that I had you know I didn't plan that uh but I couldn't have planned it better if I tried that's great um Bev asks in the Q a if in choosing an octopus as a main character have you ever considered writing a children's book you know I I have tried writing children's books I've never tried to write a an octopocentric children's book but I went through a phase sort of early in my attempts at fiction writing you know and this is when my kids were very small uh and we're reading the board books and I'm thinking to myself like oh gosh like I could write this right like turns out no it's actually very hard yes um and I still you know I have a few uh children's book type projects that once in a while I'll pull them out and kick them around but it is it is one of those things that I feel like seems like it should be easy and actually is very very hard um yeah well Bev has a follow-up question which is how did you land the title of this book oh so um for most of the life of this manuscript when it was just on my computer it was just titled Marcellus like that was the file title it was like Marcellus V12 final X final and you know all the different files things that we name when we try to indicate that we have stopped poking at it um and it wasn't really until I was at that point in that summer of 2020 I was like okay I'm gonna actually query this to agents when I realized I needed to have a title Marcel that's not a title that doesn't tell you anything about the book right right um and a writing friend actually shared an exercise with me that she had gotten from some Workshop maybe uh where you just go through your book and it asks you all these questions you're meant to generate something like you know hundreds of potential titles by picking out favorite favorite lines favorite phrases places you know street names um titles of other books that you like and then it kind of tries to use these bits and fashion them into into something like that uh but I just remember in the course of one of those little exercises uh the phrase remarkably bright creatures came out and I was like oh I think that's the title um and it really was just when I was researching the book you know you you Google octopuses and you get all these kind of you know encyclopedia type articles that just explain octopuses and almost every single one of them has some sort of combination like octopuses are remarkably intelligent octopuses are incredibly bright animals like they just that superlative in some combination is always there and so I thought that was a nice sort of play on that um very uh recognizable type of way of describing an octopus well it works that's fantastic um I have a question here from Kathleen Kane from Massachusetts and Kathy asks can you talk a bit about why the novel focuses so compassionately about aging both Marcellus and Tova well um I think you know just the fact that when I you know Marcel is from his inception for whatever reason I had him focused on sort of the end of his life and I think it just goes back to sort of wanting him to have that that stoicism uh you know is really a part of his character uh and you know then bringing in a character that was based on my grandmother you know originally actually I had Tova being in her 80s uh when I wrote the draft and uh both my agent and my editor had kind of lobbied to make her younger than that um one of the main reasons was just for like believability you know I'm already asking the reader to buy into a an octopus who's directly addressing you and then we have an 80 year old woman mopping floors in an aquarium it's like no one is going to hire an 80 year old woman to mop floors at an aquarium to which I said you never met my grandmother because you could have done it but you know that was like okay that's a fair point and then I think they also just wanted her to um because so much of the story is sort of a this idea that it's never too late to to start over to start new to start a new path you know if she's a little bit younger that just gives her a little bit more time makes it a little bit more satisfying that she you know is able to get herself on this new path but um you know I just think a lot about kind of different Generations uh and you know how how different Generations approach things differently and I really liked the idea of connecting people across Generations you know and across species yeah for the things that they have in common even though they have very different backgrounds love it so you started with Marcellus and then you developed Tova and who was your second human character this is a question from Jane Swift in Georgia Jane Swift also was the name of the first female lieutenant governor of Massachusetts I'm assuming this is not the same person um it would be amazing um yeah you know I chronologically I'm I'm pretty sure it would have been like tova's friends than it whips like that was one of the very very early things that I brought in was her group of friends and that also happens to be the thing that I'm most directly stole from real life uh my grandmother really did have a group of friends called the knit wits and I spent a lot of time with them when I was a kid I was an old child and we lived next door to my grandparents so I was always over at my grandma's house and she would have her her ladies come over and her knitlets so I think I just soaked up a lot of their conversations and quirks um so they were definitely like the second kind of chronological characters but you know they're also fairly minor characters um you know I think the second sort of major character that I I tried to bring in was actually Ethan the grocery store owner um and this was one of those scenes where I was I was putting people together in scenes trying to figure out what the plot was and I was like well where's Toby gonna go okay she's gonna go to the grocery store all right let's put her there let's give let's give her some sort of mild annoyance you know in in this case and this is not a spoiler it's very early in the form of um someone bagging her groceries in a way that annoys her you know and so that's how kind of you know that those little plot threads get started I guess definitely a fascinating process um azita asks the question would you please tell us about the process of how you found an editor if you selected one and a publisher or any marketing effort which you decided to implement for this wonderful successful outcome congratulations on the success of your wonderful novel oh thank you so much azita um yeah I went about a very traditional way you know I found an agent um I have a wonderful agent who is very very good at her job and so she was able to generate a lot of interest among editors Publishers um and we actually ended up with several interested parties which was very cool and so I got to talk to them before we sold the book to kind of understand their you know their background their vision for how we would you know take the book through editing and into a final product and my editor is amazing um Helen etzma at Echo I really just loved her she has a real knack for like paring down Pros into um into like letting the reader kind of get there emotionally you know leaving a little bit off the page and making that a little bit more satisfying for the reader and you know I think definitely working with her has made me a better writer like I'm so grateful for her for her mentorship um yeah and then marketing it's funny um you know I have a lot of writer friends who are in the we call it the querying trenches where you're trying to get representation for your book you know you have a finished manuscript and um one a piece of advice that I kind of always tell those people from the other side is like kind of like start working on your marketing game um you know doing public speaking is a very different skill from writing a book yeah it's a skill that takes um you know time and a practice to develop for sure I mean maybe it comes naturally to some people more than others but um I remember especially at the time when my book published was May May of 2022 just kind of feeling like I went from this coveted isolation pandemic to like TV appearances and public speaking and um you know if I could go back to my 2021 self I would have spent a little bit more time preparing for that because it is I mean it's a it's a totally different skill from writing and it is something that you know everyone I think whether you're self-published or traditionally published like you know if you want to get out there and make your book successful you've got to be comfortable putting yourself out there that's a great point you do have to be good at both Darlene grummett has not a question but a comment she says I haven't read your book yet but I've heard so many good reviews and I can't wait to read it as an animal lover and someone concerned about natural world loss well your next book include animals as well so we know it takes place in a forest what kind of Woodland creatures can we expect um oh gosh how do I say this without I don't know um yeah you can say no there are creatures okay all right but yes um you know I think one side effect and um you know I I don't think I could plausibly say that it was my primary motivation in writing the novel but um getting people to care about the natural world and about animals and about our planet and climate change it just um if it gets someone to care even a little bit more because they connected with an animal creature like I feel like that's such a good sort of side effect of of a book that is very nature dependent and um definitely like my this next book that I'm working on will kind of have that as a little bit of a like an undertone as well really interesting of course octopuses octopi octopuses have been popular for a few years now for uh for the reasons that you've mentioned um but trees are also uh really um popular right now too yes so yeah there's a little bit of a tree moment I feel like there's like a mushroom moment a couple of years ago that's right I think that's still happening too yeah a lot of really really cool stuff going on in in science and nature journalism and and art sure so Beth uh asks in addition to loving the book I love the book jacket how did you select this colorful art so do you want to explain how obviously you were able to choose a title that stuck through the publishing process which is great that doesn't always happen does not always happen right so tell us about how the art came to be yeah so that's another one of those things where just having watched some people I knew go through the traditional publishing process I was almost like ready for a fight you know um that's kind of one of the things that they warn you mostly Twitter warns you about um that you know you're not going to have a say in this and they're going to do whatever they want with your cover and like you've got to be kind of prepared to like you know put your guard up or whatever and in the end it was just such a non-issue um I remember getting the uh it was like a watercolor that this wonderful graphic artist um at Echo Vivian El Rell is her name you can follow her on Instagram she does beautiful beautiful artwork had made this kind of watercolor of um the octopus in Toba and it's kind of clear that she's supposed to be looking into an aquarium and I just loved it I was like yeah sign me up like I'm on board and it pops on the Shelf too and I'm so glad that they I think that um I agent and I were a little bit like a happy and surprised that they went with like a very literal cover I feel like um there's been a trend in book covers that maybe is going away a little bit now but like everything for a while was so abstract and they're beautiful covers but I feel like they kind of it's like what is this book about right yeah um given that it was a book that was gonna it was gonna hit you from page one as you're being talked to by an octopus I am really glad that they went with an octopus cover because that way I feel like people are less likely to be blindsided sure and that's the appeal yeah that's great well I'm going to combine two questions and comments um one from Charlotte Hebert and another from Ziana so Charlotte asked did you plot this book out in advance at any point it sounds like you just kept putting characters in interesting um situations but at some point you had to get to an ending right and then Ziana is asking um did you have a plan for the big mystery of the book and where it was going or did it emerge as you were writing kind of the same question yeah um I I am not very good very good at plotting um I have writing friends who and it just it amazes me they will write these like outlines and they have index cards and like they know what's going to happen in every chapter and I sit down and try to do that and it is just like my mind is just empty I have no ideas um but you know a little bit along the way definitely uh once I got particularly through about like 50 of the book I was kind of like okay I can start to see how some of these things are going to unfold and I started to have sort of landmarks in my mind um I will say the one thing that I did know and this I guess is a little bit of a spoiler but not too bad um I did know in the end that you know Marcella starts with day 1299 or whatever it is of of my captivity like the the day one of my freedom was instantly there once I had that so I was like okay I know that this is where I'm going to get to I don't know how I'm gonna get there I don't know how Marcellus is going to get there I don't know how these other humans are going to be involved but like I kind of I had that at least as a guidepost the whole way along um as far as like the the sort of the mystery element like I just I took a lot of wrong turns and kind of found found my way there and then on on the edit particularly like that first like major edit of the draft there was a lot of switching things around and going back and saying okay now that I know how these facts play out I've got to go back and Seed all of this other stuff into the beginning of the book Janet draxdorf wants to know do you have a routine for writing a certain amount of time number of pages per day or do you write more spontaneously once you were in the groove because it sounds like there were fits and starts yeah well um I think I I'm a procrastinator so for me having like some accountability or deadline is uh definitely necessary whether that's the form of a like a formal deadline from an editor which you know like I don't have right now I have more informal deadlines from critique Partners who it's like we agree that we're gonna write so many pages by this date um yeah I think without that I would definitely I would just always put it off till tomorrow it can always be done tomorrow um so that helps me a lot with my tendency to procrastinate and put things off um in terms of sort of like habits I almost tend to try to like de-ritualize my writing rather than ritualize it uh particularly activities like I don't have an office with a door unfortunately our house um you know that was something we learned very quickly when the pandemic hit it's like okay we're all working from home like um you know we have a one very small office and my husband sort of took it over because he was going to be on conference calls all day so I have my corner of the living room um which is a great place to sit with my laptop and do emails but I don't love sitting there to write so um yeah I kind of try to train myself to be able to to do it wherever I have the time and space and like mental capacity um I know I have you know U.S Twitter threads about writing rituals it's like okay I've got to sit I've got to have this type of tea and I almost feel like a reaction to that because I'm kind of like oh my gosh if I made it so that I had to have a certain type of tea and be sitting in a certain spot like I've I would never get it done that's great Sue wants to know I loved the gray Pages for the voice of the octopus how did that come about oh that was all my publisher that was a that was an echo invention um and it turned out so so beautifully I'm so glad that they did that you know I think and aside from just sort of enhancing the aesthetic of the book uh I think there was some desire to just give readers a visual cue that you were going into this different voice you know not only because it's an octopus versus Humans but also it's it's first person versus third person um it is a totally different format from the rest of the book and so you know similar to how the audio uses a different voice actor uh I think they really wanted to prevent people from feeling kind of Jarred or uh confused by that so like you know you turn to one of those pages where it's got the gray octopus arms on it it's like okay you know what you're getting you're not gonna ask by hearing hearing first person it's so inventive and it really works Fran sander Hurley wants to know what's the most frequent question uh you get from readers and did we already ask it tonight oh it's always so it's always some version of like why like why yeah or you know just like how how did it come about and it's it's actually one of my favorite questions too because it is just um I think it's you know I almost kind of need to hear it myself again um you know as a writer who's trying to to write more books and more projects to remind myself that you know you don't have to go into this having a grand plan you know you don't have to um you know you don't have to have all of the answers when you start Sometimes the best stories come from just these little scenes of things that we come across in our lives and um you know if you sort of nurture them and let them grow uh that's that's what needs to happen um Kimberly Trudeau says that uh her 11 year old son Henry and she read the octopus pages together and he is suggesting a prequel to Marcellus Henry you are a smart smart fella um yeah you know I it is something that I've thought about um you know maybe it would be a short story I don't know there would be a whole book there um but yeah you know Marcellus as a young octopus before his capture the capture yeah yeah my kids are a little bit younger they're seven and nine now but we did something similar I actually attempted at one point to read the whole book to them because I always read to them at bedtime that's kind of my role in our bedtime routine and they really wanted to hear my book so I started to read it to them and my seven-year-old who was probably like you know five or six at the time I would be on a chapter where Tov is doing something or whatever like away from the aquarium and he would interrupt me and say Mommy I thought this was a book about an octopus so it got to the point where I was just did exactly exactly what Henry's um system is there and we just like mostly read the octopus pages fascinating yeah I love that um well just two uh sort of extrapolate on Fran's question about what you get asked most frequently um has there been a question um from a fan or an interview that has stuck with you that you really loved to answer something that has not been asked tonight oh I think one of my favorite questions this was actually at the Los Angeles time festival of books Los Angeles Times a festival of books I was on a panel and someone I think just a random person in the audience um asked the question of like how did you know how does making art change you or like how did writing this book change you and it's something that I had thought about a little bit but I hadn't thought about it in quite that way and it's something that you know I've done a lot of reflecting on I think um since since the book came out of just you know these characters I think I intentionally made them so different from myself you know there is not a 40-something-year-old woman with young kids in the book in fact there are no young kids in the book really at all um which is strange to me because when I was writing and I was in the throes of parenting young kids but you know so many of the things that Tova struggles with with with vulnerability with accepting help um with you know with being able to admit that she doesn't have it all you know under control are the so many of the same things that I dealt with in that season of my life going from not being a parent to being a parent and having young kids and so I think I just really um yeah I really learned that about myself I guess through writing sort of unintentionally I thought I was kind of shielding myself from it by making these characters so different from myself but you know in reality I was just exploring the same the same things that I struggle with absolutely so this book uh was perhaps therapeutic or um obviously it was fun um and and it did change you in some way what do you hope uh would change in the reader in the process well I mean this is very kind of superficial but I've had so many people tell me that they stopped eating octopus after eating it oh yeah and you know I'm not I'm not a person who really cares a whole lot about what people eat or don't eat and I certainly I'm sure that people could judge my eating habits I'm not perfect from an ethical standpoint um but I do like you know I think that like octopus farming is pretty gross and it's like a thing that happens in in some places in Europe and there's been movements to try to stop it and I I've heard from people who have been inspired to get on board with that and do some activism there and I think that's so so cool and also I think if I were able to write a dystopian novel it would absolutely take place in an octopus Farm foreign not to be confused with an octopus garden okay wow all right well last question um I read that octopi wreak havoc and Aquariums can you comment on that that's from Fred I guess I thought it was from Cindy but I think it's from Fred yeah Cindy and or Fred um yeah no that's I think one of my favorite things on YouTube and there was one fairly recently where there was an octopus that was like throwing rocks and yeah I mean they I think they're bored I mean it's um and yeah I I think that most zoos and Aquariums really like do the best they can to keep them occupied um you know I know I had a chance to go behind the scenes at the Milwaukee Zoo uh gosh it's been probably like a year now but um and just talking with their handlers there and all of the things they put a lot of work into keeping them stimulated um but still at the end of the day I've got to imagine their strictures of time where they are just bored um absolutely it's very fun to watch I feel a little bad for the octopuses of course but well thank you thank you all so much for tuning in to this evening's PBS books event remarkably bright conversation with Shelby Shelby Van Pelt in collaboration with gbh and the Library of Congress just a reminder the 23rd annual Library of Congress National Book Festival one day event will be held on Saturday August 12th in Washington DC a selection of programs will be live streamed online and videos of all programs will be available shortly after the festival you can go to loc.gov bookfest for more information and if you're looking for more thrilling summer reading books you can register now for next month's beyond the page with the Thriller novelist Riley Sager just follow the link you see in the chat Riley Sager is a New York Times best-selling author of seven novels his latest release the only one left is the perfect book for anyone looking for that next don't turn off the lights read Sager's Thrillers are filled with unexpected plot twists that will keep your eyes glued from the first tantalizing page this event will be located will be hosted Sorry by Jeremy Siegel who's the co-host of gbh's Morning Edition on 89 7. you can follow the link in the chat to register now we hope you had an amazing evening like I did can't wait to see you again soon good night everyone foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign