Speaker 1: You've got to be so happy about what People Magazine
says is not for the faint at heart. You have
me at hello, I've got a book in my hands,
and this is how we're going to enter the Fall
of twenty twenty five because you have really really done
a grind great job here.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3: I am so excited to the early reactions. It's really
been amazing.
Speaker 1: Well, you know how we are. I don't know what
it is about this current generation. It may be because
of the lockdown and we reopened our imaginations, but we
want books like this. We crave them because we want
to be taken somewhere, and then when we get back
to the real world, we want to go back to
your book.
Speaker 2: I totally agree.
Speaker 3: I think that there's an amazing opportunity for Catharsis in
horror stories.
Speaker 2: And I know people said, I never want.
Speaker 3: To read anything about an outbreak again because that's what
we've been living in. But we still need to process
that as a community, right and so that's why I
think stories that kind of cover and face down these
grand traumas of the generation are really important.
Speaker 1: One of the things that viewers and readers are going
to see is they're going to see the book cover
and they're going to see that title. What was it
that was magnetic to you as a creative person to
come up with the Dead Summer? Because I'm sure there
must have been one hundred billion different other choices. But
what you've done here is you now say this is
the Dead Summer, and it's like, give.
Speaker 2: It to me.
Speaker 3: We had so many ideas, Oh my gosh, I don't
even want to think about the hundreds of different ideas
in my notes out that didn't end up becoming this title,
because we wanted something that kind of captured the summary
vives of a book that takes place in a beachy community,
but also captures the kind of insidious nature of a
summer that just will not end, that period of summer
where whips going on.
Speaker 2: And on and everyone's like kind of hoping.
Speaker 3: That fall starts soon, And especially in a book that
has to do with the ocean and all of the
strange creatures that are looking down there. I think that
it ended up being a really great title for for
this particular opening to a duology.
Speaker 1: Right away, I was thinking of Carolina when you're speaking
of all this, and the reason why is because we
have the beaches and we've got the summers that just
absolutely refuse to leave us. And so I mean the
actual place where you planted this book, I think could
go in any part of this nation, and people feel
at home when they read the paragraphs.
Speaker 3: I totally agree. I think a lot of us grew
up maybe going to a beachy community that was sort
of just there for one week in our lives during
the summer, and I chose my version of that, which
is omnipe Cod, But I ended up making up my
own island.
Speaker 2: I said it in the Gulf of Maine, and I
wanted to write about a lot.
Speaker 3: Of the pressures that kind of show up in places
like this, where if you live in one of these
communities on the beach, you know you're there for the
off season, you're there when everyone goes home, and you're
sort of stuck in this version of paradise that ultimately
has all of its own problems.
Speaker 2: But the people that come and.
Speaker 3: Go they don't have to experience them. They just get
to leave at the end of their week and head
back to wherever they're from. But you've got to stick around,
and you've got to clean up this mess. And that's
actually a lot of what the tension of the book
is about. It's about the people that live in the
speech community trying to do their best to basically guard
it from a lot of different texts of invasion.
Speaker 1: I feel like you just described yourself because you, as
the author, you can't leave. You got to put this
story together. You got to keep going. There's a mess here,
and you've got to figure it out, dude, so that
the rest of us can sit here and say, oh
my God.
Speaker 3: Tell me about it. There are so many points in
this particular book where I was ready to jump shift.
It was hard, it was a big challenge strive this book,
but ultimately I'm so glad that I stuck with it
because I love how it came out and how it
came together. And as people react to it and read
the story, it's clear that they're not getting the panic
and the strife that I had to go through. They're
having a great time reading about this horrific situation and
exploring the world and meeting all of.
Speaker 2: The diverse characters. And that's great.
Speaker 3: I love when my effort seems almost non existent on
the page, and that readers just get to kind of
you know, run away with the stories themselves. I will
be licking my wounds for quite some time while I,
you know, go to the eyes aster and go to
the chiro faster and do all of the things that
I need to do to take care of myself as
a writer.
Speaker 2: But I'm happy to sort of sit back and let
people have this story.
Speaker 1: See, a lot of people don't understand the relinquishing part
of what we do as authors. It can be a
very tough journey, and I think that's one of the
reasons why I do a DFRAG journal, so that when
I get into that moment, which I call post production blues,
I'm able to go in there and sort stuff out
because as creative people, you know how we are, Ryan,
it's not an easy journey. On the opposite side, when
it's finished.
Speaker 2: No, no, it's not easy. And there's kind of a
grief to.
Speaker 3: Give me something away that's lived in your head for
so long, like you almost kind of resent it, like, oh,
I guess the books out and I guess.
Speaker 2: It belongs to everybody else.
Speaker 3: No exactly, You're like you kind of are saying goodbye
to an imaginary friend, and you know, this book for
me we're taping this. It comes up tomorrow, so if
you if you're hearing it's probably already out. But but
I always have to remind myself that really that's the
beginning of the book's life out in the world and
then the imaginations of readers. And for a moment, it
kind of does feel like you're sitting alone at a
party that no one's shown up to, and then suddenly
people start to knock on the door and kind of
flood in, and and then it's really joyful and really
fun and you kind of get to to burn.
Speaker 2: Away the blues.
Speaker 3: But I'm in that moment now where I'm just kind
of waiting for people to arrive.
Speaker 1: Yep, please do not move. There's more with Ryan Lsala
coming up next, the name of the book The Dead Summer.
We're back with author Ryan Lesala. I got to tell
you something. There's an invisible side of what you do
that a lot of readers don't get to see. What
you've done is you've opened the door for me and
other other writers like yourself, so that I can have
conversations with people that don't realize these books exist, that
there is something written about something that is going on
in their own personal life. And I know you know
what I mean, because gender identity is so important. But
if I don't walk out there as a heterosexual and say, look,
you got to read this book, my god, you've got
because all of a sudden, they're going I didn't know existed.
I didn't know. And so and that's what I want
listeners to do. When you read this book, you've got
to share it with other people so that people like
Ryan Ryan here can continue doing what you're doing.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and I would even argue that there's a tremendous
amount to be learned in my experience as a queer
person in the story that I'm writing for really everybody.
I mean, if we look at where resilience sort of
tends to inhabit in.
Speaker 2: Communities, it's a lot of communities who.
Speaker 3: Have had to survive at all costs, and I've kind
of sort of had to create their own sanctuaries. And
that's that's an experience that we see throughout history with
a lot of different communities, and it's kind of a
central experience. So this book about a sanctury that's been
created in is ardently being defended by the kids in
the community.
Speaker 1: Ultimately, I want a T shirt or I want a
poster from you, you, and hopefully you'll market this ike
because there's something that you say in this book that
changed me. A secret is a breath that you ask
someone to hold. Where in God's name did you come
up with that?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: Shame and secrecy is a big theme in this book.
Speaker 3: It's about a community that's been dealing with a lot
of sickness over the years, and there was a chemical
fill deep in the past, and now as a result
of a lot of the hardship, the community has kind
of had to rally around this idea.
Speaker 2: Of paradise and really cling to it. But all along
there's something affecting only the locals that the main character
has got to figure out.
Speaker 3: I've got to figure out what's going on before it
starts hurting more people. And I wanted to write about
the whole community being held hostage by the secret.
Speaker 2: And so there's a few things around secrecy in the book.
Speaker 3: One of them is, yes, a secret is a breath
that you ask another to hold, because you're sort of
bringing someone in to sharing in the Christy with you.
But there's also another saying, which is some secrets are
kept in some secrets we keep talking about, how you know,
sometimes the secret things that we're trying to make sure
other people don't hide, they end up kind of totally
controlling the life that we get to live.
Speaker 1: But you know what's really interesting, one of the secrets
that authors like ourselves get to do is that when
we add a twist or we add some suspense, do
you sit there in your writing chair and kind of
giggle knowing how people are going to react And it
hasn't even happened in front of you, but you know
they're going to react.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love it. I My favorite thing as an
author is getting those like messages at like three am
from someone who's clearly stayed up way too late reading
one of my books. And they're equal parts furious as
they are ecstatic that I've tricked them or beguiled them,
or it made them scream or made them cry. And
I just take a little screenshout of those and I
keep them a little folder, and sometimes when I'm feeling
down or blue or like I'm not creative, I'll I'll
open it up and remember all of the people that
I've managed to catch off guard, and I will There
is quite a big twist at the end of this book,
and so far no one has managed to guess it.
Speaker 1: So now, if this were a movie, would the role
of Gracie be best supporting role? Because Gracie is very
important inside this.
Speaker 3: It's true, Gracie is Ali's mom, always the main character
of Gracey's mom. She's just sort of like if you
took like one of those kitschy pillows at like a
home to course store with like a saying embroidered on it,
Like she's that person. She's like a live last love mom,
which is a great character to put in the middle
of a horrific catastrophic scenario because she's determined to be
positive even.
Speaker 2: If the world is ending around her.
Speaker 3: And I think that I would have a great time
with the auditions for something like that role.
Speaker 1: Wow, did you learn anything during this writing project? Because
we grow forward and we always take something from our
last book forward with us.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, I try to really get into the research of
what I'm doing. I literally got my suba diving certification
so I could EXPERI what that was like. And being
a writer is wonderful because you get to explore other
lives in other worlds, And this particular.
Speaker 2: Book was a pretty big challenge for me because.
Speaker 3: I've never written something with sort of like the epistolary format.
Speaker 2: Right. So in this book, we get Ali's story, but we.
Speaker 3: Also get a scientific researcher trying to piece together the
catastrophe that Ali is currently trying to survive. And as
a result, I got to explore a lot of different
types of media. For instance, there's a radio show. There's
a transcript from a radio show.
Speaker 2: In the book.
Speaker 3: There's injury transcripts, there's some social media posts and all
of this is a different kind of writing that I
had to kind of figure out how to do in
real time, and I'm really glad for it. Was a
lot of work, but it was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Now, Ryan, it was Mark Twain who said, and he
did this in his one hundredth anniversary of his autobiography.
He said, You've got to use your own writing accent
when you put things together. And that's exactly what you
have done. This is your accent. I can't write the
way that you write.
Speaker 2: I totally believe this.
Speaker 3: This is something that I say to a lot of
the teens that I get to talk with at book
events and at school visits. That real power comes down
to discovering your own voice and telling a story on
your terms. Because that's advice that I got really early.
I was lucky enough to have an English teacher who
put me on the right track and said, you know,
if you don't like the books that.
Speaker 2: You're reading, how about you write your own. There you go,
and I did. I sat down in the middle of
my school library.
Speaker 3: I was seventeen, I started writing and that became my
very first novel that got published.
Speaker 2: And now here we are, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I've lost out five or six books later, and this
has become my whole world, my whole job. And it's
because I took the time to figure out what my
voice was.
Speaker 1: God, I can still relate with you because the book
that I wrote in the eleventh grade, thirty two years
later it was finally published.
Speaker 2: You just don't give up, that's the main thing. Yeah, exactly, Oh,
I totally. Yeah. I always tell people, you know, you
don't need to know what you want to do early on.
It's a long life if you're lucky.
Speaker 3: But you know, if you know, if you know who
you are and what you want.
Speaker 2: To do, then You've got to give your dreams to
dayity of taking them. Seriously.
Speaker 1: Wow, where can people go to find out more about you?
Speaker 2: Ryan?
Speaker 1: Because I love where your heart is.
Speaker 3: I'm all over the internet, so find me on social
media on TikTok.
Speaker 2: Instagram, threads. My website is Ryan lsala dot com and
all of my social media is are linked there. I
love it.
Speaker 1: You're gonna come back to this show any time in
the future because the door is always going to be
open for you.
Speaker 2: Dude, I would be honored. I've had a great time.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, you too,