Nancy: Welcome, Shelby, to our front porch! Shelby: Hi, Nancy and Linny, thanks so much for having me. Linny: Well, welcome. We're delighted to have you. We put out a request on our website and social media for people to ask you questions. But we also have our own questions because we both loved your book so much. Shelby: Well, hopefully I have answers. I'll try my best. Linny: This is your first book, is that right? Shelby: It sure is, yes. Debut novel came out in 2022. Linny: Congratulations. Shelby: Fun fact, the first and only book that I've ever written. I'm still in the process of trying to write the subsequent one. Linny: And it's a bestseller, which is fantastic to have that would be your first book. Shelby: It truly is such an incredibly unique and amazing path that this book has been on. It's just been incredible. Linny: What have you always wanted to be an author? Shelby: When I was really little, I always loved writing stories and I've always loved writing. That was always the thing in school that I was good at versus math or science or other things. I was always English, writing. I really didn't come to fiction writing until I was well into my thirties, though. I had sort of had another career before. I'd had a few stops and starts with that. Had been honestly a bit of a trailing spouse to my husband's career. We had moved around a bunch of times and as a result, I had sort of struggled to find what I wanted to do and how to make my career work within that framework. And then we had children, which of course added another layer of complication to that. And so, I decided I want to try writing fiction and I really didn't ever think it would be anything more than a hobby but here I am. So dreams come true. Linny: Congratulations on your success. Nancy: I think I read in the New York Times that you took a writing course at Emory, which sparked the idea for this book. Is that right? Shelby: My first attempts to write fiction, we had just moved to Atlanta for my husband's job, trailing spouse. And part of the deal that I agreed to move there again for his job. It was like, all right, if we do this, I'm going to take some time off and kind of figure my own stuff out. And the house that we moved into, the previous owners had subscribed to the Emory University Continuing Education catalog. And so this like old school paper catalog landed on our mailbox. And I remember just thinking to myself, hey, like I'm going to flip through here and see if there's something that I might want to do. And I had been trying to do a little bit of the writing thing and they had a creative writing continuing education workshop. Again, this is not like a degree program. This is like anyone can sign up, it's typically for a few weeks. Brings all sorts of people. One of my favorite things about continuing education classes is that you just get this amazing cross -section of people, older people, a lot of older people, I think, because when you're retired, it's often when you have time to do that. But then you also get younger people or middle -aged people, people that have just started writing, people that have been doing it for years and are trying to keep it going. But it really was something that I just kind of convinced myself to do because I was a little bit lonely and it was in a new city. And I'll talk about... your life changing because you picked up a catalog. I mean, truly. Nancy: That's incredible. So now are you on the cover of every catalog that they send out? Shelby: It's interesting. So I've taken other continuing education classes. We moved in 2018 up to the Chicago suburbs and we have a school there, College of DuPage out in my area. And I've done their version of that same workshop and they've interviewed me and I think did a feature for one of their magazines. But I haven't heard anything from Emory, I should reach out. I do still talk to the teacher. We send each other Christmas cards every year. Linny: Nice! Nancy: Take our writing course, become a bestselling author. Shelby: Yes, this is a launch pad. Nancy: It's as simple as that. Linny: Absolutely. Nancy: Well, one common theme we heard from our listeners is how much they loved Marcellus. Our friend Patrice wanted to know how you came up with the idea of having an octopus as a character. Shelby: It really is one of those things that I just kind of found when sort of hunting for characters in the wild. As I said, I never really took a class on how to write fiction before I started writing fiction. And to be honest, I never really thought I was creative enough to write fiction, which is probably why I didn't try it until I was into my 30s, sort of middle of career. So my approach to trying to figure out what to write when you're sharing in a blank page was just to look at the world around me and try to take people I knew, take scenes I knew. I did a lot of eavesdropping. I still do a lot of eavesdropping. So if you're next to me at Starbucks, just be forewarned that you might make it into the next novel. Linny: I love that. Shelby: But in all seriousness, I again, not thinking that my brain could really come up with its own ideas. My instinct was just to let's find them externally and then massage them from there. And so, Marcellus really came from me just wasting time on the internet one afternoon and going down this YouTube rabbit hole of like naughty octopuses. And it's a really fun thing to Google. Oh my gosh, there's so many. Doing the escape artistry and solving puzzles and, being kind of just obviously bored in captivity. And I remember just thinking to myself that that would be a really fun voice to write, to give voice to this incredibly smart creature that is just kind of stuck and bored out of its mind. I didn't know a lot about octopuses back then. I knew that they were smart and I was very curious about them. I think the thing that really propelled me forward was thinking this octopus might be looking down on the humans. If they really are as smart as they are, as we believe they might be, they really could be thinking, what are these idiot humans doing? It's always interesting in fiction when you can step outside of the human point of view, it really does allow you to have. a lens on humanity that you can't have if you're human. And just make these observations about some of the weird and incomprehensible things that we do as a society. Nancy: Why we like cookies so much, for example. Linny: Well, it's interesting for me to hear that you observe people and you kind of eavesdrop because your characters were ordinary and normal people. We just felt like, these are just everyday people that live in a small town and people that are people we know. Shelby: Yeah, I mean, and a lot of them were our amalgamations of people that I've known. The character of Tova, most notably, was based on my grandmother. I took a lot of my grandmother's characteristics and brought her into Tova, sort of used that as the foundation to build Tova. The story is all fictional, but I think for me, one of the hardest things about writing fiction and about writing characters in particular is, you have to make them both seem very real to be relatable, but then you also want them to feel larger than life to be interesting. Why do we care about these people? I don't necessarily want to read the story of someone doing what I do with my day, of doing laundry and unloading the dishwasher. So how do you take that and make it both relatable and fascinating? And I don't know how to do it necessarily. I think I kind of maybe did it a little bit in this book and I'm trying to do it again. But it's kind of art; it's an art for sure. Nancy: Well, you definitely did. They were fascinating characters for sure. I want to go back to Marcellus for just a second. You mentioned that he's so dismissive of humans. Our friend Vicky was interested in how you developed that particular voice for him. He's very resistant to being captive. You established that in the first sentence of the book. He's very dismissive of humans. He's curious, he's very articulate. How did you develop that particular voice? Shelby: I think the sort of tone of the voice, honestly, when I really sat down to write the very first kind of vignette, which is really how the book started, which was, in this writing class, we had to write a little scene from an unusual point of view. And so I just wrote this little thing of an octopus in captivity, introducing himself and kind of explaining what his situation was. That voice sort of just came really easily to me. Like, I think I might've been a grumpy old man in a previous life, because it's definitely inside me. But, beyond that, it definitely took some work to fine tune it. And, when you're in this unusual perspective, you're always thinking, okay, well, what would this character know? What would they not know? What vocabulary does he have access to? It's a little bit easier than it sounds because he is so observant. He basically has access to anything that anyone would have said within his proximity because he soaks it all up like a like a little octopus sponge. But I think I took I took some inspiration from my cats, Nancy: Yes! Shelby: two cats and and I fully admit like I am the person who if I'm alone by myself in my house with my cats or even if I'm not alone in my house with my cats, I , they're looking at me and I'm giving them a voice, as to what I think they're thinking. But a lot of times it is just this sort of judgment, just derision, judgment, kind of what are you doing? Just stop being so silly. And then I took also some inspiration from my kids who at the time when I was really in the big push to get this draft done, this would have been like in the first part of 2020. My kids were three and five. And my three year old in particular, just looking at the way that he looked at the world and the questions that a toddler sometimes asks of us. Why smart cookie? Why, like, what does that mean? It's like, okay, you're right. That doesn't make sense. These are just turns of phrases that we use, but I can't explain to you why we use it. You're right. It doesn't make sense. Just that sense of sort of innocent curiosity. about the world, a sense of wonder almost. And I really enjoyed bringing that into Marcellus because, he is such a grump. He is such a classic curmudgeon, but he also does have this wonderful curiosity about him. It's like he almost can't help himself. He's got this big neural network, this big brain running through his body. And as much as he pooh -poohs the humans, he also can't help but be curious about them. Nancy: Yeah, very much so. I read part of the book, reading a regular hard cover edition, but I also listened to part of it. And the narrator for Marcellus was such a wonderful narrator. I was wondering if you had heard the narrated version of the book. Shelby: Oh my gosh, it's so wonderful, isn't it? Nancy: Yes. Shelby: Oh my gosh. I never was a really big audiobook person. And I think having my own book on audiobook be so well recorded has made me more of an audiobook person. As the author, you sort of get some say in that, but you don't really get the final say. My publisher was really great. They, asked me, they had a bunch of ideas of people that they thought would be good narrators for both Marcellus and then for the sort of the third person narration. And they just asked me to go listen to samples and sort of rank them, which ones I liked best. And Michael Urie is the actor who does the Marcellus narration. And he is such a fantastic comic actor. The sample that I listened to when I was in this process was Stephen Rowley's Lily on the Octopus, which is a very different type of book about an octopus, but also, sort of in the same wheelhouse. It's a book about losing a pet and there's a metaphorical octopus that embodies the sickness that this pet is experiencing. But the way that Michael Urie narrates it is just, it's about humor, but warmth, but sarcasm and all those things sort of blended together. And I just knew, I was so thrilled when he said yes, that he would narrate it because I just knew that he would be the perfect Marcellus. And then I've had a chance to meet Stephen Rowley several times since the book came out and we kind of joke that we're now trying to typecast Michael Urie as an octopus. Linny: Fantastic. Well, one of the scenes was the sucker marks on Tova and what that meant. I thought about some things about their physical touch with each other and the lasting marks that he had on her. So I was curious as to what your thoughts were on that, what importance do you think that was that he left marks on Tova, and that other people noticed them? Shelby: At the beginning, it's really just, the purpose that they served was literally to give her a sense that this was real, that this was not some fever dream, that this stayed with her. But I think a little bit beyond that, I wanted it to sort of symbolize the power that an octopus can have. This is a 50 -something pound giant Pacific octopus, it's the biggest octopus in the world. Tova's kind of a small lady, but even if you weren't a small lady, you touch one of these guys and they are strong. It's a really vulnerable feeling to be touched like that by an octopus and probably by a lot of other animals. I don't have a lot of experience going around offering my limbs up to animals, particularly very strong ones, but they do, they are tasting with their suckers. You get latched onto by an octopus and it's almost like, it's not really in your control anymore, right? It's kind of up to them. The tables are turned instead of you looking at this creature through a tank, this creature is now examining you and you are gonna sit there and wait till it's done and let's go. And so I sort of wanted to just emphasize in a very physical and semi -permanent way, the effect of that. I had to be a little bit careful. I think at one point I actually used the word hickey and I don't know if that made it into the final book, but that's kind of what they are. And I remember going around and around to some of my beta readers and I'm like, gosh, I don't want people to get the wrong idea about this. This is a family-friendly operation. And I really did not want it to go down the path of being anything other than just a friendship with a physical component to it. So, I had to be a little bit careful with some of the language there, but in my mind, they're absolutely octopus hickeys. And I've talked to folks who work with octopuses and they refer to them that way too. So, maybe I could have used that word, but err on the side of caution. Linny: I did feel like at one point he might take her in there to show him his treasures because I couldn't figure out how he was going to lead her to know the information that he knew without showing her. So I thought, oh my golly, he's not gonna take her in the tank. Because there is that kind of vulnerability. This is a live creature with some power. Shelby: Yeah, I mean, I think he maybe could have if he'd wanted to. Linny: He had respect for her. Shelby: Oh yeah, out of all humans. Nancy: Definitely, definitely out of all the humans, the other humans that were around him. And what about, what about having Tova's friends notice those bruises? We thought that was just fascinating that it wasn't just something for Tova, but it was something that others noticed too. What made you include that aspect? Shelby: Oh, I just really loved the idea of her having a secret, and she has lots of secrets. She's not a person who shares a lot about herself. She has this group of friends, the Knit-wits that have been in her life for a very long time, but she keeps them at arm's length. She doesn't really let them in. And that's, one of the sort of movements of the story is her sort of learning how to do that. But I just loved the idea of what they would have said behind her back when she left the room. of what is she getting up to with these marks on her arm? And it kind of thrilled me that she would just pull her sleeve down and shut them out. That's something that she needs to work on, obviously, but it felt satisfying in the moment to write it that way. Nancy: That's great. Yeah, she definitely did keep secrets from them. I mean, they couldn't even figure out why she was working. They just assumed that she needed the money. They really didn't understand that dynamic that she wanted to keep busy and that it was satisfying for her. She, in many ways, was a mystery to those friends. Shelby: Absolutely. And, I come from a large Scandinavian family and it has always fascinated me how you can spend so much of your life around these people, and particularly in cultures that are a little bit more stoic. I spent, with my grandmother, for example, I grew up next to her as a child. I was an only child. I spent every day over at her house. Her house was my house. And yet I don't know that I really knew her. She was very much like Tova in that way. She is very much the person who would pull her sleeve down over something like that and not want to share it. And so I think within the Knit-wits, there's a little bit of that going on. They have been around her for so long. They have been friends for so long, but she has kept so much inside that I think they have sort of made their own assumptions about her and in the absence of her refuting them, assume them to be true. And that was a really, a fun arc to write also was sort of the discovery of almost they felt like new friendships as she starts to open up a little bit to these women that she has known for such a long time. And they start to see these sides of her that they didn't even know existed. Nancy: Well, speaking of Tova's friendship, this friendship with Ethan was so fun and beautiful. I particularly love that scene where Tova being Tova, she decides to clean Ethan's kitchen. And in doing so, she destroys his precious Grateful Dead t -shirt. So to Linny and me, we felt that this was an illustration of such a human condition that we’re trying to be helpful and we end up hurting someone that we love. We wondered if this scene was a wake -up call to Tova in some way that her typical ways of doing things were not gonna work in this new relationship with Ethan. Anyway, we were wondering what you were trying to accomplish in that really interesting little scene. Shelby: Oh, absolutely. There's a scene early in the book where she is at the grocery store buying groceries from Ethan. Ethan, owns the grocery store, and so they, this is the primary place where they see each other is when she's buying her groceries and the bag boy puts the things in her bag and it's not done the way that she wants it. There's things clinking together. And she says something like sometimes there's just a right way to do things. And that's her sort of rigid worldview. That it's her way or it's not right. And so I think the scene with Ethan at the end where she accidentally rubs a red wine spill up with his one of a kind t -shirt is just sort of the other side of that, which is making her realize that there is not a one right way to do things. Like, yes, he had stored this under the sink, but that's because he uses under the sink as his garment closet. But, that's okay. That's how he does it. He's a bachelor. Yeah, definitely a wake up call for her to realize that there's more than one way of doing things. That scene actually got added to the book pretty late in the game. It came about because a lot of my critique partners that I work with write romance, like rom -com. And in romance and rom -com, there's always kind of a set of beats and there's certain tropes and things that always slot in in certain spots. And I remember my critique partner telling me, Shelby, I think you need a grand gesture. And a grand gesture is like John Cusack with the boombox, the moment where the character really like lays it all out on the line and gives the big apology or the big vulnerable speech or does the big scary thing that they've been sort of avoiding doing throughout the whole story. We tried to think, okay, well, that Tova's not going to go hold a boombox outside anyone's window. This is a quiet story. These are quiet characters. It would have to be something like, she's going to make this big mistake and then atone for it. In order to atone for it, she has to use the internet and drive on the freeway and sort of do all of these things that are really mundane things. But for her, that's a big leap out of her comfort zone. And I just, I loved the way that it came together. I'm so grateful to my critique partner for kind of pushing me on that. Cause I think at first when, when the grand gesture thing came up, I was kind of like, no, no, this isn't a romance. Like, I don't need that. And she was like, no, I think you really do. And she was absolutely right. Linny: Yeah, I think it really helped us to see her growth as a character from somebody who is kind of rigid and keeps other people at a distance. Doesn't do that with the Marcellus, but does that with people, keeps them at a distance. And that she would do all of that. There were so many hurdles for her, even like not really having to get somebody to help her figure out how to use the internet and how to Marketplace or whatever she used to get that shirt. And she had no clue that it was going to cost her that much money to get a Grateful Dead t -shirt. To me, when I looked at a lot of your characters, they were sort of stuck in their own little rigid places in their life. And this was really an emphasis of real growth for her that she realized. Hmm. I made a mistake, but because that's not where an expensive shirt would go. She’s a busy doing what she does. Shelby: Yes, she never sits down. Linny: That's her thing. She just moves. Shelby: Yeah, I think, you mentioned stuckness and I think there was very deliberately I tried to make these depictions of characters who are stuck. And that kind of came from the beginning. I remember when I was taking this from being, this is just a funny little vignette with an octopus talking and that I wrote in this continuing education class. And the teacher liked it and said, you should write more. So I started writing more. And then I had all of these little scenes with a grumpy octopus just giving his hot takes on this and that. That was actually fairly easy to do. When I decided, hey, maybe I want to make this into a novel. I've got to bring some human characters in. That was actually much harder. But that was one of the first things that I started to think of was, OK, if I'm going to bring human characters in and have them have relationships with Marcellus, they all kind of need to have some common thread, some common thing that they're grappling with. And, know, stuckness was what struck me right away. Marcellus is literally stuck. Tova is figuratively stuck within this rigid framework that she has sort of allowed to become her, a cage really. And, and then you have Cameron who is just kind of stuck under the weight of his own like lack of self -confidence. But they all are just characters that need to get on a different path. And that can be very hard when you've been riding around the same path for decades to make that first little nudge to get off of it and into a different orbit. Linny: Well, talk about being unstuck. You decided to free Marcellus at the end. And I loved the imagery that you had in your book there of him breathing in the salt air and the coolness of the water and diving deep. I loved that whole scene. Was that your plan at the beginning to release him? Shelby: Yes. I would say I am not a plotter. I figure it out as I go. I wish I were a plotter. I am so jealous of my writer friends who have like their outlines and their big like bulletin board that has all these index cards on it. I can't do that. I have tried. My brain does not work that way. But what I have noticed when I take on any kind of new project is that I always have some sort of little end point, even if it's something really, really small. And with this book, I remember, the first page is day, , whatever, whatever of my captivity. And from that moment, I had the line, day one of my freedom in mind. And I was like, okay, this guy is going to get out of this dang aquarium. I don't know how it's going to happen. And I actually wrote a few, you know, I went through a few different ways of it happening, but, you I knew that that was going to happen. He was not going to die in that tank. Linny: Okay, I'm glad that you said that because I saw his freedom. He was not stuck. The rest of the characters got their unstuckness at some point. But I'm wondering because we talked about this too. Nancy cried at the end. I was just happy he was free. And she said other people were crying. I'm like, he's free. He knew his days were numbered. He is happy. He gets to pass on the way he wants to. Was it more of a tearjerker ending with that or more of a, oh, I can feel the water and the salt and all of those good things. Shelby: I think for me, and I have to say, when you write a book and get it published, you end up reading that book like 20 plus times. So I have read it so many times and it was very interesting to me having the experience of reading through those ending chapters, particularly when it had been a little while since I had originally written them. And it kind of hit different depending on the day. There were some days where it did feel very joyful to me and then there were a couple of times that I wrote through it where I did like myself cry at my own work, which I also kind of patted myself on the back. So I'm like, well, that's gotta be a good sign, right? Linny: Right. Nancy: Definitely. Shelby: But I think for me, the sadder part was when we were going through an edit, we were messing around with the order of the chapters at the end. And I don't remember if this was the edit I did with my agent or my actual editor at Ecco, but at some point we decided, let's change the order of the chapters so that you have this... kind of cliffhanger where he just is gone and you're not sure what's gonna happen. He just goes into the sea, but you don't get that feeling of the saltwater, the day one of my freedom. And for me, when I was doing those subsequent read -throughs and trying, like having, I guess, as much as it's possible to have the experience of a reader when reading your own work, that was where it got me. And thinking of like, oh my gosh, readers are gonna think that I've just left them with this octopus slipping into the sea. With this like silent, dark, cold goodbye. And that was what really got me personally. And then you go and then the humans are doing their things and then you come back to him at the very end and get to have that joy with him before the book ends. So yeah, I think there's, I always, to the extent that it is like a tearjerker, I always hope that it's like happy tears a little bit. Gosh, like I love The Notebook, but like I didn't want to write a book like that, you know? It's just like, it's over and you just kind of feel like, oh man. Nancy: Yeah, well, I can speak for myself. They were very joyful tears. I mean, they were tears that he had achieved really an impossible dream. I don't know that he thought that he would realistically ever be in the ocean again. And for Tova to do that for him, I thought was beautiful. So many of the characters had these groups of friends around them and people who really love them. We loved Aunt Jean for Cameron and how she was just this foundation for him. And of course, Cameron had his high school friends. Tova had the Knit-wits as we've talked about and then previously her husband and son. And so the characters really each had a foundation of love. We wondered if for you, having characters with that foundation of love was necessary for them to have the courage to become different people by the time the book ended. Shelby: And I think what strikes me about both Cameron and Tova is that they are just profoundly lonely, yet surrounded by all this love. Nancy: Oh. Shelby: And it's a loneliness that you almost bring upon yourself because you don't let people in. You don't let them love you the way that maybe they want to. And I think some of that probably comes from, again, just me and my background, the way that my family is, the way that I am. They say that writing is therapy, but like it really is true. I've spent a lot of time looking at these characters, which, by the way, when I wrote them, I totally thought I'm, there's no way anyone can accuse me of writing auto fiction because, this is a 70 year old woman and a 30 year old man and I'm a 40 year old woman. So I'm nowhere in the same ballpark as these people, but, they are, there is a lot of me in both of those characters, particularly in the way that they have difficulty sort of letting people see their true selves. You have Tova who just basically doesn't want to be a burden on anyone, like doesn't want to invite the mess of letting people sort of into her life, just kind of prefers to keep it, keep a line there, keep it neat. Like I totally do that, particularly having it moved around to a lot of different cities as an adult. Especially when my kids were little and it's like, oh, you're going to mom group and you've got to make these mom friends. And like, I was really bad at it. Like I had a really hard time letting people in, these people who were supposedly going through the same thing that I was, who were going through the same stage of life that I was. It was very hard for me to, to let my guard down, and then you have Cameron who kind of does the same thing. He just deflects everything with a, with a self -deprecating joke. And like, I totally do that all the time. If I can bat it away by making a sarcastic comment, that's always my first line of defense. It's not healthy. I'm working on it. Linny: Hahaha! Shelby: But yeah, I think they have all of this love and support. And I think deep down they know that. I do think that is important, when you're going off on sort of these quests to try to become a better person, in the back of the mind, that if you fall, you do have people that love you and support you, even if you haven't really let them do that in the past. Nancy: Remarkably Bright Creatures was chosen as the 23-24 One Book One Lincoln title. Shelby: Yeah! Such an honor. Nancy: Oh, well, yeah, Lincoln, we love our One Book One Lincoln titles. Shelby: It's a great, great program. I love community reads programs. Nancy: I was wondering, have you been selected as a community read program in any other communities? Shelby: I have actually done quite a few of them. They're always really fun. Some of the most fun groups of people to talk to. And I think part of the reason for that, I mean, it's always fun to do like a bookstore event. But a lot of times you get groups of people who like, you just don't really like know what their connection to the book is Jave all these people read the book, where they just like in the bookstore and they happen to see this and they came in at a seat? With the one book, they will get the book into the hands of people. This is like truly a city-wide book club. And you can have these very cool book club type discussions on this much larger scale. It's so much fun. And it just is always such an honor to be chosen for something like that. I've got a couple coming up. I am going to Tupelo. I'm doing the community read in Tupelo later this month. And in Springfield at the end of next month. So they are really, really fun to meet with those people. Nancy: That must be an amazing feeling knowing an entire city is reading your book and discussing it. Shelby: Well, here's the thing that I also didn't realize about Community Reads programs. And I will say I had no idea this was the case when I was writing the book. But if you're a Community Reads program and you're trying to pick out the book for your city, not only you want something that's accessible, you want something that is a thought provoking read, but not a 600 page book. You want something that people are gonna be able to realistically get through in the course of their busy lives. But the other thing is they love a theme. If a book has a built -in theme, something that they can build the rest of the programming around, that just makes it so much more fun for everyone. And so, my book has this incredible programming built into it. And so I guess if there's any authors out there, if you want to do Community Reads programs, consider writing a book that has just a great theme that pops off the page, because that, I think it makes the job easier of putting that programming on. And it just also makes it a lot more fun. I've been to some libraries where they have incredible octopus-themed artwork. And they'll do a watch party for My Octopus Teacher. They have all this other stuff that they can do because a lot of times for those programs, it's a city -wide book club, but there's also a goal of just getting people to the library, particularly adults who maybe don't. who wouldn't go there otherwise, Get them into the library, get them engaging with the library community and all the programs that they have to offer. And it's just, it's so fun to me that they can do that through something like, hey, come take a class on how to crochet an octopus key chain. It's like, great. Nancy: That's great. Linny: I love that because that gets the kids interested. too. Shelby: Yeah it's fun, it's just, you know, it makes it, it makes it fun. Linny: Well, you've got two little ones at home. Shelby: I do, they actually, they're not so little anymore. They're eight and 10, my gosh. Linny: Aww, Nancy: To Lenny and me, that still seems little. Linny: Are you still writing? What are you working on? Shelby: Yeah. A couple projects that I'm trying to get across the finish line. I sort of made a goal for myself to hopefully get them sort of off my desk by the end of the first quarter of this year. So I've been pretty deep in my little writing cave the last few weeks trying to trying to get these drafts done and get them sent over to the people that need to look at them to hopefully take the next step. But writing second book is hard. I've heard that from other authors who are much further along in their careers that they will say reflecting back, my second book was my hardest, particularly if your first book is successful. It's just a very different experience going from writing, when I was writing RBC, I never thought anyone would read it. And there's a freedom in that where you're just, you kind of do what you want. And you're not thinking about all these marketing questions and you're not thinking about what will Goodreads say? You know, what will critics say? You're just writing. And I think it's a real skill to be able to recapture that mindset for subsequent books. To be able to turn all of that noise off and just write the thing that's interesting to you, that speaks to you, and write it like a piece of art rather than like a product that's going to be sold. In reality, of course, it's both. But I think for me, in order to get a good first draft down, I really have to tune out the noise of the marketing stuff. Otherwise I end up like I'm trying to write for other people instead of for me. So I've struggled with that. I think I'm getting better at it. It's a work in progress. Nancy: Well, I know our listeners will want to keep up to date on what you're doing. Where can people best stay in touch with you? Shelby: Of all the socials, I'm mostly on Instagram, ShelbyVanPeltwrites. I have a website that I am told I need to update more frequently. I'm working on that as well. A lot of things are a work in progress over here. But it has all of my upcoming events on it. I try to keep that updated at least every couple of weeks. I've got several events this spring, taking a break over the summer and then actually have several in the fall as well. So I may be coming to a city near you. Nancy: Great. Linny: Well, Shelby, thank you so much for joining us on the Front Porch and for giving us Marcellus, this amazing giant octopus that reached out to humans and changed the lives of Tova and the other people around her. It was just a wonderful read for me. I enjoyed it very much. Shelby: Thank you so much for having me on. And obviously, Marcellus has changed my life too, not only from having a best -selling book, but I truly do carry him with me. He is a character that will be a part of me forever. Nancy: Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you so much, Shelby. Shelby: Thank you.