Deborah Goodrich Royce, REEF ROAD: A Novel
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[0:58]Deborah Goodrich Royce is the author of Refrode, a novel, and she has been on this podcast before.
[1:03]I'm delighted to welcome her back. Her literary thrillers examine puzzles of identity, finding Mrs. Ford,
[1:10]and Ruby Falls are joined now by Refrode. Deborah began her career as an actress and went on to
[1:17]star and feature films, like just one of the guys which I used to watch in the 80s all the time,
[1:21]so this is like a crazy full circle situation. She lived in Paris and was a reader for
[1:27]the studio canal pluse in the 1990s and was the story editor at Miramax Films in New York.
[1:33]She won a grant from the Massachusetts Arts Council in 2002 with her writing partner, Mitch
[1:37]Gianneutzio, to screenplay their workshop, to develop and workshop their screenplay Susan Taft has
[1:44]run a muck. With her husband noted small cap investor Chuck Royce, Deborah restored the 1939
[1:50]Aemon Theater in Stanford, Connecticut. Deborah and Chuck have restored several hotels,
[1:54]including the Ocean House, where they had me for an event last summer, which was so much fun,
[1:58]and you all have to go to the Ocean House. Dear Mountain Inn, we co-pog in, and the margin
[2:02]street inn. Also a bookstore, the Savoy in Westerly Road Island, a numerous other Main Street
[2:07]buildings in Westerly Road Island, and Tanner'sville, New York. Deborah serves on the governing
[2:12]boards of the New York Botanical Garden, the Greenwich Historical Society, and the Prasad Project,
[2:17]and the Advisory Boards of the American Film Institute, the Greenwich International Film Festival,
[2:21]the Preservation Society of Newport County, and the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.
[2:26]She is a former trustee of the YWCA Greenwich and the Garden Conservancy. Hello everyone.
[2:31]Thank you, Zibi, for coming. So, Zibi, I really want to add my kudos just to...
[2:39]At first of all, having a Z name, this is my darling daughter Alexandra, who when she was two,
[2:44]called herself Zaza. So, we have a we have a Zon, we have a Zibi, and I just love the zip of the Z name.
[2:52]So, yeah, I'm the writer of this book, this incredible visual. Don't you love that?
[3:00]We can talk about how you put a spider on a book cover, and Becky Ford is the artist who helped
[3:07]do that. You can never make a spider too hairy or gross. So, we ended up with sort of a silhouette.
[3:17]So, I'm an actress turned author. This is my third book. Well, we'll touch on things along the way.
[3:23]Okay. How many of you have read Deborah's book already? So, good, right? Okay, so that's
[3:28]about half. So, for the people who haven't read your book, and also, this is going to be,
[3:32]if everything records properly, a podcast episode on moms don't have time to read books.
[3:37]So, I'll get, I'll cover all the bases for people listening to that too. So, Deborah,
[3:42]tell us about refrode. What is it about? So, and we're going to get a little dark.
[3:48]On December the 10th, 1948, my mother's best friend was murdered. She was 12 years old as was my mother.
[3:56]This happened in Pittsburgh in a very working class section called Homewood Brushton.
[4:03]It was a Friday night. It was December the girls had been to the practice for their Christmas
[4:09]pageant at their church, and my mother thought she would go over to her friend's house that night,
[4:14]and it turned out, for whatever reason, my grandmother said, no. The parents of the real girl
[4:21]went bowling. They left her home. They were adamant that they locked the front door, that they
[4:27]locked the back door, and when they returned at 11.30, that night the back door was a jar, and
[4:33]there was a window, and the shade had been raised. There was a very unsettling 21 minute lag
[4:43]from the moment the parents came home, heard by the neighbors at 11.30, and 21 minutes later
[4:50]when two things happened. The father called the police, and the mother ran outside of the house
[4:56]screaming. So, we can talk about that 21 minutes if you want to. So, I had always known that
[5:03]this had happened. I had always known it was an unsolved crime, and I had always known that it
[5:08]created a lot of discomfort and anxiety from my mother. My mom is still alive, and she's fine,
[5:15]but so it had been in my consciousness. I don't think I knew it as a very young child. I'm certain
[5:20]my mother wouldn't have told me when I was little, but at a certain point it was in my sphere of
[5:25]awareness. So, the pandemic locked us down in March of 2020. I know exactly where I was. It was my
[5:32]granddaughter Annabelle's first birthday, and we were all in Florida on Friday, March 13th,
[5:38]and there was that weird moment remember, where like, is this like, are we going on? Is this
[5:44]happening two weeks? So, we're going to do this for two weeks. And so, there we all were in Florida.
[5:51]I had been on a book tour, so I wasn't able to travel. So, I thought this is the moment when I'm
[5:57]actually going to finally research this real piece of not really our family history, but
[6:04]kind of this next door history. So, lo and behold, there was a vast amount of material available
[6:11]on the internet, every single newspaper article, and there were a lot covering this crime.
[6:18]It was all there. I was able to reach the University of Pittsburgh and get the coroner's report.
[6:23]I spoke to the Pittsburgh Police Department. They would not release the police report,
[6:29]but I happen to know some things about that, which we can get to. So, as I did this research,
[6:35]and as I took my notes, I thought, I don't want to write this as non-fiction. I don't want to
[6:41]say what I think happened about this real family. Most suspicion has always fallen on the brother,
[6:49]a significantly older brother. For a 12-year-old girl, he was seven years older. And those years
[6:54]are meaningful years from 12 to 19. There are all of these questions and answers and testimony
[7:04]and statements and retractions about where the brother was at night. He was supposed to be at
[7:09]work at the railroad yard, and was he there, was he not there? Did they see him? Did they not?
[7:15]So, as I was going through this, I thought I'm going to write a piece of fiction that, as a theme,
[7:23]really deals with both generational trauma and tangential trauma. But I'm going to make it a thriller,
[7:31]which I like to do with a twist in it. So, refrode is a dual narrative of two women, a writer who
[7:39]lives alone with her aging dog and a dreary apartment behind the public's grocery store
[7:46]in Palm Beach and a younger woman named Linda Alonso, who lives on refrode. And she has a very
[7:53]handsome husband from Argentina and two beautiful little children. And about three weeks into
[7:59]the pandemic locked down, they disappear. And the police reveal security camera footage of them
[8:08]in their face masks, getting on a plane bound for Buenos Aires at Miami International Airport,
[8:15]and she can't follow. So, the book toggles back and forth between the stories of these two women,
[8:20]you start to figure out what one has to do with the other. And it is set in this very claustrophobic
[8:28]hot house setting of the pandemic locked down of 2020. Wow. So, Deborah, it's one thing to research
[8:36]everything that happened in the house next door and go through that deep dive. But it's another
[8:41]to then use that and take it into make it into such a beautiful novel and figure out who these two
[8:48]women are and all that. So, how did you jump from the actual things that happened
[8:52]into these two characters? And why divided like that? Why are the two viewpoints?
[8:57]I love a dual narrative. I like dual timelines and I like dual points of view. I like that
[9:04]peeling of the onion. I like to call my books identity thrillers. That's not really a genre,
[9:10]but I think it applies to a certain type of thriller that is really focusing on puzzles and the
[9:16]secrets that people keep as you bit by bit start to peel the onion and realize what's going on.
[9:23]I like to write a twist, which, you know, the difference between a reveal and a twist. In a reveal,
[9:30]we're in a locked room. One of us gets murdered. One of us is the murderer and at a certain point,
[9:34]it's revealed who it is. In a twist, you come to the point where you realize I didn't even know
[9:41]that was what was going on at all. So, the two points of view. So, with the writer, it's first person,
[9:49]her sections are written like journal entries. She's quite obsessive. She's quite
[9:55]ruminative and there is certainly a side of myself.
[10:00]I got to indulge.
[10:01]She's fascinated with arcane murder statistics.
[10:04]So I got to go up down all these weird,
[10:07]rabbit holes about murder, who gets murdered,
[10:12]murders of women, famous murders.
[10:15]But with her, I really wanted to look at that
[10:17]sort of secondhand trauma and what it is.
[10:22]And I've read a book recently called It Didn't Start with You.
[10:27]It's a non-fiction book about epigenetics.
[10:31]And it has blown my mind that at some genetic level,
[10:35]we take on trauma, and it begins with study of mice.
[10:40]And these mice who are exposed to a particular smell
[10:43]and then give an electric shocks, two generations later,
[10:48]their grandchildren, when exposed to that smell,
[10:51]have reactions of stress and anxiety.
[10:54]They've done a lot of work with children of Holocaust victims.
[10:58]I mean, children who were not there,
[11:00]who didn't experience it, it's a very real thing.
[11:04]So that's what I'm exploring with the writer.
[11:08]With the wife, Linda Alonso, well, I think I had very recently
[11:14]re-watched body heat.
[11:16]Have you ever seen that film?
[11:18]With William Hurt and Kathleen Turner.
[11:20]I think it was made in the 80s or 90s.
[11:23]It is a steamy film, noir.
[11:26]Kathleen Turner is at the peak of her sultriness.
[11:31]And it is set in Lantana, Florida, and it's hot,
[11:35]and they're sweaty, and they're bad.
[11:38]Everyone's bad.
[11:39]But particularly, the woman is bad.
[11:41]And so in noir, you really have to pay attention to the woman.
[11:44]You really should look twice at what she's really doing.
[11:48]So I wanted that noir plotline to play out with the wife.
[11:54]And then I wanted to wind it all together and unravel it.
[11:58]I worked with a lot of 20s some things.
[12:00]And there are a couple of us who are older on my team.
[12:03]And one of us referenced Kathleen Turner
[12:04]and nobody knew who we meant.
[12:07]It was so depressing.
[12:08]But anyway, glad that we all know what we're talking about here.
[12:11]Part of the book really deals with fear of something
[12:15]happening to children, having things happening to people you
[12:17]love, and, of course, writing this in the context of the pandemic.
[12:20]Perhaps that's what it was tapping into.
[12:23]Did you, while you were writing it,
[12:25]need some sort of vehicle for all the uncertainty in the world?
[12:29]And do you feel like you maybe just shoved that into these characters?
[12:32]Or was this more of an analytical experiment?
[12:35]No, it wasn't analytical at all.
[12:37]I think we were living in a state of fear.
[12:39]I mean, raise your hand if you cloroxed your bananas.
[12:42]We were like, I have to digress.
[12:47]Because I love the digressions.
[12:48]I keep pointing at my beautiful daughter.
[12:50]We're all in this house together.
[12:52]Parents, kids, grandkids, lots of dogs.
[12:56]We had like dog hair, tumbleweeds, rolling around the house.
[13:00]I'm trying to ride Alexander Ray's a child.
[13:04]So I had a romance with my Roomba.
[13:06]I got a Roomba.
[13:08]It was the only thing that kept us from killing each other
[13:11]because we could set, and I named him Orlando after a character in another book.
[13:15]But we could put Mr. Orlando to work to clean the house while we were doing our things.
[13:20]But there was terrible anxiety.
[13:22]And I was writing a really day in date with what was going on.
[13:25]And for those of you who write us out there, I mean, there's a great piece of wisdom.
[13:30]If you just write down what's going on every day, you're writing history.
[13:34]So I look back at it.
[13:35]And the book isn't about the pandemic.
[13:38]But the pandemic is a fantastic setting for a thriller.
[13:43]It serves to impose the kind of constraints on your characters that wartime would.
[13:49]They're boxed in when the younger woman's husband gets on the plane,
[13:52]and she can't follow him because the borders are closed.
[13:56]That is an obstacle, which is very convenient.
[14:00]And Alice McDermott in her book, What About the Baby?
[14:03]So you're writing.
[14:04]That's a wonderful book for writers.
[14:06]Annabelle, have you read that?
[14:07]Wendy, have you read that?
[14:08]It's a very good book.
[14:09]So in What About the Baby, she talks about in nonfiction,
[14:13]the work for the writer is to include everything.
[14:16]You have to get it all in there.
[14:18]In fiction, you have to decide what you're writing, what you're telling.
[14:22]It's absolutely limitless.
[14:24]For example, the real murder victim, whose name was Carol, she had two brothers.
[14:31]And a friend who read an early draft said, what's with his second brother?
[14:36]And so it was confusing.
[14:37]And in fiction, it's very easy to sort of exit stage left, brother.
[14:42]Number two, in nonfiction, you can't do that.
[14:46]So I did feel this permeating feeling of anxiety that we were all living in.
[14:51]And I thought, I just didn't see any point to avoid it.
[14:55]I thought it was actually helpful.
[14:57]Speaking of brothers, talk about why you decided to have the brother come in.
[15:00]Is this new character and how you ended up writing what came next?
[15:06]Well, I'm probably not going to talk about that so much.
[15:10]But there is a very strong storyline that has to do with Argentina
[15:17]that I had the opportunity to travel to Argentina about a decade ago,
[15:22]with one of my best friends who is half Argentine.
[15:26]And one of the things that just left me shocked and completely riveted.
[15:34]And I never got over it.
[15:35]Right in the middle of Buenos Aires is this large military facility.
[15:39]That turns out was the detention center in the late 70s and early 80s,
[15:45]when the government was rounding up students and leftists and union leaders.
[15:52]And they would hood these people and drive them what they thought were very far distances.
[16:00]But they were imprisoning them right in the middle of Buenos Aires.
[16:05]And again, that's a perfect, at the juxtaposition is just so awful.
[16:12]And I really never forgot that.
[16:14]So that whole storyline of those people, they were called the disappeared,
[16:19]makes its way through Miguel's storyline into this book.
[16:24]And it is an important thread that, yeah, we'll stop there.
[16:29]Sorry.
[16:32]OK, so when you go about writing a book like this and your other books,
[16:37]when you sit down to start it, what comes first?
[16:41]Like, how do you approach the whole project?
[16:43]And do you outline the whole story ahead of time?
[16:45]Do you know what goes on or not?
[16:47]Like, what is your process like?
[16:49]That's a great question.
[16:50]So the term I've always heard is, are you a plotter or a pantser?
[16:55]Do you plot it all out or fly by the seat of your pants?
[16:58]But then I was doing a radio show last week, and the host said,
[17:04]do you write with a compass or a map?
[17:08]And I'm not going to forget that.
[17:10]So I write with a compass.
[17:13]I kind of know where I want to go.
[17:17]So it's not fully by the seat of my pants.
[17:19]I think it's a more precise expression.
[17:22]Make a note of that, Wendy.
[17:24]Right?
[17:25]You think it's a little more precise.
[17:27]So I have a compass.
[17:29]I know certain points I want to have happen,
[17:35]but I don't have a map.
[17:36]I take copious notes, and my notes take the form of what if.
[17:41]What if this happens?
[17:43]Let's say something's going on in this room
[17:46]and somebody gets murdered.
[17:47]So well, what if somebody walked out of the bathroom
[17:51]at this moment, or what if that person did this?
[17:54]And at a certain point when I have enough notes,
[17:58]I'll start writing.
[17:59]But when I start writing, it might change
[18:01]the direction of the notes.
[18:03]And then I do go back and tweak the notes.
[18:06]I also do timelines because my books are so non-linear.
[18:11]Timelines are really useful.
[18:14]So I write them out.
[18:16]But then I do this weird kind of antiquated thing.
[18:21]Do you remember like month at a page, calendars?
[18:24]I print them out.
[18:26]And I print them out because they're correct.
[18:29]If you're looking at October of 1975 or June of 2010,
[18:34]the days fall on different.
[18:37]The number date falls on different days of the week.
[18:40]And I start making notes on those.
[18:43]And it is very visually helpful for me to see.
[18:48]My first book, there's an object.
[18:49]There's a necklace on the cover.
[18:51]And the object is a very important plot point.
[18:53]And there's a point after which you cannot see that necklace
[18:57]again.
[18:58]But you can get confused as a writer
[19:00]if you're jumping all around.
[19:02]So I just make a note.
[19:04]July the 5th, XNA, I'm going to close it.
[19:07]You just can't see it again.
[19:08]So I go back to that.
[19:09]So those are some of the little techniques I use.
[19:12]Interesting.
[19:13]So talk a little bit about becoming a writer at this point
[19:16]in your life because I have led a very long life.
[19:20]So I started as an actress.
[19:23]After I went to college, I was a French and Italian major,
[19:26]studied a little bit in France, came home.
[19:30]I was cast in a movie in my college town of Cleveland.
[19:33]It was a big film with Frank Langella and Tom Hulse.
[19:37]And I was a background dancer.
[19:39]And in the twist of fate, this got me to New York.
[19:42]I came to the city to audition for the choreographer,
[19:46]who was probably not quite who he said he was when he was
[19:52]kept inviting me to come to New York audition for me.
[19:55]And I took him very literally.
[19:56]So I came to New York.
[19:57]I auditioned for him.
[19:58]I wasn't cast.
[20:00]And I ended up deciding to try acting.
[20:04]And I had a nice run as an actress about 10 years.
[20:07]I started with a very big role on a soap opera called
[20:12]All My Children That Was Around For 40 Years.
[20:14]So I was on in the early 80s as the sister of the star,
[20:18]Susan Luci, played this character, Erica Kane.
[20:22]And she had this, again, bad, bad, bad sister,
[20:27]named Silver, a very realistic name, Silver Kane.
[20:32]And I played that.
[20:34]And what I was written out, Paramount Pictures,
[20:37]flew me to LA to do this project with Christopher Lloyd.
[20:40]So I had a 10-year run as an actress in film and television.
[20:44]It was great fun.
[20:45]It was very interesting.
[20:46]I recently did CNN because of the true crime component
[20:50]of this book.
[20:51]And they asked for clips from this mini series I did
[20:55]with Mark Harmon.
[20:56]I played the woman who married Ted Bundy.
[20:59]And very cute Mark Harmon played Bundy.
[21:02]So I spent three hours looking.
[21:06]So I don't know if anybody knows how to do this better,
[21:09]but trying to find this very old mini series.
[21:13]What I came up with on YouTube was like Marcy's movies.
[21:16]So somebody named Marcy had, like, I don't know,
[21:21]not even by modern technology.
[21:23]She had taped this at home.
[21:25]So I spent the whole evening looking
[21:27]for these clips, which I do definitely got to CNN
[21:31]at one in the morning, which they then didn't use.
[21:34]But I was glad to see this Mark Harmon thing again,
[21:37]because it was actually good.
[21:39]It held up.
[21:40]So I worked for 10 years as an actress.
[21:42]And then my first husband, who had grown up in Paris,
[21:46]had the opportunity to go there.
[21:48]So in the early 90s, we moved to Paris.
[21:51]Alexander was a little child.
[21:53]She went to her grandmothers, Montessori preschool in Paris,
[21:57]and she had a younger sister.
[21:59]So we all lived there.
[22:00]And it was the first step in what
[22:04]would lead to my writing career.
[22:06]I was hired by a French film studio as a reader.
[22:09]And this is a basic job that all studios,
[22:12]they keep freelance people who read manuscripts,
[22:16]synopsize manuscripts for the studio heads,
[22:19]and write a page of comments.
[22:21]So I did that, and now we're in 92 and 93 living in Paris.
[22:26]And then we moved back to the States.
[22:30]My first husband was hired by Julia Roberts
[22:33]to run her development company.
[22:35]And I was hired at Miramax to be the story editor,
[22:41]which is like a book editor.
[22:42]So I did that in the 90s.
[22:44]And through these twists and turns,
[22:46]so Miramax, in a lot of ways, for me,
[22:48]was like my writing school.
[22:51]And being in that editorial chair
[22:53]and working with very, very fine writers for that period of years,
[23:00]I really had to figure out what I
[23:02]thought about story and structure and character and everything.
[23:07]So when I left that job just because it was very taxing as a mother,
[23:12]and we can talk about doing it all or doing it more sequentially,
[23:16]doing it all, doing it sequentially,
[23:19]I ended up going through divorce, getting remarried,
[23:22]moving to Connecticut, and writing all along.
[23:25]There's some of my writing group friends here.
[23:28]And one of the things I found very important
[23:30]was being part of a writing group.
[23:33]I found it a very nurturing environment.
[23:36]And I would strongly advise writers only
[23:38]do that with kind people.
[23:40]You should never do that with unkind people.
[23:43]But in being in a writing group setting,
[23:46]I started to get a feel from my voice.
[23:49]Not that I was modifying my voice for my fellow writers,
[23:54]but I started to notice what they recognized about the way I write.
[23:59]So it was a clarifier for me.
[24:04]And the real turning point came at this magic moment
[24:08]when I was an empty nester.
[24:11]So really in my mid-50s, which was eight years ago,
[24:14]I thought I will get serious.
[24:17]I had this book in mind.
[24:18]I started telling my friends I was writing a book.
[24:21]And my husband, who makes modesty, a practice,
[24:25]he's like, oh my god.
[24:27]I really wouldn't tell people that.
[24:29]And I said, you know, I can handle it
[24:34]if I don't actually write the book.
[24:37]I will be able to say to my friends.
[24:39]I mean, I wasn't putting it in the newspaper.
[24:42]I would be able to say to my friends, if they said,
[24:45]so whatever happened to that book, nothing.
[24:47]So that was a moment where I really committed myself.
[24:52]And then now I have my third book coming out.
[24:55]And what are your skincare techniques?
[24:58]LAUGHTER
[25:01]So I do a variety of things.
[25:03]I do see a dermatologist.
[25:06]And I've done fillers and laser and all the Botox and all that stuff.
[25:12]I'm older now, so I've done a little more lately.
[25:16]I am in my mid-60s.
[25:19]And oh, I like skin pseudocals, all their products.
[25:22]Like they're B5 gel and that TNS serum and all that stuff.
[25:28]So I feel like, so that is a weird thing.
[25:31]Like how much attention do you put into how you look?
[25:34]And how much attention do you put into what you're really
[25:36]doing?
[25:36]Obviously, it's what you're doing, which is more important
[25:39]than how you look.
[25:41]But as women, we do have that additional thing
[25:44]sitting on our shoulder about aging, about weight,
[25:47]about skin, about, oh, it's all that.
[25:52]We all have it.
[25:55]I think, I mean, you look amazing.
[25:58]Whatever you're doing, I want to start to think.
[26:01]Anyway, I didn't mean to belittle all of the success
[26:03]of the book, but this is all fun to know.
[26:06]When you think about projects that you still want to do,
[26:09]what little stories or germs of ideas do you have?
[26:13]And what do you want to do next?
[26:16]I got an email last year from a man,
[26:21]and he began with, hey, remember me?
[26:25]And I'm thinking, hmm, not yet.
[26:29]And he said, I was your best boy on survival game,
[26:34]which is a provocative sentence.
[26:36]And a best boy in the movie business
[26:39]is the head electrician.
[26:41]So I knew what he meant.
[26:43]Survival game was a movie I did with the son of Chuck Norris.
[26:48]Do you young people remember Chuck Norris?
[26:50]He was a famous martial artist movie star in the 80s.
[26:55]So I did a movie with his son.
[26:58]So so far, okay, I did that movie.
[27:00]And he said, do you remember that Thanksgiving dinner
[27:04]we had together?
[27:08]I'm thinking.
[27:09]He said, you were the only actress
[27:10]who didn't have anybody come see her for the holiday.
[27:13]And I thought, well, gosh, poor me.
[27:16]Why did I have nobody come see me?
[27:19]And I don't remember.
[27:22]And then he said, do you remember when we saw each other
[27:26]at the Cannes Film Festival?
[27:28]And now I'm really getting a little nervous.
[27:31]He said, I was in the British pavilion
[27:34]and you were standing outside and you were holding a baby.
[27:39]And he said, I looked over and I wondered for a minute
[27:42]if the baby was mine.
[27:45]But I knew it couldn't be possible.
[27:48]And I'm thinking, so I really hope it wasn't possible
[27:52]because we did not have that nature of a relationship
[27:56]because I have zero memories, like not a shred.
[28:02]So I thought, okay, so what if you have a woman
[28:08]who has a flawed memory, holes in her memory,
[28:11]why does she have them?
[28:13]What if this guy comes along?
[28:14]What if he's telling the truth?
[28:16]What if he's not?
[28:18]What if there's something else going on?
[28:20]So right now I'm calling it Best Boy.
[28:24]Someone asked me last week,
[28:26]are you gonna tell that guy you're writing this book?
[28:28]I said, you know, I don't know.
[28:31]He's a writer too.
[28:33]Now, the guy is real.
[28:34]The real guy is real.
[28:36]But in the book, I don't know.
[28:37]There might be something different.
[28:38]So I'm working on that.
[28:40]Okay, like a DNA test is in the future.
[28:42]LAUGHTER
[28:45]Anyway, I know you've given advice on doing a writing group
[28:48]and the way that you do with the calendars is brilliant.
[28:51]Do you have any advice for someone just starting out?
[28:54]I guess the lady over here,
[28:56]somebody who's trying to be a writer,
[28:57]what else would you say at the very beginning?
[29:00]I would say pay attention to your time, block out your time
[29:04]in ways that you can really change
[29:07]the way you organize your time.
[29:10]I mean, don't say I'm gonna write from nine to five every day
[29:13]if you can't really write from nine to five every day.
[29:16]We've got Avery over here who has a book coming out
[29:19]and she's a young mom.
[29:20]I don't know how she does it,
[29:21]but she can tell that story.
[29:24]So what I did really starting is I used my trusty devices
[29:30]and I blocked out windows of time.
[29:32]For me, three hours is the minimum.
[29:35]It's hard for me to get my head really into something
[29:38]in under three hours.
[29:39]People in my writing group would sometimes do 10 minutes a day,
[29:43]challenges and stuff.
[29:45]I need at least three hours and I can go about six.
[29:48]So I would block it out on my calendar
[29:51]and just really because I'm very obedient.
[29:53]I would obey my phone.
[29:56]And the other thing I would do is go into a different part
[29:59]of the time.
[30:00]My house. I have a home office that's off my kitchen, but the kitchen is noisy and trafficked
[30:06]and busy. And I have this beautiful conservatory on the other end of the house where we used
[30:12]to have lovely dinners before I took it over. It's a beautiful room that looks out on a river.
[30:17]I write way down there. I have this giant round table. I like paper. I like to do all my research
[30:24]on the computer and often I'll print it out and spread it out. There's something visually
[30:30]for me and people use all kinds of computer organizational techniques for their research.
[30:36]I just respond to seeing it there. My eye will latch onto something and remember something
[30:43]that I don't know I'm looking for. I think that's something about paper that's very helpful.
[30:49]Because I write in a glass room, I don't have the walls that some authors have to stick things on.
[30:56]So I use those metal mesh trolleys that you can use to organize your garage or your pantry.
[31:03]And I just spread papers out there and on the table. So I'm a paper spreader.
[31:11]And are there any books that you've read lately that you're obsessed with or that everybody
[31:15]should read or just authors who you've always admired? So I've been on a Joyce Carolote's
[31:22]binge lately. I came late to the table with Joyce Carolotes and maybe it's a generational thing.
[31:27]She's enough older than I am that I wasn't really keyed into her when I was younger. And
[31:32]her writing is so supremely gorgeous. And she switches genres in a way that I like. I don't like
[31:42]to be bound by one thing or another. I've been, I just read Charming Billy by Alice McDermott,
[31:49]which is one of the most beautiful books I've ever read in my life. And I was late to the table
[31:53]with that. So I'm always reading like you. But those are a couple that really stand out strongly
[32:01]for me now. Well, I have to say, Deborah, I have so much respect for you, not just in your ability
[32:09]right beautifully. Speak beautifully how you help so many other authors with your series at the
[32:14]Ocean House every summer. And all the way you support all these other people. It's really amazing and
[32:19]all the good you do with the restorations. And I don't hear just such a multifaceted, really interesting
[32:24]awesome woman. So thank you for inviting me here. And I hope everybody here has bought a copy from
[32:30]Diane's bookshop bookstore over there of refrode and give it as gifts and everything else. And
[32:37]I just want to say congratulations. Thank you, Zibi. It's always, always a joy to see you. Thank you.
[32:42]Thank you all. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[32:53]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[32:58]Also sign up for my newsletter at Zibi Owens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[33:03]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture
[33:07]Sound for the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this
[33:12]fantastic intro and out trim music.