Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman, TEN THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS FROM OKAY

[1:17]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zippymedia.com and follow me on Instagram zippieowans. Tracy Daubmeyer and Wendy Katzman are co authors of 10,000 Light Years From Okay, a Novel. I recorded this live at the Zippy's Bookshop pop up at the Minnie Rose boutique in New York. Tracy Dobmeyer and Wendy Katzman have been great friends for over twenty five years. Their debut novel, Girls with Bright Futures, was a suspenseful journey into the cutthroat world of college admissions, which earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and was named a book club winner by Real Simple and an Apple Best Book. Tracy holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a JD from UC Berkeley. She worked in biotechnology, law, and nonprofit leadership. Wendy was a nationally ranked youth tennis player and went on to play at the University of Michigan where she earned her undergraduate degree, followed by a career in medical marketing. Tracy and Wendy both live in Seattle with their husbands. They enjoy sports, reading, obviously, civic engagement, and spending time with their amazing families and friends. You can often find them together brainstorming and walking their dogs. Welcome.

[3:04]Tracy Dobmeier: Congratulations. So excited to have both of you here. Tracy and Wendy. Wow. So exciting. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. We are so excited to be here. This is really in New York. Oh. Yeah. Well, you guys know everybody. These are, like, the most popular people. You know, you can, like, meet someone, you're like, oh, you have a thousand friends. So as evidenced by this series today. Okay. 10,000 light years from today. Please tell everybody here who probably knows but everybody listening who might not what it's about. Right. So, 10,000 Light Years from Okay is about a young,

[3:38]Wendy Katzman: grieving, widowed writer who starts to fear that what she writes comes true after her husband dies in a way that mirrors a plot line from her debut novel. So it has some

[3:50]Tracy Dobmeier: heavier themes like grief and family and connection and resilience, but also sprinkled in with romance and whimsy and also explores, like, how coincidence and superstition impact our lives. The main takeaway is it's not worth going round. Do round. Not Yes. Do not I'm

[4:13]Wendy Katzman: gonna start because sadly Yes. Sam. That is how Sam dies.

[4:17]Tracy Dobmeier: Yes. I'm going on a run right after he has gotten some really great news actually. Yes. That's not a spoiler. No. That's why. Yeah. It's Because, well, why don't you describe it? Yeah. Yeah. So,

[4:31]Wendy Katzman: basically, they're young, kind of very, like, happily married couple. He's a tennis player on the pro tour, and she is a debut author and kind of living her they're living their best lives. And then she discovers she's pregnant. And on the day that she's finally able to tell him because he's come home from tour, he they go to the doctor together. They have this moment. And then he go into his family home gym to work out and do his normal workout. But he, for some reason, skips his normal workout and goes out for a run and gets hit by a car. And Thea is just completely plagued by, like, why would he have varied from his, like, normal regimen? And it's a question that really kind of that kinda picks at her throughout the next five years, and that's also gonna kinda feeds into her grief syndrome and sort of how things develop in the book. It's very unexpected.

[5:27]Tracy Dobmeier: But do you have Yes. Yes. We'll just leave it at that. Yes. I do. Yeah. Read it to find out. Mhmm. And by the way, I started reading my husband, Pat Aloucir, is former tennis player. I have a bookstore on the West Side Of LA and the first page is like, this tennis player and the and the wife and the top person. What's funny about me? We have a tennis player here too. Yeah. Oh, so I was a nationally ranked junior and I played college tennis at the University of Michigan. So I was a tennis player and then I became a tennis parent. So I raised a kid who was a college all American. I saw both the tennis player and the tennis parent perspective, which is and Tracy also played tennis. She played tennis in high But no. We knew tennis, and that was part of why we ended up including it. Like, we were looking tennis we were looking for something where the parents could be overinvested in both Sam's career but then pivot immediately to their granddaughter. Because like if Sam had been an accountant and then they pivoted towards like Lucy's times tables, like, not very interesting. So tennis really lent itself to that. And then it also became really plausible that they would be living in the guesthouse of Sam's parents. And guesthouse figures very prominently as a theme,

[6:49]Wendy Katzman: a plot device throughout the story.

[6:52]Tracy Dobmeier: Yes. Okay. So and your last book was about college admissions. Did your son did your if your son is it a tennis player? Did your son's tennis play into that? Was that part of your last book? It actually did not. No. Like, the premise of that book was that so it's college admissions thriller and that there was one spot at Stanford, and these three families all had a daughter that wanted to go to Stanford. Because the athletes Exactly. In all of the spots already. So there was only one left for everyone else. So that's yep. That was maybe how it played out. Yeah. So are you getting your ideas from like deepest, darkest fears?

[7:32]Wendy Katzman: Well, it's actually kind of so the the the idea for this story came out of a series of experiences where No. Yeah. I mean, I'll start with this one. So Yeah. So the way we write as partners We can back up. How did you she start writing? Let me Okay.

[7:49]Tracy Dobmeier: Each other, start writing together. Okay. Okay. Well, so we'll back up. Yeah. So we've been friends for twenty five years. We met actually through my husband and we all ended up living Nobody's from Seattle. We all ended up in Seattle, raising our families together. And during that time, had like business ideas and book ideas, but they never went anywhere. And we did a lot of community volunteering together. Like, we knew we worked really well together. So we wanted to do something. But it wasn't until both of our families went through a health crisis and everybody was fine that it gave us our idea. So the idea was this non fiction book about female friendship during times of crisis. Right. So we We kind of

[8:34]Wendy Katzman: We Well pushed on that idea a bit. We wanted to do it with some humor and some, you know, some some amount of levity and just kind of make it interesting and and also deep. And as we were kind of working through this idea, there was this one day we were sitting at my kitchen island. And we've been working on it for a while, I just I don't know what came over me that day, but I just looked at Wendy and I said, what if we just made the whole thing up? What if we, like, tried to write a novel? And Wendy Wendy looked at me and she kind of thought for a second and then she did her, like, gamer, like, sure. Why not? And so we then literally googled how do you write a novel because neither of us have any experience. I was a lawyer. She was a marketing executive. We were just like, had no idea what we were doing. Actually, both of those skill sets are hugely important when you release the book. Yes. That was true. Yes. It has come in handy. Yes. But not for the actual Not for the writing. So that's how you teamed up. And then fast forward now. So then you wrote that book? Yes. They wrote the first book. So we wrote the first book because

[9:32]Tracy Dobmeier: part of what was happening is we were going through college admissions and when this health crisis happened. And so there was, like, interesting juxtaposition between, like, cognition sometimes feels like life and death and we were experiencing real life and death. And so it just gave us this idea. But the way we write is we have to plot everything. We can't be pantsers because there are two of us. We have to know where everything starts, where everything ends. And so we're right. So we we have an agent already because we've written a manuscript that got us an agent. Didn't sell. Bravo. That's not a one. Okay. Alright. And she was like, go write something else. So here, we're writing something else. We are almost through what we've plotted. We're almost through writing it. It's March 2019. And all of a sudden, our phones start blowing up with Operation Varsity Blues. And we felt the headlines were ripped from our manuscript. And

[10:25]Wendy Katzman: then it happened again. So shortly after that, the next book that we tried to write was a book about youth sports. And the major inciting incident in that manuscript was this very sudden and very unusual medical emergency on the soccer field. And we finished the manuscript, sent it off to our agent, and then we're reading the news. And lo and behold, this exact same emergency had happened on the field for to a European soccer player. So we sent our agent the the news article, and she said to us she said, wow. You two are the seers of upmarket fiction. And we thought, what if we were? You know? Like, wouldn't that be interest an interesting idea for for a premise for a novel? And we had already kind of we are superstitious on many levels, and we'd already kind of acknowledged that there were certain things that we would never write about to, like, not putting that bad juju out into the universe. So we kind of had like a a sense of how we wanted to to work this story. And so we basically just created the character of Thea to kind of answer this question. So this is life becoming art. Yes. Uh-huh. Yes. Yep. When Thea is mourning the loss of not just her husband, which is obviously so tragic, but just the entire life that they had laid out for them and every all of those expectations,

[11:44]Tracy Dobmeier: their child and just so much, and she's going through it. She's just a mess, obviously. Talk a little bit about how the two of you wrote through that and where all that knowledge and sort of in-depth thoughts and feelings about grief comes from. Mhmm. Yeah. So,

[12:02]Wendy Katzman: I mean, no one gets out of this, you know, life without some personal loss, right? And so we've definitely had our share. And so there are a lot of, you know, kind of personal kind of emotions and things that you try and work through. And I lost my mom when I was pregnant with my oldest And so, like, that was I spent, you know, sort of five years in what I would consider almost like a delayed grief process. So definitely kind of like brought a lot of that emotion into the story and tried to look at this idea of grief and how people do it so differently. And there's no one right way. And so we really try and we created, you know, Thea had like a sort of a complex grief issue. And then that was really kind of juxtaposed by her mother in law's sort of more avoidant, like sort of tendencies. And so they really come into conflict a lot over this like kind of divergent way of dealing with grief for the same person, actually. So we tried to really just be mindful all the way through of, like, showing that there are so many different ways that people can move forward in life and that we kinda you kinda need to have, like, grace towards yourself and towards your loved ones and and just kind of, like, I don't know. Well, there are ideas. Like, there's just no one right way to agree and that grace isn't linear.

[13:29]Tracy Dobmeier: And it was really important to us to kind of demonstrate that. Yeah. I'm so sorry for your class. Thank you. It's true. I mean, I'm sure everybody in the town has had something Right. Happen. But I think when you read about it in fiction, it opens up new ways to process and ways to feel less alone, which Sylvia did beautifully. Thank you. Also, this notion of rebuilding. Right? Because the we watch her as time goes by, she makes new connections and figures out what to do. There's all sorts of bookish references in here too, which was, like, really fun. And by the way, we have four amazing authors speaking around. Just have to call you out. Susan. But Fiona Davis and Linda Leugman, Susie Susan Orman, Schnell, and and Amy Hovall are all here in the Golf and Alley podcast. They're amazing. Anyway, the six of you could have, like, a very long in-depth conversation about writing itself, but there was so much in here about what the agent wants and could you use this material and she didn't wanna publish another book because what if that were to jinx something and yet it was really good and then she anyway, talk a little bit about the meta writing in writing of the novel. I mean, I don't think we set out to be like yellow face where we are this but it was just reflective of our experience being new writers and, like, what our first publishing experience was like and hooking a little bit of fun in the whole experience. It just maybe, like, pulling back the veil for people who aren't writers. Like, I mean, that's part of the fun of, like, getting to learn about a new world that you know nothing about by reading fiction. So we had a really good time being. That is relatively newbies to publishing. Uh-huh. I think. What did what were you most surprised about? Like, what should everybody know who's not at this industry? Like, oh, yeah. That's funny. We should put that in or just in general. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

[15:20]Zibby Owens: Summer always makes me rethink what I'm reaching for every day. Lighter fabrics, better materials, pieces that just feel good the moment you put them on and look effortless. That's why I keep coming back to Quince. They focus on high quality essentials. Think breathable linen, soft organic cotton, washable silk, but without the luxury markup. It's that rare balance where everything feels elevated but still easy. Quince has beautiful everyday pieces like 100% European linen pants, dresses, and tops with styles starting at $32. Their denim is soft and easy to wear. I wear my jean jacket all the time. And their organic cotton sweaters are perfect for layering on cool summer nights. Everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. And it's not just clothing. Quince has really become a destination for elevated essentials across home, kitchen, bedding, and beyond, making it easy to bring a more premium feel into everyday life. In addition to my jean jacket, I recently got a white tank top dress with a beautiful cotton skirt that is absolutely gorgeous, and I can't wait for it to be warm enough so I can wear it every day, but it has been a cool spring. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com/zippy for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/zippy for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Quince.com/zippy.

[16:58]Tracy Dobmeier: Let's see. I'm not sure it's funny. Like, the Yeah. The, like, the rejection. Yes. There's a lot of rejection. The rejection. Like, I think that's one of the hardest things.

[17:08]Wendy Katzman: Mean, one thing I guess we could talk about is the Thea has a moment where she's frustrated because she her publisher is asking her to do all of this work to publicize and promote her own novel. And she's kinda like, I already wrote the thing. Like, can't someone else do that for me? And it's, I think, something that a lot of authors have felt over time, especially during the social media era. And I think the publishers have kind of started pulling back a bit on promotion in general and kind of like are focusing on a small number of titles. And so it leaves authors to feel like they have to do a little bit more to fill in the void. And some of us are talented at social media. Some of us are not so So

[17:54]Tracy Dobmeier: it's a challenge for people. It's a challenge where we we try. Yes. Wendy Wendy does a great job. But they didn't. When I was doing marketing, they hadn't invented social media, so it was all new. Yes. So what have the two of you learned about each other? Wow. Let's see. What have we learned about each mean, I knew you were a great cook. So I'm not sure we learned that. So we have this deal. So we work at Tracy's house. So I drive and she makes lunch every day. So I mean, you've got the easy end of that deal. Oh, for sure. I think so. I don't think so. But she doesn't like to

[18:30]Wendy Katzman: drive. Right. So I'm so happy to just stay in my house and have Wendy come to me and, you know, I just have to I do, but it's, you know, she's pretty easy. She's a little picky.

[18:40]Tracy Dobmeier: Thought, you know, it narrows the universe of things I can cook, which makes easier, nerve decisions. So But let's see. I think I learned will. Okay. I have another one for you. Like she does okay. Two of my favorite words in the English language when they come out of her mouth are what if. So, like, she'll wake up in the middle of the night, like, not the best sleeper. And with these, like, at first blush seemed like harebrained ideas, but I'll get to her house and I'm barely in the door and she's like, what if? And, like, what if we made the whole thing up? But it's just there's always these what ifs, but what they're amazing because they just keep pushing us to be better. Like, instead of just accepting whatever we've come up with, like, her mind is always still working, and she just comes up with these incredible ideas.

[19:28]Wendy Katzman: So what if? Well and I guess playing off of that, the ideas would never come to anything. They would never amount to anything without Wendy because she's got this incredible, like, kind of big picture sense. Like, she's like a puzzle maven, you know. So I feel like she can she could take any, like, amount of, like, craziness coming out of my brain and and sort of distill it down into like, and help it kind of fit in the story that we're trying to work on. So I think together, we make such a great team. And I think we knew that going into it, but it's just been confirmed over and over again. And and also just the fact that, like, one of our one of our rules together is that we check our egos at the door. And we really almost never fight. I mean, people ask us all the time. They're like, you guys must have arguments. Right? And we really don't. We just we have this, like, rule that we're gonna try and get to, like, an all caps yes on everything that we do. And there's no compromising because compromising kinda makes things just kind of all flat. But we really try and get to, like, the thing we're super excited about with exclamation points and, you know, and all that. And so and the only way to do that is for each of us to kind of come into it every day. And we we kill our babies. We kill our I mean, not our actual babies, but, you know, we kill, you know, like, if if Wendy's written something and I'm like, I don't think that's quite right, I just tell her and she does the same to me. And we don't like, my gosh, really hurt on that, you know, and it's mine and I feel really attached to it. We're just like, okay. Tell me why and then we just move on.

[20:58]Tracy Dobmeier: But who is doing the actual writing? You're sitting there, but you divide up our Okay. Head to Well, here's how we do it. So our process, we have a three part process. So as I said, we do all the plotting. So we sit there together plotting everything. And what if? What if? And coming up with characters. And we end up with about a 70 page outline. I mean, book was about 70 pages. And it's got timelines and character stuff and every single scene and where it starts, where it ends, and who's in it, what's the conflict. And then we divide up the chapters. And it's really whoever wants to write whichever one. There's no rhyme or reason. But we stay very close together in the manuscript. So if we run into a problem and as you finish, it goes into the master document and then we edit it all together.

[21:54]Wendy Katzman: Oh, Oh, so fun.

[21:58]Tracy Dobmeier: But it's so fun. We love it.

[22:01]Wendy Katzman: And are you working on a new project? We are. Yes, we are. So the youth sports manuscript that I mentioned earlier, we're kind of starting to work on a first page one rewrite of that because we really feel like we've grown a lot. I mean, we started this not knowing how to write at all. And over every time we write something, we feel like we get a little bit better. And so now we're kind of revisiting that that manuscript and we feel like we still have something that we really wanna say on that. So but we think we can say it a lot better, and then we did with that draft. So we're kind of working on that, and then we have another fun idea that we're exploring around, like, an unlikely friendship. So, hopefully, we'll we'll be back here.

[22:41]Tracy Dobmeier: So when you when people are browsing, like, they come into the store, there are lots of books. Why would why this book? Sell sell the customer the box. I'll turn to the marketer. I'm checking out. Yeah. I mean, I think this book offers something there's stuff in for everybody. As I said at the beginning, there are these heavier themes of grief and connection and resilience and how we make our way in the world. But there's also elements of whimsy and romance. We love so there's a lot of coincidence in there. Because of the things that have happened to us and what led us to write this, we think a lot about coincidence. And it really gets you thinking, how, like, how do you explain these things? And we've probably all had things like this in our life where there have been these strange coincidences. And, like, how does the world work? Is it random? Is there an invisible hand? And so I just think there's a lot in here to think about but to also talk with other people about and to just think about how life works and how we move forward and how we connect with people. And I think right now, people want connection. We're seeing that with everything that's happening in the world. I think this book, like, offers connection and and thoughts about making those connections. I have something. I know you said it wasn't very fine. I actually thought the prize for writing quite funny. Okay. I'll tell you. Yeah. It's good. I appreciate that. Do you when you were writing or when you focus on your next book, are you like, oh, if only I could make it like this book. This would be my ideal. Like, only we could you know, like, what who what folks do you love so much that you wish you could We could be them. Wish we could have written.

[24:31]Wendy Katzman: Or that you just love and then inspire. Yeah. I'm trying to think I mean, I guess, I can take you back to the books that when we were trying to learn how to write, there were a few books that we really dissected, like, you know, along with reading craft books and all of that. But there were a few books that we were just like, how did they do that? Like, it just seemed really just remarkable. And one of those was a book by Noah Hawley called Before the Fall. And we just thought it was a fantastic structure and the hero's journey was super interesting and it was just The song about the earphone. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And so many voices and everything. And then another one just mostly for pacing, think, primarily was the Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code. We just were like, you know, how does he keep turning the pages like that? You just and you just like, these little bites bite sized chapters and everything. So we studied that one a lot. And then what was that? Oh, Big Little Lies. Right. Yeah. Another one that we just like the way like the way that kind this kind of domestic kind of mystery unfolded and the way that she kinda handled different voices. I mean, there are a million amazing books. I I feel like every book I read, I'm like, I wish I'd written that. Yeah. There are so many great books, but those were just three examples of ones that we actually did study

[25:47]Tracy Dobmeier: because we felt like that's something really interesting to teach us. My daughter just read Finchy Code at school and I am so old. Yeah. Guess. I know. Right? I remember like, I mean, I was Yeah. Weekend I read the whole thing every week. Yeah. Right. Same. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Advice do you have for aspiring authors? Okay. Let's talk about mindset. Yes. Let's talk about mindset. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So our favorite craft book is actually not a craft book at all. So there is a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck that we read as a parenting book when we were much younger parents. And so the gist of it is that you want to have a growth mindset, which is about effort and attitude and working hard to recognize your potential versus having a fixed mindset where talent is in a finite supply. And when we started this journey for maybe the first nine months, we didn't really tell anybody what we were doing because we were worried. Like, what if we were bad at this? What if we failed? And we had this like moment one day, recalling this book and realizing like we were raising these kids and we're modeling a fixed mindset. And that was just this moment for us. And we realized we needed to embrace this growth mindset and do a better job modeling. And so after that, those first nine months, we had a lot of conversations like, Should we write a book? Can we do this? And after that, we wasting time having those conversations and we just committed ourselves to trying. So making an effort, putting your butt in your seat, controlling the things you can control, seeing all that rejection and feedback as learning opportunities and just doing our best every day. And we can't control whether we get a publishing deal or how many books we sell. We can just control what we do every day. So I would say mindset. Maybe it's not a coincidence that it took nine months. No,

[28:09]Wendy Katzman: I just I think just echoing everything Wendy said, I think you just in this business, you have to have courage to put yourself out there and it's not always easy. I think, you know, it can be very vulnerable and excruciating, but I think it's better to try and fail than to, you know, not try. And so I think that's that's maybe what I would say. Yep. Mhmm. Last question. What is your best tennis stroke?

[28:36]Tracy Dobmeier: Oh, down the line backhand. Oh. Yeah. Alright. Thank you both so much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank

[28:47]Zibby Owens: you for listening to Totally Booked with Sibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.