Transcript
Narrator/Advertiser (0:01)
Experience a membership that backs your business journey with American Express Business Platinum. When you pay with membership rewards points for all or part of an eligible flight booked with a qualifying airline through Amex Travel, you can get 35% of those points back up to 1 million points back per calendar year. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Platinum.
Charlie Gibson (0:37)
Welcome back, bookcasers. It's Charlie Gibson and.
Kate Gibson (0:40)
Oh, and this is Kate Gibson. Sorry, I didn't realize he was going to throw to me quite that fast.
Charlie Gibson (0:44)
Well, I had to wake her up and it was a little jab to the ribs and she came alert right away. We have an old friend this week. J. Ryan Straddle is with us. If you have been listening over the weeks, you have known that J. Ryan Straddle, author of three very successful novels, has been with us as our writer in residence. Why he agreed to be our writer in residence is a mystery that we will never be able to answer. He was sober at the time and we appreciate that.
Kate Gibson (1:11)
Well, we should give them a little bit of a pressy. If you haven't been listening and you really should, if you want to go back to the beginning and listen to the very first episodes with him, you'll see that this writer in residence experience has really been, it could be called the genesis of a novel. You know, we've talked about the fact that this is a masterclass on writing. We ask almost every writer about their process. We found out that there's no one way to write a book. And so we thought it might be fun to contact an old friend of mine from college, himself a very successful novel writer, as dad mentioned right when he was starting a book and talk about his processes, his frustrations, which pieces of paper did he ball up and throw into the trash can. And you know what really got him excited about getting motivated to be finished. And so the last time we talked to him, when we last checked in with our writer in residence, Jay Ryan Struttle, he had just finished the draft and had just taken notes from his agent, Ryan, who's also a friend of his, and they were about to go to market.
Charlie Gibson (2:09)
Yes. And that's a part of the book writing process that we knew nothing about. And I think if you listen, you'll, you'll learn a lot. He is admitted, acknowledged that he had no X number of book deal, didn't have a three book deal or a four book deal or whatever. When his first book came out, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, he sold it as an individual book, and the subsequent two novels he sold as individual books, but we knew nothing about this taking a book to market. And once he had the draft finished, and it's still. It's still a work in progress, but it was sent out to publishers. And he's going to talk you through, as you hear the process that he went through, to find out that his new novel is. Has been sold and it has been, and he's very. He's very excited and we are for him. But the interesting part of all this, as you've been listening, is that this new novel is about. Well, the principal character is modeled on his mom. She obviously, as you've been listening, has been very, very influential in his life. She passed away at the age of 55. She was just getting into the next stage of her life, and he wanted to write a novel about what that next stage could have been.