Melissa Weisner

Laura: [00:00:00] Hi, Melissa, welcome to watch your next podcast.

Melissa Weisner: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Laura: So happy to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Melissa Weisner: Sure. Yeah. So, I am an author of I sort of call it angsty emotional women's fiction, as well as lighthearted romance or rom coms. And I've been writing for about Well, I've been writing for about eight or nine years. I've been published for about four years. And I currently have about seven books out and my eighth book is coming out next month in October.

Laura: There we go. And so you actually start writing the like, quote, unquote, later in life, which is not really later in life. It's just 30s, which is just you're getting started. Talk to us about that journey. Like how did you end up picking this as a hobby? And now it's not a hobby.

Melissa Weisner: Sure. Yeah. I always sort of say, most authors will say, Oh, I've been writing since I was a kid, or I've [00:01:00] wanted to write a book since I was little. And they, it's still in my parents basement. There are, old books that I used to write. That is 100 percent not my story. I, it was never on, my bucket list.

It was never on my plans that I was going to write a book. It was never something that I thought I was really capable of doing. And my career sort of pre writing was all in mental health public health and social work. And so, yeah, I definitely came to writing later in life. It was something that I started to do in 2016.

Mainly because I found myself, it was sort of a weird time. The US presidential election in 2017 was happening. It was, There was a lot of like just sort of negativity. I was on social media way too much like reading about what was happening and watching debates and and I was like, this is not healthy.

So I wanted to find a hobby that I could do while my kids [00:02:00] were asleep basically, like it was hard to like go out and do something cause I had small children, but I thought, they go to bed early and my husband goes to bed early and maybe I could, start writing. And so, yeah, I did.

And it's been quite a journey and that was obviously, I don't know, eight. Nine years ago now and here I

Laura: Yeah, that's amazing. And you have some books. So that's an eighth book, like in it's when like you're actually like producing, like, you have a work product to see after, the starting. So I

Melissa Weisner: Yeah, no, I sort of laugh about it. I always did creative things as a kid like you in my bio It kind of says You know, that I was always doing something creative, but it was always like painting or drawing or something that wasn't writing related. So, so yeah. And I kind of laugh about it because when I first started writing my book, I had this very teeny tiny, like seed of an idea and I just, wrote a.[00:03:00]

And it wasn't even like the beginning of the book. It was like a scene like halfway through that ended up getting cut from the book eventually. But I didn't even tell anybody I was writing for the first year, basically. I didn't even tell my husband, who's very supportive of everything I do.

But I was just like, this is It was so, it felt so unknown and I was like, I have no idea if I'm terrible at this. I have no idea if I'm going to finish this. And yeah, so, so it took me a long time to even tell like the person I'm closest to that I was doing it.

Laura: love this. And so let's talk about whichever here, what is the elevator pitch?

Melissa Weisner: Yeah, so Wish I Were Here is this story of sort of a type A, very ordered and organized math professor who likes everything, keeps her list, likes everything to be exactly so. And she wakes up one day, she's going to her brand new job as a math professor at the local university, wakes up one day and finds out that her identity [00:04:00] has disappeared.

So there's no record of her in any of the government sort of records. Her social security number doesn't work. Her bank accounts have been shut down. She doesn't exist. And so the only person that she can get to help her, or who offers to help her, is her very charismatic, but sort of aggravating, not organized kind of all over the place, doorman named Luca.

But he's very sweet and he has a very big, loving Italian family. And so he sort of enlists his family's help to help, Catherine get her identity back.

Laura: Yes. And so, so thinking about what came first, was it the seed of the idea of like losing your identity and the journey? Or was it the characters? Which one was the first seed that came first in this story?

Melissa Weisner: Yeah, so this one is fun for me because it was actually based very loosely on a true story. I read an article about a woman in France [00:05:00] who, it was a little bit different than obviously the way I portrayed it, but she was through a series of sort of like mishaps in a court case that she was involved in.

She was declared dead. And so, basically they, like according to everybody, like when you're declared dead, there's like a death certificate, your social security or whatever the French version of that is, doesn't work you can't use your bank accounts. And so this actually happened to a real woman and she spent many years trying to get her identity back and basically prove that she was alive and that she existed.

And her, in her case, it was a very tragic story because. Like she couldn't pay her mortgage and lost her house and like lots of really sort of sad things happen to her in this process. But in reading it, I thought what if it wasn't a sad story? What if, this was, an opportunity not to minimize what happened to her, but what if in a fictional story, this was an opportunity for somebody to kind of reexamine their [00:06:00] life.

Like if you don't exist, like, who are you? And you get to sort of choose who you are and what and choose what you do next. And so for me, I thought, what if this was like a half, like a lighthearted romantic story about somebody who has an opportunity we all at some point are like, God, I just wish my life could be different, or I wish, I wish I could change something and, but it's hard to find the catalyst to do that.

And so what if it was forced on you and you just disappeared and got to choose the next thing. So that was sort of where the idea came from.

Laura: That's a really fascinating idea. And I think it's like, it gives you like a playing around as a writer to, Play around with it and double dabble here and take it from this place and then try to see it spin it from a positive space because it's a rom com in some ways you want to have that, like, like, like harder part of it.

It gets you look at the other side of the story. So

Melissa Weisner: exactly. Like in a room, romances always have a happy ending. And I saw this poor woman and thought I'd love to give her a [00:07:00] happy ending. So,

Laura: Yes. So you mentioned you, you've been a reader and you found audiobooks to be kind of like a lifesaver. Talk to us about your journey starting with audiobooks and like how long, like what's your speed like and where do you read them and all the fun stuff. Yeah.

Melissa Weisner: did not ever read one until this year. I guess I come to everything late in life. So, I didn't yeah, I didn't read audiobooks until about a year ago, and it was just, I honestly think we're, a lot of us are in this boat where there's just sort of so much going on in the world, and we're post COVID, and we, a lot of us sort of have, effects from that in terms of like, I spent a couple of years with my kids sitting at my dining table doing schoolwork, and just very distracted for a couple of years.

And so, I've I found it harder and harder to sort of sit down and read a physical book or a Kindle because I get distracted. I pick up my phone, the [00:08:00] way we all do lately. And so, yeah, I started listening to audio books and I love them because I just listen to them everywhere. I take wa I take walks and I put them on.

I drive my kids to school and the minute they get out of the car, I switch over to my phone. My audio book. I'm folding laundry and it's I've gotten through, I've read so many books this year that I wouldn't have read because of audio and so it's, I just absolutely love it and yeah, I'm, I, and I love that you can read quickly, so my speed is like two times 2.

1, sometimes 2. 2, but I love that you can just sort of speed it up and like listen the way that your brain wants to process.

Laura: Yes. I'm yeah. I listen to John Sweet. I was joking because I listen to them before going to bed. Like that's it. And I just put the speaker on. And my mom caught up and she's like, it sounds like chick monks are talking. I was like, I get it. My brain [00:09:00] works. It's like I, I trained my brain to listen to that sweet.

This is.

Melissa Weisner: exactly. Yes. I actually have an app that will, like, if I can get the book on audio, I will, but like if an author sends me a book to blurb or something that's not available yet on audio, I actually have an app that will just read it to me, and it reads it to me in Gwyneth Paltrow's voice. Like, you can choose, like, Snoop Dogg, or, like, random, I don't know, it has all these, like, voice choices.

But I always pick Gwyneth Paltrow because she's sort of, like, soothing and has a very sort of neutral calm. So I listen to, a lot of the books I listen to are Gwyneth Paltrow on Double Speed.

Laura: What's the app name? Do you know what the app name is?

Melissa Weisner: I think it's like speechify or something like that. So yeah, I mean, obviously, if I can get it with the real narrator, then I definitely will. But sometimes, like I said, early books that people send me, like, in a word doc or something, I can't. So then I [00:10:00] rely on Gwyneth to help.

Laura: I love this. All right, so you have some book recommendations. Some book recommendations are about fate, magic, and wishes, which is another area of that magical, magicalism. Some of them may have a lot of magicalism, some of them magical realism, some of them may not, but talk to us about your recommendations.

Melissa Weisner: Yeah, so I've found myself writing magical realism lately. My last book was The Second Chance Year, which was a story of a woman who basically had a terrible year. Everything went wrong. She lost her boyfriend. She lost her apartment. She lost her job. And so she, on New Year's, She meets a fortune teller and makes a wish to go back and do her year over.

And so the story is about her doing the year all over again, knowing all the mistakes she made the first time and getting to kind of do it differently. And so that's where my magical realism writing journey started and then wish I were here in my next book also has some hints of magic as [00:11:00] well. So yeah, I've been reading a lot of magical books and really enjoying them and finding like, it's sort of a sub genre that, that I think is, So much fun.

So yeah, I'll start with The Backtrack by Erin LaRosa. I actually had the privilege of reading that an early copy of that to give a blurb for it. And it's basically about a woman who returns to her childhood home to help her grandmother move and she learns that she can relive her past through an old mixtape, or I think it's a mixed CD, that her teenage love had made for her like a decade earlier.

And then they broke up and went their separate ways and she finds this CD and in listening to it can go back to those times when the relationship kind of fell apart and relive it and see how it could have gone. a different direction. And so it's really fun because there's a lot of nostalgia. If you were somebody that listened to like sort of angsty emo, like early 2000s kind of music it's really, you'll love it.

It's [00:12:00] really fun. It reminded me a lot of like stuff that I listened to in high school and college and really enjoyed like kind of reliving that. And then, of course, I had to go and listen to all the songs that show up in the book again. Yeah, so it's perfect for anyone who's ever looked back on their first love and thought like, what if something had gone differently?

Laura: Yeah, I actually love Aaron's books. And your narrator, like you're looking for the audiobook narrator. She does have like a great narrator for books for their, they're just like fun rom coms or just like a fun, place to just explore and I think this one brings back that early aughts, nostalgia that as millennials we appreciate.

Melissa Weisner: Yes, and it's really coming back now, which is fun too, like the fashion and the, the music and stuff. So yeah, this is a perfect book for like now.

Laura: Yeah, I love the next one, which \ PrimeTime Romance by Kate Robb. This is like Dawson's Creek , if Jen did not die and we just [00:13:00] relive, we actually could update the end of the ending of the show. It's such a fun recommendation. Can you share a little bit more about it?

Yes,

Melissa Weisner: this one is a blurb to everybody sends me their magical books, which is so fun. Keep sending them. I love them. So yeah, I felt the same way. I really love this sort of like take on again, those sort of those TV shows that we want, like we watched back in the early aughts and anyone who's ever sort of rooted for the ending to be differently for the girl to pick a different guy in, in the show like Dawson's Creek this is the one, this is the book for you, because it's basically about somebody who gets to, who accidentally finds herself in her favorite childhood sort of nostalgic television show and is the lead character so she kind of gets to decide how it ends and she's supposed to give the girl the happy ending that she never got in the show but in reality it kind of goes [00:14:00] awry and goes in a much different direction than expected.

Laura: I actually listened to this one and it's a delight. It's just a fun little, time travel, go back to that coastal town where you're just like, upgraded characters from your teenage years and think about them now and how to redo things over and over. And that's it. Any guy who is from the who thinks he's from the rents wrong side of the tracks is the hero.

Melissa Weisner: right, exactly. Sort of, yeah, exactly. The bad boy turns out to be

Laura: Yes.

Melissa Weisner: good guy.

Laura: Yes. And the good guy turns out to be dumb.

Melissa Weisner: Right.

Laura: So, the next one is Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin I think it's a, is it's a Romanticy, like think about witches, small town romances, talk to us a little bit about it, like, why should we read it? Why [00:15:00] should we pick it up?

Melissa Weisner: Yeah, this one, I mean, it's definitely, I mean, Romanticity, I think, is probably a stretch. I think I probably said that, but it's probably a little bit of stretch. It does take place sort of in a very, modern, realistic town. It's a small town. So, again, all three of these books I mentioned have sort of that small town charm.

Hallmark romance kind of feel about them, but this one I think has a little more of the romanticy because there are sort of more magical, mystical creatures. So people are, there are witches and mermen and, other sorts of creatures that live in this town. And, That's just sort of like the normal world that Celestine Martin has built and so that's really fun to like sort of step into this like you're just your imagination just go wild like imagining, walking around this town and just seeing this beautiful Yeah.

Beautiful like array of I don't know if you call them people [00:16:00] But witches and mermen and creatures but it's all just sort of part of the world And so so that's really a lot of fun. Yeah, and her it's actually a series of three. So her third book is coming out I think in like a week.

So this one's a really great recommendation for sort of the halloween You Vibes. And if you're looking for like a series, she has three in the series and the third one just comes out in a week. So if you start now you can make

Laura: All three of them.

Melissa Weisner: Just in time for Halloween.

Laura: Yeah. I love this. And the final one that I wanna talk about is Red String Theory by Lauren Con, Lauren Kung Jessen. I think this is like, I love her writing. It is just this beautiful writing. It's just fun. I read her debut novel and it was just this like. Chinese horoscope and like fate and conversations about it.

And so talk to the red string theory. And I [00:17:00] think you also write yin yang love song too. So what can we

Melissa Weisner: Yeah. I always say, like, if I want a book that is just going to be so comforting, that is going to just, I'm just going to love the characters, be so deeply invested in them, and just feel uplifted when I'm done with it, like, I'm going to grab one of Lauren's books because I think she's so good at writing those sort of comfort books, that are just so warm and lovely and her writing is so beautiful. And so, yeah, Red String Theory I put on my list because it's not completely magical, but it's about fate. And so I think it fits really nicely into the book. This group of books it's just really dreamy and romantic. It's about an artist who is guided by fate, who meets sort of her perfect match.

But unfortunately, he's a scientist who doesn't believe in destiny. And so she, it has sort of that opposites attract conflict, but in a really fresh [00:18:00] way. And it takes place at NASA. And so they, she becomes, she's an artist who does sort of an art installation at NASA. And so he is there to sort of help her.

He's sort of her contact at NASA. So it, it has all these beautiful sort of romantic scenes with them, literally like looking at the stars in all this sort of like magical celestial settings because they're literally like. In that at NASA and so, yeah, and that really gives a whole vibe for the book that it just has that sort of magical feeling.

Even though there's not actually any magic because you just feel that with the setting of stars and, all of that.

Laura: Yeah. Oh, I am very excited for this one. So I'm just going to bump this one up. So thank you for the recommendations. Tell us we can find you online.

Melissa Weisner: Yeah, you can find me at my website, melissawisner. com. And I'm on Instagram, [00:19:00] TikTok, and I think they're all Melissa Wisner author. Is my handle for everywhere on social media, Facebook also. So yeah, but you can find all that on my website.

Laura: Thank you, Melissa, for being in the show.

Melissa Weisner: Oh my gosh. It was so fun. Thank you so much