Steve Thomas: Alyssa Wees, welcome to the podcast.
Alyssa Wees: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Steve Thomas: So we’re going to talk mostly about your writing and your book and things like that. But before we get into that, since you do work in a library, and this is mostly a library focused podcast, how did you get started working in libraries in the first place?
Alyssa Wees: I’ve always been a lover of the library. In college, I worked a little bit in my university library, then I ended up graduating and going to get my MFA in writing instead of doing a master’s in library science which was fine too, but I eventually made my way back to libraries when I just I saw a job opening and I was like, Hey, this could be something! So I got the job and yeah, nine years later I’m still in youth services, and I still love it.
Steve Thomas: So what kind of stuff do you do? Do you do programs, outreach, that stuff like that?
Alyssa Wees: Well, I kind of do a little bit of everything. Programming definitely is my favorite thing. I do story times, which is probably my very favorite thing. I actually about a year ago I left my current library, which was awesome, and I moved to my hometown library, which is just like extra special for me because I went to that library as a kid with my mom to storytime. And now I’m the storytime lady there, or one of the Storytime ladies there, so it’s just like really special. I love that. I do all different kinds of programs, Graphic Novel Club, I just came off of doing a Moana sing along, which was very fun. So. Yeah, a little of everything. I do some preschool outreach as well, and a lot of reference.
Steve Thomas: Do you ever get to use the fact that you’ve written books or anything like that? Like, do the kids know? Oh, look, she actually has books. I mean, I know the books that you write are not necessarily appropriate for preschoolers to read. There’s nothing explicit in the books, but they’re not going to be interested in Gothic romance and stuff.
Alyssa Wees: No, yeah, I don’t think the toddlers will be there for that. But no, I mean, they really don’t. The toddlers keep me humble. They don’t care that I’ve written a book. They just care that I’m, you know, doing some rhymes with them. Some people will come in, like my coworkers are really good because I tend to get really shy about the fact that I wrote books and that, hey, you can go check them out in this library. So my coworkers are really good about like telling people, which is really nice and sometimes embarrassing, but I always appreciate it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, you don’t always have your own book sitting out there as look, it’s my staff pick. Yes, please check this out.
Alyssa Wees: Right. Yes. Yeah, and neither of my books are in because we only go up to 8th grade in Youth Services. So, I mean, I guess, an 8th grader could check out The Waking Forest. That’d be fun, but it’s shelved in young adult, which is in the adult department, but my coworkers in Adult Services are also really good about promoting it too. So that’s yeah, they’re very sweet.
Steve Thomas: So obviously, probably since you went to the library a lot, you were a big reader, and since you’re a writer, I assume you were probably a big reader growing up. Is there any authors in particular that you feel like you read growing up that… not that you’re trying to match their style, but that you feel like you learned from or kind of imprinted on you as a writer, like when you’re writing, you feel like, Ooh, this is kind of like this or something?
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, I think maybe not so much in style, but one of my all-time favorites was Gail Carson Levine, who wrote Elle Enchanted. That was my favorite book. And it still is. I read it like once a year. But I loved all of her books. And so I feel like, because I really love fairy tales and I love writing fairy tales now for adults. So I feel like she really set me on that path with her books and being like, Oh, you can kind of remix it or put a new spin on it. I was also a Narnia kid. I was really into the Chronicles of Narnia. That kind of like fantasy, the portal fantasy which I got a little bit of in The Waking Forest. I love kind of blending real world and fantasy. So yeah, those are probably two of my favorites, but I read a lot, like I read everything. You know, and but fantasy was always my favorite for sure. And still is.
Steve Thomas: What are some of the earliest stories you remember writing before you were like, I’m going to be a writer when I grow up, but just sort of when you were crafting stories as a kid?
Alyssa Wees: I wrote a lot of fan fiction about my Beanie Babies. That was like my big thing because I’m a 90s kid. So I had recurring characters that were all like, Spot the Snow Leopard or whatever. So that’s kind of how I got my start was writing about them. I also started my own little newspaper at one point too that I would give to my grandma, and it would just be like little articles about me and my cousins and I still have copies of those and they’re just kind of funny to look back on. So I don’t know. I guess I could have gone the journalism route too, but I definitely am drawn to stories and to fiction. So yeah, that was probably my earliest writing but then, you know, as a teenager, I was caught up in that Twilight craze, and I remember me and my friends writing fanfiction of that and things like that. Those were definitely some of my earliest very bad stories.
Steve Thomas: Well, the Beanie Babies things you could bring back is like that, Erin Hunter, that whole series of all the animals, you could just bring those stories back and just update them.
Alyssa Wees: Oh my God. You know what? It’s really funny. I actually went to talk to a preschool class about writing and not connected to the library at all, it was just the teacher who reached out and was like, I want my kids to talk to a writer. And I was like, alright, so I actually brought one of my Beanie Baby stories with me to show them like this was my early story and they were so into it! I was like, maybe there’s something here!
Steve Thomas: You need to have your agent or whatever, find out who has the license for Beanie Babies and see if you can get in there.
Alyssa Wees: Oh my gosh. This is, yeah, we’re getting the ideas going here. I like this.
Steve Thomas: If it happens, I’ll expect my royalty or something.
Alyssa Wees: Yes. Of course.
Steve Thomas: The first book you had published as you mentioned before, The Waking Forest I was curious, number one, how long it took you to sell it to a publisher once you’d finished it, and then tell me how you felt when you did sell it to a publisher.
Alyssa Wees: Well that one took a while, I will say. So the journey that you see for a writer is not always what, there’s a lot of things that happen behind the scenes. So, The Waking Forest was not the first book I actually tried to get published. I had a book before that, which I got my agent, you know I signed my agent with that book. And it was out with publishers for a while and I didn’t get anything, which is fine. It was very sad at the time, but then I was working on The Waking Forest. So we sent that out and it probably took, I don’t even remember… anything pre COVID is sort of blurry to me. It probably took like, I want to say, probably a little less than a year. But it was out there for a while, but when I finally got that yes from the editor, it was just like. I mean, the best feeling. So it was a long time coming, and I think it’s interesting too that then that first book that I wrote that got shelved kind of became the basis for my next book, Nocturne, because that one was also about dancers. It’s kind of completely different, but in hindsight, I’m glad that that book didn’t get published because then Nocturne could kind of come out of that.
Steve Thomas: So, Waking Forest, can you tell our listeners a little bit about what that book is about?
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, so that one is my young adult book, and it is about this girl who has four sisters and two loving parents, and everything seems fine until she starts having these visions of a forest in her backyard that vanishes when she tries to go near it, and she also has these weird nightmares. Then there’s another storyline about a witch in the woods that grants wishes to children in their dreams. And it’s kind of about these two storylines colliding.
Steve Thomas: Is that one clearly a fantasy all the way through? Like, I mean, when you start it off, you can tell you’re in like a fairytale…?
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, it’s both, I would say. The character’s name is Rhea, she lives in the real world like our world, and then the witch is kind of in a fantasy world. That’s where that portal fantasy comes in where they do intertwine eventually to become like pure fantasy.
Steve Thomas: When I was reading Nocturne, I remember I was about five, six chapters in, and I had to flip back to the cover and the back and go, I thought this was a dark fantasy, but this is like just about this ballet dancer. What is the fantasy part? And then, I mean, pretty soon after that, you get into that part of it. But it’s very solidly set in Depression era Chicago. I mean, you’re very much set in the real world, and then there’s fantasy elements in it. And it gets more fantasy as it goes along there. But for the first part of it, I mean, you’re really just kind of deep into this girl’s life and how she’s dealt with the poor hand that she’s been dealt in that period. Had you grown up in the Chicago area? How did you do the research to kind of get that feel for that era of Chicago?
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, so I did grow up in the suburbs of Chicago. My mom’s side of the family is from the north side, and so that’s kind of the inspiration for the setting as well as, you know, I wanted to write this story about dancers, and I kind of knew I wanted to be it to be historical and I was doing a separate research project about just my family history and so that led me to this era. The character, Grace, she would’ve been a little bit older than my grandma, but it’s kind of based on my grandma’s life, just that setting. She was not a dancer or anything like that, but you know, like just that era and the Italian-American immigrant. So all that was really inspired by my own personal family history.
Steve Thomas: And your grandma didn’t have any dark mysterious patrons or anything dealing in her life.
Alyssa Wees: You know, not that I know of.
Steve Thomas: There you go. So that could be the secret.
Alyssa Wees: Maybe I gotta dig deeper.
Steve Thomas: What is it that you like about ballet, or maybe even, I guess, love about ballet, that you wanted to write a book set in that world?
Alyssa Wees: I did ballet starting when I was four years old and then all the way through college, really. I was, like, all in, especially in high school. I danced six or seven days a week and it was just so intense; it was like my whole life which was great. I always knew, like, I have to write about this, and I want to but it did really take me a long time to find my way there because like you’re saying with Nocturne, where it starts off really grounded in reality, but then it goes into fantasy, which is kind of what I love about ballet. It is so fantastical, and it lends itself so well to fairy tales that this felt like the right avenue for this story to bring in all the glamour, and just the ballets themselves are so, like… My favorite ballet is Giselle, and it’s about ghosts, basically, and it’s just very ethereal which is kind of what I wanted to bring to Grace’s life herself.
You know, one of the reasons I got into ballet was to wear a tutu, right? So I love the costumes. I got to wear many tutus. So I just, yeah, I wanted to write about all that and really immerse the reader in the story.
Steve Thomas: I assume a lot of the feelings that she’s having while she’s dancing is drawn from personal experience of just how you feel when you’re on the stage and you can feel the audience there and you can just feel yourself getting drawn into the dance as you’re doing it and all that.
Alyssa Wees: Yes, yes, exactly. All of that, yeah, was really like my own feeling and even the feeling of like, once you get the big role that you wanted or whatever, that feeling of like, well, now what or sometimes there is like a little bit of an elusive, like, I want something more out of this, because there’s always something to strive for. I wanted to write that into Grace’s character as well.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, well, I’m sure you had feelings like some of the other characters who are jealous of the person who gets the main role and it’s like, Oh, yeah, I’m a better dancer than them what they get the role and all this kind of stuff.
Alyssa Wees: Yes, it’s a lot of emotions, especially when you’re a teenage girl. I mean, Grace is 20 in the book, but she’s still not quite out of that where it’s just like so many emotions and you’re with so many people and it’s really you are competing against them and it can be really tough.
Steve Thomas: The story is told through Grace’s point of view. Is there, I don’t even know how you go through the process of deciding this, but was there a point when you decided, yes, this has to be told in first person, like where you were like, okay, this is how this has to go, or you’re going to tell it in third person, where you’re sort of inside of her head of how do you go through the process of deciding how you want to do that? Or is it just a feeling?
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, yeah, that’s interesting. I guess when I really first started writing the earliest draft of this, I had a scene that I had written, and it was in third person. So I’m really not sure when I made the switch to first except that, yeah, you just kind of feel it for the story, that this one just felt like it needed to be told from her point of view. Yeah, I don’t really have a concrete answer. Just a feeling.
Steve Thomas: There’s obviously limitations to all different types because if you’re doing the third person, then all of a sudden, it’s like, well, then you can know the thoughts of the dark, mysterious guy and he’s not as dark as mysterious, but if you’re only seeing it from her point of view, you’re only seeing this person sort of shadowy going in and out. But if you’re popping around different characters, and they’re seeing all this stuff that it’s just different.
Alyssa Wees: Exactly. Yeah. What I really wanted to try with this story, too, was that the reader is in the exact same place as Grace is, because they’re each getting the same amount of information at the same time, so you’re really, as the reader, also being pulled in with her to this mysterious world, which I think wouldn’t have worked in a different point of view.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I like getting inside the character, following along with the characters again, whether it’s first person or not just following along with them.
Are you an outliner? Or are you just a, type the words on the page or write the words down and then come back later and structuralize it.
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, I’m definitely not an outliner. When I try to do that, I get bored with the story almost, like I already thought of the whole thing. Sometimes, I just kind of start something and hope I’ll find it along the way. It’s kind of my method. I think there comes a point with that where like halfway through I kind of really have to decide Okay, where is this going? You know, like I had even when I started, I knew where Grace would end up or at least the tone that I wanted, I guess, because when I first started, I didn’t actually have an idea of who the patron was gonna be like and so then halfway through when I was like, Oh, you know, he’s… spoiler, I don’t want to say it, then that’s when the rest of the story really formed for me in my mind where I’m like, Oh, okay, this is the story I’m telling.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, as long as the final product comes out well, I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to write.
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, I agree, and yeah, I just find that… you know, outlines are good too, and I have used them, but I just like to figure it out and surprise myself along the way and just kind of play. I kind of think of it as like playing around.
I love editing, like going back or, you know, revising, I don’t know, like, drafting is good, too, but I love when I have something that I can, like, play around with and just rip it apart and put it back together. I really enjoy that part of it.
Steve Thomas: The blank page is not quite as much fun.
Alyssa Wees: No, no, definitely not.
Steve Thomas: The two books you have published have both been dark fantasy, I guess is the subgenre of fantasy? What appeals to you about that genre? What is it that draws you to it, do you think?
Alyssa Wees: I think it’s the emotions of it. I like a good rom com, reading them, but I feel like I don’t know. I mean, never say never, but I feel like that’s not something I could write just because, I don’t know, I just always tend to go darker. I think that’s probably comes from my love of fairy tales and, like, there’s the Disney version, which I love. I mean, I just had a Moana Day, like, I love it, but I also really love the darker side to it, and I just like to explore that, and it’s kind of what I like to read too for the most part. I feel like there’s a little bit more freedom to kind of explore different themes and topics in dark fantasy that you don’t get with something lighter.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I mean, there’s the difference between the nice, cute Little Mermaid where everything’s nice and she gets married at the end, and then the one where she dies at the end of the original.
Alyssa Wees: She turns into seafoam, and…
Steve Thomas: Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot more death and murder and happening in original fairy tales.
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, I’m like, what does that say about me that I like that? I don’t know.
Steve Thomas: Well, speaking of that, is there a genre that you really love, like rom coms or something, but that you don’t think you would ever write because it doesn’t fit, just your writing is not the right fit for that?
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, I guess probably, oh my gosh, I love a good historical mystery. Like, I’m thinking of, like, Deanna Raybourn or there’s the Lady Sherlock series that I really love something like that, like, they can get kind of dark, you know, and there’s murder and stuff, but they are also a little bit light in tone, there’s romance in there. I love that, I don’t know if I could ever write it just cause I always tend to veer too dark for that, but, again, you never know.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, but it would be more of a challenge.
Alyssa Wees: It would. Yes. Yeah. And especially, I think, too, the big one that sticks out to me is realistic fiction. That I feel like I can safely say I’ll probably never write just because I just don’t enjoy it as much.
Steve Thomas: You’re not going to write the stuff that goes on the beach reads?
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, not so much.
Steve Thomas: A lot of times, if you ever talk to fans, they’re of course going to ask you what’s coming next. Do you know what your next book is going to be yet?
Alyssa Wees: I do. So I do have another book right now. It’s up for April 30th of next year. And it is called We Shall Be Monsters. And again, another dark fantasy.
Steve Thomas: It’s a historical romance!
Alyssa Wees: Not this time. Maybe the next book. But yeah, this one’s all about like, just like the title says, monsters, a creepy forest. It’s kind of like The Waking Forest in that way like with the vibes totally different story though. It’s about like, a mother and a daughter and their relationship and these creatures in this forest that’s by their house. So I’m really excited about that one.
Steve Thomas: Do you use specific fairy tales as jumping off points or do you just kind of use it as background kind of feel, because in Nocturne especially, there’s a little Beauty and the Beast-ish in there but don’t go into it reading it thinking it’s going to be the Beauty and the Beast story, it’s not that, but there’s some in there certainly.
Alyssa Wees: Yeah, it definitely was an influence, but yeah, I don’t consider it a true retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Like, The Waking Forest, a little bit Sleeping Beauty. But I never thought to myself, I’m writing a Sleeping Beauty story. So same with the next one, my jumping off point there was a little bit Snow White. But like, there’s literally nothing left of the original story in there, because I just kind of like, take it and run with it. So it’s more like, just the feel, the tone of a fairy tale, the themes, you know, things like that is what I like to take instead of retelling the story truly.
Steve Thomas: Okay. So again, your new book is Nocturne and then you’ll have another book in April, again, called… something with monsters, sorry, I already forgot.
Alyssa Wees: No, that’s okay. We Shall Be Monsters.
Steve Thomas: Shall be monsters. That’s a good title too.
Alyssa Wees: I get the quote from Frankenstein, but it’s not a Frankenstein book, but there’s just monsters in it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I was gonna say, the historical romance one can just be, Monster Had My Baby, or one of those Harlequin titles, you know what I mean? Those…
Alyssa Wees: Yes. Yes.
Steve Thomas: Anyway, the newest book that you can go out and right now and read is Nocturne. That’s available now. You can go out and get it at your local bookstore or of course at your local public library, and if your local public library doesn’t have it, then you request it so they get it and that still helps Alyssa out. That’s still a sale. So Alyssa, thank you so much for coming on the podcast to talk about your work, both in libraries and writing. And I hope people go out there and read your books. I enjoyed reading Nocturne and I will enjoy reading We Shall Be Monsters next year.
Thank you again so much for coming on and for the great conversation.
Alyssa Wees: Thank you so much.
Steve Thomas: Alright, have a great day.
Alyssa Wees: Thank you.
Circulating Ideas 