A Postapocalyptic Treasure Island Retelling with Dinesh Thiru: Into the Sunken City

In this week’s episode Marissa chats with Dinesh Thiru about his debut YA fantasy adventure, INTO THE SUNKEN CITY. Also discussed in this episode: how a gag project can inspire a writing career, retelling a literary classic (TREASURE ISLAND) in a postapocalyptic setting, how much of the source material to use, and creating a more modern diverse cast of characters, being conscious about your setting and sensory details, using real maps and biology to make the setting and details feel real, creating the voice of colorful characters, balancing being a stay at home parent with the writing, and so much more!

 Show notes: 

The Artists’ Way – Julia Cameron https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9780143129257 

The official MM merchandise shops: 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/happywriterstore

https://thehappywriter.creator-spring.com/ 

https://www.teepublic.com/user/the-happy-writer 

The Happy Writer at Bookshop.org
Purchasing your books through our webstore at Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores.

Amplify Marketers
Our mission is to help your message rise above the noise so it can be heard loud & clear.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Order The Happy Writer: Get More Ideas, Write More Words, and Find More Joy from First Draft to Publication and Beyond https://bookshop.org/a/11756/9781250362377

Find out more and follow The Happy Writer on social media: https://www.marissameyer.com/podcast/

Transcript

[00:10] Marissa: Hello and welcome to the Happy writer. This is a podcast that aims to bring readers more books to enjoy and help authors find more joy in their writing. I am your host, Marissa Meyer. Thank you for joining me. Just as a reminder, we are still looking for more official podcast sponsors, so if you're interested in advertising here on the Happy Writer podcast, please let us know. You can find our contact information@marissamyer.com. Podcast one thing making me happy this week while we were having our quite long podcast hiatus these last couple of months, I was very productive. Not to brag, but I finished not one, not two, but three books in the last couple of weeks. I admit I'm kind of impressed with myself. These were, of course, projects that I'd been working on for a long time. Some of them have been kicking around for a few years. Actually, one of them dates back to pre Covid times. That's how long I was working on this book. And it just happened that they all kind of wrapped up right around the same time, which feels amazing to kind of check some things off the list. I'm really excited to tell you more about them. Of course, I can't yet because the publishers control when we can officially announce and talk about things, but hopefully that will happen soon ish. And I'm also really excited to have those projects off my plate so I can focus my attention on, of course, another book. What else? Hint this next one is another fairy tale retelling. So super excited for that. And there will be more information coming. I don't know. Someday I will tell you all about them. I am also so happy to be talking to today's guest. He grew up in North Carolina but currently lives in Barcelona, Spain. I am jealous where he is a writer and a stay at home dad. His debut novel, into the sunken city came out last month. Please welcome Dinesh Thoreau.

[02:24] Dinesh: So excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Marissa.

[02:27] Marissa: I am so excited to have you. I really, really love this book. I'll just like full disclosure, I got a really early copy, so I read it quite a long time ago, like last summer or something and was able to give a blurb for it and I just thought it was fantastic. So here we are, so many months later it's finally coming out and I'm really excited to get to gush about it.

[02:51] Dinesh: Me too. I am so thrilled to be here. And getting your blurb, as I shared, was just one of the real highs of the journey. I went running and screaming through my house, finding the kids and my wife and, yeah, I'm just so excited for this session. This is going to be a lot of fun.

[03:09] Marissa: No, I'm really looking forward to talking to you. The first thing that I ask all of my guests, I want to hear your origin story. Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? How did you get here?

[03:22] Dinesh: Yeah, so I stumbled into it when I left my last job. I always loved to read, and I was actually an english double major at one point in college, but I had never written a book or anything close to that length. But I used to be in marketing, and I left that job in 2018 to stay home with our second baby. He was six months old at the time, and while I was home with him, I started reading the artist's way by Julia Cameron. Do you know the book?

[03:58] Marissa: I do. I'm trying to think if I ever read it. I don't think I ever read it, but I am familiar.

[04:05] Dinesh: I mean, it must be like thousands of writers owe their works to Julia Cameron, or artists generally. I just loved it. It's a book about creative refueling, and I was a little bit burned out from my last job, and one of the big practices it recommends is called morning pages. The idea is you write three pages longhand, stream of consciousness, just dump your thoughts out, and it's this kind of magical way of clearing your mind, going deeper on reflections than you could otherwise. You start to almost name some of your fears and self doubts. Anyway, I was doing this for weeks and just having a ton of fun with the journaling and the writing. And then my cousin's 40th birthday was coming up, and me and this cousin, we've been through a lot together. We had started a business together. We used to live together, and I started writing some little stories about him. He's one of the biggest characters in our family, and that turned into a gag book that I printed out and gave to him for his 40th birthday. My whole family loved it. I've got another cousin that to this day, she keeps it on her coffee table as if every person who comes into her home wants to read this ridiculous thing. And it just gave me a ton of motivation. It just had me feeling like I'm having fun writing, and my family was into this, and maybe I'll go a step further and maybe I'll try to write an actual novel. And I did, and I was really proud of that. If you've never written 80, 90,000 words, it's kind of like, oh, my gosh, I pulled that off, right? Yeah, the quality was there. Sorry. The quantity was there, the quality it needed to level up a little more. But anyway, then I sent that out and I got a bit of interest from agents and I didn't get an offer of representation, but just getting a few requests on the manuscript gave me a bit more motivation and made me feel like maybe I have the smallest amount of talent in this. And as writer journeys go, I wrote several more books over years, and one of them was into the sunken city and eventually found the agent I have today back in late 2021. And it's just been a dream. It's been an incredible career change and swerve, and I'm feeling super fortunate.

[06:35] Marissa: I love it. Does your cousin take all the credit for your current writing success? He's like, yes, I started it all.

[06:45] Dinesh: He should. Yeah, he's such a good sport, too, because this book was totally. Was a real roast, but he just leaned into it. He became the Persona. The title of the book was called Geopowers, like this enigmatic man of mystery. And the subtitle was the demise of email and other unsolicited advice. It was just a totally ridiculous thing. But I owe him so much because he leaned into it and became the person. So it was really fun.

[07:22] Marissa: I love that. And I think it's so funny hearing you talk about it. It sounds, of course, very humorous, very comedic, which is not into the sunken city.

[07:32] Dinesh: Totally. Yeah. I read everything. And the more I write, the more I find I like to kind of write in a lot of different areas, genres. So anyway, maybe my personality is a little bit all over the place and that comes out through my reading and writing, but, yeah, that's how I got going.

[07:54] Marissa: Yeah, no, I love that. And I'm the same way. I can't stick to one genre. I come back, it'll be like a little fantasy. Now let's hop over to contemporary. Now let's work on a graphic novel. Okay, back to fantasy. And, I don't know, I like to keep it interesting for me and my muse, I guess.

[08:14] Dinesh: Yeah, it's fun. It kind of keeps you fresh and you find new challenges. I love that. And obviously you're very prolific and just finished three books. I immediately was like, wow, are we going to get, like a year of Marissa? Like the year of. That's. That's incredible. Congrats.

[08:36] Marissa: I know. I was really excited sending them all to my editor, and it's like, I don't know what you thought the publishing schedule was going to look like, but I have idea.

[08:46] Dinesh: Love it. That's so great.

[08:49] Marissa: All right. So we've hinted. Now, would you please tell listeners about your debut novel into the sunken city?

[08:58] Dinesh: Yes. So the quick pitch on into the sunken city is in a climate ravaged near future. Jin and her sister Tara are just scraping by until a mysterious drifter arrives, offering them the score of a lifetime. A massive stash of gold hidden in the sunken ruins of the Treasure island casino in Las Vegas.

[09:22] Marissa: Okay. It's such a clever, clever take on Treasure island. At what point were you like, Treasure island casino, Treasure island, classic literature. How did these two things come together in your brain?

[09:41] Dinesh: Yeah, so it was 2020 pandemic. I was home with my kids, who were four and two at the time. My wife had this big busy job. She used to run a school district, which you can only imagine how wild that was during the pandemic. And so me and the kids, as I'm sure many stay at home parents, were kind of losing our minds at home and I needed a bit of escapism in the evenings. And I had been writing and I had this idea for an always raining earth, which into the sunken city is set in. And I had this idea that sea levels would have risen massively in this always raining world. And I'd never really seen an always raining world done. Maybe it has been, but I just hadn't read it. And I had actually written halfway into another book where a lot of things were happening on land and I just kind of got halfway in. And normally I like to kind of finish what I start, but I was just like, this isn't the right plot. This isn't going the way it should for this setting. At the same time, I started rereading Treasure island, the classic and it just immediately clicked. I was like, oh, my gosh, I've got this maritime archipelago earth that is a pirate story, that is a nautical adventure. And then, as weird ideas go, at some point occurred to me that there's the treasure island casino and at what altitude is Las Vegas? Oh, actually, in my world, the Treasure island casino would be underwater and a wildly ridiculous plot was born. Yeah, that's how it got going.

[11:38] Marissa: Did you go and do or watch one of those simulations that if all the ice caps and the glaciers melted, this is what the earth would look like? And you were like, bingo, Las Vegas underwater. It can work.

[11:50] Dinesh: Yes, except that if all of the glaciers melted, it actually only adds up. I don't know the exact number, but it's somewhere around like 80ft. So into the sunken city. It's a hyperbolized version of climate change. Sea levels have risen more than 4000ft. And if you read into the book, there's a bit of mystery on what's going on there. Anyway, very much like climate change inspired, but also goes a step further or potentially many steps further.

[12:32] Marissa: Right. As the creator, you can kind of wave your hand and do a little magic. And this is the world we want. So this is how I'm saying it happened.

[12:41] Dinesh: Yeah, that's part of the fun and I think that's part of what can be unraveled. Also, I'm dating myself slightly, but I always loved Kevin Costner's water world.

[12:58] Marissa: I love that movie too. Everyone always makes fun of it and it's like, it's so bad. I'm like, I kind of liked mean.

[13:05] Dinesh: There were way too many jet skis.

[13:07] Marissa: But otherwise I think it's.

[13:13] Dinesh: Yeah, I really. I really thought it's fantastic. But it was also kind of like, wouldn't this be so much better and more fun with a little bit of land that everyone's fighting over? Anyway, I love these kind of like post apocalyptic tales and settings and was inspired by some. And here we are.

[13:35] Marissa: Yeah. So talk to me about actually creating this setting because it is one of those books where as you're reading it, you feel cold and damp. Like as a reader it's so immersive and just like the descriptions are so bleak, it's just so gray and dreary all the time. And you really did a great job of putting the reader there. So what were some of the techniques that you used just to try to develop the setting on the page?

[14:11] Dinesh: Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that was one of my hopes, that you'd kind of walk away from reading the book feeling like you're drenched now. Right.

[14:20] Marissa: I need to find a tropical island.

[14:22] Dinesh: Exactly. I need a bath or something. Yeah. I love it when a book is really sensory, when you can feel the raindrops, like, cascading down your face. And for me, as a writer, I feel like I can do that particularly well when I'm in first person and into the sunken cities written in first person. So I really tried to just ground myself into the scene and had many scenes where I'd think through each of the senses and think, am I hitting these and hitting them straight out the gate as you step into the new scene? And yeah, I then was happy to have some early beta readers who said some of this, who felt like the pages felt damp in their hands, which was just incredible. So started to feel like I was on the right track with some of that and then I think when I heard some of that, it made me realize even more like go chapter by chapter, go scene by scene, and really make sure that I'm doing that, that I'm making it very visceral for folks.

[15:36] Marissa: Yeah, that's a great tip because it can be easy to kind of forget. Like sometimes when you're writing, we spend a lot of time establishing the setting and the vibe of a story in those first couple of chapters. But then as the plot starts and you are really getting into the action and discovering the characters, sometimes it can be easy to forget to also come back to the setting, also bring forth those sensory details. And this is a book that definitely carried it all the way through.

[16:06] Dinesh: Thank you. Yeah, the other thing I think that was kind of tricky for me here was the deep sea diving that they do is in these giant metallic exoskeletons. So on the one hand, the world itself is very sensory. Rain is just cascading down on you constantly and it's cold and it's dreary. But then on the other, you step into these suits and you sink to the bottom of the ocean and your visibility is 50ft max. And you have haptics in the suit but no sense of touch, really. You have no smell. All of a sudden you're in kind of like a sensory deprivation. Anyway, I was very aware of that contrast in writing it and. Yeah, anyway, I'm hoping the readers feel a little bit. I hope that adds maybe a little bit to the terror of truly being 3000ft below the sea. It definitely added to my terror in writing it.

[17:16] Marissa: No, that's an excellent point and it is a really interesting contrast. Tell me about the diving. Like, have you been diving? Do you have any experience? How did you research for this?

[17:28] Dinesh: Yeah, as a kid I had been diving, but mostly free diving and I had done some cave diving as well. And then last year I got my scuba certification, my patty certification, and so I've been diving in California and then recently in Thailand actually, which was just an incredible dream. Yeah, I love the ocean overall. I actually own a paddleboard and like to go out on that as well. So I'm a real water baby and tried to draw directly on some of that experience, but also tried to just research a lot and tried to make the book very real through the research. So some examples of that, the topography in the book is all essentially real. I used some online tools to map out what geography would look like if sea levels had actually risen 4000ft. And there's a map included in the book. But all of the places that are mentioned as land are essentially mountains today. Right. And I had a real topographical map that I was using when we're plotting out the adventure and the heist and so forth, and then even the sea creatures. I actually had a friend just message me on instagram and she was just raving about how she was reading the book and she's like, is this stuff real? And then I looked up kite fin sharks and do they glow blue? And she's like, they do. This is real stuff. It was so cool. I literally got that message this morning. And anyway, I wanted to, just as much as I could, try to make that very real for folks.

[19:33] Marissa: Yeah, I love that because I have nothing creepier than underwater creatures.

[19:39] Dinesh: Oh, my gosh. They're truly terrifying when you can't see them and when some of them are just gigantic. And even the ones that aren't are. Can be quite terrifying and can travel in very large numbers.

[19:58] Marissa: Meanwhile, you're stuck in this suit with limited mobility. Like, where are you going to go if this thing decides to.

[20:06] Dinesh: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, this book, it's a real genre bender, but there's definitely some ocean horror in there.

[20:14] Marissa: Yeah, I love that. I will say so in my notes when I was reading the book, my notes for the scenes, the diving scenes, especially when Jin is going really deep in this suit. My exact words, sense of suffocating and being trapped constantly.

[20:35] Dinesh: Yeah, I have trigger warnings on my website, but I'm now immediately going to go over there and double check that claustrophobia mentioned. Yeah.

[20:47] Marissa: Does anything that you've seen in your diving, was there ever a moment where you're like, oh, I need to use this moment or I need to use this thing that I've just come across or any real world stories that played a part?

[21:02] Dinesh: One of the things that I think stuck with me the most, I had done some cave diving in Mexico, and there's something about diving into the sunken city, diving under and into something and through small holes that is utterly terrifying because you're sort of like, I think I have enough breath to do this, but am I going to come out the other side? Everyone says it's like, yeah, you just go through and then you come up doing that at a below sea level of like 15ft versus. And even in Thailand recently, I did one of those. They called it like a swim through. Anyway, it stuck with me how casually guides or instructors will sort of talk about that, but then just how utterly tense and my hands clawed together I felt doing it. So that was very much in my head when I was thinking about our characters entering actual buildings and moving down hallways of hotels and casinos. Just how cramped and tense you're going to feel doing this, particularly when everything's waterlogged and feels like it could fall apart at any moment.

[22:26] Marissa: No, it's horrifying. It really is horrifying. It really just puts you in that scene. But I loved it. I love heist novels, just for starters. And the combination of this being sort of a casino heist but also post apocalyptic, but also a retelling of this beloved treasure island. Such a great adventure story. The combination of it all worked together in a way that was just like really cool and different.

[22:55] Dinesh: Thank you. Yeah, it's a real mashup on the movie front, I think. Something like the setting of water world with some of the characters from Pirates of the Caribbean and the plot from.

[23:13] Marissa: That's it, Hollywood. Get on that. 

ADVERTISEMENT: Calling all authors and book marketers. If you're looking to increase sales, there's a marketing agency that specializes in optimizing and advertising on Amazon. Amplify marketing services was founded by Franklin, who has been in the book business for more than 20 years. Amplify has promoted over 30,000 books and they invest millions of dollars each year in Amazon ads. Head to Amplifymarketers.com to explore their free articles or set up a free meeting with Franklin. That's amplifymarketers.com. 

Marissa: So tell me about the inspiration of Treasure island. You said that you were reading it and that that kind of inspired this take on it at that point. Did you go back and how many times have you read the book? Did you reread it to try to inspire? How much were you wanting to retell versus create your own?

[24:21] Dinesh: Great question. I had read it as a kid and then I reread it probably for the first time since I was a kid in 2020. And then I've read it several more times since then. I mean, I love the book. It's one of the classic young adult adventure stories. And reading it during the pandemic where I was looking for that escapism, I mean, it just delivered completely. The adventure, the atmosphere, the pace, the characters. I really was just all in on it. But I did have a quibble or two, if I can take a quibble with Robert Louis Stevenson.

[25:05] Marissa: We are allowed. We're allowed retellers. This is why we retell things. We're not very good.

[25:13] Dinesh: Yeah. First of all, the book's written in the 18 hundreds, but essentially every character in it is a white man, except for Jim's mom, even. It's funny, at one point, a pirate shows up to Jim's inn, and the writing is like a tall, dark, nut brown man. But then a few paragraphs later, you're like, this is actually a white dude, isn't it? Or they sail all the way across the Atlantic and they find someone living on the island they're going to, but it's not a brown person. It's actually a marooned white. Okay. We could probably have a little more diversity in this story, and that's part of why I wanted it to be centered on two sisters and their experiences. And I really wanted a pretty diverse, global, cast supporting cast. So that was one big one. And then my other was, as Jim was progressing through the book, he was battling pirates and he was becoming braver, but he wasn't really battling any of his inner demons. And I didn't see the flaws or the things he was overcoming internally as much. And I thought it could be really powerful to center that more as well. And so in this story, Jin and Tara, their dad, passed away a few years ago in a diving accident. And they used to go diving with him all the time. And in a sense, it was kind of a bit of a reckless thing for a father to be doing with his young daughters because this is an extremely dangerous thing to be doing. In another sense, though, this is how they were making money. This was their livelihood. This is what they had to do to survive. And also, their father just loved it, and he couldn't not do it anyway. They're still grieving him a lot in the book. Tara is a much more hopeful character who really wants to set out on the adventure. And Jin is much more of a survivalist, and she's been taking care of Tara. She became Tara's guardian, Tara's the younger sister, and she's scared to go diving again. And she's still dealing with a lot of trauma from her dad's passing. And I hope that makes for a powerful and hopefully emotional character arc for readers.

[27:58] Marissa: I loved both of the sisters, and I love a sister relationship. I don't have any sisters myself, so I feel like part of me, when I read a book that has a really close sister relationship, there's a little bit of vicarious living there.

[28:12] Dinesh: I have one, and I'll tell you, I'm both excited and terrified to hear what she thinks. Yeah. Waiting with bated breath.

[28:23] Marissa: I love that. I just finished a book. So my book that's coming out. Actually, tomorrow, as of the day that this gets posted, is my first time writing a book completely from a male perspective. And you wrote a book completely from a female perspective. What was that like? Were you nervous? Did you have a lot of questions for the women in your life or how did you do that?

[28:48] Dinesh: I was a bit nervous. My wife's probably read the book. She's read the book at least four or five times. And then she told me this week that she's going to start the audiobook. And I was kind of like, man.

[29:03] Marissa: Are you sure?

[29:05] Dinesh: I was like, exactly. Trying to talk her out of it almost. And I definitely had several beta readers as well who are women. Yes. But I think because of Treasure island being so white, male centric, I just felt like I really wanted two sisters to be leading this story and I just wanted to change that up pretty dramatically. So, yeah, it just felt like the right thing for the story that I was trying to tell.

[29:40] Marissa: Yeah, well, I really liked it and it's hard to imagine it. Of course, we have the original Treasure island told from a male perspective, but this story, it does feel right. It definitely feels like it is Jin's story. It's her arc. And the way that she loves her sister is so deep and clear and really well done.

[30:06] Dinesh: Thank you.

[30:07] Marissa: That said, one of my favorite characters has to be Billy, who is the drifter kind of piratey character that shows up and just totally turns these girls lives upside down. And she is such a character. She's so quirky.

[30:29] Dinesh: Yeah. She brings all the entertainment to any party she's at. She's just a ton of fun to write. It's just the minute she's in a scene, you're just sort of like, all right, what kind of zany things are we going to have Billy up to right now?

[30:46] Marissa: Yeah.

[30:48] Dinesh: And I don't want to give too much away, but you'll find for readers out there that Billy has a very different relationship with Tara than she does with Jin. And I loved exploring that as it's. I think that's something that can be very true as you're growing up. It was true for me as a young adult that you sometimes look at people or look up to people differently and differently than your siblings would. And anyway, that was a lot of fun to write. I realize I can't say too much about it without giving too much away.

[31:29] Marissa: I know she's a character with secrets.

[31:34] Dinesh: Yes.

[31:35] Marissa: I hadn't really thought of this until just this moment, but we were talking earlier about how the setting of the book is so gray and dark and bleak and dreary. And then you throw this character, Billy, into the mix, and she's just, like, so colorful and vibrant and out there, and again, you get that really cool contrast in the story.

[31:58] Dinesh: I love that I hadn't thought about Billy just being, like, a splash of color on Eddie Page, but you're so. Is. She's such a character, and, yeah, that is so well said.

[32:11] Marissa: So one of the things that I think really stands out about Billy is she has a super unique voice and a way of speaking that's different from any of the other characters and different from contemporary people. Where did her voice come from? Did it just. She showed up on the page and started talking. And you just heard it, or was it something that had to be kind of molded and know?

[32:39] Dinesh: I think it just started kind of unfolding? I think I knew early on that I wanted Billy to be a character that you weren't sure about as a know, is this a good person? Is this a bad person? I wanted there to be some real mystery around Billy, and I wanted there to be mistrust of Billy. And I think as I started to do some of the dialogue, I started to feel like, well, if Billy comes off as someone who is very uneducated, speaks without a lot of normal grammar rules, then there's a certain type of person who's going to judge that and immediately be like, this person isn't trustworthy, and there's a certain type of person who may not judge that. It kind of just started to roll off. One of my favorite sort of early moments in the book is starts reading from some books that she has, talking about the job that she's proposing, and Jin's all of a sudden like, hold on. You can read, especially in a world like this and in a post apocalyptic world where folks are a lot more focused on survival than they are getting through school, you can easily jump to conclusions based on the way that someone speaks, and sometimes those conclusions are right, but sometimes they're wrong. And I think that can create a lot of interesting dynamics and tension and just be a lot of fun.

[34:27] Marissa: Yeah, no, and it's interesting, too, to consider how that affects the other characters, but also, how is that going to affect the reader? And as a writer, you can kind of make intentional choices to kind of mess with the reader's opinions and minds a little bit.

[34:48] Dinesh: Yeah, that's definitely one of the things I've seen in the early reviews. Folks really loved not knowing who to trust in this book, and it really kept them turning the pages. I'm glad that that's really resonated.

[35:07] Marissa: All right, I've got one last question to kind of change directions a little bit before we go on to our bonus round. You are a stay at home dad. Tell me a little bit about how you are managing to balance parenting full time parenting with the writing.

[35:25] Dinesh: It's not easy. My kids are eight and five, so it's now gotten a bit easier because I have one in second grade and one in kindergarten. But really the toughest years were when I was first trying to get an agent and trying to. And in kind of the earlier stages of this book and my first books that I wrote, I essentially wrote them during nap time for Caleb, my younger son, or during. I am fairly good about waking up early in the mornings. And so I would write from like five until 630 and then I'd get myself ready and get the kids ready, and Caleb would sometimes be home when he was very young or get him ready for preschool and so forth. So I've been part of the 05:00 a.m., club, which I really loved. And for me it was very powerful because I'd wake up and that first hour and a half of writing would sometimes be as good as anything else I'd do the rest of the day. And so just having that, just knowing I'd made some progress, even if it was small, was really powerful. Especially when weeks are a usual parenting week, is you've got one or two kids homesick at some point and there's some fire drill that just throws everything sideways. So having kind of some bit of routine I can count on was great. I also have to really thank Caleb for being an incredible napper. My oldest, I don't know how I would have ever done it because he only ever napped for like 35 minutes at a time. Caleb is a beautiful two hour napper. God bless him.

[37:23] Marissa: Yeah, that's nice, right?

[37:26] Dinesh: Yeah.

[37:26] Marissa: Girls stopped taking naps way too early, and I was, no, no, we're not done with those.

[37:31] Dinesh: No. Right. Please, let's keep going. Reading alone.

[37:41] Marissa: Started going to school. Were you like, what do I do with all this freedom? Or were you, oh, my gosh, ready to focus?

[37:51] Dinesh: It did feel like the world's my oyster. I had gotten used to trying to do as much as I could in those 2 hours that I would scrape together. And then all of a sudden it was like, wow, there's a lot more time. I quickly did learn that a lot more time, but there's a lot of breaks and there's a lot of sickness. But, yeah, I feel super fortunate to do it. I owe a ton to my wife for working her amazing job and career and supporting me while I kind of made a career change. Yeah, I feel super fortunate to have gotten the time. I kind of always thought, like, oh, this will be a special time. And I have thought about the time home with Caleb as just like, a special bond that we were going to have together, but it ended up just being a lot more than that. It ended up being amazing for me in terms of my career and creatively. And now this book's coming out and I'm really focused on writing. It also ended up being really great for my marriage, too, because really, I became the primary at home then and became the person who packed the diaper bag and who just realized when everything was out of stock. And quite frankly, I wasn't that person previously, and I wasn't pulling my weight the way I should. So anyway, it's been really a pretty incredible kind of life changing experience, so I'm really thankful for it.

[39:30] Marissa: Yeah, no, it sounds like you're in the right place doing the right thing.

[39:34] Dinesh: Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. And now I get to read this book and try to skip over parts to my eight year old, and he's like, wait a second. I saw that word. Yeah, they're getting pretty wise pretty fast.

[39:50] Marissa: Yeah. Oh, it happens quickly.

[39:53] Dinesh: How old are yours?

[39:54] Marissa: Nine year old twins, and we are still homeschooling. We kind of fell in love with the homeschooling lifestyle and so decided not to put them in public school, which had not originally been the plan. And I love it. I love having them home. I really enjoy homeschooling and the freedom that that gives us, but, oh, man, when I think about how they could be gone for like, six to 8 hours every day, I get pretty intense envy sometimes.

[40:25] Dinesh: Yeah, that's very understandable. But, yeah, there's gifts in all of it.

[40:33] Marissa: Yes. Pros and cons. Pros and cons. Sure. Okay. Are you ready for our bonus round?

[40:40] Dinesh: Yes, I am.

[40:42] Marissa: What book makes you happy?

[40:45] Dinesh: So I wanted to mention something more by Jackie Kelalia. Something more is her debut novel. I read it last year, came out in 2023, and has just been one of my favorite young adult books that I've read over the past few years. It's about a girl who receives an autism diagnosis right before entering high school, and it's just laugh out loud funny. It's boy obsessed. It's got a big, loud arab family. Jackie is palestinian canadian and writes a lot of her own identity in the book. It opens on a scene where the main character, Jessie, is like waxing her unibrow into two separate just, and it's so heartfelt and the voice, I think it's like I would follow Jessie through all four years of high. It's, it's really a special book. So yeah, for folks of Jenny Hahn, I think it's just a must read.

[42:01] Marissa: What are you working on next?

[42:04] Dinesh: I am working on a couple of different books. I have another adventure fantasy concept that I'm working on that I've ridden into a bit. And then I have an outline for. And then I have two other thrillers actually. One is like a young adult contemporary thriller and the other one is a more creepy adult thriller. Anyway, like I said early on, I'm a little bit all over the place in terms of what I read and I like to write across different genres too. So yeah, lots happening.

[42:48] Marissa: Nice. Lastly, where can people find you?

[42:52] Dinesh: On my website, dineshthrough.com. And I am most active in terms of social media on TikTok, which is Dineshmt nine.

[43:07] Marissa: Awesome. Dinesh, thank you so much for joining me.

[43:09] Dinesh: Thank you, Marissa. This was so much fun. I really had a blast. Thank you for having me.

[43:15] Marissa: Readers, I hope you will check out into the sunken city. It is out now. Of course, we encourage you to support your local indie bookstore, but if you don't have a local indie, you can check out our affiliate store@bookshop.org, slash shop Slash Marissa Meyer. Please don't forget that my new book is also out tomorrow. That is with a little luck, I hope you'll enjoy it. And we have some new merchandise on our Etsy and spring pages. Next week I will be chatting with Hafsa Faisal about her vampire heist novel, A Tempest of tea. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe and follow us on Instagram at Marissa Meyer, author and at Happy Writer podcast. Until next time, stay inspired, keep writing, and whatever life throws at you today, I hope that now you're feeling a little bit happier.