One giant leap

Oct. 20—Isa Arsén is the debut author of Shoot the Moon, a fictional account of a NASA secretary from Santa Fe who plays a role in the Apollo 11 mission.

Shoot the Moon, available now, is published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

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Isa Arsén will appear at Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo Street, at 4 p.m. on Sunday, October 22. She'll have a reading at Bookworks, 4022 Rio Grande Boulevard NW in Albuquerque, at 6 p.m. on Monday, October 23. For more information, visit inarsen.com.

Arsén, who lives in south Texas, grew up spending time in New Mexico with her family, and she chats with Pasatiempo about her writing process and the local ingredients that went into her first full-length novel.

Can you tell me a little bit about your writing background? I see you published a couple of novellas before your novel Shoot the Moon?

I've been writing since I was really little. I've always really enjoyed telling stories. I have a sister, and my parents got us really excited about the library young. I've always had a book in my hand. And it was a grand A-Ha! moment when I realized I could write stories too. That just kick-started a habit that I haven't kicked since; I've been doing it my whole life.

I've published one novella and a couple shorts, and I've also done some experimental fiction with interactive things. My day job is in game design. A short story and a novel are very different beasts, but I do like to flex those muscles. Shoot the Moon isn't the first novel that I've finished, but it's my favorite of the ones I've finished. So I'm glad to be able to debut with it.

Can you elaborate on the difference between writing a short story and a novel? They're different muscles, and one is more sustained energy for a longer period of time.

The idea of planning the beginning, middle, and end is the same where you want a satisfying arc regardless of the length of the piece.

A novel is like a 14-course meal where you want to have this through-thread of here's the ultimate destination that we want to feed to the reader; but you have side plots and side characters and secondary things that keep the attention and keep the momentum spinning. With short stories, I feel like those are much more concentrated. That's like a really delicious side dish that you always hope that one family member brings to Thanksgiving. It's a lot more specific.

I have so many ideas just rattling around all the time, and I can tell pretty reliably what's going to turn into the potential for something bigger where it can be layered or it can have more nuance to it. So I'll save that one for a novel.

When you're plotting or outlining a story, do you find there's more room to improvise within a short story than there is within a novel?

I have a terrible sense of direction, and if I don't have a plan on the page, I get stuck. I get stalled. I lose my place and put it away and I never pick it up again.

I like to really loosely outline and then use the outline as a place for me to jot down notes of what happens. Then I start filling it in with prose and actually writing the thing. Sometimes I'll see a side road I want to take so I'll adjust the outline. And because it's so loose, it allows me to make these changes and be very flexible with what the story wants to be. I tried for a long time to be in control of every little thing and that did not work and that was not fun for me.

I agree that improvisation is a pretty perfect term; you want the story to be running alongside you. You don't want it to be tearing ahead of you and you don't want it to be lagging behind. If we're putting a percentage on it, it's probably 60 percent planning and 40 percent improvisation, and regardless of the story, it always finds a way to surprise.

You have a career. You're a married person. How do you find so much time to write?

I don't have children! There are a lot of writers who do have children and they're amazing and they're superheroes. But a lot of my hobbies are creative anyway, so the people I surround myself with are creative people. My husband is a really creative guy. It's definitely just building my life around this thing that I do. And it's a habit. I'm never writing the same amount every day.

Thinking about word count gives me hives. I can't do it, and I have to think of everything in scenes, as these digestible chunks. My brain has to start at Point A and make it to some kind of Point B or it's not going to let me sleep, it's not going to let me focus. I have to finish the thought and then I'll be done. Then I can put it away. It's very compulsive. I exercise and let it rest. I exercise and let it rest. If I didn't give myself any boundaries, I'd have no friends.

I understand that Shoot the Moon has some autobiographical elements in that you spent some time in New Mexico as a youngster?

I think the autobiography elements stop at New Mexico and computerisms. I think the main character, Annie, is much smarter than I could ever hope to be, which is hilarious because I still had to teach myself all of the stuff that she does to be able to write about it accurately.

My mom's entire side of the family is from Albu-querque, so every summer we would go down to visit my grandparents. And when I was a kid, it was sort of like, "Oh, this is where my grandparents live. This is New Mexico." But then as I got older I realized it is just this gorgeous, boundless, magical place.

It really is the Land of Enchantment. So I fell in love with it and my parents ended up there now and it's just a wonderful place to be able to call home.

I really, really love everything that New Mexico has to offer in terms of art, culture, and food. I am very excited for people to read the book, and maybe they haven't ever heard of New Mexico or ever really thought of it as anything besides this place in the Southwest. But there's so much history there and there's so much meaning that I'm just so stoked to bring to light."

Can you tell me a little bit about the process of writing Shoot the Moon?

It was kind of a fever dream. I got married in 2021, and wedding planning is a lot. Everything was just starting to grind back to the normal routine of

living.

I had the idea, but I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. I knew I wanted to do like a puzzle box, something to do with time travel or time as an element, and I really wanted to set something in the mid-century.

I was kind of digging around for any idea of what could I do with this? How would this be best set? And I was staying with my parents. I was in Santa Fe for a few days; we were doing wedding stuff and in my downtime writing I was trying to get this outline worked out. My mom has this gorgeous garden in her backyard, and my grandparents had a beautiful garden in their backyard and they had these really really high walls around theirs. Any memory I think back to of being a child in my grandparent's house, I can always remember the garden.

So I thought, "OK, what do I want to do with this concept of a garden in New Mexico?" From there it just kind of extrapolated and expanded, and that was the first starting point. Then I built everything else on top of that. The main character's father works at Los Alamos, and he's working on the bomb in the '40s. You can't have that anywhere else. It has to be New Mexico.

From there, it was really fun to build the pieces of her childhood up through her teenage years. She spends it in Santa Fe: Where did she live? How do I describe the houses? How do I describe the smells and the landscapes and everything like that? It was really fun to challenge myself to put words to all of these things that I've always had in my memories and to be able to give them to readers and communicate them in a way that is satisfying on the page."