Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly

Tricia Ford: Hi, I'm Tricia Ford, Fiction Editor here at Audible. And with me today is Katie Siegel, creator of the delightfully entertaining, whip-smart, and funny new novel, Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective. Welcome, Katie. Thanks for joining me today.

Katie Siegel: Thank you so much for having me. Whip-smart is a new one. I like that.

TF: It’s very true. I love Charlotte, and she is a whip-smart girl. Now, for anyone seeking to satisfy their Harriet the Spy, Encyclopedia Brown, or Nancy Drew nostalgia, this charming debut stars a 20-something former kid detective who's coaxed out of retirement for one last case. I encourage everyone to listen, and I'm so excited to get in on this conversation. I know this kind of all started on TikTok, so I would just love to know the origin story of Charlotte Illes and where it came from.

KS: Yeah, it's a very wild origin story. So Charlotte Illes originated as a TikTok. I had recently ended a web series that I made on TikTok that was called Lavinia Uada Isn't Afraid of Ghosts—asyou can tell, I really like titles that are “someone is not something.” It was fairly popular, and I wanted to do another series. I figured the best way to do that was to see what my audience wanted, what they were interested in.

So, I ended up making three pilots, as I called them, for potential web series. One of them was about a 20-something young woman who was a former kid detective now trying to figure out what she was doing with her life and then gets pulled into a new mystery. And that was Charlotte Illes. That one performed super well—people were really excited about it. I was happy about that because it was definitely my favorite of the three concepts.

As I was working on the actual series, I was contacted by my now editor, Shannon at Kensington Books, and she was like, "Hey, I saw your TikTok. I'm a fan of all of your TikToks, but I especially like this one. I think it's a really great concept for a mystery book." Actually, at the time on my website in the About Me portion, I had a line: "I would love to write a book one day." So, she was like, "I saw on your website you said you'd like to write a book one day. Would you be interested in coming up with a proposal for a book that I can bring to people at Kensington?" I said, "Yes, absolutely, I will do that!" I wrote up a whole proposal—I had to write out a synopsis of the book, the first three chapters, character descriptions, things like that—and Shannon brought it to Kensington, and they loved it. And a lot of other stuff happened in between, and now it's coming out June 27. It’s here.

TF: It's here, yay! On YouTube you can see the full series, so I got to watch it in full. I do think Audible listeners would love to hear about the difference between that [creative] process and what you are now—an audiobook narrator, which is an art and a skill in and of itself. What is the difference, and what's similar in those two experiences?

KS: Well, the first thing I tell people is that the stories themselves are different, the series and the book, so if anyone is interested in checking out the series before reading the book, you won't get the whole book spoiled for you. But yeah, they are definitely different experiences. Creating a web series, writing a book, and then narrating said book—it was kind of a full-circle moment because, you know, when you're writing a book, you hear all the voices in your head, but you're not acting or reading them out loud. So, going on to narrate the audiobook, it's kind of like going back to the beginning where I was in the web series. I played Charlotte. So, it was kind of like, now Charlotte has a voice again—an audible (laughs) voice again. That's a really cool experience. There's so much that's different about the different mediums—I don't even know where to begin. But definitely, it's been a fun journey going from TikTok video to physical book to audiobook.

"Even when you feel like you know what you're doing and you have things to keep you occupied, there's always the questions. Am I doing the right thing? Is this what I need to be doing right now? ...I feel like it's relatable to a lot of people in their 20s in that respect."

TF: You make a fantastic Charlotte, which is kind of to be expected, because you kind of are Charlotte, if you go by the web series. You also perform all the supporting characters for the audiobook, and it’s seamless. It’s really well done, and it's quite different from the web series.

KS: Thank you.

TF: So, do you think the characters themselves morphed and changed in this kind of transition from web series to book to audiobook?

KS: Yeah, definitely. I mean, the web series was ... how many episodes is it even? Six? Seven? Eight episodes, I think. It's really very short. It was around the time that TikTok started letting people post longer than one minute, which was such a relief (laughs) because then I wasn't constrained to 60 seconds. Even so, the whole series itself is around 10 minutes. So, there wasn't much time for character development, or really to get much into the characters at all. It was mostly just … action. So, being able to then do the audiobook after having developed these characters so much more than they were developed in the web series, it was really cool, again, to hear the difference of acting Charlotte in the web series versus acting Charlotte in the book. They're definitely different people… like an alternate universe. There are all these movies out now about alternate universes between Marvel and Everything Everywhere All at Once and the Spider-Verse. There are similarities, yeah, but they are different people, and absolutely book-Charlotte is a lot more flushed out than series-Charlotte.

TF: And the supporting cast too. Now I'm curious—are these characters based on people in your real life?

KS: Definitely certain aspects of them. There's no one character who's like “this is this person.” But there are definitely aspects of different characters that I've taken from myself and my friends to create these whole characters because I think that's the way you make the most realistic characters. I mean, even just like the way certain characters text, like her friend Lucy, or, just between Charlotte and her friends Gabe and Lucy, they all text differently. I'd say Gabe and Charlotte, the way they text is more similar to how I text, and then Lucy texts more like a couple of my friends who maybe use more capitalization and punctuation than I do in texts. There definitely are aspects of them all that I pull from people that I know in real life, and it all comes together to create one brand new person.

TF: Right. And the story itself—I love the premise, and I'm curious to get your feelings on the appeal of the idea of a child detective. It's so core to so many of our first loves in literature, as kids. What is it that drew you to this brilliant little sub-genre of the child detective?

KS: I grew up on Nancy Drew, the big one, and also Encyclopedia Brown and Cam Jansen. Harriet the Spy always comes up when talking about this book—I don’t know who first started using that. Maybe I read the book or watched [the movie], but I wasn't really into Harriet the Spy, though I understand the connections. For me it was Encyclopedia Brown, Cam Jansen, and The Boxcar Children. When I was developing the original idea for Charlotte Illes—it was so long ago, I can only just try to remember how I was feeling at the time or my thought process—I was in my 20s, and still am in my 20s, and thinking about my childhood and things that were important to my childhood, and mysteries and these child detectives were a big part of it. I was just thinking, I'm at this phase in my life where I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing. I wonder what any of those child detectives would do [in their 20s]. Because being a child detective, that's the big appeal—the most interesting thing is that it's a child doing this and solving these mysteries. So, how do you handle that legacy, having that be such a big part of your life as you go into adulthood? Because you can't be an adult child detective. You either become an adult detective or you stop, and for Charlotte, she stopped. What was really interesting to me is—how do you deal with that? How do you grow up with that? Do you hold onto it, or do you let it go? And does it come back to haunt you against your will? (laughs)

TF: And with that, would you call what she's kind of going through here a quarter-life crisis? Do you think that's what it is?

KS: Yeah, absolutely. My editor describes the book as a kind of second coming-of-age story. There’s definitely a lot of not knowing where she is in life and where she's going and trying to figure that out. But yeah, (laughs) quarter-life crisis is definitely a good word for it. We actually have an official Charlotte Illes playlist—I know Kensington has it somewhere; I think it's on Kensington’s Spotify—and there's a song called “Quarter Life Crisis” that I put on that playlist.

TF: Now is that something you identify with, being of that age?

KS: For sure, but definitely not to the extent that Charlotte was. The difference between Charlotte and me is that I have held onto the things that I enjoyed doing when I was young. I've been making videos and doing stuff like that since early high school, so I've continued doing that into adulthood. So, probably if I had made the decision that no, I have to let that go, I would probably be struggling a lot more to figure out what I was doing with my life, and I would not have written a book. (laughs) But you know, even when you feel like you know what you're doing and you have things to keep you occupied, there's always the questions. Am I doing the right thing? Is this what I need to be doing right now? Am I wasting my valuable 20s doing something when I could be doing something else? So, it’s definitely relatable, whether or not you're really at the rock bottom or even if you're doing okay but still trying to figure things out. I feel like it's relatable to a lot of people in their 20s in that respect.

TF: Social media does come into the story as well, but it's more about the origin and the story. I just think this is such a positive example of the good social media can do, where it gets a pretty bad rap, there's a lot of things to be scared about with it.

KS: Yeah.

TF: I'd love to hear what's your favorite thing about social media, and how do you think it can be a tool for good in the world?

KS: Ooo. Ah, yeah, there definitely are some terrible things about social media, but there's been this wave of so many more people being more accepting and informed and understanding about people who are different from them. I think before social media was really big that only happened in largely populated areas that had very diverse groups of people where you could meet those people in person and learn about different types of people, different lifestyles, different backgrounds. And now with social media, you, in the comfort of your own home, can see videos or tweets or Instagram posts or what have you, see the lives of people who are different from you and learn about them and become understanding of them.

People see ignorant as a negative, insulting term, but really, it's just you don't know. Obviously, there are people who are willfully ignorant, and that's a whole other thing. But I think a great thing social media does is just opening the eyes of people to other people and other people's lives that they wouldn't have known already and connecting people. I mean, that's really social media—it’s social. Unfortunately, that social aspect also opens the door for a lot of terrible people to say terrible things and reach people that way, but I think that it does do a lot of good with building bridges and educating people and creating connections that way.

TF: What about storytelling? What about social media inspired you to become a storyteller?

KS: I really love that very immediate validation, even if that validation comes in the form of 10 views. I've said that I've always wanted to write a book—it always felt like one day I'd write a book—but it wasn't on the front burner for me because, you know, there's a lot of work that goes into it without knowing whether it's going to go anywhere. (laughs) And making videos was a way for me to be creative and tell stories and tell jokes and do things that immediately reached people.

I’d work on something for a short amount of time, and then it would be done and would be out there, and then people would appreciate it to different extents. So, that's definitely what I like about social media—the turnaround time. And it's been so different in publishing. (laughs) Publishing is very different from that. I finished this book last year—though, obviously, I was still working on it for a few months after it was initially finished. But I have the first draft of book two done now.

TF: Oh, wow.

KS: And now I'm going out and talking about book one, and it's like I'm already ready for book two. Let's go! (laughs)

TF: That's awesome.

KS: It's definitely a different experience, but I do like that about social media—that it is more immediate. Again, there are two sides to every coin. There's a negative to how quickly things move on the internet. But what I like about it is how quickly you can tell a story and get it out to people and they see it, and maybe someone from a publishing company will see it and then ask if you wanna turn it into a book. (laughs) It's pretty cool.

"Now with social media, you, in the comfort of your own home, can... see the lives of people who are different from you and learn about them and become understanding of them."

TF: That's awesome. And I have to say, everyone's process is different, but one thing I really took from this story and from your performance of this story was just an authenticity to the characters in the way they spoke to each other, and her internal dialogue is just really well done.

KS: Thank you.

TF: I just really enjoy it. It works perfectly as a book.

KS: Yeah, I think definitely with the audiobook you can tell how much I love natural-sounding dialogue, and that I come from a background of writing dialogue for screen. It's something that I'll notice when I'm reading a book—I’ll be hearing the dialogue in my head and being like, "Oh yeah, that sounds like how someone I know in real life will talk to me." And people have told me that about this book. That definitely made recording the audiobook easier because then sometimes it was just like chatting and just the characters chatting with one another. It really felt just how I would talk because I wrote it like that.

It is really funny recording the audiobook for a book that you also wrote because there's a lot of, "Who even wrote this joke?" And, you know, you read a line and you're like, "What? Why did you write it like that?" There weren't too many lines like that. I mostly wrote it in a way that I was like, "This is good." I have a lot of lines that go on for a little bit, and I wasn't taking into account while I was writing, "Oh, someone might have to record the audiobook and do that in one breath." (laughs)

TF: (laughs)

KS: So, that was a fun experience doing that, being on both sides of writing it and recording it. But that’s something I have kept in mind while finishing book two, you know? Seeing a sentence and being like, "Hmm, we should put a period in here actually, in case I record this audiobook again. Let's give future Katie a break." (laughs)

TF: So, book two is pretty much wrapped up. That's exciting. Congratulations on that.

KS: Thank you.

TF: Will there be a book three?

KS: Your guess is as good as mine. I sure hope so, but only time will tell.

TF: (laughs) Okay. So the potential is there. That's good to know.

KS: Yeah, totally.

TF: Are there any other projects that you're working on right now?

KS: Yeah, I have a podcast called Dear Liisphyra, which I've been making since late 2020. “A scripted fantasy radio advice show podcast” is its full title. (laughs) I guess technically it's an audio drama—that's the term for scripted podcasts—but it's not a drama. It's a fun little fantasy comedy about a wood elf named Liisphyra, and she has a radio show in this fantasy world called Grevelon. Recently in that same podcast feed, we started a spinoff series called Tales from Grevelon, which takes place in the same world. It’s a TTRPG podcast, tabletop role playing game—we use a different system from Dungeons and Dragons, but the easiest way to make people understand is to say, "like Dungeons and Dragons." It's me and three of my friends, and we play this game that's in the same world as Dear Liisphyra, and I play Liisphyra's older brother.

So that's kind of the second biggest thing that I work on other than writing the books, Dear Liisphyra and Tales from Grevelon. That's very fun, and I definitely took some of that voice acting experience and carried that over to recording the audiobook, but I couldn't use all of my silly fantasy voices for Charlotte Illes, unfortunately.

TF: Okay, well, who knows what might happen to Charlotte in the future? (laughs)

KS: Who knows what strange creatures she might meet? (laughs)

TF: Right, exactly. Was there anything that we didn't talk about that you would like to address about Charlotte? About this whole experience of creating a whole book, an audiobook?

KS: Yeah, the thing that I like to say when asked what else should people know about the book is that it's funny. It’s something I struggle with saying because it's hard to, you know, toot my own horn and be like, "It's funny." (laughs) I can say, "a lot of people have said it's funny," so maybe you’ll trust the opinions of other people and not just like, my parents—people who have no emotional connection to me whatsoever. It’s just hard to bring up, especially when you're talking about the premise, "Oh, she's 20-something and it's a quarter-life crisis and she's struggling with dealing with her past," and it sounds like it might be very depressing. It's not. It's fun; it's funny.

It's also very queer. That's also another thing that's hard for me to just bring up casually because there's no real romantic plot. But Charlotte is queer, one of her best friends is, and there are a couple other queer LGBTQ characters. That's something that some people have been pleasantly surprised by—I've heard that they've been like, "I didn't realize." And then you go into it. You know, you can't talk about everything—

TF: Right.

KS: And you only have so much time to give the premise, and I think what is most important is to tell that it's a mystery, a former kid detective, and then people get pleasantly surprised when they find out that it's funny and queer.

TF: Mm-hmm. Well, that’s awesome.

KS: Yeah.

TF: Thanks so much for your time today, Katie. It's been a pleasure getting to chat with you.

KS: Thank you so much for having me.

TF: And listeners, if you're looking for a fresh and funny new mystery series, check out Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective, written and performed by Katie Siegel, available now on Audible.com.

KS: Whip-smart. (laughs) I really liked whip-smart.