Rodrigo
Delgado
Author of
MORTAL NATURE
The following is a summarized transcript from the podcast “Ants Humans Stars” where podcaster Caleb interviews Digo (a.k.a Rodrigo Delgado) about his book.
To listen to more episodes about music history, true crime and other random bits of our planet’s colorful history, check out our podcast “Ants Humans Stars.”
Were you a big reader as a kid, growing up?
Definitely. My parents gave me my spark, my dad’s a big reader and mom and dad take me to the public library where I would always checkout the maximum number of books at any given time. There was also an incentive program in my elementary school, in partnership with Pizza Hut where, if you read X number of books, you would get a free kids size pan pizza. I was a chubby little kid, so free pizza was huge. Plus I was an only child, and that gave me ample room for exploring adventures in fiction.
There was all this time during summer vacation too, and back then, no I didn’t go on many trips because Dad was always working and so there was a lot of time at home. I played with the neighborhood kids, I played lots of video games, or read. There wasn’t much else to do, I couldn’t waste endless hours on a smart phone yet. I’m really glad I grew up before smart phones because it allowed me to have such focus on reading as a primary pass time, instead of it being a novelty.
Who’s your favorite writer?
Tough question, but I have narrowed it down to three: Michael Crichton, Michael Connelly and Stephen King. Michael Crichton, who wrote many sci-fi novels, including Jurassic Park, taught me that fiction doesn’t necessary need to be that far out, that bringing back dinosaurs or shrinking down to the size of an insect could be possible. I read Jurassic Park first, I was 9 or 10 and I had already seen the movie, but I remember it being the most spectacular experience. The gore was way more intense, and that primed the pump for Stephen King, where a lot of my friends said, oh you know, it’s scary, gory, intense. But you know, I had gone through most of the Goosebumps, so I was good. And Stephen King opened up a whole world for me, and he showed me the that worst horrors in life are not from silly ghosts and monsters, but from the human psyche. Stephen King led me to Richard Stark, who wrote the Parker crime novels, and that led me to Michael Connelly, who threw me into a world of LA crime and ultimately fueled my passion of True Crime.
Walk me through your decision to write the book and inspiration behind it.
When I lived in San Francisco, I needed some extra cash, and out of the blue I found a website hosting a contest for beginner writers, and I thought I had a shot of earning some money and started writing. What I didn’t know is that writing a short story can be tough if you don’t stay focused and narrow the storyline. I ended up being way over limit and nowhere near an ending. So I abandoned it for a few years, and eventually I turned that shame of not finishing the story into action. I started writing again, if nothing else, just to finish the story for myself. I needed to know what was going to happen! What went down with Lima and did she save herself. Once I realized that I was actually going to finish it into a novel, I put all the pieces together and got it done.
The inspiration for it was a mix of Stephen King and Michael Crichton. I wanted a human story, the grittiest version, wrapped into an epic sci-fi. I wanted human horror and chaos married with futurism and action. Movies also were also heavy influencers, as I really visualize everything that I write, so: Star Wars, Alien, The Mummy, Stargate. A lot of those movies helped me concretely describe the scenes in the book and then so I could then get those descriptions to an artist to bring the characters to life visually.
How did it make you feel when your book was released and available to the public?
Like I gave birth. It was unreal to think that those notebooks that had been sitting on my bookshelf for years in San Francisco, were now consolidated into one published book. To finally say to people, yes it’s published, here’s the Amazon link or you can go to my website and get the link there. It was also a huge confirmation to my own self that yes: I can do this, I just did it. And then immediately, work for the second one began. Because I knew, I can do this, here’s the proof. And what’s funny is that I never had a dream to become an author, it just happened through life circumstance.
What’s your ultimate aspiration for the “success” of the book?
Ideally, it gets picked up by Netflix and they make a few movies out of it. But I don’t know what success looks like just yet, because I haven’t finished the story. Making a bunch of money off of the book sales isn’t something I’m interested in right now, but later on as I continue writing, I think I’d be happy if I can live as I live now with just being a writer. Not rich and famous, but just good. And if someone feels like making a film adaptation, that’d be, the best. To sit in a movie theater and watch a movie of Mortal Nature, it’d be amazing.