The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Lost Seeds: The Beginning by Teresa Mosley Sebastian

Episode Date: March 10, 2024

Lost Seeds: The Beginning by Teresa Mosley Sebastian https://amzn.to/4a0FzLn Teresamosleysebastian.com “The engrossing first book of a series, Lost Seeds addresses various facets of historical racism and piques keen interest in the saga’s continuation.”—Clarion/Foreword Review A novel chronicling the strained relationship between two brothers born into the remnants of their parents’ former enslavement. One brother seems to overcome, while the other descends further into adversity. What happens when they are forced to face each other? Lost Seeds is the story of two brothers, Dublin and Timothy Brisco, born into poverty at the turn of the twentieth century to formerly enslaved parents. From birth, they witness firsthand the atrocities their parents had to endure and themselves experience the continued struggles of being Black in the South. Encounters with physical abuse, mental illness, and racism define the brothers’ lives, and despite their best efforts to survive, the seeds of slavery’s wickedness inevitably spawn and lead the two down separate paths. Dublin attempts to overcome his tragic past and hopes to elevate his place in life by escaping oppression and adapting to segregated societal life, while Timothy openly displays his wounds, attempts to reject his Black identity, and descends into a fog of mental illness. The two brothers never discuss their journeys, nor the lifetime of insecurity and violence they experienced, ultimately creating an impassable chasm in their relationship. Eventually, at the request of their mother, Dublin reluctantly permits Timothy to live on his family’s land in a one-room windowless shack. Although they are once again united on the same property, their feelings of indifference and the distance between the two persist. Will their relationship forever be lost to the traumas of their past, or will they be able to come together and be each other’s strength in the face of the cruelties of their world? Because no matter how much time or distance passes, the seeds of brotherhood never die. About the author Teresa Sebastian is an attorney, entrepreneur, and law school professor. She seeks to make a difference in the environment and culture through her involvement with nonprofit community and corporate boards. Teresa believes spiritual words and the sounds of nature soothe the inner being, define a place of peace, and inspire her creative writing. She has always been compelled to put words to the human life she sees around her. Lost Seeds: The Beginning is her first novel.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. When the Iron Lady sings it, that makes it official Welcome to the big show, we certainly appreciate you guys having you As always, for further support of your family, friends and relatives Guilt trip them You know, just go to them and say Hey, have you subscribed to the Chris Voss Show Our Lord and Savior

But if not, you should Because you want to improve the quality of your life He has the most amazing guests on the show Brilliant minds, none of them are him of course It's just the guests that come on the show and you should subscribe at goodreads.com fortresschrisvoss linkedin.com fortresschrisvoss chrisvoss1 on the tiktok and all those crazy places around the internet we have an amazing young lady on the show with us today we're talking about her new book called lost seeds the beginning it's a novel that came out September 22nd, 2023. Teresa Mosley Sebastian will be joining us

on the show to tell us about her newest work. Teresa believes spiritual words and the sounds of nature soothe the inner being and defines a place of peace. Creative writing is her way to release the soul and share herself with the world. When she's not writing, Teresa is an attorney, entrepreneur, law school professor, and philanthropist. She seeks to make a difference in the environment and culture through her involvement with community and corporate boards. She's always been compelled to put words to the human life she sees around her.

When her children were young, she made up stories about characters that travel around the world and immersed herself in the imaginative words of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. She now composes children's jingles about her granddaughter and sings them to her. Lost Seeds, The Beginning is her first novel. Welcome to the show. How are you, Teresa? I'm doing just great, Chris. How are you? I am excellent, and it's wonderful to have you as well. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot coms.

Where do you want people to get to know you on the interwebs? For sure. The first place is going to my website, which is through LisaMosleySebastian.com. A lot of words, but it's easy to find. And from there, also, I show up on Instagram and Facebook. And hopefully, within a couple of weeks, you'll be able to see me on TikTok. That's the newest place. You'll be dancing and singing over on TikTok.

I'm going to cut that link just one more time because I think it dropped out a little bit on the sound. TeresaMosleySebastian.com is where you can find her and her works. So, Teresa, tell us a 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book?

My new book actually is about two brothers, Chris, two protagonists, and they're the first generation out of enslavement, and they're trying to navigate their way through the world. So it's a historical novel, and it's about those two brothers. One finds success. One doesn't find so much so so two lost seeds as it were is that what i is that the two brothers that lost seeds yes that's correct my whole family my whole family had a whole bunch of lost seeds no i'm just kidding so no i was just gonna say chris every. So, you know, the origins makes no difference.

We all have lost seeds in our family. I have some seeds that I definitely want to lose that are in my family and hope they never come back. So there you go. Whatever. So what inspired you to write this story in the format that you did, telling the story as a novel? What inspired me was I had an uncle that lived in a shack behind my grandmother and grandfather's home and frankly they did not let us speak to him they didn't want us to interact with him and when i was little i really didn't understand what his issue was but now i'm

an adult i know he was an alcoholic and he was not even allowed in my grandmother's house so i made up a story about him because i never really knew who he was that's how my family treats me they just throw me in a house in the back when i was five and like don't talk to him leave him alone he's a bad kid they still don't talk to me i'm still in the house right now in the back they give me a microphone and this is my connection to the world i did drink i did drink pretty a lot of vodka for 20 years but i gave them so tell us a little bit about you let's talk about you people love to get to know the author tell us about your upbringing how you were raised and when did you know you're a writer when did you start writing actually chris? When did you start writing? Actually, Chris, I've always written.

I never identified myself as a writer until recently. So a little bit about me. I'm a lawyer by training. I'm also a business person. So when you're training to be a lawyer, you're doing an awful lot of writing. And so with that, I just took to doing a little more writing. Now that, excuse me, I left my corporate job, and I was looking for things to do, and this story dropped in my head. One day, out in the sun in my porch, and we won't call it a hallucination or hearing voices,

but the story just came to me because I started thinking about my uncle again, and I put him in the paper and started writing. Oh, there you go. Isn't it interesting how the stories and journeys of our life are some of the ones that end up interwoven as we use lightism later? You're like, I don't know. I learned something from that. I can use that. You know what, Chris?

The interesting thing is I had people that told me I should write a biography because I have a lot of stories to tell about things that have happened to me. But it's not easy to talk about yourself, at least for me. I don't know about you. But for me, it's very hard to talk about myself. So what I do is I like just coming up with things out of the sky. There you go. And it was easy for me to write this story versus writing about my life. There you go.

That's why I have guests on the shows because people are sick of me talking about myself. They want, they want to hear from somebody else. So did you have a problem, you know, since you're used to it? Well, your kids will write about you. I don't have any kids, so that's, that's on them. Yeah. See what I did there? I made sure that they yeah yeah i control the

narrative so they can't write bad stories about like dad beat us once or twice or all the time once a day usually probably because you know you got to keep kids in line but don't do that people that's a joke just once a day is fine but yeah so that's why i didn't have kids i didn't want them writing horrible stories about what an awful father i was because i would have been one did so you you were used to writing legal prose did you have a problem switching from all that latin and stuff and you know all that legalese terms it was to some extent i had to learn that my audience is no longer, you know, 40, 50, and 60-year-old lawyers and business people.

My audience may be, you know, 16, 17, or 20-year-old. You're not writing like, I'm going to sue you. Oh, wait, this is the novel. Right, right. Exactly. the novel you're right exactly so you know you you learn to write more for eighth and ninth grade even even lower sometimes they say write like you're writing to a sixth grader and that's and i really had to program my mind that way there you go yeah i mean people read it people like simplicity i think especially with novels because they love to consume them a lot of people consume novels pretty fast they'll read

right in front of back they get caught up in the story and they just eat it up and and off they go and so you know they like a simple thing most people you know like i remember when we were editing my book there were like you fix you have fixed these spelling errors, Chris. And I'm like, does anybody know what their spelling errors are anymore? Have you seen social media? Now. Here, let me just tell you this one thing, though, Chris, too. Because I was writing, writing, writing. And I don't know how you are with writing your book, but sometimes you get carried away and the the publishers reminded me that people don't read these huge

novels like you know 400 500 pages anymore they want small things let's think about you know tiktok social media so many characters so many lines whatever you got but people don't want generally speaking don't want large novels so i had to also take some stuff out to make it shorter. Oh, did you? Now, evidently there's a trilogy involved somewhere in here. How does that work? So there you go with the fact that I had to cut it down because my story was, it just became generational.

So instead of having it all in large volume, we broke it down into a trilogy. So the trilogy takes you from the early 1900s and the story about the family at that time. Then the second one takes you to the family in the 60s. So you see how the story continues in the late 50s to the early 60s. And then the third piece will be in the 80s. So you're following the generations of the family into various eras and how what happened back in the early 1900s affects the family generations down the line. Now, we have probably, or you have probably seen movies or stories, you know, that are kind of generational. Let's think about Yellowstone, for example. You know, they have it from in the 1800s, and they take you to the 1920s,

and then they take you to more current times as to how one simple seed of an incident impacts the family going down the generations. So basically, that's what the trilogy is about. So you're going to see the two protagonists in the early 1900s, Dob and Tim, you see how they established themselves, affects the fleet in the 1960s, and how that family at that generation makes some decisions that will affect their children in the 1980s. And so, you know, whether it's the history of abuse, whether it's the history

of other dysfunctions, somehow it kind of gets hit down. There you go. And so the trilogy is going to be called, I think, the Lost Seeds trilogy? It will be called Lost Seeds, the beginning. That's number one. Lost Seeds, the legacy, will be number two. And number three is going to be Lost Seeds, Reconciliation. So that will kind of tie everything up. And we'll see. Maybe it will put the family back into more of a cohesive family unit, I will tell you the first two,

you will see a number of fractures. And again, Chris, I don't know about your family, but I can look at various parts of my family where there are certainly fractures that may have existed over the decades and decades ago but for some reason you know it's it's still going on to today for example i have you know a an aunt that i frankly haven't seen since i was a small girl i'm not sure why nobody wants to talk about why she has, you know, severed herself from the family. I wouldn't know my cousins. I know she has some children. I wouldn't know what they looked like if I saw them. But there's something happened to the family that, you know,

caused that fracture that's existed, you know existed for 50 years or more. So we all have those kind of stories, and we may all have a relative that the other family members have chosen to disown for whatever reason. It's a very sad thing. But anyway, those are some of the issues that this story tackles. There you go. Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff like that in the family where, you know, people stop talking and things break up and no one wants to tell the kids why.

I remember our family went through that and no one would tell the kids why. We kind of got some words about it, but we didn't fully understand. And even years later, I asked my old man about it before he passed away, and he refused to talk about it. So it's interesting how those things persist, if you will. Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I think hopefully one of the outcomes of this book

will cause people to think and say, you know, for something that I have no idea why, am I going to be the catalyst for change? Am I going to bring this family back together? And what will it take? And, you know, there's some decisions that come out of that. But hopefully this is one thing that this book, The Lost Seats, will stimulate in people is to take a look at their families and ask, where do we need to mend ourselves? And leave our family unit a little closer for the following generations. Oh, yeah, definitely. That or we can just leave them by the side of the road. That's fine.

I'm better off without them. That I still want to leave them by the side of the road. That's fine. I'm better off without them. That I still want to just leave on the side of the road, right? I'm going to be honest about it and keep moving. Yeah, some of them are so toxic, you're like, I can't save those people. So there you go. It's on them. So all that good stuff. So what were some of the things that you enjoyed most about writing this book?

You know, Chris, the one thing that I enjoyed, and I don't know about you, but I'm one of these individuals that I don't mind a project, and I always like learning something new. So the fun part about it was learning something new. I had spent my life as a business person doing deals all over the world, mergers and acquisitions, whatever you want, capital raising, you know, all of that good stuff, which is very intense work. And so I had the ability to now say, what do I want to do, you know, with this, you know, as I'm rounding third base of my life here.

And again, I told you how this book came to to being but the fun part about it is figuring out what the publishing world and what writing is all about because it is something very different from what I had done before so that was one of the fun things you know meeting the publisher you know doing it's like podcasts like your shows book signings all over the place so you know it was something fun and and new for me and also the other thing was just letting my mind go to create these characters i mean characters are i i live almost as personalities. And so if sitting in silence writing, Chris, you know, sometimes I can actually,

it's almost like the spirit of that particular character comes and I'm just writing about, you know, what this character is feeling. They're telling me what they want to say to this other character. So it's almost like I can hear the story in my head. Oh, wow. It's really wild how you guys, novelists, have that, where you can hear the characters come alive.

The story comes alive in your head. Yeah. It's pretty wild how you guys have that. I think it's really cool. You know what it is, Chris, and I had to learn how to do this somewhat. It's almost like a meditation because we

all have these voices and our mind is always churning. I don't know about you. I have a bunch of personalities in my head. Yeah, mine are mostly personalities. One says kill, kill, kill all the time.

Judge says I can't use that one anymore. Well, you're the scary person. You're the scary... Those are the scary voices. They'll get along sometimes when they're not fighting. Yeah, well, you know, tell them to break it up because sometimes it may get a little intense. But, you know, you got to quiet your mind down.

It's true. It's true. Yeah. And then you let those characters come in and they speak to you. And, you know, they can give you an idea of who they are. And they will tell you who they are. And they will tell you how to reckon to this other character but you've got to get yourself at least i get myself in a quiet place

and i just you know calm my mind down and the characters come in there you go i mean that's that's makes all the difference so what do you hope people take away from your books? A couple of things. One thing that I want them to take away, again, is the family dysfunction and how to resolve some family issues before it gets carried down the road. Another thing that I want people to take away from this book, you will see one character struggles with mental illness. And so I want people to understand that it's okay to talk about that. And it's okay for a family to try to deal with it.

Because I don't know about in your community or in your family, but sometimes people don't like to confront it, don't like to acknowledge it for what it is. And as a result, help that family member may never get help or get the help or the therapy they need. So dealing with mental illness is another thing that I would like for people to take away from the book. And the third thing that I want people to take away from the book is persistence. You know, being persistent, being tenacious, setting a goal and achieving it. One of the protagonists really has to push to achieve and move up the ladder and move his community, his family up the ladder. So, you know, whether it's, you know, for my community, you know, coming out of enslavement or for other communities, their family came over here as immigrants. where people were coming to this country or people were here in this country and trying to move themselves up, you know, whether it was the social or economically, and coming across a number of challenges and are still facing challenges.

So persistence and tenacity in growing yourself and achieving your dreams. There you go. Achieve your dreams and all that good stuff. So as you develop the characters, how did you develop them out? It sounds like they were based on some family members. What were some of the other ways that you developed the characters and fleshed them out and found yourself working with them?

Again, some of them just developed to themselves, but also working with, I had several individuals that I would give my manuscripts to and i had an editor also that edit the book and they helped me with character development because sometimes i would know what a character who they were what i wanted them to be or what they were telling me they were but not all of the information was finding itself sometimes on the pages so editing and having baiters they would say hey love this

character but there's something that might be a little bit missing in the story about this character so if you're writing a book one of the important things is to have beta readers and editors that can help you make sure that the characters and the storylines are fully developed where a third person, you know, can come in and read it. And it's a very cohesive, laid out story. And also, sometimes I would have to put the back book down or the manuscript down, and I would have to divorce it for even one time it was up to almost two months. Wow. Because I was just so inside the words, and the story was so embedded in my

head that I needed to push back so that I could come back and see it a little more clearly. There you go. Sometimes you can see it fresh by taking some time out. Exactly. It's almost like a relationship. Sometimes you have to say, can we take a break? Let's take a break. And then maybe I can see it in a better light. Right now, I'm a little pissed off at you. I just feeling where it's too much togetherness. So let's take a break. There you go. I did that 30 years ago in my first marriage. I went out for milk

and never came back. And so I'm probably going to go back maybe, I don't know, next year or something. So there's that. Now's your time for redemption, Chris. Next year. Next year. I still got to buy the milk. Okay. All right. I still got to buy the milk. All right. But I'm sure they're waiting

so there you go so final thoughts and pitch out to people to order up the book and all the good stuff yes please you know if if you really are looking for a good read about bailey and and goal setting and achieving goals and all that stuff pick up lost seats the beginning you can get it on Amazon, of course. If you just put in the search Lost Seats, The Beginning or Teresa Mosley Sebastian, it'll come up. Also, you can buy it on Bards & Noble and you can buy it on bookshop.org.

Also, it's an audio version for individuals that don't want to read the words, but want to listen. There's a great, we got a great guide to narrate the story. And it sounds very compelling. And also you can get it on Kindle for those that just load their Kindles up with books. So you have digital form too. You got it however you want it, Chris. Awesome sauce.

Awesome sauce. Thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me and hopefully you'll have me back at some there you go for the trilogy the new ones coming up folks order up the book wherever fine books are sold it's called lost seeds the beginning came out september 22nd 2023 you make sure you want to make sure and order it read it as quick as you can. Do you have an anticipated date for the second book? Yes, we're aiming for the fall and no later than Christmas, but we're aiming for September 2024.

It'll be Lost Seeds, The Legacy, and start with Lost Seeds, The Beginning. There you go. You know, you should do a book called lost seeds return of the jedi no i'm just kidding that's star wars isn't it how about lost seeds the chris was show oh boy there's a lot of lost seeds there that's a that's a whole packet of lost seeds there you get a home depot there's a whole forest of loss going on there i think it's mostly my children that i constantly never call back. Mari keeps ringing my phone. Anyway, whatever.

Thank you very much, Teresa, for coming on the show. Thanks, Monis, for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chatschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chatschristmas, all those crazy places on the internet. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.