Embrace Your Weird with Carrie Harris

Annmarie Kelly:
Wild Precious Life is brought to you in part by Visible Voice Books in Tremont, Ohio. With a glass of wine or cup of Joe in hand, readers can explore a curated selection of new and second handbooks, learn more or shop online at visiblevoicebooks.com. And, we're brought to you by the Terrateer Club, a holistic online community helping parents raise kids who will care for the earth and change the world. Find resources, free activities, and a supportive team to help take the guesswork out of parenting at theterrateerclub.com.

Annmarie Kelly:
So I got my first perm when I was 13. I wore purple and blue eyeshadow, sprayed my bangs with Aqua Net, and pegged my jeans, and tricked my grandmother into buying me a Benetton sweater. And I snuck out, and I snuck in, basically I did whatever I could to fit in with the crowd. In college, I went to parties and bars where the music was too loud, but nobody danced. I drank Bartles & Jaymes and Zima, and later hard cider and pretended to have a good time.

Annmarie Kelly:
I wish I could pinpoint when all that stopped. I wish I could remember the day I finally gave myself permission to quit pretending so much, to stop tripping and stumbling along with some crowd that didn't even see me, and just be comfortable in my own skin. I suspect there was not one single moment, and like anything it was a continuum, a slow slip of days and then weeks where I learned to say yes to what served me and, no, to what didn't. I'm not always grateful for what it means to be getting older, I don't love the creaks and pops in my knees, or the bald patch forming along the part in my hair but one of my favorite things about being grown up is that I've learned to embrace my quirks. Now, I see my individuality is a superpower. The stuff that makes me different is what makes me cool. And I suspect that's the case for most of us.

Annmarie Kelly:
I thought about all this during my lovely talk today with Carrie Harris who writes licensed books, including Marvel novels, and her own weird and wild stuff. Carrie likes monsters, superheroes, and things that explode in slow motion. She's a full-time author who lives in New York with her ninja doctor husband, and three teenage children. Carrie Harris, welcome to Wild Precious Life.

Carrie Harris:
Thanks for having me.

Annmarie Kelly:
So how long has it been since you and I have seen each other? I'm one of those people who thinks that the '90s were like 10, maybe 15 years ago.

Carrie Harris:
I was telling someone that I was going to do this the other day, and they were like, "How long has it been?" And I went, "15, no, no, 30 years."

Annmarie Kelly:
Yeah. I'm told my math is off even possibly on that number. I suspect one of the last times we saw each other was either in Mrs. Links or Mrs. Elrick's English classes, or maybe backstage at a play or a musical where you were in charge of everything and I was like the fourth chorus person on the left, but I was also missing my entrance because I had to get my spiral perm right and it was hard to do without being able to flip up a collar on a jeans jacket, which we weren't allowed to wear. Anyways, I feel like we have a lot to catch up on.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, yeah. It was a tragic time so there's plenty to talk about.

Annmarie Kelly:
Also since then, we've both been busy, but I think you've been busier because I wrote a book, go me, but I think you've written more than 20. So I think you, and I need to talk a little bit about time management and, I don't know, word jujitsu or how exactly it is you tap into the prolific muse. But we always start with the same question around here. So do you mind just telling us your story?

Carrie Harris:
Yeah. I was thinking about this because I listen to the podcast and so I knew you were going to ask me this. I do, I stalk you. It's okay though.

Annmarie Kelly:
Right back at you.

Carrie Harris:
Right. So I think it all goes back to Mrs. Elrick's class. I had her for freshman English. And for those of you who have not had the pleasure of knowing Mrs. Elrick, she looked like the angry teacher from central casting, like she always had angry mouth, she just always looked mad and I had floated through school, everything was easy and I wrote my first paper for her and she gave me an F. I had never gotten an F before. I handled it very well by crying in public.

Annmarie Kelly:
Excellent.

Carrie Harris:
Yep. And then I got mad and I revenge wrote the next paper and she read it in front of the class and she said, "You should be a writer." And I went, "Oh, okay." But we came from a small Ohio town, we didn't know any writers. That's not something you do. And I spent a lot of my high school career trying to fit in. I would go home and I would read comic books, but that wasn't cool so you kind of hid that stuff and you tried to fit in. And then my early twenties and thirties were the same thing. I would watch reality TV and try to talk to the people at my workplace because that's what they did. They did not care about superheroes and hobbits and Star Wars and all the things that I was into.

Carrie Harris:
And it wasn't until after my kids were born that I said I got to quit trying to be somebody I'm not because how can I tell them to be genuine and be true to yourself when I'm not? And it started out slow. I wore my comic book t-shirts to school bus pickups, I became the weird mom. And after we had our twins, my husband and I decided I would try this writing thing because I'd worked desk jobs, I'd worked in labs. And I thought, "Well, I'll try to write a book and if I don't get published by the time they're all in school full time, then I'll go back to work." And so that was in 2006 and I haven't gone back to work. So part of the number of books that I've written has to do with the fact that I've been at it for a long time. My first book came out in 2011 so I think it's like 23 books in 11 years.

Annmarie Kelly:
That is amazing, many gold stars. So that's fantastic. In an interview you gave, oh, it could be a year ago or it could be 10, COVID has made years seem marshmallowy to me, but you mentioned-

Carrie Harris:
Time has no meaning.

Annmarie Kelly:
Yeah, you mentioned a story that stuck with me, it was about playing Star Wars in your neighborhood and how the boys were always Han Solo and Luke Skywalker and there's really just the one girl, right? And you don't get to do anything. Would you mind telling your version of this story if you remember it?

Carrie Harris:
Oh yeah. I definitely remember it because we played a lot of Star Wars and it was just like you said, the guys would be Han and Luke and Chewbacca and R2 and Darth Vader and then Princess Leia got captured. And so I would sit in cell, which was the patch of grass outside my front door, and I could not leave the grass, that was my cell. And I would sit there and the guys would go off and they would have lightsaber battles and whatnot and completely forget about the princess they were supposed to rescue. And I got tired of waiting and so I would rescue myself and that they would tell me, "You can't do that." And my question is, "Why not?"

Annmarie Kelly:
Rescue yourself.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, why can't the princess rescue herself? And so almost all of my books have female main characters or one of many main characters, at least some of them are female. And I want to write books about princesses who rescue themselves, but who aren't perfect because that's another problem entirely, right? We have these unrealistic expectations where you have to be beautiful and smart and motivated and a perfect parent and your car is never messy and all of these things, which I am not. But I want to read a book that helps me realize that when the ships are down, I've got this.

Annmarie Kelly:
Yeah. I love that about your writing and that's the kind of book that I want to read too. And I want to raise, I've got three kids, two daughters, I want to raise all of them to know that they can rescue themselves.

Carrie Harris:
Right. Yeah, it shouldn't be just women but I think my experience as a girl who was taught to wait is that there's one girl, so you got to fight for your spot. I don't want to do that, I want it to be both of us.

Annmarie Kelly:
Yeah. We had this strange upbringing. Again, we're the same age. We were on the one hand told we could be anything we wanted to do, we could be anything we wanted to be. But the reality was that in our high school, our girls leaders club, you know what we did in the girls leaders club?

Carrie Harris:
I never went to that.

Annmarie Kelly:
We decorated the football players' lockers. That was our leadership. We also sold tickets to the basketball games. And this is not me knocking the club, I'm just saying, that was our school leadership to serve, to put candy in the football players' lockers. Girls our age are not always groomed to be purveyors of much of anything, let alone monsters and mayhem and murder. How did you find your way into that subject matter?

Carrie Harris:
I've always loved speculative fiction, so that's anything that has something fantastic in it. Fantasy, science fiction, any horror book where it's an alien or a monster or whatever. And during high school, my home life was not good. And so spec fic was my escape, that was where I could go and hide. And one of the things that you get older and you kind of think about it and I still love spec fic, and one of the things that I think I love about it the most is that it can be about things that are inhuman and unreal and yet tell a story that is very human and very real, but you have that space.

Carrie Harris:
And so for me, reading your memoir, I could not do that. It's spectacular, but I've tried and I get too close and I have feelings and they take over when I should be trying to write. Well, I'm too busy having an emotional moment. But with spec fic, I can say what I want to say, because I have that distance. So it's still a very personal story, just in a completely different way.

Annmarie Kelly:
Well, first off I will totally read that memoir whenever you quit making these excuses and write it so we'll just put a pin in that until we'll bring you back on for that. But I know what you mean.

Carrie Harris:
Oh, you just called me out.

Annmarie Kelly:
It's on the show. We're just putting it right there, putting a pin in it. We'll be back to it. We had Laura Maline Walter on who wrote this debut novel Body of Stars about how women's bodies predicted the future. And it's exactly like you're talking about, right? You use this fantastical idea of the freckles rearranging on a women's body, and then it becomes a vehicle to all kinds of truth that's incredibly recognizable and real. And I love that on the one hand, yes, your stories are fantastical right there. And the one I'm reading right now, there are witches and there is a Ghost Rider, but there are people with difficult family lives, right? There are people who are unburdening themselves or making mistakes in their jobs because they're holding onto the story they're telling about themselves, about owning a tragedy that may or may not even be their fault.

Annmarie Kelly:
So again, these guys are riding motorcycles and doing magic, but the parts of the story that are most real to me are when I'm looking in a mirror. And I do not expect to see myself in superhero stories, but I do find myself there. I love the way I love the way you do that. Thank you for doing that writing.

Carrie Harris:
Well, thank you for saying so. It's one of those things where you get into this business, or I think even you pick up a book like this as a reader and you think there's no way this can be a personal story. The book that you're talking about has Ghost Rider in it, Ghost Rider has been in a million comics. He's been in movies played by Nicholas cage. There's a whole lot of history there. So how do you make that personal? And not every story needs to be personal, sometimes you just want to see a flaming skeleton on a bike right around it and be a badass. But I think for me, the things that are most interesting are how do you deal with a curse like that? He was a person just like anybody else before this happened. How do you come to terms with the fact that this is your life now and what do you do with that?

Annmarie Kelly:
Yeah. I don't think Nicholas Cage fully captured the full picture.

Carrie Harris:
Slightly different portrayal, yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:
He Nicholas Caged the shit out of that role, but I think we missed maybe some of the other parts.

Carrie Harris:
I have seen Nicholas Cage in that movie, you are absolutely right.

Annmarie Kelly:
I perceive the comic industry as a pretty male dominated space. Am I perceiving that correctly?

Carrie Harris:
Oh yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:
What's that like?

Carrie Harris:
This isn't my first time being in a male dominated industry. Before this, a lot of my writing was in games, which is also very, very dudely. And 95% of it is great, people want to hear what you've got to say, you create connections with people who love the same things that you do and that are passionate about them and you can talk about what you're working on and talk about what you're reading and have great conversations about it.

Carrie Harris:
There are moments where it's not so great, where you're passed over for things that you know that you are more than qualified for. And maybe there's a whole bunch of reasons for them, it's kind of hard to say exactly why, but it happens so many times that you kind of start to wonder. And I think that's one of the biggest struggles with that kind of thing is you have to have peace with not necessarily knowing why the answer is no and being stubborn enough that you're going to keep going until you get your yes. And it doesn't really matter how long it takes because I'm not quitting.

Annmarie Kelly:
Yeah, you might have to keep rescuing yourself.

Carrie Harris:
That's right. Yeah, it's not a one and done.

Annmarie Kelly:
It's good to remember. The game keeps going.

Annmarie Kelly:
So you're perhaps best known these days as a writer of Capital M Marvel stories, including a few, I'm just throwing out titles here, like Shadow Avengers, which is an X-men book, and Witches Unleashed, which I was just referring to, which features the Ghost Rider of course, and three pretty kick witches. Full disclosure, I was not a comic book reader as a kid. As a kid and preteen, I was way too busy passing those VC Andrews and Sweet Valley High books around the classroom and dog earing the smutty pages and making sure your friends saw that. So the subject matter might be different between those stories and these, but I wonder if the skillset required is at least a little bit similar because what is it like to write a novel based on existing characters that other writers have also written?

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, well my early novels were original and I started out writing teen books too. So it's somewhat different in that you have to be really careful not to break canon. Canon is everything that came before, who the character is and yes, you can make some choices that change the character, but those choices have to be approved because you don't own it.

Annmarie Kelly:
So Spider-Man can't marry Black Widow and have the Hulk raise their babies?

Carrie Harris:
Right. Unless you get approval, which I mean, I might like to read that. But everything that I write goes through a very extensive approval process. And as I've gotten older, I become more and more dedicated to outlining, which has served me well in the Marvel books because by the time I've submitted it to them, I've gone through about five or six outlines and they get to be about 20 pages long. And so I've worked out all of the problems in the plot and then I worked out all the problems with the license, like we don't want this character to go in that direction or we're using this character for something else, we need you to switch gears and that kind of thing. So by the time I sit down to write the book, I've re-plotted it five or six times so all the holes are closed. It's very easy to get to writing because they force you to do all that advance work. And I like it so much that I do that for all my books now.

Annmarie Kelly:
That's fascinating. I only recently learned that phrase, retconning. It turns out I knew what reconning was, but I didn't know it was something like you're watching One Life to Live or General Hospital and well, I mean, do you ever get halfway through plotting one of your books and realize that somebody died so you have to General Hospital it and make it all a dream and bring back Roman, but as Roman's twin brother, do you ever have to do that?

Carrie Harris:
For Marvel, not so much. I have gotten halfway through plotting and went, "Oh, no, I can't do this, this is not going to work." But that's also the nice thing about writing in a universe that has a multiverse so that there are all of these different universes and each one has a Spider-Man. And so you've got a little bit of room to play, so you can use that. But actually I wrote a licensed book a few years ago called Sally Slick. And it didn't have a Bible, there's a thing called a story Bible, which it tells you all the background and all the things you need to know. There was no Bible. And so I read what existed, but I missed the fact that she was from Nebraska and I wrote a story that was very much dependent on the fact that she was outside Chicago and we didn't discover it until it was done, the book was going to the printers. So I was like, "I have to do something."

Annmarie Kelly:
Nebraska High School.

Carrie Harris:
Nebraska County.

Annmarie Kelly:
There you go.

Carrie Harris:
From Nebraska county, which does not exist.

Annmarie Kelly:
Retcon, it works. Close enough.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:
So, I mean, you write for one of the big dogs, right? Marvel Marvel, who's the star of this corporation is clearly ascending in the movie realm. This sounds like a lot of people's dream writing job. So I'm curious about how that happened. Did you just run into an executive buyer at your favorite smoothie shop? Did you just call Marvel? How does one get that job?

Carrie Harris:
Yeah. Well, it's my dream job too. And so I have to go back a little bit. I sold my first books to Random House, and so I thought, "This was it I have made it and it's going to be smooth sailing from here on," out and oh-

Annmarie Kelly:
Rollercoaster that only goes up.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, yeah. My rollercoaster went down and things did not go as I'd hoped. And I found myself in a position where people that I really respected in the business were telling me my career was over.

Annmarie Kelly:
Liars, no.

Carrie Harris:
And I couldn't sell anything. And trust me, I tried, I have so many trumped books that just did not sell. And so for a while I quit because that's what everybody's telling you to do. And then we get back to the rescuing yourself thing again, that I wasn't ready to quit, I still had stuff to say, and I wasn't going to let anybody tell me I can't. So I started to take any project anybody would give me and pay me for. I would write anything and worked on my craft and I climbed up tooth and nail bit by bit, because I was determined that the next time that the door opened, I was going to go through it. And so, I mean, I self-published a few things, I worked for tiny, tiny publishers. I did anything I could.

Carrie Harris:
And then I heard that somebody was doing books based on board games, a company called [inaudible 00:25:34]. And I've worked in the gaming industry before and I've written books, seems kind of perfect. So I auditioned and they gave me a book and the week that I signed with them, they inked a deal with Marvel. And I thought-

Annmarie Kelly:
How great is that?

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, this is it. And they didn't know me yet, I had spoken to this editor like three times and I wrote her this email and I said, "Please, please, please let me pitch for Marvel. I don't care what I have to do. I show up on your doorstep and cosplay if you let me do this." And I'm thinking, I really hope she doesn't say yes because they're in England and I can't sew so I was going to have to buy a costume, but I would've done it. I really would've done it. And she said, "Go ahead and pitch." And so when you pitch, you have to come up with three ideas that fit into continuity, that fit into this set of factors and criteria that they give you. And so I wrote my pitches.

Annmarie Kelly:
Do you remember one of them?

Carrie Harris:
Actually, one of them was the pitch for Liberty and justice For All, which was my first Marvel book.

Annmarie Kelly:
Oh my gosh.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, they said yes.

Annmarie Kelly:
So all those years of reading comic books and playing these games and feeling like, I don't know if I'm just like everybody else, then you get this moment, right? This same week when you were hired to write a board game, right? And then instead you end up pitching Marvel.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:
Good for you, man. Good for you.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah. And I don't think it would've been possible if I wasn't stubborn, but also I think the fact that I... I'm trying to think of how to say this, the phrase that comes to mind is embracing your weird.

Annmarie Kelly:
Works for me.

Carrie Harris:
I finally decided I wasn't going to be embarrassed about the things that I love, I wasn't going to try to be like everybody else. I am a weird mom who most of the time I have blue, hair right now I'm lazy. I wear comic book t-shirts, I'm almost 50 years old. I don't care. It makes me happy.

Annmarie Kelly:
I always call it dancing to the beat of my own elephant.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, I like that.

Annmarie Kelly:
So who are some of your favorites, characters you've written or just characters in the universe you admire, who you like?

Carrie Harris:
Well, yeah, I admit that I engage in very deep fan service with my books. My first book featured Sabretooth who's one of my personal favorites. Why did I pick Sabretooth? Because I like him and I wanted to. And then Ghost Rider, I picked up my first Ghost Rider comic because he rode a bike and on both sides of my family, my grandparents or my uncles were bikers and I thought they would think it was cool.

Annmarie Kelly:
Your grandparents were bikers?

Carrie Harris:
My grandpa was a bike mechanic, and yeah, and then I dedicated the book to my uncle who was like my replacement dad. And he was a biker. He used to ride in parades and do all the formation, crazy formations with the funny hats. And I thought they would think it was cool.

Annmarie Kelly:
That's great.

Carrie Harris:
So, yeah, and they're very personal stories. I mean, I think that's a reason why I picked Ghost Rider to tell a story, found family because my uncle became my dad. He called me his daughter, just lost him late last year.

Annmarie Kelly:
Oh, I'm sorry.

Carrie Harris:
The book tells a story about family that's lost and found because that's what I was living when I wrote it.

Annmarie Kelly:
First off, I'm sorry that we didn't know each other better in high school because-

Carrie Harris:
Me too.

Annmarie Kelly:
I think about the people I've met since high school who I went to school with. I'm like, "What the hell were we doing?" You know what I was doing? Probably trying hard to fit in just like everybody. Everyone's all trying hard to fit in and we don't realize we could have been watching Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in somebody's basement. But second-

Carrie Harris:
That still happens.

Annmarie Kelly:
I love the notion that you've used these, Carmen Maria Machado uses fairy tales to talk about telling the untellable or getting at the story a different way. You can't get it at straight on so she uses the vehicle of fairytale in order to tell that story that she maybe couldn't say. And I think that I'm hearing some of that same thing in the comics that you're using these as a vehicle to tell some stories that you maybe haven't told straight on.

Carrie Harris:
Well, and there's actually a history of that if you're not into comics you might not know. There's been a lot of talk over the years about the X-men and the X-men are mutants and people are afraid of them, people judge them just based on their mutant status. And that could be a parallel to a lot of things. And so to be a part of that, it's not something I expected, but it's been one of my most favorite things about the whole deal.

Annmarie Kelly:
That's wonderful. I hadn't thought about it that way. Okay, so we always close the ice breakers. Since you listened to the show. I tried to put some in that maybe you haven't heard before. These are multiple choice. So dogs or cats?

Carrie Harris:
Dogs, I have a crazy one.

Annmarie Kelly:
Yeah, what's your dog's name?

Carrie Harris:
Slartibartfas. We call him Bart. It's from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I always wanted a dog named Slartibartfas and my family loves me.

Annmarie Kelly:
Bart, excellent. Coffee or tea?

Carrie Harris:
I mean tea if I'm sick. I'm already hyper enough, the last thing I need is coffee.

Annmarie Kelly:
Got you. Mountains or beach?

Carrie Harris:
Beach.

Annmarie Kelly:
Early bird or night owl?

Carrie Harris:
I would like to be a night owl. I'm naturally a night owl, but I have children so I'm forced to be one of those early people.

Annmarie Kelly:
Why does school start so early? That is something we still need to change. Loud or quiet?

Carrie Harris:
Quiet. I'm actually one of those obnoxious people who needs it to be silent in order to work, and I just like the quiet.

Annmarie Kelly:
Are you a risk taker or are you the person who always knows where the bandaids are?

Carrie Harris:
That's a good one. I am the bandaid person, except for my professional life. I will take all the risks because what's the worst thing that's going to happen?

Annmarie Kelly:
Let them tell you yes. If you could time travel, would you rather go back in time or forward?

Carrie Harris:
Ooh, I think I'd rather go back because there's things that you can experience if you go back on a level that you couldn't just by reading it and I don't plan on going anywhere for a while so I'm going to get to see forward, at least some of it.

Annmarie Kelly:
What's something quirky that folks don't know about you? I mean, we already covered the mad cow, likes, loves, pet peeves?

Carrie Harris:
Pet peeves I'm probably not that quirky, I'm one of those people who can't stand to hear people eat.

Annmarie Kelly:
Oh, chewing, I thought I was the only one.

Carrie Harris:
Oh no, it's a thing it's called misophonia, there's a word for it.

Annmarie Kelly:
I hate that, I don't want to hear your food.

Carrie Harris:
No, mm-mm (negative), no.

Annmarie Kelly:
I didn't know we were allowed to say that out loud. It's bothered me for so many years and I just assumed that people make noise while chewing and they can't help it, but I hate it.

Carrie Harris:
Oh yeah. It's an awful thing, it should be outlawed.

Annmarie Kelly:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Chew quietly folks, quiet food. Ah, all right. What do you love about where you live?

Carrie Harris:
So we moved from Utah, which is very, very overwhelmingly Mormon, to a neighborhood in New York that is Orthodox Jewish and we did not know that we did this. We bought the house on Zoom.

Annmarie Kelly:
On Zoom?

Carrie Harris:
Because of the pandemic. Yeah, yeah. We had not seen it in person. And they are some of the most welcoming, wonderful people in this neighborhood that I have ever met. They spend their Saturday Shabbats drinking in their driveways. And so we are now their mascots, their non-Jewish mascots. They got us a shirt, I have a shirt that says that I'm a part of the club and they just this morning dropped off a Passover gift basket so that we could celebrate too.

Annmarie Kelly:
Aw, that's lovely.

Carrie Harris:
The sweetest thing.

Annmarie Kelly:
I didn't know that you were in New York now. That's excellent, you're much closer.

Carrie Harris:
Yeah, yeah, we just moved last summer. So I'll be back to Ohio.

Annmarie Kelly:
You're out of excuses now for coming to the reunions, man. When you're on this side of the Mississippi, but now I'm going to get a hook and hook you in. What's one of your go-to songs?

Carrie Harris:
Well kind of on the same, considering what we talked about, anytime I get a rejection, I play How You Like Me Now? By The Heavy.

Annmarie Kelly:
You have a rejection song, good for you.

Carrie Harris:
Oh yeah, I do. I play it really loud in the car while I'm going to pick up the kids from school.

Annmarie Kelly:
And what's your favorite book or movie or both? Sometimes people need to answer a favorite book, a favorite movie.

Carrie Harris:
Oh yeah. The one that I've read recently which I really loved was called The Rook by Daniel O'Malley and I read it fairly regularly. It's about a woman who wakes up with no memory of who she is and she's surrounded by dead people and wearing gloves, rubber gloves, and she doesn't know what has happened. And it's funny and it's profound, it's another one of those books that's about weird stuff. But ultimately it's about knowing yourself.

Annmarie Kelly:
And say the name-

Carrie Harris:
The Rook.

Annmarie Kelly:
Literally like a chess piece? Yeah?

Carrie Harris:
Chess piece, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Annmarie Kelly:
All right. We'll link to that. I have not read that one. That's excellent.

Carrie Harris:
Oh, it's so good.

Annmarie Kelly:
And favorite ice cream>

Carrie Harris:
Chocolate peanut butter.

Annmarie Kelly:
Excellent. We'll hang. And last one, if we were to take a picture of you really happy and doing something you love, what would we see?

Carrie Harris:
I keep asking for my author photo to be this one in which I'm just laughing.

Annmarie Kelly:
I've seen that one.

Carrie Harris:
And yeah, I was laughing because I felt awkward and she was trying to tell me lean it this way and turn your head and I felt so ridiculous that I was laughing despite the fact that I was uncomfortable.

Annmarie Kelly:
I think that's a beautiful picture.

Carrie Harris:
And I think that it's all about being real.

Annmarie Kelly:
I love that.

Carrie Harris:
I'm tired of faking.

Annmarie Kelly:
Well, you send me that one and we'll use it for this, because I've seen that, that's beautiful. Okay, all right. Carrie Harris, thank you, or Carrie Fisher, what did you want to go by? No, we'll go with Carrie Harris. Carrie Harris, thank you for coming on this show today. Thank you for reminding us to trail blaze and not to take no for an answer and to rescue ourselves and reminding us that monsters and zombies can be friends on the page who lead us to the truth in our stories that maybe we're afraid to admit.

Annmarie Kelly:
Folks, our guest today has been Carrie Harris. She's the author of so many books I could not list them, but the most recent ones are, I think, Shadow Avengers, Witches Unleashed and Elder Dance Squad, that's pretty recent, right?

Carrie Harris:
Elder God Dance Squad, yeah.

Annmarie Kelly:
Okay. So guys, she has books that are comic books, they're comic book based, but they're also are books that are just like fun campy teen zombie. I can't really explain them except that they're just good fun. We will link to as many of them as I can find on the show notes page and to everyone listening, we are wishing you love and light wherever this day takes you be good to yourselves and to one another. And we'll see you again soon on this wild and precious journey.

Annmarie Kelly:
Wild Precious Life is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Special thanks to executive producers, Gerardo Orlando and Michael Deloya, producer Sarah Wilgroup and audio engineer, Ian Douglas. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.