Charlie and Kristy Woodson Harvey (The Summer Of Songbirds) discuss whether we should like her character, Lanier (who stops her best friend and brother being together); the various plot threads she left out of the book (including alternative endings); and US summer camps (both Kristy’s experiences, and the effect of the pandemic lockdowns). We also spend a good amount of time discussing the pre-actor’s-strike announcement of an adaptation of Kristy’s Peachtree Bluff series and her next two books.

Kristy’s The Summer Of Songbirds
Kristy’s The Wedding Veil
Kristy’s Christmas In Peachtree Bluff
Friends & Fiction
Kristy’s interview with Susan M Boyer

Release details: recorded 23rd October 2023; published 11th March 2024

Where to find Kristy online: Website || Twitter || Facebook || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram

You can contact the show at books@carnelianvalley.com

Go back to the list of episodes

Discussions

02:14 The inspiration: a sailing trip at a summer camp Kristy went to with her family during the pandemic
06:49 So Lanier and Rich came first?…
08:02 How Kristy doesn’t write in chronological order and how it ends up working well
12:01 How Kristy feels about Lanier
15:35 Why was important to write about Daphne’s family and the problems there are there?
19:21 Why no narrator for Mary Stuart?
25:39 This book was originally longer (what got cut)
29:24 Kristy’s childhood experiences of US summer camps
33:52 Why Kristy ends her book with a scene about Daphne, Lanier, and Mary Stuart’s children going to camp
34:51 Real camps that had to close due to the lockdowns
36:24 The concept of ‘hard things’
40:27 Other endings Kristy had in mind for The Summer Of Songbirds
44:43 A sequel?
48:18 The on-hold Peachtree Bluff adaptation
52:16 What’s next (A Happier Life, and and very, very brief peak at Kristy’s 2025 book)

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 93. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. I’m Charlie Place and today I am joined by Kristy Woodson Harvey, author of The Wedding Veil and The Peachtree Bluff series and co-host of the awesome weekly webshow and podcast Friends & Fiction – if you haven’t heard of it, check it out, link’s in the description. We’ll be talking today about Kristy’s latest book, The Summer Of Songbirds, which flew off the shelves when it was published in July. I will note that what I’m about to say relates to fiction because there’s some truth in there as well: as they did to many businesses, the pandemic lockdowns have reduced the funds of children’s holiday camps and one such is Holly Springs. The camp is owned by June, who, contrary to other camp owners, lives at the site year round. Holly Springs is her life and the threat of having to close and sell up to a property developer is awful to say the least. But there may be hope yet: we start our tale with friendship – Daphne, Lanier, and Mary Stuart are three life-long friends who met at Holly Springs and when Daphne – June’s niece – finds out about the potential sale, she and the others rally to action. But there’s a few extra threads here, you see Daphne’s a lawyer and she works with the mother of Lanier’s fiancé and she’s found out something that Lanier really needs to know about but there’s the issue of client confidentiality. And then there’s the return of Huff, who is both the love of Daphne’s life and Lanier’s brother which makes for a bit of a problem. And finally there’s also the fact that Lanier’s first love might be back on the horizon too. Hello Kristy!

Kristy: What a wonderful summary of the book, oh, my goodness, thank you so much for that, and thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

Charlie: I’m glad you liked it. And, yes, it’s great to have you. I’d like to start – your sailing trip, and the time that you were at camp; you were at camp during the pandemic with your family and this whole sailing trip started you off on the inspiration for Songbirds. Can you tell us about it?

Kristy: Yes, I can. So, yes, as you said, in 2020, my son was supposed to go to summer camp for his second year. And of course, camp was not able to be in session because of social distancing concerns and things like that, which, honestly, 16 boys in one cabin barely showering for two weeks is never very sanitary [laughs], so certainly not during a pandemic. But they offered us the opportunity to come to a family camp instead. And I thought it was such a great idea because who doesn’t want to relive their childhood days? But also because it hadn’t really occurred to me yet that these summer camps were going to be in real danger of closing because they wouldn’t have any funds for this entire year of the pandemic. So we thought this was a great idea, a lot of fun, a great way to support the camp at the same time. And so the minute that we got there, the kids run out of the cars and disperse, and the dads went down to the dock to fish. And a couple of my friends and I decided to take out a sailboat. And my best friend, who was there with me, is an amazing sailor, like a very expert sailor, has started a sailing school, and she learned to sail at this camp. And so she’s sort of famous there. Everyone knows her because she went to camp her whole life. She rode through all the ranks, they call them. She got her sailing licenses and all these things. So when we’re down on the dock, one of the counsellors says, well, we’re short on radios, but you guys don’t need one because you have Millie with you, so everything will be fine. Now, of course, if you read that in a book, it’s cue the dun dun dun. Something bad’s going to happen, right? But in real life, we don’t often realise those moments when we have them. So we head out on the sailboat, and we get about 30 minutes away from camp, and the wind just absolutely dies, and we can’t go anywhere. We were just stuck in the middle of this river, in the middle of nowhere. And I remember saying, I hope our children get hungry, because if they get hungry, they’ll notice that we’re gone [laughs], and then we’re going to be okay. If not, who knows when we’re going to be saved? So we started telling camp stories to pass the time, and my friend who was sailing us told a story about being in a very similar situation on a beautiful day at camp, sailing by herself, when all of a sudden, a water spout – which is basically a tornado on the water – comes across the river right at her. And so she had to jump out and abandon her sailboat because she was the tallest thing around. So it picks up the sailboat, crushes it on the shore, but no one remembers her near-death experience on the water. All they remember is that the super hunky sailing instructor was watching from the shore. He saw her, he came to her rescue, and everyone was so jealous because he was everyone’s camp crush. And so when she told that story, I was like, oh, my gosh, I’m writing a book about camp, and you have to let me use that story; I don’t know how it’s going to go in there, but it has to go in there. And she was like, of course you can use the story, please use the story. So that was the beginning of the little spark for The Summer Of Songbirds and a really fun story to get to tell on tour too, by the way [laughs].

Charlie: Well, it sounds like the camp that you went to and your friend’s reputation, there’s a new anecdote to add to that now…

Kristy: That’s exactly right. Well, and here’s the really funny thing too – so the camper that rescued her is obviously all grown up now and happens to be one of my neighbours. And so, we thought it would be really funny to disguise Rich McNab in the book as him in real life. And we were like, oh, this will be great, he’ll never know. Well, someone told him [Charlie laughs]. Fortunately, she called me, she was like, oh my gosh. I told him. I’m so sorry. This was so awful. And I was like, well, this is going to be so awkward. We’re going to have to talk about it because I’m going to see him all the time, we’re neighbours. And so before we can talk about it, we were at a party and I saw him walk in and I had that dread of like, oh, God, we’re going to have to tell, this is so weird. And he came up to me and he was like, I’m so excited that our book’s about to come out! [Both laugh.] He was not upset about being Rich McNab in this novel and having this book sort of centred around the story of this rescue. So anyway, it’s been kind of funny; I live in a very small town and so it was a funny little anecdote in our town this summer!

Charlie: Brilliant. Brilliant. So he’s read the book as well, I guess.

Kristy: I’m sure he has [both laugh].

Charlie: We’re going to say he has, it’s a good story. So sounds like from this, then, that Lanier and Rich came first?…

Kristy: I believe they did. So the first scene that I wrote in this book was the scene where Daphne, Lanier and Mary Stuart are stranded on the boat and Rich comes to their rescue. And I think I said this somewhere in my acknowledgement – my first favourite line of this book is, ‘is this the sign of which you speak?’ Because Mary Stuart and Daphne have always believed that Lanier and Rich belonged together, and Lanier has betrayed him in a way, and believes that he’d never forgive her. And so that was really the central kind of beginning piece of the story. And I tend not to write in chronological order, so a lot of times I don’t completely know where I’m going when I start. And so it’s just like trying to get the feel for the characters on the page and what they might be like and what their stories might be. And so, yeah, I do think that Lanier and Rich were my first focal relationship in this story.

Charlie: As you were saying what you’ve been saying, I wondered; that sounded correct. And yet it seemed to me when I was reading, I thought Daphne was first. Yeah and you said about you don’t write in chronological order – I wanted to ask about that because I’ve heard you say that and you’ve given us an idea with this scene you’ve talked about and the setting and Lanier and Rich and everything. Can you talk about this further? Like how the not writing in chronological order works, if there was anything else that came out in a different place sort of thing, if that makes sense?

Kristy: Yeah, no, for sure, and not writing in chronological order makes no sense at all. And so I don’t know why it is that I do that, but I’m not an out-liner, obviously. I often times get these little nuggets or bits and pieces of ideas, and sometimes they aren’t even full ideas; sometimes they’re conversation between two characters that are in my head and I don’t really know who they are or what they’re doing yet. So I tend to get those ideas fortunately when I’m working on something else. Otherwise it would probably be scary. I’m not really working on the next book yet, so I’m free to go in and write down these little bits and pieces of conversation, or write down these scenes that are in my head and figure it out later because that’s not really what I’m working on right now. And I think it helps me because it helps me get to know who my characters are, and maybe the journey that I want to take them on. I will say in The Summer Of Songbirds, I had more of an idea of where I was going than I sometimes do, simply because I knew I wanted to write about these three best friends who come together and save their summer camp. Now, how I was going to do that, I wasn’t completely sure. I also did know that I wanted to have that attorney-client privilege situation that you mentioned earlier. That was something that was interesting to me, and I just thought to put two best friends in that situation where one of them knows something and she knows she needs to tell her, but she knows she might lose her job, and especially as a single mother, it’s a really big deal no matter what – you’ve been to school for 100 years to be a lawyer! You’re not just going to throw that away lightly. But being a single mother and having someone who really depends on you, I knew that was going to come into play, in some part of the story. You want the reader to feel conflicted, and so I think for me to create these two best friends and have one of them know this big thing, it’s difficult to put them in that situation and not immediately want the reader to be like, well, of course you should tell her, she’s your best friend, she’s done all these things for you your entire life. And so I think in that way, I did figure out early on that Lanier was going to have to be a little bit of… maybe not a wholly unlikeable character, but a definitely unlikeable at times character. Because if you were fully on board with Lanier and everything that she did, and you thought she was the best character that you had ever read and you loved her completely, and Daphne was even considering not telling her, then you had to hate Daphne [laughs]. So there had to be this conflict in there. And so I think all of that – going back to the not writing in chronological order – some of these things were things that I was able to find out in little bits and pieces as I was writing the story. And before I was really sitting down and getting into the nitty gritty of it, I had already decided that I wanted Daphne to have had this secret relationship with Lanier’s brother that she didn’t really know about, because I felt like there had to be reasons for these women to keep these secrets from each other, and you had to be able to identify with them in some way, of why they would keep these secrets and why they would potentially make the choices that they make. And I just thought that was something interesting to explore; I’ve had that situation, I’ve seen that in my own life. Not personally; I don’t have siblings, so I’ve never had someone date my brother! But seeing that with friends, and I think that’s always a really tricky situation. And it sounds like, when you just say it, you think, oh, how fun. But I think there’s a lot that goes into that behind the scenes where everyone’s not always thrilled when that happens [laughs].

Charlie: How do you feel about Lanier? I mean, you did a very good job, I think, for me, as a reader. I loved that she had a bookstore, but I was never going to love her to pieces, which sounds like I’m kind of reading it right, I suppose, how you’ve written it. But how do you feel about her yourself?

Kristy: Yeah, I mean, I tend to love my characters with all of their flaws and their difficulties – I think they’re real. I think Lanier is a real character. I think she is probably a character that’s maybe more similar to a real person than I’ve necessarily written before, because I do think that real people have real feelings. And a lot of times, if we said them out loud, we wouldn’t be accepted for them. And I think that’s true – I think we all carry thoughts and opinions that if everyone was inside of our head, they would be like, well, you’re awful [laughs], and I think we all do. I mean, I think that’s part of our inner monologue. And we really got to see that with Lanier. I think if people are really being honest and you’re really thinking about yourself in Lanier’s position, you would have a lot of concerns about Daphne. As much as you love her, as much as she’s your best friend – she’s not your family. And I think that was this distinction that I was trying to draw in this because I love writing about family, I love family stories, my Peachtree Bluff series is a big family saga. And I think there are things that sisters can do to each other, that sisters can say to each other, that sisters can bounce back from, that best friends cannot. And that was a line that I really wanted to play with in this book because these women have known each other their entire lives, and I do think it gives them a different type of relationship than maybe if they had met when they were older. Not necessarily better or worse, stronger or less strong – it’s just a different relationship. You have lived and grown together in such a different way and stuck by each other through things that maybe you wouldn’t if you were older. And so I think there is that kind of element. And I think Lanier, ultimately, as I saw her, she’s coming from a place of protection. She wants to protect her brother because she knows that Daphne has broken his heart before. She’s broken a lot of people’s hearts and she thinks she could potentially do it again. And I think she wants to protect her best friend because she has seen her brother and her best friend in this terribly codependent situation and she knew it wasn’t the best thing for both of them. And so while I think she’s maybe not the warmest, fuzziest character in the book, she’s realistic [laughs] and I think her concerns come from a place of love. But again, if you fully love her and think she’s the heroine of the story, the story doesn’t work [laughs]. So we have to dislike her at some points along the way. But I do think that she is ultimately just a person who’s growing up in this story. She’s growing up, she’s coming into her own and she’s figuring out who she is in this new part of her life, both where Daphne’s concerned and where Rich is concerned, in her relationships and her friendships and everything. And some people, I think, come to that a little bit later. And other people come to it a little bit earlier. I think Daphne has had a much harder life, so she’s had to come to some of these conclusions about herself and what she needs a little bit earlier than Lanier, who has had a lot of love and support around her, always unconditionally. So she can afford to test those boundaries of that love a little bit more, I think, than Daphne can.

Charlie: Well, I want to ask you about Daphne, and I want to ask you about the family aspect as well. And I think we can probably put it into one question. So you’ve mentioned Daphne’s family. There’s struggles there. Why was it important to you to write about this family?

Kristy: Well, when I’m thinking about a character’s backstory, I’m always trying to think, why do they do the things that they do? Why do they make the decisions that they do? And I knew there was going to be that moment where she just feels like she can’t commit to Huff and she’s going to break his heart all over again. And that partly that was going to have to do with Lanier, but partly Daphne’s 30 years old and she’s a big girl, and she’s been to law school, and she’s a mother, and she can make decisions – she can choose the man that she loves over her best friend if she wants to. And so I knew she needed to have a piece of her and a piece of her heart that couldn’t let her have what she wanted because she was afraid of something. Now, I didn’t know what that was necessarily, but I knew she needed to be afraid of something. And I have to tell you, that scene [laughs], where she breaks up with Huff; every time I read it – like a thousand times – it was with one eye. I was like, God, I hate this. Don’t do this! It’s all going to be okay! Don’t break up with him! Like, I hated that scene, but anyway, I mean, I loved it, but I hated it [laughs]. But I think her fears that she would turn out like her mother or her parents, honestly just that concern that her son would have to be in a position like she was where people came into her life and she loved them and they let her down, and she doesn’t want that for him. And I think even beyond loving someone in a romantic way, I think that love for your child really trumps everything. And I felt like that was the ultimate reason – like beyond Lanier, beyond her family, beyond her fear, her love for her child. And for right or wrong, I do think she’s afraid that she’s going to make a decision that is going to make her son’s life end up like hers, that he’s going to be hurt like she was hurt. And so I think her family plays into that a lot. And like I said, her fear that she could become her mother one day, and I think that is a big fear for her, and her main goal is making sure that that doesn’t happen to her and it doesn’t happen to her son. And I think it gives her reason to back out of the relationship that I don’t know if readers will fully understand it necessarily, but I think even when you’re in that moment of, oh, my gosh, this is a terrible decision, at least maybe you can somewhat understand why she would feel the way she does.

Charlie: No, it read very, I suppose, real to me. But it’s interesting because, not that you need, in quotes, to have a reason to have a child in a book, because people have children, it’s very normal, but you did a very good job of showing, like as you’ve told us here and in the book, Henry’s reason to be there as such, which was nice.

Kristy: Yes, I think you’re right. Exactly. You don’t need to have a reason to have a child in the book, but – I love Henry, I think he’s a doll – so I hate to say he was a plot device because he’s not a plot device! He’s an amazing, wonderful, darling character in the story, but he is a little bit of a plot device too. He is Daphne’s ultimate reason for making all of the decisions that she makes throughout the course of this book. Whether they’re misguided or not, like as parents, we don’t always make the right decisions. We screw it up constantly all the time. But I think she thinks she is making the decisions that she makes for Henry, whether she is or not [laughs].

Charlie: I’m going to reel us back; I do this all the time, listeners are going to be used to it – but I did want to ask about your choices for narrative. You have Daphne, you have Lanier, you have June, and I think I kind of gathered why you didn’t have Mary Stuart. And at the same time, I think, inevitably, given that you’ve got two of the three friends, you’re kind of like, oh, maybe could have had a Mary Stuart one. What was your reason for not having Mary Stuart in the narrative, as a narrative voice?

Kristy: So there were multiple reasons. So the short and simple, really honest Writer Kristy answer is that I had just come off of writing The Wedding Veil that had four narrators, two real women in the past, and then two made up fictional ones in the present. And then the book before that, was Christmas In Peachtree Bluff, which we were talking about off air before this. And it has five different points of view. And then the one before that, Under The Southern Sky, also has five points of view. And I just thought, I am not writing another book with five points of view! I am going to have two narrators of this book and I’m going to pick and it’s going to be hard, but I’ve done it before and it works really well and you don’t need to see every character – this was the talk that I had with myself. So I decided right off the bat – it was an easy decision, we had to have Lanier and we had to have Daphne. They were the two central characters; they were in the main conflict of the story if we didn’t see their points of view, we couldn’t really tell the story that we needed to tell. So I knew that we needed to have those two. I wanted this to be a first person situation because I wanted you to feel really close to… maybe Daphne in particular and the struggles that she goes through, I wanted to see these women in first person so that we could really get into their heads. So I started writing the story and I thought, well, this is going to work really well because I love having three best friends because I think, same with like three sisters, three anything or five or an odd number always really works because you have people that are at odds with each other. And I liked the idea right off the bat of not seeing Mary Stuart’s point of view because I liked her being the go between these two women and us not really knowing what’s in her head. But then also, honestly, just again, from the Writer Kristy point of view, there’s a lot in this story already. So we don’t need another character who we need a fully developed backstory on, who we need to know everything that she’s doing and every reason why. But then as I got into the book, I started to realise that, especially in those beginning parts, where we’re talking about the camp and we’re talking about Holly Springs, and we’re trying to figure out how did Holly Springs get to this point where it’s about to close and what has June been thinking about, and is there a backup plan here, you know, what does all that look like? I was telling the reader a lot and we were getting a lot of information from conversations that characters were having. And I don’t like that; it’s okay in small doses, but I felt like some of their conversations felt like information dumps and I was like, nope, not doing this. So I decided to put Aunt June in, again for multiple reasons; I felt like her relationship with her sister was going to be a really critical part of the story, I thought her relationship with Daphne was going to be a really critical part of the story, and seeing the way that addiction and loss and all of these things really trickle down through generations of family members. So I thought, well, this is a really interesting point of view that Aunt June is going to have. So it wasn’t just like, let’s put her in there so we have all the information – let’s put her in there because she has an interesting story to tell. But I also put her in there because I wanted readers to be able to see what she had been through, how she had acquired this camp, why she had acquired it, all the things that she’s gone through, and then also how camp Holly Springs becomes a crutch for June and how she ends up using it as such. And then the parallels between June and Daphne and how in some ways they seem so different, but at the end of the day, they make a lot of the same choices for a lot of the same reasons. And they’re kind of the only two people who can help each other out of it because they’re the only two that lived what they lived. So I was like, okay, I’ve got a great reason to have Aunt June in here. And actually there was a lot about Aunt June that didn’t make it into the final draft of this book – she had a love story, there was a lot more about June and Melanie, her sister. There was a lot more about their childhood and their past in the original versions of the story. But I think ultimately I had to kind of narrow it down to what do we really need to keep this story moving forward and what do we have to see? Because it was a very long book [laughs], I just felt like it was too long for a book of this genre. It read a little long to me and I was like, okay, we gotta cut some things out of here. But I hope readers don’t feel like they missed out on Mary Stuart. I do feel like she’s a character that I could come back to and really dive into her story as well in a different way. And that she is certainly equally as interesting and worthy of a point of view as these other two women. But I think for the purposes of this story, I liked not necessarily completely knowing what Mary Stuart was thinking and being able to see her thoughts through the other women and which side she was on through the other women.

Charlie: Well, it struck me that… I think particularly because you had her wedding at the start?…

Kristy: Yeah.

Charlie: Yes. She had less conflict in her own life, which made it work as well I think.

Kristy: Yeah. I hoped that the reader didn’t walk away feeling like, oh, well, we needed to know this about Mary Stuart or we needed to know that about Mary Stuart. And so it was very intentional to have her at a slightly more settled place in her life, you know, settled for good, settled for now! Who knows! If there’s more Holly Springs in the future, Mary Stuart could have a whole other way to go. But I think her being a little more settled did lend itself to maybe not having her quite in the centre of this conflict. And not that she’s less of a best friend, but she didn’t grow up in a town with Lanier and Daphne; there are a lot of things that Lanier and Daphne went through that Mary Stuart was not at the centre of. So I felt like for that reason too, it was okay to give her a little less of a point of view.

Charlie: I agree with it. You said that this book was originally longer. How longer are we talking?

Kristy: Oh, gosh… I probably cut 60 or 70 pages from this book, which is a lot [laughs], it’s a lot! There were some other things, like in the original draft, Daphne had a stepfather who we saw a lot more of, and I loved him, he was darling [laughs]. And he was the kind of person that she was able to count on and rely on even after her mother was gone. But part of the reason that I took him out was because I wanted Lanier to really be Daphne’s only soft landing. I wanted her to be the only constant in her life. And so while I loved him as a character and he honestly was an easy way to solve some plot things, it just seemed like maybe we didn’t need him. And again, it was another character that we were really developing a lot of. And I thought, okay, if we cut him, then this could be okay. There’s something else big that I cut out of this… oh! Yes. So, in the original draft, after Daphne and Huff break up, she has a little bit of a love triangle thing going on with Steven as well. And there is a moment in there where he very much wants for them to try to be a family. And there’s a moment in there where she thinks maybe that’s not a bad idea – I mean that maybe that is something that could work. She doesn’t ultimately end up pursuing that or anything, but I did think it was an interesting angle, and I think it’s shown a little more light on the fact that they were much younger and they’re very different people when they had Henry, and the decisions that they made during that time were maybe not the decisions that they would make now. And I did like that angle. But again, there’s just a lot going on in this book and I didn’t want readers to feel overwhelmed by all the things being thrown at them. And so I thought maybe the conflict of Daphne choosing between Lanier and Huff was maybe enough. She didn’t have to choose between Lanier, and Huff, and Steven [laughs].

Charlie: No, yeah. I mean, you have still got an element of Steven… obviously Steven is in the book still [Kristy: sure], so he’s always there in the background. And, I did wonder, even though I thought, okay, I think it’s a done deal, effectively, that you’re going to have Huff and Daphne end up together, I still did wonder if that was going to happen, even though I kind of felt it was inevitable, I don’t know. So, yeah, no, it’s still there, that good balance.

Kristy: Well, and I do feel like there was a little bit of that, I mean I hoped. I think even in this draft, like you said, there was a little bit of that. He’s there and he’s great, he could certainly be a contender for her heart – you know, even though he’s not, he could be. And so I think it’s kind of there. And actually [laughs], funnily enough, when I had the stepfather in the first draft, there was this element… part of the reason that I ended up cutting him is because I don’t know why it was and it wasn’t intentional, but it was like this inevitability that you felt a little bit like maybe June should be with Daphne’s stepfather, but, like, no, he was married to her mother, that would be way too weird, that could not happen, and that doesn’t happen in the story. But it was like every time I read it, there were these moments that it felt like that’s where the story was going! And I was like hmm, I think I got to take that out [laughs].

Charlie: Okay, so you had this thing, yeah, going on, definitely, and you said absolutely no to it, yeah.

Kristy: The irony of this book is that on the surface, it should be a really easy book to write. It’s three best friends, they’re saving their summer camp. It’s a fun summer story. It makes you think about your childhood. It’s my 10th book, and it’s probably the one that I rewrote the most and edited the most, which I think is hilarious [laughs].

Charlie: It’s come out great in the end, all the work and stuff, it’s been good for it. Yeah.

Kristy: Thank you.

Charlie: The camp – you’ve been to camp, I believe, you’ve been to camp yourself?

Kristy: Yes.

Charlie: I think there will be quite a few listeners, potentially, who haven’t been to necessarily the kind of camps that we’re talking about. Can you tell us about your experiences, camps in general, maybe – that sort of thing?

Kristy: Absolutely. So I grew up going to a camp in the mountains in North Carolina called Camp Hollymont. And I loved it; I went there for – I don’t know exactly how many summers, but seven or eight – from the time I was a child until I was a counsellor-in-training. So I was a teenager at that point. And it was just this lovely moment in time where you were totally removed from your regular life, you were with people that you never would have met otherwise, from all over. It’s something I sort of hit on in this book a lot, but I think for me, something that, in retrospect, I think camp taught me, or that I felt about camp, was that it’s the first time in your life that you have that taste of independence as a child. Your mom’s not there, your dad’s not there, your siblings aren’t there! Everything about your normal life is stripped away. And while, yes, you have counsellors and you have people making sure you eat and bathe and are alive, whatever, it’s like safety, but you have this freedom in confinement, I think is the best way to explain it, because there are a lot of parameters around what you’re doing, but there’s a lot of freedom in your days too. And it’s something that I think is so interesting and important and it’s something that especially I think kids today don’t really get a lot of. Because in earlier years kids would get that in some ways of like, okay, well, come back before dinner! And now we’re tracking them on their phone to make sure they’re still at soccer [laughs]. I mean, whatever it is, I think the world is very different and so there are reasons for that, I don’t think it’s like, oh, parents are just crazy now, I just think the world’s a very different place. But I think camp was a moment in my life where I was really able to experience that freedom of childhood and that feeling that the world was out there and everything was a possibility and you could really be anything and do anything. And it was also the first time that I really experienced people from outside of my small town in a really crucial way. My parents loved to travel, so I was lucky that I got to go a lot of places, but to spend those weeks with these girls from all different places gave you a little bit of a different perspective on people’s lives and where they’re from and how they grew up. And I think that’s something that I really wanted to hit on this book too. I think there’s a line in the book where – I think it’s Daphne – she thinks, you only know your own reality until you are led into someone else’s. And I think that’s an interesting thing. Her friends are like, wait, your mom sings Madonna and you eat McDonald’s every day [laughs] and they’re like, what? And she’s like, oh, is that weird? You don’t know those things until you’re at a place in your life where you’re experiencing other people’s reality. It’s all of those little things that I think are really interesting but just in a basic kind of brass tack way, and camp was very much, you get up, you have breakfast together, and you have all these activities throughout the day, and you get to choose the ones that you love and that mean something to you. And you’re learning new skills and honing old ones and again, meeting new friends and being with people that you haven’t been with. And it was a really special experience for me. And because I wrote this book during the pandemic, I really sat down and thought, where do I want to go and where do I want to take readers? And where is a place where you just feel kind of free? And camp instantly popped into my head and I was like, I’m going to write a book about summer camp.

Charlie: Okay, so that was the genesis, the very initial moment?

Kristy: Yeah.

Charlie: Right.

Kristy: Yeah. And then getting invited to family camp happened right after that. So it just ended up being a fortunate coincidence that I already knew I wanted to write a book set at summer camp, we got invited to go back to a summer camp, and it was so fun to kind of relive those days of childhood and just being outside all day long and getting to do all these fun activities and just remembering what it was. And I also think there’s this element to – not all camps because obviously some of them are newer – but the camp that I went to and certainly the camp where we had family camp, where you get that feeling that there are all these generations that have come before you that have been in the same place you are. And there’s something really special about that.

Charlie: I had a question about that, actually. I’ll bring it up now. So that’s effectively why you end the book with the children of Daphne, Mary Stuart, Lanier, going back to camp, then to kind of round it off, go full circle?

Kristy: Yes, exactly. Exactly. I wanted that feeling of that circle that kind of continues and continues inevitably. And we don’t know how long because who knows what the next chapter holds, but I loved the idea of this next generation getting to experience what the former generation had. And I do think that is a big element to a lot of camps, and the one that I kind of based this on, Camp Seafarer in North Carolina, it is a very multi-generational camp. I mean, you have, now daughters and mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers that have all been to the same camp forever. And there’s something kind of special about that, that real sense of legacy and carrying on into the future.

Charlie: Yes, it is lovely. I suppose not necessarily the camp, Seafarer, that you went to, but, given the premise, were there any camps that had to close or were near closing due to the lockdowns?

Kristy: Yes, I think there were a lot. I can’t think of specific examples off the top of my head, but that was certainly something that I had heard a lot about. And I do think the camp that I went to and then the camp I went to family camp, they were both, again, really long lasting legacy camps where people were very invested in making sure that they were still around for the next generation. But yes, there were many, many, camps that were definitely not that lucky and did have to close. And I mean, obviously there were a lot of things in place to try to make sure that that didn’t happen. But I do feel like if you were certainly a camp that was already in a position that was somewhat precarious, where you thought ooh, is this coming to an end? Or are we able to be sustainable, losing an entire year or mostly – a lot of people lost two full summers, 2000 and 2021 – and just couldn’t recover from it. So, yeah, it was a really unfortunate side effect, that, again, was something that I hadn’t really thought of until I was in the position, when they reached out and said, hey, can you come to family camp? Can you help us bridge the gap for the next year? And I thought that was such a really clever way to do that.

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. I suppose I was thinking, hoping, that they were fine. I hadn’t thought that maybe some would have closed, but yeah, if you say they were already having troubles, yeah, that makes sense.

Kristy: Yeah, definitely. It was too much to have to get through.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s a sad thing. Going back to the friends for a moment, you’ve got this concept of hard things, which I think lots of people sound like they loved. Can you tell us how you got the idea [for] this? It’s great. Yeah.

Kristy: Well, I’m glad that that resonated with people, because it was one of those light bulb moments that… again, it was in 2020, and my husband and my son and I spent months basically at our dining room table all working together because our son was doing school from home and my husband and I were – well, I mean, I work from home mostly, anyway. But I was really working from home in a very different way because I was supposed to be on book tour; April of 2020 I had a new book come out. And so it seems kind of silly now because we’re so used to doing Zooms and being virtual and all of that, but at that moment, no one had done a virtual book tour. And I had, like, 41 book tour stops or something, that we were all of a sudden trying to figure out – these are going to have to be virtual. I mean, I remember a lot of the bookstores didn’t have a Zoom account or know what that was, and I was hosting all of these – anyway, it was nuts. My husband’s a dentist, so that was obviously, a very unique time because the dental association in the United States at first was saying, absolutely everyone needs to be shut down. There’s no dentistry being done at all. And of course, that’s difficult because you’re trying to figure out, we have all these employees and all these patients, and what do we do? And then it became, oh, my gosh, they have to open back u, because all the dental emergencies were going to the emergency room, which, of course, was a huge problem because they were trying to keep the emergency rooms open for people with severe Covid. So he was trying to figure out all these things – everything changed, all the protocols changed, everything was very different. So we were all just working at our dining room table in this sort of frantic way [laughs]. And I remember saying to him when we were just all in a brand new situation and I was like, wouldn’t it be really cool if we could just divide our days up? All the things that I thought were hard but you think are easy, you could do, and the things that I think are easy but you think are hard, I could do. And then we were talking about our brother-in-law; he’s very good at a lot of things that we’re not good at and we were like, and then he could do those things, and we were just laughing about it. And I said, yeah, we could just all do each other’s hard things. And it was like this light bulb moment and I was like, oh my gosh, I’m going to have these women in this book do each other’s hard things! And I think it was just born out of something kind of silly, but then I do think there’s some truth to that, that when you do have these long standing relationships that that is part of being in a friendship or a relationship, or even if you’re not literally calling that place for that person, or returning the shoes [laughs], or whatever it is they do for each other. If you’re not literally doing that, you are bearing a burden for them in some sort of way, or giving great advice, or being their sounding board, or doing things that they do find difficult in their life, even if it’s not in that very literal way like it is in this book. It was meant to be a little bit of a metaphor for those close relationships in your life and how you do take on each other’s hard things.

Charlie: When you’re close to someone, you know them so well that you can do those things for them in the way that they would do them as well.

Kristy: Yes.

Charlie: It was a very interesting thing to read and it was fun, even though I know it was hard things, but it was fun to read.

Kristy: Yeah, it was supposed to be! I definitely wanted it to be a little bit tongue in cheek and fun, but that has been, like you said, it’s been really interesting to me to hear what people say about that or like, wow, I wish I had someone that could do this for m,e or this would be really cool, or my friend and I got together and I’m doing this for her and she’s doing this for me [laughs], and it was an unexpected point of this book that I think has resonated. You never know what’s going to resonate with people, so it’s always interesting to see.

Charlie: I tried to stop my friend buying more books than she can read, and she reminded me to get my hay for my rabbits. That’s two very different kind of things but [laughs].

Kristy: Right there. I love it.

Charlie: So I think we are going to have to get on to the ending, because I do want to talk about the ending. I love the ending. But as I think I have mentioned, I was wondering if maybe Daphne wouldn’t get with Huff, even though I thought it absolutely had to happen. But did you have any other endings in mind, whether they were about Huff and Daphne, or about Lanier and Rich, or anything like that?

Kristy: I did have other endings in mind. So I did have an ending, I actually think I wrote this one, where Daphne does tell Lanier about Bryce. She doesn’t find out through third party means, she does tell her, despite the fact that she’s very mad at her. She tells her because she knows it’s the right thing to do, and she does get disbarred.

Charlie: Wow. Okay.

Kristy: And Aunt June has decided throughout the course – this is when Aunt June had a whole different storyline, too – that as much as she loves Camp Holly Springs, and as happy as she is that they were able to save it, that it’s too much for her at this point in her life to continue to be the director, and so Daphne ends up coming back to take over Camp Holly Springs and be the director of Camp Holly Springs! So, yeah, that was a vastly different ending [laughs] to begin with. But I think there were elements of Aunt June’s story that I removed that made me want that to be her victorious ending, that she gets to keep this place that she loves, and she gets to be the person to have it for multiple other generations. I will say, though, again, I don’t always know what’s going to happen, but I was pretty dead set that Daphne was going to tell Lanier from the beginning of the story, I was pretty dead set that she was going to tell her and that something, some consequence would happen – whether she got disbarred, whether she got slapped on the wrist, whatever it may be – like whatever the consequence for that action ended up being that she did tell him that there was a consequence of that action. And I actually think it was my editor who was like, maybe Daphne should plan to tell her, but that she should find out in another way. And, I mean, I did end up liking that in the end because I thought it was a softer landing for all of them. And it didn’t require such huge change. But I could see writing a sequel to this book for sure. Although now I think it would actually probably be more like Lanier and Rich [laughs], taking over camp, as opposed to Daphne. And that was actually part of the reason that I ended up taking back the whole Daphne taking over camp. It was very developed, like to the point that she and Huff had had conversations about how it’s going to work and what they were going to do. And I did think that there were a lot of logistics to that because, I mean, Huff’s a doctor, he can’t go work at camp. I mean, that’s just not reality, and so how are they… like I had to choose. Either she had to have the camp or she had to have Huff, but she couldn’t really have both. That’s real life, sometimes we don’t get to have everything that we want because logistically, it just doesn’t work out. So I had a very different ending [laughs].

Charlie: Wow. Yeah. Okay. I mean, I like that you’ve said this, because while I’m completely satisfied with the book as it is, I like that there’s these possibilities that I can think that they’re kind of canon as such, I don’t know, they kind of happened. But yeah, I mean, you’ve definitely got Lanier taking over. I suppose I saw her – as much as I love her having a bookstore, because oh, my goodness, a bookstore – she can take over the camp. She’s got Rich. She can go to the boys camp. She could maybe take the camp from June. Yeah, Daphne taking the camp, that’s interesting.

Kristy: I kind of forgotten about that until you asked, honestly. And I guess I’ve never talked about it because most of the interviews I do don’t have spoilers. So I was never talking about the ending of the book because if I said that, obviously you know that’s not how the book ends [laughs]. So it’s a spoiler in some ways, yeah.

Charlie: Yeah, sure, sure, and June leaving would have been interesting. And I want to point out to listeners, you did do a really good in-depth interview with… I think it was Susan M Boyer – [Kristy: yes!] and I’m definitely going to link that for people because I really enjoyed that when I was researching, I listened to it, I was like, yeah, this is brilliant.

Kristy: Thank you.

Charlie: Okay. Endings. Wow. You’ve given me so much more of an appreciation of this book, my goodness [Kristy laughs]. And you say a sequel – is this something that you think might happen in the future, or do you think it’s kind of something you might actively do within a few books?

Kristy: I don’t have real plans for it; my 2024 book is set. It’s coming out, and I have a first draft of what will presumably be my 2025 book. So if I did do another Holly Springs book, it would not be for a couple of years. But it’s – I mean, I don’t know if I should say this – there’s some fun things going on on the potential, like adapting this for screen and nothing specific that I could talk about. But that is something that there’s definitely been some conversation about. It’s like, if that were to happen and that were to work out, doing a sequel to this book to give more. And I do think something that I liked about this book; I think there are a lot of potential worlds within this book. There are a lot more stories that I could tell about these women in this place. And a lot of times, it’s an interesting thing for me to say, because for the very most part, when I have written a standalone novel and readers will come back and they’ll say, oh, I wish you would write a sequel about blah, blah, blah, and I’m always, nope [laughs]. Like, I don’t say that, but I’m like, oh, thanks, but in my mind, I’m like, nope, I’m not doing that. Because to me, it was a world, and that world is over for me. But Holly Springs was a little bit different because I felt like when I finished this book, it was maybe the only time that I felt like I finished a book, and I really thought, oh, you know, I could really do a sequel to this book – I would love to see what happens with Steven, I would love to see what happens with Mary Stuart. I would love to see, like, do Huff and Lanier make it down the aisle, like, whatever it is. I think there’s how do Rich and Lanier end up, what happens to the camps, what happens to June in this new chapter? So I do think there were a lot of questions for me as a writer, like, okay, I could really go back into this world and open it back up. So I think that would probably be something that was predicated on something else. Like, were it to get made in a different way, then I think I could definitely see myself writing a sequel, but I might do it anyway, you know, who knows! Who knows!

Charlie: I completely see why you’ve gone for three perspectives in this book, and you say you’ve gone for, like, five in other books. This kind of seems like your perspectives, you’re meant to have done five, maybe, and you haven’t done it, so they’re coming back into sequels, please explore these people, yeah!

Kristy: Yeah, it’s exactly right! I think that’s exactly what it is, where most of the time, I just give myself free rein to be like, okay, I’m having all these points of view. But I will say, I did something similar in my 2024 book, I had three really strong points of view, and I ended up cutting one down to maybe just two or three chapters that I thought we absolutely needed to see from that point of view, because it gives you more space to explore something. And in something like, the fourth book in the Peachtree Bluff series, having five points of view was totally fine, because if you’ve read the other books in the series, you know everyone’s backstory, you know everything about the town; you have so much information already that you don’t need tons and tons of that to make the book work. So it’s not too hard to have five points of view because you’re really working on: today, what’s happening today, what’s happening right now, what’s happening in this holiday season. But in this book, I really wanted to be able to delve a little more deeply into a few characters instead of so many.

Charlie: Right. Well, I feel I should say to listeners, because we’ve mentioned it a couple of times now, is that the reason that we were talking about Peachtree Bluff number four, before we hit record, was because it’s actually October, and I’m looking into what I want to read for Christmas. And I know that Kristy has a Christmas book there, and I thought, well, I can possibly read all four of them before Christmas, but if I want to just start on the Christmas one first, see how that works [Kristy laughs]. But, yeah, okay. So going back for a moment oh, my goodness, Summer Of Songbirds, might be adapted, that’s exciting. However, and I’m going to ask this one before we go back to another question, Peachtree Bluff itself, there’s an adaptation – is that still in the the works?

Kristy: Well, I think the unfortunate reality – we got very, very far with Peachtree, we sold it to NBC, I was really involved in writing the pilot, which was amazing, I learned so much from doing that, they ordered a second episode, we were right on track. But as has happened with a lot of shows after the strike – which I fully support and felt was completely necessary, I do want to say that; two things can be true, right? I’m glad that the strike happened, I’m in full support of it, but I am also disappointed that the timing is such that I’m not sure that Peachtree is going to make it through, which is disappointing, but I also think there’s still potential to kind of start over again with Peachtree, which… I’ve learned a lot [laughs] just being in… I thought publishing was a really hard world, and it is, don’t get me wrong, but it is nothing compared to Hollywood [laughs]. It is nothing. I mean, it is unbelievable to me just the amount of time and energy and money that are put into these productions, then actually end up not making it to screen for very little reasons, like timing or someone drops out or all these different things that can happen. So that has been disappointing to realise that, I’m not sure that’s going to happen. But on the bright side, there’s been a lot of activity around a lot of my work and projects right now. So I’m hoping that we have some fun things that we can share and announce about some different things. And it’s not an end for Peachtree Bluff, it’s a pause and regroup for Peachtree Bluff. So we’re very actively working on what’s the next step and where do we go from here? And the good thing is, there was a lot of interest in it in the beginning, and so we ended up going down a path, but I don’t think it’s a closed door, I think it’s just maybe a little bit of a different path than we saw. Whereas we were hoping that right now we would be announcing air dates! I think we’re in a little bit of a different spot. So that’s a very hazy answer to the question, but it’s because in reality, I just don’t know [laughs], I don’t know.

Charlie: Fair enough. I mean, there is some positivity there, definitely.

Kristy: Yeah, for sure. There’s reason to be hopeful. Adaptations have been something that I’ve always held onto really loosely because I’ve had things optioned, I’ve had things sell, I’ve had really exciting things happen. But you know that it’s really difficult to ever get something actually to screen. And so it’s something that I’m always really excited about; I love the idea that my work would resonate with someone else enough that they would even want to take a chance on that, and it means a lot to me. But I hold onto it very loosely because I feel like something that Peachtree did teach me, in the writing and doing everything that I was doing, is that I think writing novels is my real great love. And the other stuff is fantastic. And I love the idea of someone else taking it and running with it. But I don’t think that we’re going to see Kristy the screenwriter coming anytime soon! I mean, who knows, right? Life takes us in a lot of different places, but it’s an enjoyable experience, I learned a lot, but it’s not my great love. Writing novels is my great love. And I think exploring the internal life of a character is my very one most favourite thing about writing novels. And it’s the one thing that you don’t get to do when you’re writing for the screen. So not to say I won’t do it again, certain that I will, but it taught me a lot that this is really, I think, what I like to do.

Charlie: Oh, sure. Definitely. And yeah, unless you’ve got an extremely detailed narrative that comes from the character themselves, yeah, you can’t explore their inner lives all that much.

Kristy: Yeah, exactly.

Charlie: So this new book – I might have to ask you about both of them, actually – so 2024 then. Can you tell us about this book?

Kristy: I can. We finally have a title. Oh, my goodness. I think it’s the first time I’m saying it out loud, so here you go – it’s called A Happier Life. We went back and forth on the title for a long, long time. My working title had been Where The Sky Meets The Sea, which I really liked, but it just wasn’t working for some reason. And then we changed it and I just could not get on board… I don’t know, it just wasn’t the right title. So anyway, everyone’s very happy with A Happier Life. This is a book that is – I won’t tell you too much because it’s a spoiler [laughs] but it is somewhat inspired by a family story and my own family, kind of about my great aunt and uncle who passed away long before I was born in an accident that I had grown up knowing about, I knew it existed, it was kind of an unusual accident and a lot of questions surrounding it, but it was something that I’d just always taken for granted as a child. And then my grandmother said something about it one day, and my – I don’t know what you’d call him, I guess he’s my second cousin, but he would have been my great aunt and uncle’s son – said something else the next day, and I had this light bulb moment of, oh, my goodness, what if that’s not really what happened? What if this is what really happened? And I thought, this is a book [laughs]. This is definitely a book! And so that was the impetus for this story. But it is about a woman named Keaton who has grown up her entire life knowing that her grandparents died in an accident, but she doesn’t know really anything about them. Her mother and uncle never talk about them, they never talk about that night. It’s something that just happened before she was born, and it’s not something that is really a part of her life in any way. But she is shocked to find out that her mother and her uncle have never sold their childhood home. Thinks it’s completely insane [laughs] that they have left this house in Beaufort, North Carolina, which is where I happen to live, just sitting there for almost 50 years. So they finally decided that they are emotionally ready to part with this house, but they are not emotionally ready to go clean out the house. And so they ask her if she will go do it, and she, of course, says, no, she’s not going to go do it. But then she has a change of circumstances that make it so she thinks maybe this wouldn’t be such a bad idea. So she escapes to Beaufort, and basically walks through the front door of this house that is a time capsule, for all intents and purposes. I mean, everyone left the house in 1976 and never came back. And so when she walks in, it’s basically everything that was left behind. And as she’s starting to clean out the house and she’s finding these bits and pieces of her grandparents’ lives, and she’s meeting people in Beaufort who knew her grandparents and getting to be a part of this town, she starts to realise that she doesn’t think that the story she’s been told about her grandparents her entire life is true. And so in the other point of view, we are seeing Beck St James, Rebecca St James, who is Keaton’s grandmother, and her story unfolds from 1935 until that fateful night in 1976 where she meets her demise, and finding out what really happened to Rebecca and Townsend St. James. So it’s interesting because I love to write family stories, I’ve mentioned that earlier, but this is a different type of family story because it’s a grandmother and a granddaughter, and you’re seeing these echoes of their lives and each other’s lives, but yet they’re not alive at the same time. So that was a really interesting different take. But it’s a very Southern story, which I love to write. I mean, Rebecca St James is known for her hostessing skills, and so that is this little through-line that runs through the story, and both of these women are in different time periods, in different ways, experiencing this moment in their life where they have to reinvent themselves and make some difficult choices, and they do it in very different ways. So, anyway, I don’t know, I’m very excited. You shouldn’t have favourite children, but I will have to say, I think this is my favourite book I’ve ever written, and I’m really excited for people to read it.

Charlie: All right! [Kristy laughs] Okay, then. All right. I’m looking forward to reading that one. My goodness. All right!

Kristy: Thank you.

Charlie: So that’s two points of view, then, two narratives.

Kristy: It’s just two. Townsend St James, who is Rebecca’s husband, does have a few chapters in this book. He had a lot, he had a full POV. And then I ended up, again, thinning him out just a little, for multiple reasons, but partially because I ended up… the first draft I wrote of this book had a lot of Rebecca and Townsend’s love story as it unfolded in the ’30s, and I still have a lot of that, but I cut a fair amount of that just, again, to make space on the page for what was happening now. So I ended up cutting some of his POV because of that. But then also because… it’s not meant to be, like a mystery, right? I mean, if you figure out on the first page what happens, fine. I think you’ll still really enjoy the novel. So it’s not like, this is my foray into mystery writing. It’s not like that. But there is a little bit of this secret at the centre of the story of what really happened to these people. And so as I got toward the end, I thought maybe hearing less from him made it a little bit of a stronger story.

Charlie: Okay. No, I’m seeing lots of possibilities of where the story is going to go. Yeah, I like it. I like it very much. Am I allowed to ask you about this – I think what you said you’re writing at the moment – the 2025 book?

Kristy: So I really can’t tell you about 2025, but I will tell you it was not what I was planning to write. I had full intentions of writing another series. I knew exactly what it’s about. I knew all my characters. Again, I don’t outline or anything, but I had a very clear idea of book one, two, and three, where they begin and end, like the narrative of whose POVs were seeing and all that. And then I gave myself deadlines, like, within my real deadlines, because I need to stay on track. It was a Monday, and I was like, I’m going to go home and I’m going to start writing. And I had a news alert come up on my phone. And I was like, no, that’s my new book! And I started writing it that day. And that has never happened to me before because usually I have to think about it a little bit more. But actually, I called my agent and I was like, I have this idea, is this crazy? And she was like, I love it, you should write it. So I did, and I had lunch with some friends that day and I was like, what do you guys think? I read this article this morning and I had this idea. And it was one of those things that became so catchy that we were talking about it all afternoon. And they were like, you need to write this, you’ve hit on something here. So anyway, I hate being vague like that, but hopefully I’ll be able to tell you very soon, but I’m not finished with it yet and I’m not under contract for it yet, so I really can’t talk about it until I am! But very soon. Very soon.

Charlie: It’s sounding like you could get a book that’s even better than the next one then, yeah. My goodness. Okay. All right. [Both laugh.] So, yeah. Kristy, it’s been lovely to have you on. I knew I was going to like The Summer Of Songbirds no matter where it went; ironically, we’ve spoiled some of the book here, but I didn’t want to spoil it for myself. So I read very little about it. And yeah, I just loved it. And I’m reading The Wedding Veil at the moment and doing the same again, trying not to find out what’s going to happen and really enjoying it. Thank you very much for being here today, it’s been lovely having you.

Kristy: Oh, thank you so much, Charlie. This was such a great interview. And I’m so appreciative that you took the time to have me on and read my book and it means a lot. So thank you very much.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time. And for more information as to upcoming authors, check out wormholepodcast.com. The Worm Hole podcast episode 93 was recorded on the 23rd October 2023 and published on the 11th March 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.