YA Horror and Ghost Stories with Kate Alice Marshall: The Narrow

In this week’s episode, Marissa chats with Kate Alice Marshall about her latest YA horror, THE NARROW. Also discussed: how you can reinvent yourself as a writer, the appeal of scary stories and writing them even if you’re a scaredy cat, the process of writing tension, mystery, and red herrings, coordinating the writing, editing, and promoting of several book projects in multiple genres, and so much more!

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Transcript

[00:10] Marissa: Hello. Hello, and welcome to the Happy Writer. This is a podcast that aims to bring readers more books to enjoy and to help authors find more joy in their writing. I am your host, Marissa Meyer. Thank you so much for joining me. If I sound a little weirdly, scratchy today. It is not your imagination. I've been fighting off a cold. If you've listened to this podcast long enough, you know that I have this weird thing where I lose my voice like every twelve to 18 months. I don't know why it's so weird, but it happened again here a couple of weeks ago during our big epic move and I'm still kind of recovering and also I leave for the Heartless musical in Salt Lake City. In trying to do the math, I think in five days and last time that they produced the Heartless musical and I flew in to see it, I lost my voice that entire weekend and I'm really paranoid that it's going to happen again. And you're probably thinking like, well, maybe, Marissa, you shouldn't be recording podcast episodes, but that's just not how my life works. But hopefully I'll drink lots of tea and honey and all will be well. What's making me happy, no surprise it is that the hopeless musical is happening again. I am so excited. I gushed about it so much last year. If you have no idea what I'm talking about. There is a group of teenagers out of Salt Lake City who have turned my novel Heartless, based on The Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, into a musical. Written the script, written the lyrics, the music, casting, costuming, set making. It is entirely teen produced and it is epic. The production last year was such high quality. They did such an amazing job and I cannot wait to go see it again, especially knowing how hard they have been working to make it even bigger and better this time. And I am just floored and absolutely cannot wait. By the time you're hearing this, this episode is going live after the musical is over. So that's kind of bad timing on my part, but definitely go check out my Instagram because I'm sure I will be posting from the scenes all weekend long and so you can go and take it in vicariously. And of course, if you are going to the show, I hope to see you there. Of course. I am also so happy to be talking to today's guest. She is the author of a whole bunch of middle grade young adult and adult novels, including What Lies in the Woods, Rules for Vanishing and 13s. Her newest ya horror, The Narrow, came out earlier this month. Please welcome Kate Alice Marshall.

[03:16] Kate: Hello. Thank you so much for having me.

[03:18] Marissa: Thank you so much for joining me. And congratulations on another dark, creepy, spooky book.

[03:26] Kate: Thank you. Doesn't quite fit the gloriously sunny weather, but sometimes it's nice to contrast those that's funny.

[03:36] Marissa: No, I do feel like books like this, they tend to get slated into the fall because that's when we're all kind of in the mood for something dreary and dark. But I don't know, it worked for me. I really enjoyed reading it this last couple of weeks. Maybe I have had too much sunshine. I needed a little darkness in my life.

[03:57] Kate: Well, it's there to get you in the fall mood, for sure.

[04:01] Marissa: Well, it worked and I loved it. It was so captured so many of those wonderful classic gothic novel tropes, and yet also in a wonderful teen romance. And yeah, I thought it was great. Now I'm definitely ready for more gothic and more horror.

[04:19] Kate: Bring on the I'm always ready for that.

[04:23] Marissa: So, Kate, the question that I like to start with, with my guests, I'd love to hear your writer origin story. How did you come to be a published novelist?

[04:35] Kate: Well, I was a very precocious writer. My mother is a writer and I declared that I was going to be a writer as well when I was about three years old, and I started dictating short stories and scribbling them on the back of phone bills, and I basically never changed my mind. There was a brief period where I wanted to be a marine biologist because I thought that I could have a pet otter that way, but other than that, it's just always been my goal. And I've been writing as my main hobby since I was a preteen and I started trying to get published as a teenager and thankfully didn't because I was definitely not ready for those stories to be out in the world and publicly perceived. It took me until I was in my mid twenty s to actually make some real traction, but it's always been the one thing that I poured all of my hopes and dreams and energy into, and I've bounced around to a few other jobs, but I always knew that this was the end game. Yeah.

[05:50] Marissa: So take me through that period in your mid 20s when you started getting some traction, as you say. Had you written ten manuscripts by that point? Did you query agents? What was the path for you?

[06:07] Kate: Well, I wrote a few novels and I wrote 80% of a lot more of them between when I was in high school, I was an 80 percenter also.

[06:19] Marissa: Why are endings so hard?

[06:21] Kate: Well, they've always been hard for me, but I also kept hitting that 80% point and realizing that I'd learned so much about how to write writing that 1st 80% that I no longer wanted to write this broken book. I wanted to start over with everything I knew then. So I had some issues getting to the finishing line, but I think that every one of those abandoned manuscripts was both a very valuable learning experience and abandoned for a very good reason. Yeah, but at that point, I guess it wasn't like anything clicked or changed in a dramatic fashion. It was just many years of study and craft and practice, and I started to finish my projects and I tried some very different things for me. And the first book that I actually sold was a historical romance. And everything else that I had written up until that point was Science Fiction and Fantasy. So that totally jarred me out of my comfort zone. I'd written it because I loved reading them, and so it was like a happy, stress free place that I didn't have any expectations on. And then the book that kind of poured out of me was just so much fun, and it was fun for other people as well. And so I sold that one and one more, and they did terribly. They just did not do well at all. And I ended up leaving that genre and that career path behind with complicated feelings. But I really appreciate that experience and having that place to start my publishing journey where I hadn't built up a huge mythology about who I was going to be as a romance writer. And so I was able to just sort of take things as they come and reinvent myself and then take that energy into other new genres.

[08:36] Marissa: That's interesting because I think that for a lot of authors, one of the biggest fears that we have is that we will finally get there. We will finally get a book published, see our name in print, have an agent, an editor, a publishing deal, and then nothing happens and the book doesn't sell. And for so many, that feels like a death knell. Like, oh, what now? Is my career over? Am I done? Will I ever write anything again? Did you feel that at the time? At what point in that experience were you able to kind of switch gears and move into another genre and kind of take this experience and spin it into a positive?

[09:21] Kate: Yeah, it was really rough. And I think that I have only recently realized the degree to which the negative parts of that experience were still weighing on me. But the thing that saved me is that I am kind of a frantic little squirrel with ideas. And so I was already working on things in other genres, and so I turned hard into complete denial and pretended it didn't bother me at all and just dove headfirst into the next thing and the next thing. And I think that I probably should have unpacked my feelings a little bit more, but it worked at the time.

[10:14] Marissa: There's always hindsight.

[10:18] Kate: I have to say, that fear. I don't know that it ever goes away, especially having actually experienced it once. And it just has to be part of the game that you hold on to the possibility that things are going to fall apart and the hope that they won't and keep going and finding the joy in it anyway.

[10:42] Marissa: Yeah, no, definitely. We talk about that a lot on this podcast, how important it is to find the joy in writing, because you can't guarantee anything in this career and there are always going to be the ups and downs. But if you can constantly come back to, like but I still love storytelling and I still think this is a really fun thing to do, then no one can take that from you.

[11:11] Kate: Absolutely.

[11:12] Marissa: Yeah.

[11:13] Kate: And at this point, I know that I have reinvented myself once, and I know that I could do it again if I had to. Yeah, there's a comfort in that.

[11:23] Marissa: No, absolutely. No, that makes a lot of sense. It is interesting because I was just talking to another writer friend of mine, and I won't say who, because I don't want to invade her privacy. And she's very successful. She's had a number of New York Times bestsellers, and her career has been phenomenal. But her upcoming book isn't hitting the preorders that she and her publisher expected it to. And she is having all of these doubts and these fears, and maybe I'm done. And from the outside, I'm like, you're not done, you're fine. It's just a blip on the radar or a blip on the path or whatever. But those fears are always there, and I don't think that any level of success ever fully eliminates them.

[12:13] Kate: It's a very nonlinear career, that's for sure.

[12:17] Marissa: Yeah. Oh, so true. Okay, but here we are. You reinvented yourself. You now have done, like, a deep dive into the horror, the thriller, the gothic, and not just in Ya, like you have written in this genre across many different ages. And we are talking about your newest novel, The Narrow. Will you please tell listeners what is The Narrow about?

[12:45] Kate: The Narrow is about Eden White, who arrives at her beloved boarding school after a rather traumatic summer and discovers that her tuition hasn't been paid. And the only way that she can stay in school is to serve as a kind of companion and housemate to a girl, another student at the school, who lives in complete isolation because of a mysterious condition. That means that if she has contact with any untreated, unfiltered water, she could die. And the girl has some kind of connection to the ghost story at the school, which is about the drowning girl who rises out of the river that runs behind the school. And as Eden starts noticing things like wet footprints leading up to the bottom of her bed at night, she starts to investigate who the drowning girl was and what her connection might be to delphine the girl who she is serving as a companion to.

[13:53] Marissa: Even just you mentioning the wet footprints gave me chills all over again. So talk to me a little bit. Why horror? What is it that draws you to horror?

[14:08] Kate: I have always both loved scary stories and been a complete wimp about them. I was such an anxious kid and so convinced that there were like, monsters and vampires that were going to get us in the night that I had to have my little sister share a room with me. I think, in a way, that makes me an even better horror writer because I know what it is to feel so afraid of those things and to lie awake at night and be uncertain of the sounds in your house. So I've always been completely drawn to those stories and then deeply regretted reading them once the sun goes down. And I've always enjoyed creating them and being in control of them too, because then I get to enjoy the spookiness but know what's going to happen? I can decide. So it's always been one of my favorite spots to play around in. And it wasn't really planned as where I was going with my writing, but I ended up with the idea for Rules for Vanishing and it was just so, such a great hook and so compelling that I just dove into writing it without a second thought. And somehow I've ended up here several books later.

[15:42] Marissa: So I am curious. I am also a bit of a scaredy cat, and I blame my overactive imagination, like, to this day. We just moved into a new house, and living in a new house is creepy. It's weird. It has totally new sounds and shadows that move in ways that you're not used to. And so my imagination has just been just been totally going overboard lately and reminding me of when I was a kid and going to sleepovers or whenever you're in a new place and just, yeah, I get scared easily. And I'm curious. So for you now, writing in this genre, having written so many books in this genre, does it make you braver? Do you feel like, oh, I see the craft behind the story, I see the tips and the tricks that the author or the creator is using. Do those sorts of stories not have the same effect on you now, or are you still the same?

[16:41] Kate: I think it depends on the kind of story. I've definitely become much better at reading books, horror novels, without totally freaking myself out. I'm still the person who looks up the detailed summary of a horror movie before I watch it. And I really love picking apart the craft of a good horror movie, but it's too physical and visceral a fear for me. So in that way, I'm very much still a scaredy cat.

[17:15] Marissa: Yeah, well, okay, so let's talk craft then, and the craft of creating something scary. Because one thing that I noticed reading this book is that it is scary on a number of different levels. We have the atmospheric just eeriness of it all, this haunted river, this old boarding school, just the prose and the language that you use to describe things just has this very kind of eerie quality to it. And then we have actual ghosts and a couple of semi, what I would consider like a jump scare, as much as you can do a jump scare in a book. And then you have real world scary, like, what sort of actual awful things can happen to a teen girl in the real world. And of course, there are actual monsters in real life, and you've got that kind of element as well. And I just thought that was so cool. It was so layered and something that one person might not think is so scary. Like, don't worry, there's more.

[18:30] Kate: Yeah, it's interesting. When I first started writing Horror, I was very concerned with whether readers found the book scary. And I pretty quickly realized that people were always going to have wildly different reactions to is this book scary in a way that I hadn't experienced with, like, is there good chemistry in this book? Or is this book funny? And things like that. And so I decided to give up on trying to make things scary and focus on scaring my characters, but also using the things that I know how to control, like creating evocative and disturbing imagery, or surprise, doing the unexpected thing and working with tragedy, which can create a kind of fear. And building tension and dread are much more in the writer's control than actually scaring a person because that is so personal. And so I found that people have generally found my book scarier when that is the last thing that I worry about.

[19:50] Marissa: Interesting. That makes sense, though. And I like just the idea of trying to create tension and dread that seems so much more in our control. You just immediately get a vibe for how a writer might go about accomplishing that, as opposed to trying to scare readers, which seems much more vague. So let's talk about the mystery aspect, because in addition to this being a ghost story, there's also a mystery that Eden, our main character, is attempting to solve. And it's a bit of a cold case. It's something that happened long before she was born. Mysteries are kind of just always to me. I have such a wow moment reading mysteries because I understand that there's a complication factor to them that you don't see in other genres. So for you, are you a planner? Do you know what happened 40 years ago before you start writing, or are you kind of discovering it as you go?

[21:00] Kate: I try to stick in the middle. I generally have a pretty solid idea of what happened before I can actually get started, but it stays very fluid. I give it permission to change if the story demands it or if I think up a better twist. Usually my solutions will end up, I don't know, like 60% to 80% the way that I planned. But there's usually extra stuff that I figured out along the way or minor changes to usually, like, I'll build up a better alternate suspect because on the first pass through, it's super obvious who did it, that kind of thing.

[21:47] Marissa: So when that happens, how do you then go about in your revisions making it not so obvious?

[21:55] Kate: Well, sometimes it involves adding in characters or bulking up a character or their potential motivation. I think it's just naturally part of my process that I need to spend most of my thought and attention on the people who are going to end up mattering the most at the very end, which means that your red herrings get a little bit less attention. And so on future passes, I have to more trust that I've done the baseline work and start to add things on top and obscure the work that I've done. And I work really hard on finessing character motivations in particular and planting false clues on that second pass because at that point, I know what the real clues are and what things might seem suspicious and be able to mislead the reader.

[22:57] Marissa: Yeah. Have you ever been working in.

[23:04] Kate: A.

[23:05] Marissa: Red herring or an alternate suspect and felt like, you know what, this might actually be a better murder story than the original one I was going with? Do you ever change course halfway through?

[23:19] Kate: I find that that does happen to me, and it almost always ends up being a mistake.

[23:27] Marissa: Oh, interesting.

[23:29] Kate: It usually just means that I'm doing my job on revision well and making that a really intriguing possibility, but that's just where my attention is right now, and it's usually once I sit down to plot out. Okay, how would that actually change the book? There are too many ripple effects into things that I've put there intentionally and that are really doing the heavy lifting in the book. And so making that kind of change because it's a little sexier or a little flashier will actually disrupt things that make the heart of the book kind of crumple. And so usually that means that I need to go back and make sure that the shiny original mystery gets a little bit more polished.

[24:17] Marissa: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And you can also just kind of see how obviously the point of a red herring is to lead the reader away from the actual facts and the actual story. And so if you suddenly are like, wait, but this red herring is so cool, and let me do that, but now you've kind of done the opposite of what you're trying to do, sometimes.

[24:44] Kate: That results in giving the red herring a little bit more of an impact and more substance. So, like, okay, this is a really cool character, a really cool plot point, a really cool motivation. So let's give it more of a consequence that isn't swapping it in as the real solution, still letting it have more impact and more weight.

[25:10] Marissa: All right, I want to talk about our second mystery of the book. And we're not going to give it away, of course, no spoilers. But throughout the book, we are also slowly uncovering what happened to Eden, our protagonist, over the summer. And we know that she comes to the school injured pretty much from page one. But figuring out what happened and the full scope of the story is kind of this added mystery that's going on the background. And I'm particularly wanting to call attention to it because she is our narrator. Is it first person I'd actually have to glance? I think it's first. Yes, it is. Yeah. And so being in her head and yet having her manage to keep it from the reader seems like it would be a particularly interesting writing challenge.

[26:08] Kate: It is. And it works only because she is trying really hard not to think about it. And so I can dip into her memories of what happened and thinking about what happened and then have a clear psychological reason for her to shy away from that and not give any more detail. And it was a real balancing act to figure out when to reveal what pieces. And that, for me, was less of a mystery writing challenge and more about trying to control the release of that information to match her character arc so that we sort of face the full reality of it at the same time as she is being forced to face the full reality of it.

[27:09] Marissa: No. And I actually have in my notes here that I thought it was so well crafted because we do we've got this backstory for her that ties perfectly into her character arc and watching her kind of come to terms with what happened herself and have that big realization moment at the end that then forces her to change. It was very powerful, very well done.

[27:40] Kate: Well, thank you. It was heavy work. It was an interesting experience because I started this book, I just wanted to tell a ghost story, and I started from that premise like, I want to do a boarding school ghost story and I want to have this creepy river, and then I got to come up with a story for it. And so it felt like a very sort of intellectual puzzle to start with. But starting from that point without having the character meant that there was more sort of open space around who Eden was and what her emotional arc would be. And something about I usually start much more character centric, but getting into that story without that somehow made it easier to dig a little deeper and a little darker. And so I expected this to be sort of a less emotional book to write, and then it ended up being my most emotional and difficult to grapple with books that I've worked on so far.

[28:56] Marissa: Sometimes books just do that to us. Do you think of Eden as an unreliable narrator?

[29:08] Kate: I think that she shares some traits with an unreliable narrator, but she's not going to intentionally mislead the reader. And I think that her avoidance of her memories doesn't really make her unreliable. I think her unreliability comes more from the fact that she has been traumatized, she is very depressed, and she has a hard time with accurately perceiving what her friends think of her and things like that. She has unhealthy and negative thought patterns that because it's in first person, are just presented as fact. And in that way, she's an unreliable narrator. But I tried to write it in such a way that those thoughts are framed enough that you can see that that's the dark place that she's in and not objective truth.

[30:18] Marissa: Yeah. No. And that's one of the things that I found so great about her character, is because she admits that she lies to everybody in her life. And so it brings up the question, of course, to the reader, is she lying to me? And yet at the same time, she can be so earnest as a narrator. And you believe her and you're along for the ride and you're along for this story, but there was always that like, but what isn't she telling us? I know she's hiding something. And of course, it turns out that she is.

[30:59] Kate: She has her secrets. Yes.

[31:01] Marissa: As all good protagonists. Um, and you mentioned the friend group. I wanted to talk specifically about the friend group because we've got Eden, who was a great narrator. We've got Delphine, who is the girl trapped in this house dormitory, the maiden in the tower. The maiden in the tower who was also the love interest. So we've got these two great characters, but we also have Eden's friend group. And for me, whenever they were there, they stole the show. They are so great. And one thing that I loved, that we got to see them, of course, from Eden's perspective, because she is our narrator. But there's just a couple of chapters from a different point of view, and getting to see the Friends through such a totally different lens was fascinating.

[32:01] Kate: That was really fun to write.

[32:04] Marissa: Yeah. I was wondering those chapters seemed like they would have been really fun to write.

[32:09] Kate: Yeah, and they were a challenge because without giving away too many spoilers, the different point of view does not like the Friends nearly as much as Eden does. And so it's definitely the flip side of the sort of unreliable narrator where I needed to say some rude things about them that I clearly, as the author, did not agree with.

[32:40] Marissa: But you can also see where those opinions come from. You can see from this perspective why this character feels this way.

[32:49] Kate: Yeah. And it's all a matter of interpretation and how much grace we give to each other and that sort of thing. Yeah. It's not entirely inaccurate, but it is not a generous perspective.

[33:07] Marissa: Yeah. No, and I loved it because for me, as a writer, it was a reminder that our characters are always going to be seen through a lens. We are going to see them through the lens of the narrator. The readers are going to see them through their own lens, and it really is. I almost can see it be like a fun writing exercise to like, okay, you have these characters that you've created for this story. Now write about them from someone's perspective who doesn't like them or someone who's just meeting them or whatever else to see. What else can you learn about these characters and what other things would a completely different person pick up on?

[33:49] Kate: Yeah, I think it would work really well just as an exercise, because writing that section and then going back to Revise, I suddenly knew so much more about why Eden loves these people, and it was fun to go back and make sure that I was using those same traits as things that, for her, are part of the person that she adores. Yeah.

[34:19] Marissa: No, I love that. I love that. That impacted the revisions too quickly. Before we move on to our bonus round, I want to also talk about kind of your career more generally, because as it mentioned, you have written middle grade, you've written ya, you've written adult. The narrow just came out, and yet you have another middle grade coming out here in a few weeks, which is amazing. I'm sure you're totally bogged down with publicity and promotion right now.

[34:53] Kate: I am, yeah. I have Extra Normal coming out on the 27th. And if you love your ghost, a little less frightening. It is a light hearted, spooky middle grade book about a girl named Charlie whose parents are sort of like X Files style paranormal investigators and have adopted three supernatural kids. And when mom and dad leave on a much needed vacation, evil neighbors move in across the street, and Charlie has to take care of her siblings, who include a ghost, a werewolf, and a little telekinetic kid, and she has to figure out what the neighbors are up to without interrupting the vacation.

[35:44] Marissa: Oh, that sounds so fun.

[35:48] Kate: My middle grade books are definitely like my happy place, and this book in particular was just a sheer joy to write from start to finish. And it's got some spooky bits and a little bit of creepy atmosphere. But it's very much based in this family that loves each other and lots of fun little details and nods to other things in the genre. And one very bad cursed doll who is based on my terrible cat.

[36:23] Marissa: So when you get an idea, do you automatically know, oh, this is a middle grade, this is a ya, this is an adult? Or do you ever get an idea that you then have to stop and think, like, what would this look like for this age group? What would it look like.

[36:37] Kate: For this one I'm usually starting with I want to write XYZ type book and that usually includes what the age range is going to be and that's where I sort of start my brainstorming process and I start sending out the little feelers for information for ideas. But every once in a while I will do that kind of shuffle and try to figure out where does this need to land? And I will sometimes, just for fun, take an idea and do sort of a plot treatment for it in multiple age categories or even different genres just to keep it kind of elastic and not get too set on a particular version of it. So I can be sure that I've found the one that sparks the best.

[37:30] Marissa: Oh, interesting. That'd be a fun challenge or a fun exercise.

[37:34] Kate: I love playing around with ideas and pitches and I have just like notebooks full of them that I will never actually write. So I'm a little bit OD the degree to which that itself is just very satisfying to me.

[37:49] Marissa: Yeah, so if you've got two books coming out in the same month, I have to assume that you were probably trying to balance the writing of the books around the same time. How do you manage that?

[38:06] Kate: Those two, I'm trying to remember exactly what sequence I wrote them in but yeah, it was basically like being a short order cook and flipping pancakes and then going over to the scrambled eggs and back. I both of those are with Viking and so I was working with my editor Maggie and we were just shooting things back and forth and trying to coordinate the gaps with each know. So here I'm giving you my first draft while you hand me my revision letter for the next one. Yeah, it was a challenge and it was a lot of fun writing both books. I don't know that I want to do quite as many projects as I was handing back and forth with people all at once again.

[39:00] Marissa: Yeah, no, it can get to be a bit much. So were there days where you're drafting this one in the morning and then this one in the afternoon? Or would you mostly try to focus on one project at a time and then as soon as it's off to the next stage you switch over to the other one?

[39:19] Kate: I mostly try to focus on one thing at a time. Sometimes I can do it if they are very different and middle grade in particular, I am much more likely to be able to sort of slot in around other things because it's much easier for me to completely change tone and voice than to shift it a little bit like between my ya and adult stuff. But I can also sometimes, depending on what task I'm doing, I'm fine doing like copy edits in the afternoon and drafting in the morning, but drafting two things side by side. They have to be very different.

[40:05] Marissa: Yeah, no, that makes sense. All right, well, congratulations on another book coming out in a couple of weeks. I'll have to pick it up. My kids love horror.

[40:15] Kate: Well, I hope they love it.

[40:17] Marissa: Okay, are you ready for our bonus round?

[40:20] Kate: I am.

[40:21] Marissa: What book makes you happy?

[40:24] Kate: Oh, goodness, let me think about that for a moment. I've been reading so many lovely, very dark books recently.

[40:34] Marissa: The dark ones make us happy.

[40:36] Kate: The most recent book that I really loved, I'm going to cheat because it's a trilogy is the Rampart Trilogy by Mr. Carey, which is a post apocalyptic trilogy about a boy and later young man growing up and sort of setting out to change the world in a way that I found to be a really beautiful way of showing how one person and small groups of people can change their world even if they don't change the whole world.

[41:17] Marissa: Other than Extra Normal, what are you working on next?

[41:22] Kate: Well, I have my next adult thriller coming out in January that's called no One Can Know, and it is a dark psychological murder mystery about three sisters who are hiding the secret of what happened to their parents 15 years ago. And then I am actually taking a longer break from releases than I usually do, and it'll be a little while before my next project after that, and none of them have titles yet.

[41:59] Marissa: Lastly, where can people find you?

[42:03] Kate: I am currently just on Instagram. K Marshall Arts is usually my handle anywhere that I do appear. And I have a website, Katemarshallbooks.com, where you can sign up for my newsletter, which is the most reliable way to get news.

[42:22] Marissa: Awesome. Kate, thank you so much for joining me.

[42:25] Kate: Thank you very much, readers.

[42:27] Marissa: Definitely check out the narrow. It is available now. And extra normal. Coming out soon. I'm sure that is currently available for pre order. Of course, we encourage you to support your local indie bookstore, but if you don't have a local indie, you can check out our affiliate store@bookshop.org slash shop slash Marissa Meyer. And don't forget to check out our merchandise on Etsy, Instagram and tpublic. Next week, I will be chatting with Ayesha Sayeed about her magical Ya romance, 40 Words for Love. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe and follow us on Instagram at Marissa Meyer, author and at Happy Writer Podcast. Until next time, stay inspired, keep writing and whatever life throws at you today. I do hope that now you're feeling a little bit happier.