Kim Harrington Interview

WOOOO! Guess what comes out this week? Clarity by Kim Harrington! It has crazy awesome characters, perfect pacing, and above all, it was written by an amazing author.

I had the honor to interview the author a month ago and here is the interview below:

1.) In your mind, why do you think people do not believe in psychics?

I think it’s because certain people need proof before they believe in something fantastical. And…I’m one of those people! I’m not going to say true psychics don’t exist, though. Just that I haven’t met a real one yet. I have visited about six (a couple times in college for fun and then a few for book research) and none of them impressed me. But my mother visited one in Dublin when she was a teenager that she swears was the real deal. So who knows?

2.) What is the one power you would want if you were a psychic?

I wouldn’t want any of the Fern family’s powers. But if I could have any ability, I’d love to be able to manipulate time. Mostly because I’m impatient.

3.) Do you bare any similarities to any of your characters?

I can be sarcastic like Clare. I worry like Starla. Also, Clare’s aversion to seafood? Totally me.

4.) What was the hardest part in writing this novel?

The hardest part was making sure all the pieces of the mystery fit into place and finding the right balance between predictable and completely unforeseeable. I don’t want the villain to be someone from left field that the reader never could have figured out. But I don’t want the solution to be too obvious, either. Somewhere in between. And that’s tough to do.

5.) Best line ever from a book/show/movie? :D

Oh my…there are so many! I’m going to have to go with one from the movie Say Anything. And it’s not, “I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen,” though I do love that line. The one I like more is Lloyd’s response when Diane says, “Nobody thinks it will work, do they?” He says, “You just described every great success story.”

6.) If you could pick one song that represented Clarity, what would it be?

Maybe “Army of Me” by Bjork, which seems totally random, but the song has this swagger and confidence to it. I can imagine Clare walking down the street with her earbuds in, nodding her head to it.

7.) What is the weirdest dream you've ever had?

This is tough because I have weird dreams all the time. The scariest weird dream I had was that I was stuck on a cruise ship when one of those stomach viruses started going around. But then we realized it wasn’t just the stomach flu…it was the zombie virus. So everyone on the cruise ship started turning into zombies and I was running and hiding for what seemed like hours. Horrifying! I also had a funny, weird one where a sinkhole opened up on a Boston street and was swallowing buildings and I was running away from it with Neil Patrick Harris.

8.) How was your day? XD

Fantastic! While writing this interview (in January), I got the news that Publishers Weekly gave Clarity a starred review!

Back to Books: Lauren Oliver | Day 006

As I am writing this, it’s August 24^th and I’m in Paris, eating loads of baguette and watching vespas zoom on the single-lane, cobblestone-lined street beneath my window, and I am thinking about school.

You might wonder why I’m thinking about school. Shouldn’t I be thinking about accordian-playing mimes, and cute French waiters, and more baguettes?

Mais non, mes amis.

Parisians take summer vacation very seriously. VERY seriously. Everybody takes vacation in France in August—and not for one week, or ten days, but for the entire month. That is not an exaggeration. Bakeries shut down. Butchers shutter their windows; boutiques lock their doors. The streets are empty of Parisians. The mornings dawn misty and quiet, the evening smolder in silence. It is actually a very peaceful time to be in France…if you don’t want to buy anything!

Here’s another example of how seriously French people take les vacances d’ete (summer vacation). There is a famous, famous ice cream shop here called Berthillon. It has exactly one location, on the Ile St Louis, an island in the center of Paris. It does not export its ice cream. You cannot find its ice cream outside of France, or even outside of Paris. And it sells nothing but ice cream—no cookies, no chocolate, no bars of nougatine. Just ice cream.

It is also closed for two full months of every year. Guess which ones?

July and August.

And then, suddenly, at the end of August is la rentree: literally translated to the re-entering, it is when Parisians pour back into Paris, and the bakeries fling open their doors again and begin churning out their heavenly baguettes, and the boutiques and papeteries are packed with families shopping for back-to-school clothing and supplies. This might be my favorite time to be in Paris: la rentree is all about optimism, and energy, and hope for the new year.

That’s what I always loved about going back to school in the fall. It offered a chance of reinvention: new clothes, new binders, untouched sheaths of paper, unused pens. The promise of new friends and (possibly, please God, please God) new adorably hot transfer students who would fall madly in love with you during chem..

And okay, yeah—so most of the time it didn’t work out that way. Within a week, your new clothes are just newer old clothes and you still have nothing to wear, while that annoyingly perfect student body vice president looks like a freaking runway model every day of her life—meanwhile, the only transfer student is weird and short and smells permanently like meatball subs. (Or, if he is cute, he’s already dating the student body president.)

But the point is the start of the school year is all about hope and new beginnings—so much more so, I think, than the actual new year. (Who wants to celebrate new beginnings when it’s like, negative five thousand degrees outside and everyone you know has the flu?)

So make a wish. Heck, make a resolution. And happy New Year!

Lauren, the other one, is giving away a copy of BEFORE I FALL. Click here to enter!