7 Questions with Kelly Harms
Kelly Harms’ newest novel The Seven Day Switch will satisfy the curiosity of any chronically bedraggled mom who has ever looked at her seemingly Pinterest-perfect peers and wondered how the hell they do it. This Freaky Friday style mom swap is made up of equal parts humor and heart. It's definitely one you want to check out. But, before you do, get to know the woman behind the novel a bit better by checking out Kelly's answers to our 7 questions.
1. What's your favorite drink?
Just one? I often find I crave a cold beer the most, and living in beer country right now that makes total sense to me. But if I could drink only one non-water beverage again for the rest of my life, it would be champagne.
Champagne, the beer of authors everywhere.
2. Where and when do you write?
I write as soon as the family is sorted in the mornings, but after a mellow cup of tea or iced coffee, a little journaling, and the New York Times crossword puzzle.
This means I start earlier on Mondays than I do on Fridays (if you know you know). This summer I am working in a downtown office to give myself some serious quiet and solitude, but I look forward to bringing the operation back home when my son goes back to school, which is a thing I dream might happen this fall.
I did a lot of homeschooling in lieu of virtual school last year, and I really enjoyed it, but I still love writing most of all, and my son is such a social butterfly, I am really glad he'll get to be with friends on a regular basis again soon.
A win for all.
Over the last 16 months I have tried to heed advice from well-meaning coaches like Wendy from my book to get up at 5 in the morning and "put myself first." In my body, these two things disagree with each other. Either I am still sleeping at 5am, or I have put myself last.
3. What does your prewriting process look like?
I don't think I really have a prewriting process.
I'm writing, or I'm not, and I'm happier when I am.
When I start to have an emotional affair with a new book, I'm still dating my old book, and then there's a couple of weeks where I swear I'm too exhausted to ever write again (or longer, as during the lockdowns) and then I start writing again, page one, chapter one, and get to know the characters as I go.
This means revising early chapters heavily, but whenever I really heavily plot and diagram, I find the fun slips away a bit.
This is such a personal process, and I'd tell other writers: don't do what I do, except it works, in as much as I have created a few books this way. Many of them even have plots! So do whatever feels right and use trial and error.
4. What's up next?
Now that is an excellent question.
It's top secret! I'm halfway through, and I still can't say with 100% certainty what this heroine is going to do next.
She's downtrodden, and she's let herself believe stories about herself that have no truth to them — but hasn't yet started to tell her own story the way she wants it to be. I have a strong feeling that she's going to give into love, but boy is she putting up a fight.
5. One of the key strengths of this novel is characterization. In it, you have two really robust dual protagonists. How did you develop these characters in a way that made them so rich and realistic and relatable?
Well, thank you!
I came with more familiarity to Wendy's life, (she is the mom employed outside of the home,) partly because I do work a lot, and partly because I find that small children, while irresistible to me, tend to slow down time to an almost painful extent. I have trouble leaving them alone to do their own thing, and then they start looking to me for entertainment, and by four pm we're both sitting there staring at each other and wondering if the sun is over the yardarm yet.
Celeste, who is with her three kids full time, is the one who really surprised and delighted me as I got to know her. In my next life, I would like to be Celeste, but with a better haircut.
6. As a mom of two, I have definitely felt the pressure that society puts on modern mothers. It is this rather unbearable stress that you captured so wonderfully in this novel. What advice would you give to moms who find the pressure of contemporary expectations to be too much to bear?
First, don't be the person putting that kind of pressure on other women.
Most of the time we aren’t going through the world completely obsessed with what our entire life looks like to strangers. But then we go on social media… and suddenly it seems some users have a lot to prove.
If you don’t know someone in real life, know that whatever they’re posting online likely isn’t real life either. Or as a wise woman told me, “Don’t compare someone’s outsides to your own insides.”
And if you're one of the women making your life look like nothing but sunshine and unicorns, maybe tone that down, could you?
For the rest of us (most of us), wanna mute all those overzealous influencers with me? It feels amazing. I’m learning to mute all kinds of things, and not just on social media.
I mute long involved hair color processes (for now), competing for parking spots, bras that poke, really weird diets that that one friend we all know is currently obsessed with, books that feel like required reading, wax-based hair removal, and hard seltzer that is really malt liquor.
Mute, mute, mute.
7. As I read The Seven Day Switch, I felt my sympathies shifting back and forth between the two protagonists. Which of these two women did you feel the most sympathy for initially, and did this shift as you wrote?
That's a great question — the shift was huge!
Because I relate more closely to Wendy in lifestyle, I naturally went in thinking Celeste was really and truly perfect and I didn’t know what to expect from her.
The more I wrote, the more I saw Celeste clearly, and in the end she was my favorite of the characters. I love how she changes the way she sees herself in the course of the book, and I imagine her future is going to be wonderful. She had an innate patience that I took lessons from while writing.
How I wish I could borrow from the best qualities of my characters as needed… a dash of fortitude here, some equanimity there, and I wouldn't mind a life coaching session with Wendy and a personal pantry organizer like Celeste.
Why DO I have approximately two ounces of every single pasta shape ever imagined? It's a zen koan around here.
Check out these reads by Kelly Harms
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