Books Right Now Presents:
I’m so excited to feature Kira Brady on Books Right Now! I really enjoyed her small-town sports romance, Love and Pickleball, and I’m honored to have had the opportunity to interview her.
Intro
RD: For anyone who hasn’t read Love and Pickleball yet, how would you describe your book in one sentence?
KB: Love and Pickleball is all about a cinnamon roll pickleball coach who falls for a sexy, crossword-obsessed older woman who is reinventing herself after a difficult relationship. It has solvable crossword puzzles, bad pickle puns, and hot closet escapades.
A Deep Dive into Love and Pickleball
RD: In the past, you’ve written paranormal romance that features Babylonian gods and dragon shifters. Why did you decide to pivot to contemporary small town romance this time?
KB: My older books are dark. They are apocalyptic paranormal romance with warring shapeshifters who are fighting over the cracked gate to hell in Seattle. Those books came out with Kensington in ebook, print, and audio, and I wrote and envisioned them before I had kids. I sold that trilogy in a three-book deal when I was pregnant with my first child.
After I had kids, it really was a pivotal moment in my own inner transformation. I had to stop writing for a long time. I spent the next ten years watching Octonauts and Bluey and reading fairy tales and happy things.
Becoming a mom helped me tap into my inner optimist and a positivity that I had but had been covered up by this armor of darkness and negativity. I’ve had these two warring sides: I’ve always loved Disney, but not been hopeful about the ability to find love and happiness in the real world. Having kids helped me find that. It’s not just that I believe in the power of love and happy endings because I became a mom, but because I have to model that behavior for them.
I can’t be grumpy and pessimistic because I don’t want them to see that and do the same thing. That’s really helped me tap into and feel comfortable expressing the joyful, happier parts of my personality again.
RD: What did your research and drafting process look like? Are you a plotter or a pantser?
KB: Unfortunately, I’m definitely more on the chaos monster side. This has resulted in me having a computer full of half-finished novels. I’ll have a great idea, dive right in, write 50,000 words, and then suddenly think, “Where am I going now? I don’t know what happens next.”
At this point, I’d say I’m a reformed pantser. I realized that I didn’t want to have a billion abandoned drafts on my computer. I wanted to finish the books and put them out in the world. With this release, I self-published. It’s a lot more work, but it’s also very freeing. I don’t have to write to sell to an agent or editor. I can just finish the book that I want to write and put it out there.
I focus on the scenes I’m excited about writing. I knew I wanted to have a pickleball tournament about two-thirds of the way through the book. I knew I wanted crossword scenes. I also had a really great idea for the grand gesture, which meant I needed a third-act breakup, even though I dislike them.
I’m a very visual person, so I color-code my scenes. Seeing everything laid out visually really helps me.
Once I have the color-coded scenes and know the direction I’m going to go in, before I start writing a scene, I prepare the goal, motivation, and conflict. Who is the protagonist in this scene? What do they want at the beginning of the scene? What’s standing in their way? How does their goal maybe change the end of the scene? Having those three guardrails for writing a scene has been helpful.
RD: What was the hardest scene to write, and what was the easiest?
KB: The third-act breakup was definitely the hardest thing to write. Even after I had written the whole novel and beta readers said the book was great, I knew something still wasn’t working well. My editor gave me great advice for fixing this. She put into words what was wrong with the scene; the character wasn’t well-motivated enough. So I ended up moving a whole bunch of stuff around to fix the motivation.
The easiest scene to write was when Hayden brings Celeste back to his house to meet his family. I had so much fun writing that scene. It was early in the writing process, and it just flew off my fingers. I finished it and immediately sent it to my editor and my husband because I was so excited about it.
I love the found-family aspect of this book. That’s what I gravitate towards when I pick out my own reads. I loved giving Celeste that big, warm family experience that she didn’t really have before and exploring the quirkiness of a family.
RD: Why did you decide to write a cozy story?
KB: I think that Salmon Bay is a very cozy place. The world feels really dark right now. Social media makes everything more intense, in that we’re constantly being bombarded with information. We’ve had the pandemic. We’ve had political unrest. I know that I personally go to romance because I want that true love, happily-ever-after guarantee. I want a guarantee that no matter what the characters go through, it’s all going to be okay.
There’s a huge place for cozy books right now because people need that respite from the real world. Even though these characters feel real and have real issues, together they’re going to get through it.
I feel more hopeful after finishing a book. I go through my day feeling that warm, cozy glow in me, and everything feels a little lighter.
RD: You’re based in Washington, and your book is based in Salmon Bay. What do you think makes living here special, and how did you incorporate those elements into your novel?
I am a Ballard native. We had so many Scandinavian restaurants, mom-and-pop shops, Swedish pancake breakfasts, and Lutheran churches that each held services in different Scandinavian languages.
Ballard actually was a separate city from Seattle. When I was a kid, we used to have bumper stickers that said “Free Ballard.” It still feels like a small town though, even though it’s part of Seattle.
I love the coziness of a small town. I love romance novels set in small towns, where you know everybody. My mom was a doctor here growing up, so we’d go to the grocery store and she’d run into patients. I love the idea of living in a place where everyone knows about you.
Salmon Bay is a mixture of Ballard and Poulsbo (which is known as Little Norway).
RD: I really love the inclusion of crossword puzzles throughout your book, despite the fact that I am notoriously bad at crosswords. What inspired you to include them?
KB: I’m also bad at crossword puzzles, but one of my friends from high school, Scott, writes crossword puzzles. He has been amazing helping with this book because he made all five crossword puzzles for the book and some additional ones for my newsletter. He is really good at pickleball. He also read through all of the pickleball scenes in the book to make sure that they made sense, because there’s a big difference between playing pickleball and describing people playing pickleball.
I had the idea of sending messages through crosswords. That idea stuck with me early on, especially for the grand gesture at the end. Also, you lean on your friends, and my friends are all good at making crosswords.
RD: What do you think would be the ideal theme song for Celeste?
KB: Celeste’s backstory is definitely Paris Paloma songs like drywall, labour, and He Thinks He’ll Keep Her.
For her theme song, she is detaching from her backstory. It’s about how she’s moving forward. It’s about reinvention, finding her inner joy, and paving her own path for the future.
I would say Sara Bareilles’s Brave would be her theme song. Songs that portray Celeste are now in the vein of lifting up, moving on, and not caring what other people think of you.
RD: What is one theme or message that you hope readers take away from your book?
KB: The biggest message is that we are all broken in some way, and that doesn’t mean we should give up. Love is powerful enough to heal our broken pieces, and it starts with learning to love yourself, warts and all. Nobody is perfect, and we are all more interesting because of our quirky imperfections.
Meet the Storyteller
RD: What were your favorite books growing up? Did any of them influence your writing style or storytelling voice today?
KB: Definitely. My favorite books growing up were The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede. I read those over and over and over again. One of the things I loved about them was taking well-known fairy tales and turning them on their head.
The other thing I really love about The Enchanted Forest Chronicles is the strong female protagonists. You have Cimerone who doesn’t want to get married to a prince. She wants to forge her own path. All of my characters are definitely cut from that same cloth. The heroine’s journey is really the main focal point of my stories.
I was also always attracted to the books in which the kids go off into the forest and survive by themselves for a while like Julie of the Wolves, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and My Side of the Mountain. I loved that survival aspect of it: forging your own path, being put in a really difficult position and persevering against the odds. Even though I love backpacking and camping, I would one hundred percent die in a real survival situation. Still, I’ve always been attracted to that.
My books also deal with survival because in modern life, we’re not out facing the bears, or the wilderness, or blizzards. We’re facing a crisis that’s more internal. We’re being fed so many opinions about how we should be and what we should believe. The survival aspect comes from believing in yourself and diving deep to really let our own joy and inner light shine, even when the world feels dark and various pressures feel against us.
RD: What is the most important thing you’ve learned during your writing career so far?
KB: If I could go back and tell my baby author self one thing, it would be that this is a marathon, not a sprint. One book does not make a career. It’s very unlikely that your first book will sell unless you’re already famous. You shouldn’t expect to hit it out of the park for your very first manuscript.
I rewrote my first novel into the ground trying to make it perfect, and in the process I lost a lot of my own voice. I sent it to a billion writing contests. Every time someone suggested a change, I’d make that change because I was convinced that other people knew better than me.
The best thing you can do is discover what you like about doing your art, and keep that flame alive. It’s so easy to let someone else burn out that candle. Remember that your goal is to keep this one candle alive while you’re running a marathon.
I stopped writing and stopped reading for years because I couldn’t turn off my internal editor. That was the saddest part, because I love reading. It took me ten years to get back into it. This time around, I’m determined to keep my candle lit. If I do anything, I want to be a reader. I’m a reader before I’m a writer.
The most important thing is putting one word in front of the other, facing that blank page, and getting those ideas down on paper. Give yourself permission to write badly at first.
RD: What are your favorite Seattle bookstores?
KB: My favorite Seattle bookstore is Secret Garden Books, which I went to as a child. They’ve moved several times, and they are currently in Ballard. Secret Garden carried my book because I’m a local author, and I had my launch party there.
I also really like Couth Buzzard up on Phinney Ridge. They have a big romance section, and a used book section with a ton of mass market paperbacks. I recently went to Lovestruck in Seattle, where I saw Ilana Long, another local pickleball author.
I also love Hardcovers, which is in Mill Creek, and they have a giant Fabio cut-out which you can get your picture taken with. I love him as a symbol of the old-school bodice ripper. Finally, I really like Third Place Books. They have three locations. The one in Seward Park has a giant romance section, a cafe, and a great event space.
RD: Do you enjoy writing in public? If so, what are your favorite coffee shops or spots to write in?
KB: Yes, when I was writing in the past, I needed to write in cafés. I could not write at home. There were too many distractions. Either it was too quiet, too loud, or there was too much laundry calling my name.
I think that’s the thing about being a writer. You think you want to write, but when it comes to actually sitting down and facing that blank page, you want to do anything else but writing.
So forcing myself to leave the house and write in a coffee shop was key for me. I wrote Hearts of Darkness at Miro Tea in Ballard back when it had just opened up. I spent so many hours there rewriting the first chapter over and over again. I think I wrote the second book at Essential Bakery in Fremont, which has sadly closed.
Now I’ve started writing again, as Kira Brady 2.0, once all three of my kids went to school. Since it’s so rare to have the house this quiet, I actually really like writing at home.
RD: Where can readers find your books?
KB: Love and Pickleball is available in ebook and print. You can buy the print edition through Bookshop.org to support indie bookshops, or you can read it on Kindle Unlimited if you’re a subscriber.
What’s Next
RD: What’s next for you? I’d love to learn more about the future of the Salmon Bay series and any other projects you may be working on.
KB: I’m currently working on two Salmon Bay projects: a novella featuring two rivals-to-lovers personal trainers, and Salmon Bay Book 2, currently titled Without a Paddle, which includes a pregnancy storyline and the Milk Carton Derby.
I’m also revisiting my paranormal backlist and editing those books for re-release.
Thank you for reading! This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full version of this interview is available on Spotify.
More About Kira Brady
Kira Brady is an award-winning author of paranormal and contemporary romance.
She grew up in a small Scandinavian town on the shores of Puget Sound, where she fell in love with cardamon braid and Kringle, which inspired her new series of interconnected sweetly spicy, humorous, sport romances set in a cozy, small Scandinavian town in the Pacific Northwest.
When not writing, Kira loves reading, hiking, pottery, knitting, learning to play pickleball, and spending time with her family. She loves hearing from readers.
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