ME, IN A NUTSHELL

Caution: Life story ahead

When I was a child, what I wanted to be more than anything was a champion in a fantasy world. This was probably due to the fact that I grew up seeing the castles in Europe, travelling the world with my mother & father's amazing sense of adventure, and spending much of my time exploring the woods of Northern California that were outside my back door. Not to mention, my parents sent my brother's and me to a Waldorf school, where they teach you to fence and do blacksmithing and encourage you to believe in things like elves and faeries and the like, (Awesome).

But then the big question came, since I couldn't tame dragons or be hired for quests of valour for a living, what was I going to do with my life?

The first time I was asked the question, "what do you want to be when you grow up?", I answered, "a writer, because then I can be anything or anyone that I want to be". That quickly changed in the third grade, when I did my school play about Thor and his mighty hammer. I played the comedic role of the giants mother and I had this epiphany, instead of writing stories, I could be in them!

I had such a lust to be in a fantasy world, and at that time acting those roles felt one step closer to living them than writing about it did. So I pursued an acting career. I did my best to fill my journey with as much adventure as possible along the way. I organised bungee jumping trips off bridges in the middle of the night, traveled solo to Florence when I was only seventeen for an acting for film course—running around the cobblestone streets un-chaperoned. I studied various martial arts, mainly Kung Fu at that point, traveling to China to compete in their first ever International Wushu competition. I also studied Judo, Mauy Thai, and Bujinkan.

When I was eighteen, I left home to travel to the other side of the world for university. There in Australia, in a little place called Wagga Wagga, I studied Acting for Screen and Stage. I travelled a lot while I was there, around that country and in others. Tracking tigers in the jungles of India, sky diving in New Zealand, teaching children English at a monastery in Tibet. I spent another stint in China studying more Kung Fu, and got certified for advanced scuba diving by descendants of pirates on the island of Utila. I did Magic Tricks as a hobby and worked as a pirate for children's entertainment on the side. 

And then something funny happened, I grew up. It hit me one day like a freight train. I was a struggling actor who was working on the side as a bartender in an Irish pub in Sydney called, The Cock and Bull. I had just met my husband (An Australian sailor), and suddenly everything in my life changed. It was as if until that moment, I had been holding onto my childhood dreams so tightly, because I was scared that if I let them go, then I would lose who I was. But when I finally did, I was able to catch up to who I had become.

Suddenly, I didn't want to act anymore. I didn't want to spend another moment playing anyone but myself, or being anywhere but here. I had fallen in love with the world around me. With its mystery and diversity, with the beauty in its dark spaces, and the exquisite poetry of humanities imperfection. I’d become thirsty to know more about it. I started wanting to read about science and to study our history. I got a tattoo. I married my husband and we had two beautiful children, and I finally realized that everything that I had loved about acting—the colorful characters, the action stories, the honesty and exploration into what it means to be human, the magic and imagination. All of  that I loved, because I am a writer.

Not just a, "Oh I think I'll write a book" writer, but a, "Holy Shit, I’m a writer" writer. Like an adopted child who has been reunited with their real parents and discovers who they are, which makes them feel like they finally make sense and have a real place in the world. Yeah, like that. 

So my books might not be perfect, but I promise they’re from the heart. I don’t write what’s hot right now, or for a certain age group, or genre—I write the stories that I want to read, ones that I feel compelled to write. I observe the world around us and paint it in words, and I create new worlds from the most intimate parts of my imagination, and characters pulled from inside myself. And I truly hope that you enjoy them, even if it's only half as much as I enjoy writing them.

Thank you for reading!

K.L. Harris