All right, everybody, welcome back to I'll read what she's reading.

I'm Reggie.

I'm Michaela.

And I'm Kennedy.

And today we have one of our favorite authors with us on the podcast, the one and only, Carissa Broadbent.

Carissa, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here with all of you.

Oh, thanks. We are so excited, too. This was like a dream to get you on here, and we cannot

wait to chat with you. I actually just finished

songbirded Heart of Stone like 10 minutes ago. Oh, sorry. I'm freaking out. No, seriously.

I'm freaking out. So I'm like, this is perfect. We can't wait to chat with you. So before we kind of

get into the nitty gritty questions, we'd love to just kind of hear your story and kind of tell us how you became an author.

Yeah. So I always really enjoyed telling stories. Like when I was a kid, I used to write like in elementary and middle school, like really dark, dark stories.

Like there was this one about a girl dying alone in the woods that like definitely got some parental calls, you know, from the teacher.

And then as I got into high school in college, I like got busy and I stopped.

But then when I was like 22, 23 and I was out in like

corporate America and I had that thing happen that I think a lot of people around that age have where I was

just like, oh, this is it forever. Like this is life now. And then I thought I should write a book because the idea,

like I felt like I needed something else, you know, to work towards. So I wrote a couple of really

bad books and they were published for a while. They're no longer available for good reason.

They're not good. And then in like 2018, 2019, I started writing Daughter of No Worlds, which ultimately

became the book that like really started to kickstart my career at that point. And a couple

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