I’d like to welcome author Carrie Carter to the blog for #WriterWednesday!

Favorite summer treat: watermelon

A summer treat that makes you gag: hot dogs

Something crazy you did on vacation: Rappelling 27 stories into a cave, followed by a 7 hour journey to get out, against the water current. Amazing? Absolutely. Tiring? Oh yea…. I’ve never been so sore the next days, and I’ve run marathons. You did notice I said days…

Something you’d never do again on vacation: Go on vacations that are 100% organized. I did it once, because my friend’s mom insisted on it, but basically, we were herded from gift shop to gift shop with five minutes at the actual historical sites. And every five minutes a new person would get on the tour bus, say two sentences and leave, but we were told to tip them handsomely. There were like 12 people a day doing that. And the most annoying part, they showed a movie on the bus, about a man who creates a serum to make women’s busts increase, and shut it off before the ending. To this day, I want to know how it concluded.

Favorite summer beverage: Nothing says summer like lemonade.

A drink that gives you a pickle face: Sake. I know, there are different grades and quality out there. But I just can’t.

Best thing you ever grilled in spring: Sashimi grade salmon. Yes, I did. I know a lot of people would cringe, but it really does make for the most flavorful, smokey, silky salmon you ever had when you grill it.

Your worst kitchen or grilling disaster: I was making a lentil bean loaf (can we use a sexier word than loaf?) and the kitchen mitt slid down. My pinky hit the hot glass and stuck to it. I had to peel my finger away. It looked like candle wax dripping down, and I had no sensation in my finger. Fortunately, after about nine months, the scar cleared up, and I regained sensation in my pinky.

Best summer vacation memory: Being in Acapulco, Mexico with my family. I was five years old but had an amazing time. To this day, those memories are crystal clear.

A summer vacation disaster that you’d rather forget: When I was five, we went to Acapulco, and ate at a chicken place. When you took a bite, you found yourself staring at green-gray chicken. I was so sick after eating that. Ha, but my family left me in the hotel with my equally sick grandmother. The maid took care of us once her shift was done! What a saint, and what was wrong with my family for not being there to take care of us? Seriously, this was sick as in, you should go to the hospital sick.

Best summer vacation ever: Too many to list. For real. All my vacations have been amazing.

Somewhere where you don’t ever want to return: Amsterdam. Of course, I wasn’t there long enough to get a feel for the city. It was just a quick lay-over. But a junkie accused me of not paying him for his meth, and I’m like, I did not buy meth from you. Then he stuck his hands in my pocket, and my best friend jumped on his back, strangling him. I had visions of us killing him and having to dump his body in a canal, but she let go of his neck, and he ran off. It kind of soured me on Amsterdam.

Favorite thing to do on a summer evening: sit outside, b-b-q veggies, drink a glass of sauvignon blanc and enjoy the company of friends.

Least favorite thing about summer: the heat, humidity and mosquitos. Welcome to Texas.

The thing you like most about being a writer: writing

The thing you like least about being a writer: writing

Most daring thing you’ve ever done: I rode a bicycle naked down the street in Austin, Texas. It was for my short film, where a woman experiences an event under the hair dryer at the beauty salon and sees through clothes and anything else she wants to afterwards. No one volunteered for the bike part, so I did it.

Something you chickened out from doing: Going backwards down a water-shoot made of rocks. Some call it canyoneering. I probably would have done it with no question, but the guide held my head underwater when he was telling me about the safety rules. Seriously? I thought I might drown, and my enthusiasm was squashed.

About Carrie:

Carrie Carter has a profound love for Japan, cats, sumo, dioramas, and eating unusual foods. She has traveled with her husband Jim to Japan fourteen times, so her numerous holidays across her favorite country were the inspiration for her first book, Whiskers Abroad: A Human and A Feline Perspective on Traveling in Japan. Carrie has run multiple marathons including the Tokyo Marathon, and as expected, Carrie and Jim live with an adorable cat named Frenemy, who was unhappy at not being selected as the model for the book.

She started and has been playing in an ‘80s band, Molly and the Ringwalds, for over two decades now! In addition to playing the keyboard, Carrie also plays the recorder and bagpipes.

Carrie lives in Houston, TX and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. At home, she loves to cook, design/create Halloween costumes, daydream about meeting Jacques Pepin, and watch Elvis movies, although not necessarily at the same time. She dislikes overly dramatic music used in reality TV shows. Currently, Carrie is working on her secondbook, a sequel to Whiskers Abroad, where Audrey and Ashi explore further into Japan and get themselves into even more interesting predicaments.

Carrie Carter always wanted to be a writer. She started churning out short stories in the third grade. They all went like this: the main character, a young smart girl, noticed a suspicious person sneaking around in the dark. She investigated and ended up getting whacked in the head with a blunt object, only to wake up days later in a new location to discover everything was a simple miscommunication. Fortunately, Carrie managed to graduate from those narratives of concussions to the much more enjoyable readings about a traveling cat. Her debut novel, Whiskers Abroad: A Human and A Feline Perspective on Traveling in Japan, combined guidebook with travelogue and tales of cat adventures.

Before writing and creating the book with her sister, Stacy Vickers, she moaned to all her friends about her lack of Ikigai (life’s purpose). She created a list of her personal likes and forced her friends to read it. They were supposed to be inspired and suggest the perfect career for her.

The list had all the usual suspects, drinking coffee, not to be confused with making or serving coffee, petting cats, dining in hoity-toity restaurants, eating in whole in the walls, reading about infectious diseases, figuring out the nutritional content of a meal, and so on. Her sister suggested combining several of the ideas to create Whiskers Abroad. Cats, new foods, travel, Japan, and writing united? Bingo.

At first the book was going to be a spy novel with a cat as the main character, but Carrie knew nothing about espionage. She did know about traveling in Japan. She visited the country fourteen times with her husband, Jim. She once ran the Tokyo Marathon. The Whiskers Abroad concept solidified.

Carrie and Jim live in Houston with an adorable cat named Frenemy, who was unhappy at not being selected as the model for the book. They also play in the 80’s cover band she formed, Molly and the Ringwalds, which has been going strong for over twenty years.

When not making music or writing fiction, she loves to cook at home, design/create Halloween costumes, and daydream about meeting Jacques Pepin. She dislikes overly dramatic music in reality TV shows. Currently, Carrie is working on her second book, a sequel to Whiskers Abroad, where Audrey and Ashi explore further into Japan and get themselves into even more interesting predicaments.

Carrie graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a B.S. in Radio-Television-Film. She has several screenplays waiting for the right producer to come along.

Let’s Be Social:

http://carriecarterwrites.com

https://www.facebook.com/carriecarterwrites

https://www.facebook.com/AshiGrayCat

https://www.instagram.com/carriecarterwrites/

https://www.instagram.com/whiskersabroad/