Cara Tanamachi/Lockwood: Hi, I'm Cara.
PJ: And I'm PJ and this is...
Both PJ and Cara: Skip to the Good part.
Cara: We're so excited today to have
Christy Swift on the show. She is the author of the hilarious book Celebrity Crush. She writes geeky romance with sometimes with a side of sci-fi.
PJ: Nice. So she writes fantasy and sci-fi under her pen name, C.P. Swift, and also has a degree in technical writing and daylights as a freelance writer and social media content provider for medical and technology clients across the country.
Cara: He's a world traveler, lived in Spain, Canada and Mexico, and is fluent in Spanish. Christy, welcome.
Christy Swift: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Cara: We're so excited. I absolutely adored Celebrity Crush and there's so many people buzzing about this book too, for good reason. It's hilarious, deliciously addictive.
I also personally love some of the sci fi quotes in it. Aliens is one of my favorite movies. So when she's like, you gotta nuke it from space. I'm like, yeah, you do. That's the only way to be sure.
Tell us how you came up with the idea for the book.
Christy Swift: Sure. Well, first of all, I'm so glad you thought it was funny. That was the most important part to me was that people would laugh.
And as a friend of mine who's reading it now said, you know, there aren't that many rom coms out there for the sci fi girlies.
Cara: Yes. Yeah.
Christy Swift: Here you go. We get to geek out about aliens, which is also one of my favorites, along with Terminator.
Cara: Yes. Awesome. So good.
Christy Swift: Mm. But so many. I could list them all, and a lot of them are in the book. So, like, another. Someone else called it, like an Easter egg hunt because there were so many little name drops of shows and stars and stuff.
And actually, the whole idea from this book came from basically our family geeking out on the Marvel movies during COVID quarantine.
Cara: Oh, yeah. We have watched them all. We've watched them all. Yes.
Christy Swift: So I hadn't seen them. My husband had. And we had three daughters living at home at the time, and they hadn't seen them. Like, we'd seen pieces here and there. But, you know, I had said to my husband, I'm ready.
You know, let's make it fun. Let's hear something we can do as a family. And we all kind of obsessed about them a bit, the girls and I. And then they started sending me, like, footage from promo tours and little tidbits and stuff, and.
And I just, like, kind of wanted to escape reality at that time.
Cara: Sure. I think we all did. Yeah.
Christy Swift: Yeah. I'm gonna go and throw myself into this Hollywood world and imagine what. What would it have been like to be a part of something like that? And over, like, a decade.
Right. These actors worked together, they became friends. It was just an amazing show. The character arcs, like, all of it. So just kind of wanted to live that. And I wrote this as just entertainment for myself, basically.
And it was the first rom com I ever wrote too, because I was writing sci fi and fantasy before that.
Cara: Yeah.
Christy Swift: But I entered a contest in January where I was forced to try new genres, and one of them was rom com. So I wrote a rom com short story. It did really well in the contest.
So I'm like, you know, let me flex my skills a little bit and see if I can't do a whole manuscript. And that's where this came from.
Cara: Oh, that's great. You know, it's so funny you mention Avengers, because my husband. I mean, the whole family, we've all watched the movies, but he will often say, like, well, you and your Chrises, you know, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt.
I'll take any of the Chrises.
Christy Swift: Agreed. Totally. Totally on board with that.
PJ: Yeah, she's got kind of a hard consonant rule if it starts with C or K. Like Keanu.
Cara: Yeah, true.
PJ: They're all hall passes, apparently.
Christy Swift: Who are your ks?
PJ: Keanu.
Cara: Keanu. Keanu.
Christy Swift: Oh, Keanu.
Cara: Keanu Reeves.
Christy Swift: Yes.
Cara: I mean, the Matrix films. We can go on.
PJ: You want me to leave you two alone for a while? I mean, you guys can.
Christy Swift: I think we can behave ourselves, right, Cara?
Cara: Yes. Yes, we can.
PJ: Well, let me actually, let me ask a general question. You mentioned that there's not a lot of rom-coms in the sci-fi space. Why do you think that is?
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