Community and Bad Author Behavior Pt. 2

September 15, 2024September 14, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Last week in part 1 of “Community and Bad Author Behavior,” I discussed what to look out for when it comes to a writing or online community that enables toxic behavior from bad actors. In this week’s post, I would like to outline what we can do on a personal level and going forward as a community to hopefully combat this behavior and keep this pattern from repeating.

Recognize Manipulation

This is easier said than done, but being aware of the signs of an abusive manipulative person helps you avoid falling for another abusive manipulative person. Keep in mind that people who are manipulative are good at what they do. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t do it. Some things to look out for are:

love bombing– this is when someone showers another person with praise and attention while getting closer to them. Once they have the person close, they then withhold affection. This done to keep the person craving their attention and trying to get in their good graces. Someone who runs hot and cold with their “friends” might be love bombing.
gaslighting– telling you something didn’t happen or didn’t happen the way you remember it in order to make you question your sanity or to make them look better. Once again, it keeps the person off balance, and the story might even be spun in such a way that it makes the person apologize to the gaslighter and try to make it up to them.
testing your boundaries– often they will run over your boundaries by asking you to share more, give them more time, be more emotionally intimate, trust them more. If you set a boundary, they will ignore it. At the same time, they are allowed to have boundaries, and if you run them over, they will punish you for it.
controlling behavior– In online communities, you’ll often see things like, you can’t interact with X person; if you do y, you’re a terrible person; you can’t be part of the group if you like so and so; and if you do any of those things, you’ll be kicked out of the group. People want to be loyal and be part of the crowd, so they comply without much push back, especially if the person is adamant.
using DARVO tactics– DARVO stands for deny [behavior], attack [victim], reverse victim and offender. Often someone is at the center of drama from multiple sources will try to play it off like they are the victim in all cases. Yes, someone can be bullied by multiple groups, but if someone seems to be involved in drama constantly, it warrants looking closer because DARVO tends to be involved. It’s a “get them before they get me” tactic to keep public opinion and support on their side and a way to muddy the waters when they do bad things.
can’t handle criticism or being told no– most of this abusive behavior comes from a fragile ego or low self-confidence, so they pretend to be an authority in order to maintain an unquestionable position. They use this to avoid accountability and deflect criticism when they do something wrong. When you approach them to tell you they hurt you, they will blow up at you or do the “I’m sorry you feel that way” type apology.

Think Critically

Manipulative and abusive people rely on the fact that you will not think too hard about what they’re telling you. Trust is key when manipulative people build communities to insulate them because, in order to get away with things for as long as they do, people need to not see what is right in front of them. It’s a slight of hand. In part one, I talked about how in these communities we often see cult-like vibes and a culture where authority isn’t questioned. Both of these mindsets require people to not think critically about what they see or experience. People who are or have been part of high control groups (like certain religions) are often more vulnerable to this sort of behavior as they were raised in a similar environment.

People who require control to keep things in their favor do not want you to think too hard about what they’re saying or push back against their behavior. Once one person defects, there’s a higher chance others will too. This is why they often boot or smear people who leave them, to keep others from believing them or doing the same. One can push back against compliance or herd mentality by having a healthy amount of skepticism. You don’t have to be an asshole and loudly question everything, but you can keep in mind that you don’t truly know people, especially online. I have online friends, and I love them dearly, but I don’t know how they behave when they aren’t talking to me. Two people can have two very different experiences with the same person.

At the same time, if something feels fishy, dig deeper. During the FM situation early on, there were red flags that popped up for me that I ignored at first because other people seemed to support them. Once they bullied one of my friends right in front of me, I realized those red flags were definitely there and dropped them like a hot potato. Being a “good friend” only goes so far. If you see them do something mean, confront them. How they react to that criticism is a good indication of whether they are trying to manipulate you or not.

Don’t Be a Yes Man

Being loyal is a good thing. Being blindly loyal is a good way to end up with a toxic friend group. Manipulative people rely on yes men to always support them out of blind loyalty or because you feel indebted to them. Community is important, but let me say this, you owe awful people nothing. Cut your losses and move on if you realize they’re toxic. There’s often a sunk-cost fallacy with friends or people higher than you in the industry where people think, “if I just wait a little longer, things will get better” or “if I wait a while longer, they’ll promote my work to their followers, and my work will take off.” People will stay in toxic situations far longer than they should because they’ve already been there so long. At the same time, it can also be a “boiled frog” situation where things slowly become worse and don’t notice.

What I think is most important is to pay attention to what is going on in front of you with this person. If you see them doing something mean or shitty, call them out on it. Normal people don’t expect their friends to always agree or support them. Most of us know we can be irrational, petty, childish, jealous, etc., and personally, I’d like to be told if I have gone off the rails and been an ass because I know I need to apologize for my behavior and do better. One of my fears is that in the age of “your valid,” people take it too far or misunderstand what it is supposed to mean. Someone feeling jealousy is a perfectly normal emotion to have. How you act on that emotion is a very different story. Having a little vent in your group chat is one thing. Spreading falsehoods about that person to undercut them is another. If a friend is doing something bad, they should be called out on it. If they can’t handle the criticism once the heavy emotions have died down, then you need to reevaluate your relationship with them.

I was debating which heading to put this under since it straddles all of them, but if you are part of a friend group or friends with someone and you are afraid to disagree with them because you think they will put you on blast or smear you as they do others, that is a mega red flag. Just think about the situation from a more objective perspective. You are afraid to leave a group for fear of being bullied. That isn’t normal, and you shouldn’t tolerate it.

Move Away from a Punitive Mindset

At the heart of many manipulator-fueled pile-ons is a sense of justice, that the people engaging in the pile-ons are helping their friend or standing up for some greater social cause. It’s commonplace for manipulative people to take a personal beef or a perceived slight and spin it with a social justice slant, couching the crime in language that isn’t truly applicable in the situation (once the evidence/situation is looked at more closely) in order to get the “good” people around them to react more strongly. “Good” people don’t engage in pile-ons unless a threshold of unacceptability is reached, and the manipulator knows that. They can’t say, “I hate so-and-so who many of you are friends with, so unfollow them,” but they can say, “So-and-so is harassing me and said something hateful about me.” That’s the kind of thing people will jump on because they believe their friend. This all should have been covered in the critical thinking section, but this mob mentality falls under punitive justice.

Punitive justice is the belief that people need to be punished for their crimes in a way that is proportional to the behavior. The problem is that people with large followings and parasocial relationships can turn those people into judge, jury, and executioner for those they don’t like. As mentioned in part one, often there is no evidence presented at all to substantiate what they’re upset about, the yes men/enablers swarm around them to console them, and then they go off to exact justice, whether that’s through harassment, review bombing, or smear campaigns. The question becomes is there actually a crime? And if there was one, is this hornet swarm proportional to what the person actually did? Acting as a white knight or savior to another person is a symptom of this sort of punitive mentality. The dragon must be slain, and the other person rescued.

In a perfect world, the mindset should be that the person is held to account but with a focus on restorative or transformative justice. If there was something done to the other person, they should make amends and do something to restore that person to how they were before the offense or to do something to atone to the community. Punitive justice leaves little room for growth or doing better, and I would even suggest that it works in the manipulator’s favor in several ways. 1. if they play the victim, the person they’re accusing will almost always be worse off than them because they end up being harmed for something they didn’t do. 2. When the manipulator is caught, they will just delete all their accounts and pop up with a new persona.

Do I think they should be punished? Yes. I think withholding support and unfollowing people is something one should do if someone is awful. At the same time, I think there should be room for growth. If we watch from afar and see that this person is trying (emphasis on is), then they should be allowed back into the community after rebuilding trust and making amends to those they hurt. Unfortunately, without all the things listed above and a severe, sustained attitude change from everyone (myself included) in the writing community, I don’t know if this is even possible.

A Note on the Victims of Manipulators

A manipulative person leaves swaths of victims in their wake. There are the people they actively wronged through smear campaigns and bullying, the people they manipulated and abused in private, and the people close to them who were used and lied to. Those closest to them need to examine how they behaved after the abuse is exposed and remember that you can be a victim and a bully.

Something that upset me after the FM incident was how the people closest to them were consoled and coddled far more readily than those who were the victims of FM’s bullying campaigns and cyberstalking. I understand why. Those people had more of a community than their victims; they had each other. It felt like they were more upset about being in the splash zone of a scandal than that they had been complicit in FM’s abuse by enabling them and/or acting as a bully by proxy for them by engaging in their pile-ons against others.

Every single person I’ve talked to who was a victim of their bullying, cyberstalking, and abusive behavior all show signs of PTSD and anxiety from the experience. Seeing their profile pic became a trigger. My blood pressure would shoot up when they appear on my timeline, and I would go into anxiety spirals when they would start harassing me with sock puppet accounts. Now that they’ve been exposed, the anxiety has lessened, but these online harassment campaigns are not victimless crimes. People who were abused privately feel deep amounts of shame, and some haven’t returned to online communities because they feel they can’t trust people anymore.

This section isn’t meant to be a complaint section on what I and others experienced. It is meant to point that real harm is done when people enable manipulators and let their behavior go on unchecked, especially after they’ve seen the red flags. My hope is that as a community, we can be better about seeing the signs of a manipulative person early, not enable their manipulation, and think critically about what we’re witnessing before acting in a punitive manner at their behest.

Personal Life

Emotional Whiplash

July 28, 2024July 28, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Not gonna lie, I’ve been going through it emotionally lately. It’s hard for me to talk about feeling anxious and depressed when nothing obviously horrible is happening in my life. Knock on wood, no one has died, nothing catastrophic has happened, but if I think a little too hard about my current situation juxtaposed against the state of the world, I find myself k.o-ed by a brain death spiral more often than I would care to admit.

I often think about Otto Dix and other Post-WWI artists and authors. When I was younger, I never understood how they could all be so sad and traumatized years on, even though the 1920s seemed so upbeat, especially compared to the 1910s. I get it now. The big joke about Millennials is that we’ve lived through too many historic events. A merry-go-round is fun until it won’t stop spinning, and you’re ten seconds from hurling or jumping off. That’s where we are. The only time in my life where the world was stable was from ages 0-9, which was just enough to lull me into a false sense of security that things could get better. Things have never gotten better in any meaningful, big picture way. I look back at those poor, ennui-filled people living through WWI and then a pandemic and then having to face more of life’s messiness with no real hope of things getting better, and I’m like yeah, same, bud. At the crux of that ennui is the idea that so much of this death and destruction could have been prevented.

Instead of WWI, my generation has the Palestinian Genocide. Day after day we’re confronted with horrific images of children being blown to pieces, bombs dropped on schools, on mosques, on ancient sites, libraries, universities, whole communities and families wiped out in a senseless instant. Even worse is knowing that an AI algorithm decides who lives and dies while Israeli troops post videos of them proudly rummaging through Palestinian people’s houses on Tiktok. I often think it isn’t hard to be not be a shit head, yet every day people seem to prove me wrong. Much like WWI, it’s all about land ownership. Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Palestines lived side by side for centuries, and they could again if it weren’t for people who are hellbent on turning Gaza into a seaside resort and running Palestinians out of the West Bank, once again, for the real estate.

On top of all this, there’s the pandemic, which, FYI, we’re still in. The radio silence from our leaders about Covid grates on me. Wastewater data doesn’t lie that we’re currently in another wave of covid. Each infection has a good chance of leaving you with long covid, for which there is no cure or treatment. There’s something about people willfully infecting themselves and their children with something that could give them brain or organ damage that fills me with far more dread than nearly anything else. I can ride out economic mess, I can white knuckle it through more trans- and homophobia, but I can’t stand that people won’t mask up because it “salts the vibe.” Sorry, baby, covid isn’t done with you yet, and viruses don’t care that you’re tired of their existence. Studies have proven time and time again that it isn’t milder, it isn’t a cold, and vaccines protect against severe disease only and do not prevent you from catching or spreading it. Masking would prevent so much sickness and disease, but so many well-meaning liberals just won’t anymore, no matter how much you explain how this affects chronically ill or disability people or even themselves (I mean, who wants to potentially become chronically ill or disabled?). I don’t know how to make you care or appeal to your humanity when it apparently isn’t there anymore.

“Pandemic fatigue,” “compassion fatigue,” what I’m tired of is the bullshit from people who want to pretend nothing bad is happening and that they can’t possibly be complicit. Newsflash, you are.

At the same time, I’ve been heartened by seeing others online masking, especially as the #Yallmasking went viral on Twitter. I didn’t feel so alone seeing so many people post selfies in their N95s and KN95s. Seeing the sudden renewed verve for pissing off conservatives and calling out their ridiculous bullshit has been heartening since Kamala Harris announced her run for president. Do I think she’s perfect? No. Do I think she’s spurred something akin to hope? God, I hope so. I feel like democrats are suddenly growing something at least vaguely resembling a spine, and I think Harris can be pushed further left than we’ve been in a long time. If we can gain that momentum and keep pushing left, we may actually make headway. I feel like I need to guard my heart against hope because I’ve been burned one too many times, but if there’s progress to be made, I need to feel that disenchantment, burn it off, and pick myself up again.

Since you’ve gotten this far into my soapbox rant, I hope you will

a) mask up for your own health and the health of those around you. If you can’t afford masks, see if there is a mask bloc near you

b) support the Airborne Act of 2024 by calling your congress people and asking them to support this bill, which gives tax incentives for businesses and public spaces to filter the air, which would help current and future pandemics

c) demand your congress people support a permanent ceasefire in Palestine as well as reparations for the Palestinian people, so they can rebuild. You can also leave a message for Vice President Harris.

Personal Life

Ambition v. Spoons

May 19, 2024May 16, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I hate making banana bread. And it isn’t because I hate bananas or banana bread or even baking. It’s because somehow, no matter what I do or how I plan the bananas and I are never ready at the same time.

This has been a theme throughout my life, especially as an adult as my inflammatory issues have taken a toll on my energy levels. If I have the energy, I don’t have the inspiration. If I have the inspiration, I don’t have the energy to work on my creative projects.

If you’ve heard of spoon theory, should sound familiar to you. In short, spoon theory is the idea that we all have a certain allotment of energy (spoons), and certain activities cost more spoons that others. The problem with being neurodivergent and chronically ill is that there is no such thing as a work-life balance. There isn’t a single activity that doesn’t cost me spoons, whether they’re physical or mental.

Spending time with people outside my partner, costs me even if I greatly enjoy our time together. Washing my hair will ultimately feel better, but it will cost me energy to do, which means I end up putting it off until I have to because I have work or I put it off so long that it starts to bother me from a sensory perspective.

What people don’t seem to grasp with spoon theory and autism is that things cost you spoons that don’t always make sense to others or they cost a disproportionate amount. Going to the grocery store isn’t physically taxing for me, but the lights, the noise, trying not to get clipped in the parking lot, the people, remembering to get everything on my list (I need a list because I have gone totally blank at the store), acting “normal” at the checkout, etc. is a lot that most neurotypical people take for granted. For me, this mental stress converts into physical stress, so once I get home from the grocery store and unpack everything, I wind up in a heap of fatigue for a few hours decompressing. It’s the same thing with my job(s) and why I avoid going to conferences or conventions. Even if covid wasn’t a thing, they still suck the life out of me and require a multi-day recovery period. Part of the reason I diligently mask and try to reduce my chances of catching covid is because if I got long-covid/a post viral illness, I would have even less spoons to go around, and I can’t imagine limiting my life more.

I’ve tried to organize my life in such a way that I’m expending as few extra spoons as I possibly can, so I can still do my writing and creative stuff and not be an overstimulated misery to deal with. It sucks though because I don’t think most people who casually know me would think of me as disabled or even autistic, and people with invisible disabilities or neurodivergence will always be held to impossible standards. They might be attainable for a time, but they aren’t something most of us can manage long-term without burning ourselves out. There is no way for me to have a standard neurotypical work-life balance without losing something, whether it be hobbies, socializing, chores, or my actual job. Something will always be falling to the wayside, and in neurotypical society’s eyes, I will always be failing.

For people where most of these things are near effortless or the effort is only required in short bursts, they will probably never understand how much I struggle and how little of a safety net there is. There are many reasons I support Universal Basic Income (UBI), but one of the main reasons is for when people who are ND or disabled burn out or need time to recover from a flare, they won’t be left destitute or having to keep working at seemingly 100% while actively hurting themselves. We live in a society that is very much all or nothing. If you aren’t disabled enough, you get zero benefits/support. If you are able bodied enough, there is no safety net. The best way to support your neurodivergent or chronically ill friends is to help them out when they need it (after asking, of course) and pressuring your government and politicians to expand things that actually help our society and those who need that extra help or safety net. Being able bodied is a temporary state for most people. Shaping our society to support rather than penalize a state most of us will end up in will benefit everyone.

Personal Life

On Gender

April 28, 2024April 27, 2024 Kara Jorgensen2 Comments

The other day I was listening to the audiobook of Threads of Life by Clare Hunter, and there were several instances in her book where she discusses the synergy of cis women working together and relating to each other in a space all their own. Listening to it, I was puzzled that people experience that kind of synergy or easy relation. I often chocked up my discomfort to being autistic. By nature, I’m not particularly good at “blending” with neurotypical people. As Hannah Gadsby talks about in their comedy shows, being autistic is like being the one sober person in a room of drunks; you constantly feel like you stick out.

But it runs deeper than the autism. I’ve never felt like a woman. People would talk about womanhood or what women want or feel, and I would feel my eyes glaze over. Cannot relate. At an abstract level, I get it. I can see and understand what other people in the same way I can say people can be the same gender and be very different people. The problem is woman has always fit like an outfit two sizes two big. It just sort of hung around me with no shape, and the shape people tried to give it didn’t make me feel good about myself or make sense in terms of how I see myself.

That has always been the bigger issue for me: how people perceive me. The lack of control over other people’s assumptions is a burden I constantly struggle to deal with. Any time I get hit with “ma’am” or “miss,” I can feel my soul curl like a shrimp. I’m lucky in that I’m an adjunct college professor, so most of the time, I get called “professor,” which is blessedly neutral. There are assumptions that come with being a woman or man, none of which I want or live up to. If I tried to ascribe to either, I would always be failing, falling short of someone’s idea of what I should be.

The best way I can describe my gender is neither or none or femininely masculine. One of the reasons I gravitated toward Stede Bonnet in Our Flag Means Death is because he hits the right gender buttons for me. He is a queer, autistic man, but he’s quite feminine and fussy compared to the other male characters. He wears bright colors, loves a luxury fabric, and isn’t clinging to traditional masculinity. I look at him and see gender inspiration. Same with Lestat de Lioncourt in Interview with the Vampire, though I’m far too silly to embody that fully.

I joke with my partner that “weird little guy” is my gender. Can a gender be queer? Not genderqueer, per se, but slightly masculine in a queer way, not a cis het guy way. Mostly, I use agender or nonbinary as the closest labels I can get. I add lightly masc because if I wear anything too feminine, I get dysphoric. Truthfully, I’d rather toss gender out the window as an unnecessary nuisance. The people I tend to vibe with most tend to be neurodivergent nonbinary people because I think we look at gender differently than neurotypicals. Autistic people are more likely than the general population to be trans or nonbinary, and that’s probably because gender is made up. We hate when people make arbitrary rules or try to create hierarchy, so why would we let made up gender rules get in the way of living our best lives?

While in the past it may have bothered me that I didn’t vibe fully with cis men or cis women, I’m more than happy to vibe in the agender autistic/ADHD club with the rest of my friends. I may never feel the synergy people talk about, but I feel at peace and at home where I can talk about my special interests, not be chastised for a verbal fumble, and not be judged for the parts I came with. For those people, I am eternally grateful.

Personal Life · Uncategorized

A Vent: the Freydis Fiasco

April 21, 2024April 22, 2024 Kara Jorgensen11 Comments

**What is written below is my experience with Freydis Moon and what has gone down since last February. Obviously, all of this is from my perspective, and I have not used other people’s names for privacy reasons. I want to use this post to vent everything that has happened this past year**

If you follow me on social media, over the past year or so, you may have seen me posting about how I was getting weird messages/replies on Twitter along with ghost quote rts (where someone who has seemingly privated or blocked you shares you work) on posts that wouldn’t normally get quoted/shared. This freaked me out so badly that my hair fell out over the summer/early fall of 2023 due to the stress of what was going on and the fact that I couldn’t say anything because the person who was behind it was another author within my orbit: Freydis Moon.

Freydis Moon has been unmasked Scooby Doo style as another terrible author named Taylor Barton or Brooklyn Ray. You can take a look at the evidence here if you want more background. The main m.o. with this person was that they would bully people, and when they would say something or try to, Freydis would rile up their readers/followers/friends to take them down. This was often done publicly, but it was often done on Discords and back channels only.

My issues with Freydis go back to February of 2023. I made a post on Twitter complaining about trope marketing since I don’t write or read fanfic, basically riffing off what a friend said. Freydis came into both of our posts and stirred up shit. I got off lighter with insinuations that I was being classist for saying if you have a BA in English, you look at book structure/writing differently (not better, differently). But they went after my friend, even though they backed down and unnecessarily apologized for their marketing opinion. Freydis and another queer author made a whole thread making fun of them and then seemingly booted my friend off a queer author Discord we were part of with the words “bad vibes be gone.” I was pissed. I left the Discord nearly immediately and muted Freydis everywhere. Part of me hoped they might apologize, but that never came.

After that happened, I started comparing notes with another neurodivergent author who had also had run-ins with Freydis and realized there were more and more of us who had this experience of “misunderstandings” that felt ableist. What I mean by that is tone policing, reading into things that aren’t there and then attacking you for it, and ganging up on them with another author/supporter among other things. Between February and summer, I watched another neurodivergent author get into a spat with them after calling them out for bullying. It’s also key to note here that Freydis also masqueraded as another author, Saint Harlow, who often acted as their attack dog. Saint Harlow went after this author, then Freydis got them into emails/DMs and then twisted around what they said. Once again, shitty behavior, but when you throw in that this author was autistic, it takes on a far more obvious ableist edge in that we are often not as socially adept and it’s far easier to trip us up, especially since clarifying leads to over-explaining, which gives the bully more to work with.

By this point, the pattern of ableist behavior was solidifying, especially after going through older spats between them and traditionally published authors, several of whom were known to be neurodivergent. Another autistic author became more vocal about Freydis’s behavior toward autistic and neurodivergent author, and so did I. Neither of us ever named names, and I don’t think I even mentioned that I was talking about a specific person when I talked about ableism being a pattern of behavior rather than a discreet action. That was seemingly enough. When a friend was called out by them, I told them to ignore Freydis (basically doing the opposite of what happened with the other author and because grey rocking is a common tactic against abusive behavior). Someone leaked those chats to Freydis, who then leaked them to their friends. I lost like 10-15 mutuals in like two days and couldn’t figure out why. I later found out it was because they told people I had been “racially harassing” them despite the fact that I hadn’t spoken to/about them in months and never had been racist toward/about them.

By that point, I had had them blocked everywhere, and I mean everywhere. Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, Tiktok, in my email, even Etsy. Their presence was triggering to me by that point. I went out of my way to avoid them, so there was no way in hell I was going to harass them. On top of that, I hadn’t said anything about any of this on any of my public social media accounts, only within close friend groups. Around this time in the summer is when what I can only describe as cyberstalking started. I would post something and a friend who come tell me Freydis is subtweeting me, even though I had them and their other alias’s account (whom I thought was a separate person) both blocked. I started getting ghost quote retweets on posts about my health or neurodivergence, which was strange since those aren’t topics people would comment on. I would have replies/qrts pop up, then disappear, and I started to think I was losing my mind. More people I thought were my friends unfollowed me, and I stayed silent publicly. I didn’t know how to possibly prove something I hadn’t done, but what saddened me most was that people who I thought knew me, knew my character and behavior over the months/years we had been acquaintances believed I was harassing someone and being racist. I’m not perfect, but I do my best to be anti-racist and continue to unlearn damaging behaviors and thought patterns. If I had done something, I would have apologized and taken responsibility for my behavior, but I hadn’t, especially since I hadn’t spoken to/about them since February.

When Bluesky appeared, I was relieved as they hadn’t arrived and the weird ghosts posts stopped for a time. The moment Freydis got an account there, I blocked them. I literally searched their name every day just to block them. Then, one day I made a post that was meant to be a joke about asexuality and spice (I’m asexual). Suddenly, my post was circulating among Freydis’s people, despite having most of them blocked, and I only knew because a friend came to tell me people were upset with me. I realized they were creeping on my posts again and cyberstalking me with a sock puppet/alt account or by using a friend to evade the block.

During the Trans Rights Readathon this year, I was tagged in a trans author list and one of their followers popped on to call me a serial harasser. Their “evidence” was me complaining about Frey’s clique to the friend from February and the ace-spice joke post (that I later deleted and apologized for). Luckily, the person who saw it didn’t believe the “evidence,” but this confirmed to me that they were doing this somewhere privately and that I wasn’t wrong in believing that they were sowing discord on Discord. During the Trans Rights Readathon, this happened more than once, and someone left a one star review on one of my books calling me a racist harasser, which my friends reported and got taken down. Once again, I still hadn’t said a peep about them.

Two weeks or so before today, I cracked and made a thread on Bluesky about being cyberstalking and how if someone asks you to keep tabs on someone who blocked them, you are contributing to stalking and harassment. I was tired and overwrought emotionally by what was going on but still didn’t name names or use specifics. My friends were being supportive and agreeing when a sock puppet account came out of the woodwork to call me racist [again]. They told a person who was supporting me that doing so was not a “good look” for them. Fortunately, that person saw through the manipulation and told them off. The sock puppet deleted their account and disappeared.

That episode rattled me because of how overt it was. I spent the rest of the week freaked out, and as recently as Friday, I had been pouring out my feelings to my partner about how this bullying felt like it was never ending to the point that I had gone back through interactions to make sure I hadn’t actually done something. It made me question my sanity and memory. I struggle with OCD and have chronic inflammatory problems, and the prolonged nature of Freydis’s bullying took its toll on me. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, my hair fell out from stress.

When the news came out that there was hard evidence that Freydis Moon was Taylor Barton/Brooklyn Ray, I was relieved. Several friends who knew about the situation reached out to me, and I decided to finally post about what went on. Everyone who has interacted with my posts has been very supportive, which I greatly appreciate. At the same time, I have mixed feelings about everything. The non-anonymous whistleblower was part of the crowd that spread/believed lies about me and shut me and several others out of parts of the queer indie romance community. People who I saw joining in on Freydis’s bad behavior are claiming they had no idea, and suddenly, people who have had me blocked for months on Freydis’s orders or word are now unblocking and re-friending me.

While I’m relieved this person’s behavior and real identity have come to light, I have been embittered by what has happened. My character and conduct meant nothing in the face of Freydis’s word because if they said it with enough authority, it had to be true even if there was no evidence. Freydis also weaseled their way into authority positions on projects that centered autism after being ableist and awful to autistic authors. They were actively ableist on their Discords and even made fun of me specifically for being autistic, yet no one pushed back. I’m not ready to forgive anyone who moved in that circle because I think if a new leader for the cult of personality stepped up, they would follow them. I hope they examine their actions and strive to do better in the future.

My sympathy goes out to all the readers who saw themselves in Freydis’s work and the queer, Latinx indie authors who may be harmed in the future due to their careless actions. They all deserved better.

Personal Life

The Discomfort of Trying

March 10, 2024March 9, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Remember back in my discussion of social media and the devaluation of the arts, I mentioned how AI “art” partly arises from the discomfort of trying and being bad at art and how many tech bros don’t want to try to actually learn how to create art because a) it’s hard b) it takes time c) being bad at something is uncool d) caring enough to try for long periods is also uncool. That is vastly oversimplified, but you get the point.

In my infinite wisdom and procrastination as I work on book 3 of the Reanimator Mysteries series, I have decided to take up cross-stitching! Yes, folks, Kara is learning a new craft, and ironically, this time, there is no mental breakdown that has set it off. I was in a mental health low when I decided cross-stitching looked interesting, so maybe, I followed my usual pattern anyway, but I had been putting it off. At first, I wanted to finish “An Unexpected Question” and didn’t want to use my craft project as a procrastination method, which was sensible because I would have absolutely done that. Then, I kept putting it off, despite having AIDA cloth, hoops, floss, and a simple pattern. Why was I actively intrigued by projects and cross-stitchers I saw on Instagram but kept not starting a project?

Because what if I sucked at it? What if it was too hard?

I never thought those words exactly; I just sidled away from the project, putting it off for another day. When I finally realized what I was doing, I was pissed. Kara Jorgensen does not cower before a new craft project. Hell, my life’s goal is to be decent at every craft I can possibly learn, and if I can construct whole plastic canvas village sets, I can do a six by six inch cross-stitch pattern.

To force myself to actually start, I decided to participate in a stitch along (I’ll use SAL as an acronym for it here on out). SALs are when a cross-stitcher releases the pattern in pieces week by week, so week one you do the frames of the piece, week two you do a part in the upper left corner, week 3 you do part of the upper right, etc. In this case, it’s the Femurs and Fungi SAL by Fine Frog Stitching, which is supposed to have a sort of science goth, dark academia nature aesthetic. I saw it on Instagram and thought it looked really cool, so I bought the pattern, ordered all the materials on the list, and prepared myself to start the project in April. After following another SAL from a different creator a few months ago, I had always hoped to join one but never committed. Part of the fun with them is sharing your pieces each week to show off what you’ve done. It’s like having a community to cheer you on and having a sort of cheat sheet in case you get stuck since you can check out what other people have done with the patterns.

By joining, the SAL, which begins in early April, I set a deadline to learn the basics of cross-stitching. Most SALs are roughly advanced beginner to intermediate in terms of skill level, so I knew I would need to do a semi basic project to learn the ropes before I could do the SAL. A few weeks ago, I finally picked up my AIDA and hoop after watching like ten “how to cross-stitch” videos on Youtube. It didn’t look difficult, but that anticipatory anxiety remained. In a fit of oh-for-fucks-sake, I stuffed my fabric in a hoop, measured the center with a chalk pencil and got started, and guess what happened?

I sucked. Yes, I could follow a pattern since they’re very similar to plastic canvas patterns. Yes, I could put my stitches in the same way each time. But I struggled. I couldn’t find the holes in the AIDA, I couldn’t separate the floss properly and spent half an hour untangling it, I couldn’t thread the needle without taking five minutes to do so, and I couldn’t figure out how to hold the hoop without making my hand cramp. At one point, I did like twenty white-knuckled stitches and put it down. There was that little voice whispering, “Maybe this craft isn’t for me,” but instead, I stepped back and thought, “What am I doing wrong, and where can I make my life easier?”

I invested in a needle threader. I have a minor hand tremor that makes threading difficult. I already used one for plastic canvas yarn, so I bought one small enough for cross-stitch thread. One problem solved. That problem finding the holes on the fabric? Turns out, I was using the wrong size needle. I got the proper size, and the process is now significantly easier. A cross-stitcher on Youtube posted a video of how to properly pull the floss to separate it, and once I figured out that technique, the floss no longer tangled.

The vast majority of my problems were caused by inexperience, not ineptitude or a lack of innate talent. If I had someone teaching me, they probably would have taught me the tricks of the trade, but since I’m teaching myself, I needed to hunt down the things that are common knowledge to those who have been doing it for a long time. That isn’t true of just the world of crafts. Everything has those bumps that beginners don’t know about, and you can either throw down your hoop and give up or seek the answers yourself to figure out how to get past them.

The progress I’ve made over the past week has been significant. My stitches are no longer so wobbly or lopsided. I can find the holes in the AIDA much easier, which means I stitch faster and with more fluency. I’ve done creative projects long enough to know that there is always a skill acceleration, then a plateau, then another acceleration, etc. as you level up whatever skill you’re working on. At some point, I’ll hit another wall and have to go back to consulting my more experienced friends and the lovely people of Youtube who share their knowledge for free.

But the point is I’m learning by doing. I’m enjoying and trusting in the process of learning, even when it’s frustrating. Doing any sort of artistic endeavor is difficult, but if you want to learn it, do it. Do your homework, research the supplies you need, and dive in knowing you will be bad at it initially. The only way to get good at something is to actually do it, so trust the learning process and don’t be afraid to look for help online. Take this as your sign to use that craft kit or start that project.

Personal Life

Reintroducing Myself

February 25, 2024February 26, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Since a lot of people read my blog and followed along after my two part blogs on how social media/capitalism are decimating the arts, I thought I would reintroduce myself (and because I deeply needed a palate cleanser blog that wasn’t me yelling about capitalism).

My name is Kara Jorgensen (they/them), and I am a queer, nonbinary author of nine books. As a little background, I have a BA in English and biology and a MFA in Creative and Professional Writing, and besides writing, I’m also an adjunct professor teaching freshman writing classes and creative writing. I’m an eternal student who loves learning new things and deep-diving into research for my books or whatever interesting thing crosses my path. If I could continually go back to get degrees/study new disciplines, I would. Some of my favorite things to research are the 1890s, food history, Ancient Egypt, medical history, diseases, folklore, and the history of crafts/art/fashion. There’s definitely more that I’m missing, but those tend to be what I gravitate toward most.

Besides writing and reading, I’m also a crafter. I have been creating art in its various forms for as long as I can remember, but I’m particularly fond of crochet and plastic canvas. Soon, I’ll be getting into cross-stitch (and hopefully embroidery as well) as soon as my supplies come in. One day, I’d love to get back into painting and drawing more, but for now, that sort of creative spirit is relegated to my bullet journal spreads. Stickers and planner supplies, like washi tape, are another weakness, especially when I can support my favorite artists in the process. My aesthetic preferences tend to be on the Gothic side, so if you ever see my crafts, please know that they’re either super colorful or Goth ninety percent of the time.

If you noticed that I have a lot of special interests, it’s because I’m autistic. In my books there tend to be a lot of characters who are neurodivergent, mentally ill, and/or chronically ill because I am all of the above. Growing up, I didn’t see many autistic characters that reflected my experiences or who were queer, so my most recent books, The Reanimator Mysteries series, has a queer, autistic main character that embodies many of my experiences.

Speaking of my books, all of them have queer characters, and they are all paranormal, historical fantasies set in the 1890s. My first series, The Ingenious Mechanical Devices, is set in mostly in England while my last three newer books are set in America. If you’re interested in checking out my books, I highly recommend The Reanimator’s Heart, which is about an autistic necromancer who accidentally reanimates his murdered crush. Together, they go on to solve his murder and others, and I promise there is a happy ending. It’s in ebook, paperback, and audiobook. You can also check out The Earl of Brass, which is my first book and is free in ebook form. If you want something a little less heavy, I would suggest Kinship and Kindness, which features a trans man fox shifter who wants to unionize the shifters at the Paranormal Society and accidentally falls for a strapping werewolf who is leading a delegation in his father’s stead. All of my books are available at all major retailers and in library systems.

You can also join my monthly newsletter. If you join, you’ll get free short stories for The Reanimator Mysteries series along with a stand alone sapphic novella called Flowers and Flourishing, which features a trans woman MC, a jaguar shifter, and a gorgeous painting. In each monthly newsletter, you get writing updates, a dog pic, and a morbid research tidbit. Plus, whenever I write a short story, you get it for free.

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing, I hope you’ll stick around. On this blog, I will post more about writing as a craft, book research, author updates, monthly wrap-ups, and the occasional rant/essay on topics I’m passionate about.

Personal Life

On Not Being Palatable

January 28, 2024January 19, 2024 Kara Jorgensen4 Comments

I’m starting to think the path of least resistance and the road to hell are the same thing. With what is going on in Palestine and my own country’s various issues, the vast majority of which stem from white supremacist ideology, I’m happily putting a stake through the heart of my palatability.

I’ve never been a people pleaser. To be a people pleaser, you have to actually please people, and when you were born weird and slightly arrogant, that doesn’t come easily. Typically, people pleasers will blend in with whomever they’re around, letting go of their edges and corners until they’re palatable. At this point in my life, I’ve decided to grow out my points.

At 32, I’m tired of making myself smaller to make other people comfortable. I got a taste of this in college as the student who always raised their hand and received dirty looks and snide remarks from my classmates. Frankly, I didn’t care. The eye-rollers were assholes, so I ignored them. Unfortunately, going to a very neurotypical-staffed grad program and then an abysmal job market eroded my “I don’t give a shit about other people’s opinions of me” attitude. Pretending I was normal (or masking, as we say in the neurodivergent world) sucks. It’s soul-sucking and wrong to the point that I burnt myself out playing normal. When I finally gave up and told my students that I’m autistic and queer and acted more myself, I ended up having a much better relationship with them. A weight had been lifted, and there was no going back if I could help it.

On the writing front, I’ve been far less willing to blend. I saw a post back in October where a new author was worrying that their audience might not align with their political views, so they decided to just not say anything. The knee-jerk reaction I had to the cowardice dripping from the post made me set my phone down. My first thought was, “Oof, I guess you’re white, cis, straight, and Christian.” Only someone whose identity aligns with the political “norm” would have such a shitty take. I used to be upset when I received homophobic reviews on my first few books. At this point, I smear so much queerness and neurodivergence across my books and online posts that someone would have to purposely ignore it to not see it. If you’re conservative and reading my books, you’re probably hate-reading, and I still have your money in my pocket, so *shrug* go ahead and leave a review that lures in queer readers.

Art is political. What we do or don’t include, who we do or don’t portray and how all gives a glimpse into our politics. If you want to sanitize your work to make it palatable for everyone, there is no chance that you’re creating anything worthwhile. Is it worth it to hack off your edges to make a few more bucks?

While I may not be immediately clocked as queer or nonbinary in the wild, I still stick out as a mask-wearer. I’m immunosuppressed, but even if I wasn’t, the science says we should avoid the plague at all costs if we want to maintain our and our loved one’s health. Masking is community care, and if you’re someone who feels strongly about racial equality or disability justice, you should be masking. You can’t be an ally to communities of color and not mask when they are more likely to have worse outcomes than white people. I don’t care if it’s weird or people think it’s over the top. It’s no skin off my nose to put a mask on when I’m at work or the store. It’s the least I can do.

I’d like it if everyone could take a look at themselves and figure out what parts of themselves they’ve been sanding off to make themselves more palatable and why. Obviously, if you’re in an unsafe situation, you should do what you have to in order to preserve your life/sanity, but for those of us able to step out of line or march to our own beat, we should stop trying to be palatable.

Being palatable is blending in, being palatable means not making waves, being palatable allows genocides to unfold, whether they be of queer people, Palestinian people, disabled people, and I’m not about that life.

Personal Life · Writing

My 2024 Goals

January 14, 2024December 31, 2023 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Some of you may know that I do quarterly goals and use the HB90 system, but this year, I also wanted to make a goal list for my year overall. I’m not a fan of making wild or grandiose goals that assume you are magically a new person when the new year starts, so I try to keep my goals realistic or at least doable. I’ve broken these goals down into writing goals, publishing goals, personal goals, and other.

Writing Goals

Write more consistently- I have been struggling to get into a writing routine this past year, so in 2024, I want to be better about writing more days than not and doing more sprints than I am currently doing
Finish, edit, and send out “An Unexpected Question” (The Reanimator Mysteries #2.5) to my newsletter subscribers in January
Write and edit The Reanimator Mysteries #3
Write The Reanimator Mysteries #3.5 short story
Start brainstorming The Reanimator Mysteries #4

Publishing Goals

Publish The Reanimator Mysteries #3 in October
Have a good launch/preorder period for book #3
Make REDACTED in sales overall (about 15% more than I did in 2023)
Proof and publish the audiobook for The Reanimator’s Soul
Look into selling books directly on my website/Etsy
Publish 1-2 books

Personal Goals

Assemble and use the elliptical I bought months ago (oops)
Stay out of other people’s chaos
Be more mindful of my mental health and do more to support myself before it gets bad
Work more on my office renovation (that has been basically shelved since last summer)
Be better about refilling my creative well with things like crafts, movies I enjoy, reading, art, etc.
Take a trip to HMart with my partner

Other Goals

Read 100 books (which is my usual goal and includes graphic novels, manga, short stories, etc.)
Play extensively/finish 2 video games
Have 5 2,000+ word writing days
Have 2 5,000+ word writing days (I’d really like to work my way up to having large writing days. Out of all my goals, these two are probably the least attainable, but I can try)
Keep crafting and/or learn a new craft skill
Continue to blog weekly and send out monthly newsletters
Commission more art of my characters, as a treat

I’m sure for some people this looks like a lot while for other authors, this is nothing compared to how many book they publish. At this point, I think I can only publish 1-2 books a year, and while I’d like to be able to write more or get ahead of my publication schedule, I am trying to be conservative and/or realistic with my goals. Nothing makes me feel worse than dreaming wildly and completely missing the mark. Overall though, I think this is very doable.

My hope for all of us is that 2024 will bring a very boring, peaceful time. I hope for Palestine to be free, for people to take public health seriously, for all of us to have more public safety nets and prosperity that isn’t at the expense of others.

Personal Life · Writing

My End of 2023 Reflection

December 31, 2023 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’m not going to lie, I have been putting off writing a yearly review of 2023. By and large, this year has been awesome. My book won awards, I had a record number of preorders on The Reanimator’s Soul, I wrote a whole book, things have gone well– more than well. On the other hand, there were things that happened that upset me and have continued to grate on me all year. My fear is that this reflection will come off as unnecessarily bitter, which I don’t want for you (my readers) or for myself. I don’t want someone else’s assholery to poison my soul and that is something I will be working on as we move into 2024, especially since so many great things happened this year. Without further ado, let’s get into it.

Things That Went Really Well

This year has been awesome, and I want to thank my readers for that. Without you all, I wouldn’t have had nearly as good a year. You all were so enthusiastic about The Reanimator’s Soul‘s release in October, and you all put up The Reanimator’s Heart for a bunch of awards/categories. As someone who is a bit self-deprecating when it comes to awards, I was shocked to see my books repeatedly put up. Seriously, thank you all. The Reanimator’s Heart won third place in BBNYA 2023 (Book Blogger’s Novel of the Year Awards 2023) out of over 250 entries. My books are also up for the Indie Ink Awards in several categories, and The Reanimator’s Heart won “best historical fiction” in the Queer Indie Awards.

The Reanimator’s Heart was also Meet Cute Bookshop’s LGBT romance read for September. Hell, MY BOOK WAS IN A PHYSICAL STORE! That alone just blew my mind. I was also interviewed by Geeks Out about my books/writing. More importantly, my books got more fan art! I love artwork so much, and every time I find out that someone was moved to create something based around my characters I am just over the moon. Few things make me happier than fan art. I also commissioned art from OblivionsDream and really want to do that again in 2024.

I don’t want to go into sales numbers and all the nitty gritty of that, but I had a good year in that regard. I’ve been trying to build on the momentum of The Reanimator’s Heart‘s release with book two, and I think I achieved that. I had the most preorders I have ever had, which I did not expect at all. My sales overall have been strong (for me), and I’m hoping I can keep that up in 2024 as well. I’m also hoping that the various awards and such will sort of keep stoking that fire.

Things That Didn’t Go As Great

I need to get better at writing consistently. It’s something I have struggled with this year. Overall, I wrote quite a bit, but I often feel like my attention is all over the place. Stretching my attention muscles is something I really do want to work on going forward as well as getting into a more consistent writing routine. This year had some chaos that I know messed specifically with this. If I’m mentally doing not great, my writing suffers first, and when my writing isn’t going well, I can’t get mentally balanced. It is a vicious cycle.

When I was called for jury duty in July, my OCD kicked up. This was compounded by some assholerly caused by another author who repeatedly made my life miserable by being a bully to me and others I know. The first instance of this didn’t cause me that much angst back in February because, while angry about how they treated someone else, I muted/blocked them, deleted my reviews of their books, and said good riddance. Unfortunately, several months later (when my OCD was already acting up) they reappeared when they got in a beef with someone else I know. The bullying person somehow got access to conversations where several of us talked about our shared experiences of them being weirdly passive aggressive or being a straight-up bully, and they made our lives miserable. I ended up having to lock my Twitter for a bit because I was getting cryptic replies and ghost rts, despite having the other person blocked everywhere. It was stress I neither needed nor wanted.

Going forward, I need to move on. I know I have been stewing on this because this person hasn’t been negatively impacted at all, despite bullying ND people several times this year that I know of, because they sick their followers on anyone who even mentions they have behaved poorly. If you follow me on social media, you may have heard me mention that my hair fell out from stress; this was why. My brain doesn’t want to leave it alone, but it isn’t healthy to dwell and frankly, calling them out on it will only backfire on me. I have to accept that and focus on maintaining my mental health in 2024 and working on my stress levels. Taking care of my brain is something I need to get better about. My plan in 2024 is to forget they exist and wait til karma catches up with them or they pick a fight with the wrong person.

Things I’m Thankful For

Let’s clear the air of negativity by ending with talking about the people and things I am very thankful for this year.

All of you. Seriously, every one of my readers who have read my books, suggested them to others, left reviews, made art, replied kindly to my posts, you all have made my life so much brighter this year. I wish nothing but the best for you in 2024, whether that’s success, prosperity, peace, healing, I hope you get it.

My partner. My partner has been going on a journey of their own with their gender, mental health, neurodivergence, etc. This year has been tough for both of us, but my partner has been nothing but supportive, kind, and loving, even when dealing with their own stuff. I love them immensely and cannot wait for another year with them.

My author friends who are my social network, my moral support system, and vast wells of knowledge. I couldn’t ask for better peeps to hang with than all of you. I plan to keep cheering you all on in the coming year.

And of course, my students, who make my daily life so much brighter, richer, and sillier.

Overall, this was a really fantastic year, and I just wanted to thank all of you [again] for making it one.

I’ll be posting a goals for 2024 post soon, so stay tuned for more on that in the coming weeks. I hope you all have a safe and happy new year!