dog mom – Kara Jorgensen

If you already follow me and have for a while, you already know who I am, but semi recently, I’ve gained quite a few new followers online and a bunch of new readers. It just feels like a good time to reintroduce myself.

Hi, dear readers. My name is Kara Jorgensen, my pronouns are they/them, and I am a queer indie author who writes queer historical-paranormal romance books set [mostly] in the 1890s. In terms of queerness, I am a nonbinary or agender person who is a little masc leaning. I’m also asexual, omniromantic (or biromantic, both apply). My partner is a trans woman who I have been with for over twenty years, and we have two dogs that we love dearly. Online, I tend to talk a lot about queer books, queerness, and how that intersects with being chronically ill or neurodivergent. Being autistic is central to my identity since it influences every aspect of my life. It’s has lead to some of my favorite personality traits, but it also has gifted me with debilitating anxiety and OCD at times. And if you follow me long enough, you will hear me complain about my autoimmune conditions as well (sorry, not sorry for complaining about my allergies and gut problems). I am a complex creature who often feels like a bunch of comorbidities in a trench coat.

The good thing is that I love learning about medical stuff. Medical history and diseases are some of my special interests and have been since I was in high school. Growing up, I wanted to be a doctor, but in college when my autoimmune problems were at their worst, I realized I probably couldn’t handle the 24/7 schedule of a medical residency (but still finished a BA in biology as well as literature). Instead, I became a writer and writing professor. I earned an MFA in Creative and Professional Writing and have published eleven novels thus far. Currently, I teach at universities as an adjunct English professor, mostly teaching College Writing (freshman writing), creative writing classes, and running the university’s literary magazine. While I wish that I taught full-time, it leaves me time for writing and can be worked around my chronic issues and neurodivergence.

Writing has been the one thing in my life that has been a constant since I was ten years old. My first “real” stories were self-insert Sherlock Holmes stories that were very dramatic. Sherlock Holmes was always getting shot and needing to be nursed back to health. After that, I went through a brief Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicle fanfic stage before moving into my own works. All of which were very dramatic and involved a lot of characters being sad, broody, and injured. Oh, and queer. The stories slowly got queerer and queerer with time. My first published book, The Earl of Brass, started out as my senior final project in college, which was then expanded when I was in graduate school. Looking back on it, I think it’s a highly flawed hot mess, but I tell myself keeping it available is a way to see how much I have grown since 2014. It’s also nice to see the things that set my books apart from others even in those early books.

Since then, I have published eleven full-length novels and several short stories. The books that are most well-known and most read are my Reanimator Mysteries books, starting with The Reanimator’s Heart, which are about an autistic necromancer who accidentally reanimates the man he loves after he’s murdered. From there, they team up to solve his murder. It ends happily, and there are four books in the series about these characters. My books tend to be on the Gothic side, but Gothic ala Guillermo del Toro or The Addams Family. Ones where you romance the darkness rather than being scared of it. Anne Rice, Tim Burton, The Brontes, Guillermo del Toro, KJ Charles, Cat Sebastian, and Edward Gorey have been major influences on my work, but at heart, I am a romantic and it shows. If you read my books, you can expect some sex scenes. No matter what though, the focus will always be on the emotional intimacy between the characters and how their neuroses mingle and can be soothed by the other person.

Some other random things about me, the lightning round:

I am a foodie. I absolutely love trying new food and making new recipes. One day, I would love to get my hands on Vincent Price’s cookbook. I love sushi, Japanese food in general, cheese of all kinds, and food from the Maghrab (grape leaves are soooo good)
I collect plushies- mostly Squishables. I have always been a plushie person (a very autistic trait, iykyk). My favs are the moths, coffees, and bees. My partner loves dolls and has quite a few Blythe and Monster High dolls.
I love stationery. I am a sticker and marker person. I do quite a bit of bullet journaling, so I mostly use my supplies to do that. My partner also steals them to do art.
My favorite step of the writing process is research. I could sit and research random things in my books forever. I often have to stop myself and make myself actually write because I could continually put things off to learn more. It’s the academic in me. I just always want to learn more.
If possible, I want to be the avatar of crafts, aka I want to learn them all. I do plastic canvas, cross stitch, crochet, and plenty more, but I would love to make rugs or stained glass and take more pottery classes in the future.
Favorite authors in no order: KJ Charles, Jordan L. Hawk, Cat Sebastian, Nghi Vo, P. Djeli Clark, Rebecca Roanhorse, Anne Rice, Anna-Marie McLemore, T. Kingfisher
My dream jobs if I didn’t have to worry about paying for additional schooling or the job market: beekeeper, working in a museum, archaeologist/paleontologist, owning a cafe or store where local artists could sell their stuff, being a writing professor full-time.
My dogs are my babies. I love them vastly more than most people. They’re my constant companions, my dog children, the greatest source of anxiety (because they can’t tell me what’s wrong), and a source of love and fulfillment which I hope they feel is reciprocated from me.
At heart, I am a little Goth. I love everything spooky and dark, but I am also a marshmallow who loves bright colors and comfy clothes. As much as I would love to be a sexy vampire, I am more like a rainbow plague doctor plushie.
In my family, I’m the annoying political killjoy. I am nowhere near perfect, so I try to make sure I am always learning, growing, and listening to other marginalized people. Masking is also a priority to me as I am covid conscious and do not want to add more conditions to my collection of disorders. I’d also feel really guilty if I was sick and gave it to other people.

I don’t do personal posts nearly as often as I used to, but I wanted to update you all on why I am so behind on basically everything. I apologize if this one is a bit heavy, but my life has been a bit of a shit show since February to the point that I feel like a bad news bear. CWs for pet death and pet medical stuff.

If you’ve read through my monthly wrap-ups for January and February, you know some of this. In January, I worked up to the wire on The Reanimator’s Fate and then, decided to take a few weeks off from writing to recover my brain. In mid-February, I decided to start working in earnest on “An Unexpected Christmas” (TRM #4.5). Within two days of doing this, Finn, my oldest and best boy had repeated seizures and had to be put to sleep. He was eighteen years old and lived a very long and good life, which is what I take solace in. He was a very healthy and robust dog until the last six months or so of his life where he needed a lot more care and attention. I miss him immensely, especially hugging him and giving him sweet baby kisses, and still catch myself checking on him, even though it’s been over a month. We celebrated my partner’s birthday a few days later on a rather somber note, and the week immediately after, Edgar (15 year old soul dog) had a medical problem.

Edgar is fine now, by the way, but he scared the ever-loving shit out of me. He went outside and suddenly, his mouth started bleeding nonstop to the point that I thought he was going to bleed out in my kitchen. I took him to one local vet (not my usual one as he was closed), had an absolutely traumatizing experience with a vet who was incredibly unprofessional and ageist regarding my seemingly healthy but bleeding dog. Long story short, he said that he probably had cancer and should be put down. I was like fuck that and fuck you and took him to an emergency vet half an hour away. Somewhere along the way, his mouth stopped bleeding and in the car, he spat out a glob of tissue that turned out to be the tumor that had been bleeding in his mouth. The emergency vet was lovely and took the tissue glob to be biopsied. Even after Edgar seemed okay, I was freaking the hell out because Edgar was anemic and not himself for over a week, which once again tested my nervous system. Luckily, he recovered fully with some antibiotics, and the tumor turned out to be an encapsulated piece of plant material that somehow ruptured/ripped open in his mouth. An absolutely bizarre ending to that horrific experience, but I’ll take anti-climatic at this point.

Following Edgar and Finn’s medical episodes, we took Katie (10 yr old dachshund mix) to the vet because she has had a lump slowly growing on her nose for several months. At first, we thought it was an allergy lump because she has allergy problems and rubs that spot. The vet did a biopsy on it, and it turned out to be soft tissue sarcoma, which is a kind of cancerous tumor. Luckily, it doesn’t tend to metastasize, especially if it’s a low grade tumor. This past Friday she had surgery to remove the tumor from her nose. The downside is that they can’t get wide/perfect margins on a dog’s nose due to how little space there is, so while the vet got most it, she will probably need a follow-up treatment like radiation or chemo to kill the remaining cells to keep it from growing back. We will find out next steps once the full biopsy is in and her face heals up. She’s only ten and a small dog, so she could live another five to eight years without issue if those remaining sarcoma cells are nuked. I made a donation thing in case anyone would like to contribute to her cancer treatment as it will be a lot of money by the end. My mom is helping us pay for it, but after her and Edgar’s repeated trips to the specialty vet, I am scraping the bottom of the barrel on my savings.

I also want to give a giant thank you to everyone who has donated to her care so far. Everyone has been so lovely asking after her and offering their support, and I appreciate my fellow writers and readers so much ;—; It’s been a very rough two months, but this has made it slightly less anxiety-inducing. I struggle to ask for help and continually feel guilty when I do so, but for my dogs, I will do it.

My dogs are my babies. I spend all my time with them when I’m not at work. They are my constant companions, and unfortunately, when they are having issues, it is very hard for me to focus on anything else. I feel like my brain is finally hitting some equilibrium now that Katie’s surgery is done with, but writing has been a very slow-go. I plan to work on “An Unexpected Christmas” while starting the rewrite and expansion of Flowers and Flourishing, so there shouldn’t be too much lag with the latter. I’m actually really excited to flesh out Agatha and Louisa’s story for rerelease, but I also want to give you all a fun Oliver and Felipe story. I appreciate everyone’s patience when it comes to getting AUC out. If you can hang in a little longer, I promise it will be worth it. Oh, and there will be dogs.

Tag: dog mom

Introducing Myself

Why Kara is Struggling to Write