Writing

8 Things New Authors Should Know

February 23, 2025February 23, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’m the first to admit that I do not have the answers when it comes to writing or being an author. Hell, I’m still shocked they let me teach students, but after ten plus years of being an indie author, publishing ten books and a bunch of short stories, I have learned a thing or two. It’s funny because I posted a similar blog a year or two ago, but after teaching my novel writing class this past semester, I realized there are a few things I really think new authors should know.

You have to be your biggest fan. I often see writers who come from a fanfic background get down about the lack of validation and encouragement when they come nonfanfic writers because your stories go out when they’re finished rather than as they work on them. You are probably never going to get that same validation on your work unless you post the draft live on your blog or on Patreon, so my suggestion is to become your biggest cheerleader. You need to love what you’re working on and light your fire for your characters. That isn’t to say there aren’t going to be hard days where you are frustrated or hating the process. You just have to be excited to see these characters go on their journey more than anyone else. Write for yourself first and foremost to keep that excitement alive.
Take care of your body. My partner and I are both from artistic backgrounds, and the number one thing they always remind me of is to take care of my body. If you want to have a long and sustainable career as a writer, you need to take care of your hands and your back. Resist the urge to curl up like a shrimp while you type, make sure your wrists are in an ergonomic position to avoid carpel tunnel, stretch those fingies and wrists, and take breaks. I’ve been stressing this to my students lately because what you can do at 18 or 21 is infinitely harder at 34.
Avoid burnout. Something we all need to know the warning signs of and try to prevent is burnout. Burnout is basically when you run your brain into the ground by overtaxing it and not giving yourself enough rest. It can also be caused by compounded stress. Sometimes, it is unavoidable due to bad things intersecting all at once, but if you can help it, be on the look out for suddenly feeling run down, actively avoiding your work, everything suddenly being far harder than it normally is. This can be due to other health issues, but if this feels more mental than physical (or is mental and turning physical), it may be burnout. Radical rest is the best medicine. Your deadlines and readers can wait for you to take care of yourself. Being burnout for a long prolonged period can lead to permanent damage, so please rest when you feel it coming on.
Learn about taxes early. I know this is probably not as big of an issue outside the US, but please learn about how taxes work for independent creators in your state. I always thought taxes were very scary, but the IRS is not going to bust into your house like the Kool-Aid Man and arrest you. What you can figure out is what counts against your taxes (losses/things needed to create your products), how to do quarterly taxes (which will save your money in the long run if you make a decent amount per year), and what the threshold is for upgrading to an LLC or having a professional handle your taxes and advise you. I know it is stressful and varies from state to state, but figuring this stuff out took a lot off my plate. If you want to sell things on Etsy or from a storefront online, you should also figure out how to do sales tax and such as well.
Learn that authors are not your competition. They are your coworkers. No reader exclusively reads one author and no one else, so there is no reason to treat other authors like the enemy. I know that often this comes from a place of jealousy, but treat the people who are doing better than you are inspiration or case studies. See what they are doing in terms of marketing or interactions and try to apply that to your work. Don’t copy people; learn from them. Other authors are your community, and they are often the ones who step up to help out newer authors. Fine supportive people. It may take a bit, but also don’t be afraid to leave groups that are catty or mean spirited. They aren’t your friends, and you can do better.
Be true to yourself and your vision. This is sort of similar to point one, but it can be easy to get caught up in doing what everyone else is doing. Authors see people are making book boxes or Tiktoks or book trailers, and suddenly, you’re worried that these things are the key to success. No one thing is, and if doing Tiktoks isn’t something you want to do because you hate video, then don’t do it. It’s best to stay focused on what you want and how you want your writing life to look and focus on how to make that work rather than fling spaghetti and do everything while hoping something sticks. If you try to do everything, you will burn yourself out and get less done.
Remember that not everything you see online is real. People lie. Shocking, I know, but yes, people on the internet lie about their success or pull a Wizard of Oz to make their success look grander than it really is. There are a lot of people online who are grifters who just want to sell you their course or get you to listen to their money-making podcast, so they tell you what you want to hear. They have the secret to make a million dollars or how to make four figures a month. Someone can make a million dollars over fifteen years and call themselves a million dollar author, or they might make $50k in a month, but what they don’t say is that they spent $30k in ads. You might also see authors who claim to have personal assistants when, in reality, it’s a chatbot or them under a different Facebook or email account pretending to be someone else. Trust me that it is more common than you would think, especially from people who try to act like authorities online.
Don’t use AI. There are also a lot of people who will tell you AI can help you write faster or that it can help you with research. It can’t. AI is basically the mediocrity machine. It picks the most common dreck and smooshes it together on command, but it cannot think, it cannot create emotional depth, and it isn’t consistent. There are TONS of resources online that can teach you to become a better writer, but AI isn’t it. It isn’t a shortcut to success, but it is a shortcut to losing your career because most readers do not want to read AI written or aided stories, and yes, you can tell. From a creative writing teacher perspective, every bit of AI writing I have seen has been far worse quality than anything newbie writers in my classes have turned in. It’s soulless. If you can’t convince yourself to write and have to turn to AI in order to do it, you are in the wrong field and should leave to make room for those who do give a shit about craft and their readers.

Writing

Plot? Character? Both? Both. Pt. 2

February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Last week in part 1, we talked about how to build characters in a way that makes it easier to build the rest of the story structure around their growth and change. I highly recommend reading that before reading part 2 if you haven’t yet.

A caveat before we begin is that I am using my writing process as a scaffold for this. Everyone has a different writing process and there is no one way to write a novel. My hope is that you will adapt my advice to what works best for you by taking what works and leaving what doesn’t. Also, this post will have very minor spoilers for The Reanimator’s Heart as I use it to show how I construct the basis for my characters/plot.

A few key reminders before we start

your main characters must change from the beginning to the end of the story (this can be positive or negative growth, but there has to be change)
if you’re writing a romance or a character driven story with more than one protagonist, you’ll need to have more than one character change, so they will all need a journey tied to the plot
if you are planning to write more than one book with the same characters, you will need to have them change incrementally across multiple books, usually by shifting different traits in each book
the hierarchy of building a story goes character > plot > world-building > everything else

Let’s ruin their lives

The big difference between a character driven story and a plot driven story to me is that character driven stories focus on the change in the character first and make the plot work toward that. Plot driven stories have the characters serve the plot, meaning you could hypothetically swap out the characters without changing the major beats of the journey. In real life, we might be going through a midlife crisis without something in our external life making it worse, but because this is fiction, we can make things far more convenient than reality in our character driven story. Think of the external plot as a trigger for the inner journey of your characters. They are already feeling this way, but the external plot has kicked off a lot of feelings and made things more complicated for your character. I think a lot of writers tend to think of the internal journey and external plot as being separate, but if they are intrinsically intertwined, you can really heighten the character’s turmoil and strengthen both the character development and the plot at the same time.

I’m not going to go into a specific beat sheet or structure, so if you’re a plotter, feel free to use whatever plot structure works best for you. Personally, I like Sarra Cannon’s beat structure, which you can find in her HeartBreathings channel on Youtube.

Last week, I mentioned that we need to figure out what your character needs most to be a happier or better person (or feel free to ruin them; it’s your book) in order to figure out the internal journey. For Oliver and Felipe in my book The Reanimator’s Heart, they both need to work on their issues with isolation in order to be happy. Oliver needs to step out of his bubble while Felipe needs to let Oliver into his. How they deal with their isolation and interact with each other will be informed by the past and personality we crafted earlier. As a reminder, Oliver is autistic and a necromancer, which has contributed to his isolation and getting stuck in a rut after years of pining after Felipe who also works at the Paranormal Society. Meanwhile, Felipe is seen at the society as almost a demigod. He is a self-healer, a hero, someone who takes the worst cases and can survive the harshest conditions. This has set him above and apart from the other investigators who like and respect him but also low key fear him. This along with his daughter going off to college has caused him to pull away from most people because they expect him to constantly be that untouchable hero.

My question to myself while constructing a plot is how can I ruin my characters’ lives in a fun and inventive way? This is why we want their issues to be similar, so that we can ruin their lives efficiently while plotting. Ultimately, since this is romance, we want Oliver and Felipe to get together by overcoming their loneliness together. Now, let’s combine this with a worst case scenario for them personally. Oliver is a necromancer, and Felipe is a hero with nearly supernatural abilities. What if Felipe gets killed, and Oliver reanimates him? That’s pretty messy. Oliver is also a rule follower by nature and going against the laws of nature by keeping people alive long after death is definitely against the rules, so if he were to reanimate Felipe, that would cause him some angst. Felipe is–was–nearly immortal, so the whole being dead thing would also cause angst and an identity crisis.

Note how all of this is picking at wounds or character traits/history that was already there. As you’re writing and brainstorming, it’s fine to tweak the backstory to make this work more smoothly. This is also why I think you should give yourself some vagueness or breathing room with a character’s history; it allows you to tweak things to better serve the character-plot symbiosis while plotting.

Constructing the plot

Now that we’ve ruined their lives, we’re probably at the end of act one in terms of plot structure. This life ruining should kick us into the story proper, which means the plot should unfold logically from there. Keep in mind as you go from the kick off to the finale that your characters need to grow or change by the end of the story. In Oliver and Felipe’s case, it’s overcoming their isolation. Since it’s a romance, we can assume that means they get together as a couple in a happily ever after. There needs to be a logical progression from lonely to together that builds over the course of the story.

As I said, I’m not going to go into too much detail regarding plot structures, but the four acts of a story should go as follows:

act 1 (0-25%)- introduce the issues (and if it’s a romance, entangle them)
act 2 (25-50%)- we’re exploring the new world and showing how these issues are a problem
act 3 (50-75%)- at the beginning there’s some moment of recognition of the flaw and they spend the rest of the act trying to rationalize it or shy away from fixing it all while being more conscious of it
act 4 (75-100%)- things come to a head and the character(s) are forced to confront their issues and finally overcome them, usually while overcoming the external plot

As you brainstorm the plot and overall external conflict of your story, you need to think of a plot that will poke at the wounds your character already has while still being interesting. This way you are constantly touching the internal journey rather than weaving it back and forth into the story as a subplot. With Oliver and Felipe, I decided that a way to intertwine the inner journey and outer plot was to have Felipe die by being murdered. This forces the characters to go solve his murder (along with another murder I grafted onto the plot for cohesion after this initial brainstorming). By solving his murder, they are forced to spend a lot of time together, look for clues, get to know each other, and do things that tackle their loneliness issues while complicating their relationship. If he had died naturally as opposed to being murdered, the two plots of the story wouldn’t be linked together as tightly.

Throughout the story, but especially in acts 2 and 3, you have the perfect opportunity to use plot points to deepen or explore the internal journey while they do things for the external plot. These can be large plot points like when Oliver is nearly killed, which reveals the true depth of Felipe’s feelings and some clues for the external plot, or they can be quieter plot points, like where the characters discuss the case while having dinner and by sharing a meal, they’re also no longer isolating. You want the majority of the major plot points to do double duty in serving the internal journey while also moving the external plot forward. This is also why I suggest having the main characters in a romance have the same issue in a different flavor (like loneliness). If they have opposing issues or ones that very different, figuring out how to riff off the main plot while balancing both may be difficult or come off as disjointed.

As you are writing your story, I want you to make sure that you don’t lose sight of the most important part: the characters. They are the key to making a compelling story or series that sucks your readers in. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the fun and games of the plot, but if you’re writing a character driven story, they need to be front and center in your mind and on the page from the opening to “the end.”

Writing

Trusting Your Writing Intuition

August 11, 2024August 11, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

As some of you may know, my writing process is a delicate dance of two steps forward, one step back. I’m a writer who edits as they go, which I know is not how many authors or writers work. There’s a lot of advice thrown around in the writing community about when to edit. Some people overthink things and need to power through a draft to get it out before going back and fixing it. I am not one of those people. I don’t like mess. When I cook or bake, I clean pans and utensils as I go. The same applies to my writing.

Recently, I was working on The Reanimator’s Remains (TRM #3) and was finding myself slowing. Every time I tried to work, I sort of stalled out, and I couldn’t figure out why. I had an outline, I knew where I was going, I double checked the outline made sense, yet I still couldn’t convince my brain that we needed to keep moving forward. Sitting with the feeling, I realized I wanted to edit earlier parts of the book. Not a major rewrite, but I wanted to tidy things up again and reacquaint myself with the first half of the book. I kept telling myself no. No, you need to write forward, not go back and fiddle with the book, especially when I already knew act 1 was solid.

For a few days, I ignored this compulsion to edit, and guess what happened: I still didn’t write. Finally, after several days of stalling, I gave in. I had Word read the book back to me, and I edited through the entire first half of The Reanimator’s Remains. It took two days since it’s already been gone over several times, and during those days, I didn’t write anything new. At the same time, I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner. My subconscious was begging me to edit the first half of the book and reacquaint myself with the major threads before going on, but I ignored it. My brain literally had to force me to stop writing in order for me to listen.

The worst part is that I understand why I refused to stop. I need to be productive. I need to write every day. FORWARD MOMENTUM IS KEY. But editing is a large part of my process that helps me maintain forward momentum, and somehow, I forgot that key point. Going back through that chunk of the story helped to remind me of all the threads and little details I need to pluck at in the second half of the book. I made a list as I went through the first half and went through the parts of the second half that I’ve already written to sprinkle them back in. Continuity is key, and my memory is certainly not infallible. Actually, it’s more like an internet browser with 123 tabs open, so going back through the earlier parts of the book was vitally important to not making a huge mess had I gone further into the story without checking what I needed to add in.

This whole do I or don’t I edit again debacle really comes down to trusting your intuition. If your brain is saying, hey, we need to slow down and refresh our memories and/or tidy up, we need to listen to it. Often, your subconscious knows something you don’t. Same thing with when you stall out while writing and can’t figure out why. It’s usually because you messed something up earlier, and you need to fix it before going forward.

After over a decade of writing novels, this is still something I need to remind myself: trust that inner voice when it’s telling you to stop and regroup. 99% of the time it’s worth it.

Writing

On Writer Hustle Culture

July 14, 2024July 15, 2024 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

If there’s something I hate seeing online, it’s the glorification of hustle culture. For those of you who are not chronically online, hustle culture is the hyper capitalistic, you must be on 24/7, #girlboss, #productivity, work myself to death with a smile because I’m making more money than you attitude. As you can probably guess from my past screeds, I’m not a fan of capitalism for many reasons, but as an author/creator/artist, it’s particularly shitty to be expected to grind yourself to dust while supposedly doing what you love. Because if you aren’t, you’re apparently doing it wrong.

I believe artists should be able to make money from their art. I believe there should be social/governmental safety nets to allow us to do so as there are in other countries. I believe artists should be compensated fairly for their work and do it in a time frame that is aligns with their process and health. I feel like these are all very reasonable things to believe, but if you start looking at how people behave online, especially in certain online writing circles, you’ll see that is not the case.

Something I’ve noticed over the past five years of watching authortube (authors on YouTube), writertube (writers on YouTube), and writertok (writers on Tiktok) is the prevalence of hustle culture but in a way that is softer and almost more insidious because it is less obvious. I do want to preface this by saying that I see this more often with younger or less experienced writers than with people who have multiple books published, though I will touch upon some of those people later.

Beneath the aesthetic “A Day in the Life” or “Write With Me” videos is the looming threat of toxic productivity. No longer are authors writing in their pajamas gremlin style, they are out in the world writing and making content and recording B roll while doing it. The problem is that one must still write in order to have content to pump out into the world, and when your social media relies on you being a #writer, you must perform being a writer. The performance of writing is pretty clear in these videos, but the part that I find to be most toxic is the focus on large daily word counts.

Now, there are some people whose natural writing rhythm is 3k words a day or to fast draft. That’s totally fine. We all have our own pace. My problem is with the people who write for the sake of getting those large word counts, draft the same book ad nauseam, chasing their tail but never finishing anything. Or even worse, they beat themselves up over a no word or low word count day, even when the word count is perfectly normal for many writers. I’ve watched so many young or unpublished writers do this and burn themselves out. There are times when I’ve suspected a writer is burnt out and not writing, though they read off some giant word count while never talking about their project in any detail.

I’ve complained about Tiktok and the capitalist drive to produce content, but the mixing of word count and content does nothing to help writers. It gives completely unrealistic expectations to newbies, it’s fake in some cases, and in others, it drives people’s mental health into the ground when they try to maintain high levels of productivity for way too long. As much as the idea of NaNoWriMo started out as a good thing, I lay the blame for this trend at their feet. I think a lot of younger writer thought, If I can write 1666 words a day for a month, surely I can do more and for longer, without understanding that NaNo is not meant to set the pace for the entirety of their career or life. As with most things relating to hustle culture, it almost automatically excludes people without ideal circumstances, so people with lower energy levels, people with kids, with demanding jobs, etc. Those people can never be #AuthorGoals if they aren’t typing 3k a day while taking aesthetic B roll at a coffee shop.

My hope is that newer writers will understand that a lot of what they see online is not real or is heavily curated to make it look better than it truly is. There are ways to be productive and have goals without running yourself into the ground or creating a facade in order to live up to perceived expectations. The key is to focus less on content production or high daily word counts and more on what works best for you at this stage of your life. For some, it is fast drafting, but for many, a more moderate or slower approach is healthier. Don’t get caught up in what you think you should be doing because someone online tells you that you should or because you see someone successful doing it. You don’t know how much help they have or how many hours they have to work.

Going off this, be wary of people who consider themselves to be writing gurus or who churn out 10+ books a year. Many people whose sole job is writing can write 4-6 books a year, but if someone is publishing every month, be skeptical. Often, those people use ghost writers, people on Fiverr, or now, they rely on AI to do the heavy lifting with their books. They may also have assistants who run all their social media profiles or spouses who take care of all the day-to-day life stuff that you’re still doing. Don’t fall for the aesthetic hustle culture you see in online writing communities. Being a YouTube or Tiktok personality with never be a substitute for good writing or maintaining your sanity and health through good habits when it comes to a building long-term career.

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.

Writing

On Being Your Own Cheerleader

November 26, 2023November 11, 2023 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Let me tell you a little secret: no one will be as excited about your project as you are.

This might sound harsh, but ultimately, it’s true, and for newer writers, I think it’s better to learn this early than to learn it the hard way as you give up on projects because no one seems interested. Despite what others may say, writing is, generally, a solitary pursuit. You are the writer. You are the omnipotent god of your fictional world. And while others might be cheering you on, no one should be as excited about your project as you are, and expecting others to be your constant hype men is setting yourself up for failure.

I don’t want to say you can’t rely on others, but frankly, you can’t rely on other people. It isn’t your current or future readers’ responsibility to sustain your interest in a project.

When I first came across this sentiment of “No one seems interested in my work, so why bother,” I was a bit confused because I thought, “Well, the book isn’t out yet. Why would they be excited, especially if you are a new writer?” I forget that people actually show others their work while they’re writing. I tend not to. Not due to being squeamish about showing my unedited work but because I have a don’t bother anyone complex. It also slipped my mind that when people write fanfic, they tend to post things a chapter at a time and build an audience along the way. That tends not to happen with original fiction, unless you’re posting it on something like Wattpad or Ream as you write it, or you share your work in progress with an alpha-reader.

I can see how that would be a rough shift, having that built-in audience from posting your work on a piece-by-piece basis to having no one knowing what you’re working on or being excited about it until people read it and start to spread the word. No matter what though, if you abandon a project because your hypothetical audience isn’t hyped for it, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. I would definitely take a second and think if your knee-jerk reaction is self-sabotage to avoid feeling like a failure if that book isn’t popular.

I’ll let you in on another secret, first books rarely sell well. At least not until you have several other books out.

You need to find some sort of motivation to keep you going, whether it’s for the love of the story or for money, you need something that’s wholly you to keep writing when things get hard and it seems like no one cares. Above all, I care about my characters. I love them and want to see what happens to them, and my first audience member is me. If I like them, I assume others will too, but you’ll have to market the book to people like you in order to find those other readers. Look at what other people in your genre (or other writers you enjoy who are similar to you) are doing and try to emulate that when marketing your own work. Don’t go rogue with that first book. Don’t think you’re the exception. Don’t assume you’re a failure if book one is sort of a flop because that’s normal, and there’s a good chance it’ll get better.

As I write this, the thing I regret is that I can’t make you care about your work or about your characters enough to maintain that level of “screw you” needed to make art. Every artist who finishes something has a healthy (or unhealthy) amount of screw you in their system. It’s the little voice that pops up to tell off the world when someone devalues the humanities or says, “who would read that?” ME, that’s who. Over the years, I feel like my screw you voice sounds more and more like Anthony Bourdain, but I’m okay with that. When I need to summon the strength to tell my brain or the outside world to f-off because my work matters, I channel the spirit of a disgruntled, slightly world-weary chef, and it does the trick.

Whatever works to help stoke your artist ego to get your art done, do it. It may seem silly or pointless, but trust me, it isn’t. In the darker times when things aren’t going smoothly or you feel like no one gives a shit, that inner voice will get you through. In the end, you need to be your own cheerleader or disgruntled chef because no one else will.

Writing

The Money-Time Paradox

November 19, 2023November 11, 2023 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

Something I have been thinking about a lot, especially since I recently had to drop a lot of money on my medicine and getting my car fixed, is how creatives get stuck in day jobs and are unable to make enough to let them go or even shift down into part-time work or less mentally strenuous work due to the world we live in, especially in the US.

These past two years I have probably made more off my books than the previous four years combined, but it isn’t enough to live off. On paper it may look like a decent amount, but once you take 30% out for taxes, it certainly isn’t a living wage. Part of me would like to spend less time teaching and more time writing, but it isn’t feasible. I will say that I do greatly enjoy my job. I love my students, and I don’t think I would want to fully stop teaching, especially creative writing. The thing is that I wish I could say no when I didn’t feel like it. I wish I didn’t have to teach the summer bootcamp class, but it’s easy money for 2.5 weeks of nonstop grading. Even though it is a skilled job that requires a masters or more, the pay is trash (that is the system’s fault, not my department’s by the way). When I’ve told my students how much I make for 15 weeks of work, they all looked appalled, but I keep teaching because it allows me enough time for my brain to reset between workdays, so I can write. If I had a more traditional 9-5, especially one where I was at an office with other people, I don’t think I would write at all. Being around other people all day is hard when you’re autistic. Every second of the day is performative and tense. By the time I would get home, there would be nothing left. When I worked at an office for one day a week, I felt my brain shrivel up by the end of the day to the point that I did nothing when I got home and that often continued into the next day. The job wasn’t even strenuous; it was all the people-ing I had to do and the sensory overload that sucked the life out of me. Bright computer screens without dimmers, fluorescent lights, and constant chatter tax my system.

What I would like to be able to do one day is live off my writing and/or make things to sell as well. None of this will probably happen until my partner has a better job. I hate the idea that I might need to rely on him monetarily because I worry that would put unnecessary pressure on him. The things that hold me back from making the leap are all tied to problems our society could easily fix. I worry about paying for my medication because it’s expensive, and while I have a discount card, it does eventually run out and my out-of-pocket cost limit isn’t insubstantial. Universal healthcare would eliminate that fear of not having enough money to pay for my meds (or my partner’s). Universal basic income would go a long way to lessening the burden placed on those who struggle to work full-time. My teaching job(s) are considered part-time or contract work. If they no longer need me, I can’t get unemployment. These low paying but very necessary jobs could keep their better employees if they either paid more or the government supplemented everyone under a certain wage bracket with UBI. It could easily lift people out of poverty or tide those artists or seasonal workers over during the lean months. It’s tough enough being a creative or starting a new business, but it doesn’t need to be nearly as hard as our country makes it.

I refuse to buy into the whole hustle culture idea of writing to market or chasing trends or upping my productivity by fifty percent. There are definitely some things I could do to potentially write more, like actually prioritizing writing over other random tasks I have to do or watching a video on YouTube, but at the same time, I don’t want to suck the fun and leisure time out of my life to reach some arbitrary writing or income goal because in the past that has led to burn-out. This is what I mean when I talk about creatives being stuck in the money-time paradox. Despite what the girl-bosses and hustlers say, we have a finite amount of resources, whether it be money, time, mental fortitude, physical energy, or creative juices, and at some point, the well runs dry. If you’re not careful, you can cause irreparable harm and erase any progress or momentum you already have.

So, Kara, if you won’t do the hustle thing or quit your job, how do you plan to write more? I have no clue. My schedule this semester has been a little weird due to when my classes fall, but next semester, that’s back to normal, which will make it easier to write. November will be a bit difficult for me, as it always is, due to the time change, darkness, and influx of student papers, but by December, I’m hoping to get a solid routine down and try to find the sweet spot again for when I’m most productive. That has gotten lost in the sauce this semester with the new schedule. Next year, if I could write two novels, I’d be really happy, but honestly, I doubt that’s going to happen unless I absolutely fry myself. Still, I cling to the hope that maybe, just maybe I’ll get that safety net I’ve been longing for.

Writing

On Not Being the NaNoWriMo Grinch

October 29, 2023October 19, 2023 Kara Jorgensen4 Comments

I’m trying this year, peeps; I’m really trying, but not to hit 50k words.

So if you don’t know, I never do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November because there’s no way in hell I can write 50,000 words in thirty days. Now, I do support NaNoWriMo’s mission of supporting creative writing classes in schools, and I often participate in Camp NaNoWriMo during the spring and summer.

The problem is that my brain doesn’t do well with writing during November. As a college professor, it is the busiest time for papers/grading, and between grading, the holidays, and some low key seasonal affect disorder, I don’t do well mentally during November on the best days. Add on top of that seeing people post, “I wrote 3000 words today!” and my brain shrivels up like a depressed, anxious raisin. In recent years, I’ve jokingly called it “No Words November” because, more often than not, I write very little in November, if anything.

It isn’t like I don’t want people to fail at NaNo or not pull those huge word counts, but seeing it en masse does something less than great to my psyche, especially as someone who can write 1,500 words on a really good day and 500-1000 words on a normal day. I am a slow writer, and the pace of true NaNoWriMo is basically impossible for me. This year, my only goal is to not have No Words November. I want to harness the synergy of NaNoWriMo and just write like I would any other month. That is literally my only writing goal for November. If I could write 10k-20k words in November I would be very happy because most years, it’s literally 5k or less, which is what I can write in a good week in April or July.

I actually bought a NaNoWriMo 2023 shirt to not only support the charity aspect but to remind myself that I need to keep my attitude up and not get discouraged by seeing giant word counts. Despite my smaller word counts, I have written and published nine books, a novella, and several short stories, so my process works for me. I never thought the smaller daily counts made me less of a writer, but it often shook my confidence because my process doesn’t match that of the visual majority (not that most do that but you see those word counts more during NaNo).

So what am I going to do to set myself up for success in November to avoid No Word November?

manage my mental health by muting words/phrases regarding NaNoWriMo as necessary
focus on my own paper, aka focus on my daily word, not other people’s
have an idea of what I’m writing, at least somewhat, before November starts, so I am less likely to be aimless and panic
be kind to myself because it is a hard month for me mentally and in terms of grading

If you do NaNoWriMo and actually hit the 50k and find the words usable at the end, how? I would love to know in the comments if you have any tips for being able to write so much and actually use it later.

If you aren’t doing NaNo, what are your writing plans for November?

Personal Life

Kara Struggles with OCD

September 10, 2023August 26, 2023 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I’ve known for a while that I have OCD. It’s a very common comorbidity with autism, and they feed off each other in the worst way by tapping into that obsessive, hyperfocused piece of autism and strapping an anxiety rocket to the back of it. Once it starts, it’s very hard to stop.

To me, anxiety feels like I’m overwhelmed; the world is too much. OCD feels like my brain is hurtling through my thoughts at 100 mph in a hyperfocused yet constantly shifting feedback loop. It makes it nearly impossible to focus on one thing for long, so I just hop from thing to thing until my brain exhausts itself, gets anxious again, and the process repeats because checking/obsessing gives it a dopamine pay-off to cancel out the anxiety. The worst part is that when it’s bad, I’m not always cognizant that’s what this is, especially if there is an active source of stress. The incident that has kicked off this post was caused by someone and a perceived (real or imagined) threat, so it wasn’t illogical to believe I needed to do something to stay safe. The problem was anxiety about feeling unsafe because it seemed like someone I had blocked was creeping on my social media quickly snowballed into an obsessive downward spiral (whether that was true or not doesn’t change the anxiety over it).

I don’t like who I become when I’m obsessed like this. You know in movies/TV shows where the detective is tracking someone through storms and ridiculous situations no matter what danger appears, that is how being OCD driven feels. My brain would happily sacrifice actual safety to get what it wants, and that is terrifying in hindsight. It makes me an unsafe person when I’m in that hypervigilant state. The minutiae I would typically be anxiety-ridden over go out the window if I can feed the thought engine to go faster. Somehow my brain thinks hurtling toward danger is how I can make myself safe, as if I can think myself into safety because the solution has to be there somewhere. I just need to think fast and hard enough to do it.

Part of the problem is that I have trained myself to do this by accident. When I was in high school and college, I could ascend to a higher test-taking plane by working myself into that frenzied hyperfocused state. If you’ve ever seen Michael Phelps getting pumped before a meet, that’s basically what it looks like but internal. I could fly through a final exam in less than fifteen minutes and walk out with an A because I worked my brain into a state it was never meant to be in. After finals week, I would collapse into a pool of exhaustion and mild anxiety until my synapses cooled. The same thing happens now with OCD.

I feel the rug pulled out from under me when the source of stress is removed or I snap out of it for whatever reason. OCD brain v. normal brain is a shocking contrast, but when it’s been slowly building for weeks, you don’t notice you’re in trouble until you’re in the thick of it, which is the scariest part for me. My OCD doesn’t manifest as external rituals, it’s just internal cycling, obsessive chaos, which makes it harder to pinpoint and harder for others to notice and intervene. Plus, despite all the rest, I try to hide it if I think my partner is getting concerned about me. I shouldn’t, but unfortunately, it’s hard to admit to ourselves and others that we need help. I’m open about having anxiety and being autistic, but OCD is always seen so stereotypically that it’s hard to discuss it when it presents as a whirlpool of brain chaos and refreshing internet tabs.

Truthfully, I thought I could will it away. If I tried hard enough, I could magically beat back the OCD or pull myself out without external help, but it’s obvious I can’t. The problem with treating OCD and autism together is multifaceted. The most obvious issue is the cost and availability of mental health services. A lot of places have wait lists for evaluations, and no matter where you go, it’s going to cost you unless you have good insurance (even then, it isn’t cheap). The other major problem is that a lot of psychiatrists are not equipped to work with neurodivergent/autistic patients, so they end up either being ableist and patronizing or totally useless because your brain doesn’t work the same way as a neurotypical person’s brain. When you have a combo plan brain and one without external ritualized behaviors, OCD gets a little tricky to treat.

My hope is that in the near future I can get anti-anxiety/OCD medication that will hopefully help to tamp down these feelings or make it easier to disengage. It will probably be a bit as I research psychiatrists and figure out what my insurance will and won’t cover. In the meantime, I’m going to try to limit my time on social media and active Discords because, now that I’m less chaotic, I know those are part of the under-over stimulated feedback loop that sucks me into a checking OCD spiral.

I got off balance this year back in July when I had the jury duty panel week, and it wasn’t my smartest move to throw an intensive summer class on top of it, knowing I was working on my book and that other things could come up, which they did. I need to figure out the balance between making enough to live and not putting my brain into stressed out, OCD hell. In the meantime, I’m going to work on finding some coping strategies and supplements that might muffle the anxiety until I can make an appointment with someone.

Writing

Planning for Pantsers

June 11, 2023June 9, 2023 Kara Jorgensen1 Comment

I fully admit that I am a pantser by nature. I love to dive headfirst into writing and figure it out as I go… until it stops working and I hit the wall bug on a windshield style.

Over the years, I’ve tried to devise a way to balance out my discovery writer side, which I need to be enthused about writing, with my need to know where I’m going to avoid creating a colossal, unsolvable mess. I like to call this planning for pantsers, which sounds like an oxymoron, but if you’re someone who wishes they outlined but hates it immensely, some of what I mention below may be helpful to you. As with all writing advice, none of this is prescriptive. Trial and error is necessary to find your process, and what works for one book may not work for the next.

A Retrospective Outline

I have a whole blog post about this, which goes into more detail, but the basic idea is that I make an outline of what I’ve already written. I started doing this because I have a brain like a sieve and forget what I’ve already written, what threads I’ve added, details sprinkled in, etc. This caused me to reread my work-in-progress REPEATEDLY to the point that I would waste so much time rereading instead of writing that I was aggravating myself. To avoid rereading the whole thing, I would make an outline broken down by chapters which contained a bulleted list of what happens, including any important details or setting chunks, etc. that I might need to remember later. I have this as a Google Doc that I can leave open while I work on Microsoft Word (where I write my books).

This outline can be as detailed or sparse as you need, but the point of it is that you can easily recall what you already did in the book. You can always go back and add color coding or comments or whatever you need to make it more useful to you. I tend to add dates or days of the week if the timeline is important. If you are someone who goes back and forth fiddling with things, make sure to update your outline regularly to reflect that. As someone who does fiddle with things from the last chapter or so, what I do is update the outline once I’m about two chapters past it (ex. I will add chapter 6 to the outline once I’m on chapter 8) to avoid having to revise the outline regularly.

Sarra Cannon’s 3 Act Structure Outline

I love Sarra Cannon’s videos on Youtube, and I’ve taken both of her classes. She’s a really fantastic author who is eager to teach and share the resources that have helped her along the way. Her channel, Heart Breathings, has a lot of useful information for new authors and those who are further along in their careers.

Something I realized I struggled with was balancing the plot and threads of my stories to keep the pace from being “too slow.” I still think I write more emotionally-based, slower books, which is fine, but it was something I decided to work on. I watched Sarra’s video series on plotting your novel, and in the videos, she has a workbook that you can download for free to help you parse out the major chunks of your story. This was really helpful for me because it kept me from clumping things together or spacing them too far apart. To be clear, this isn’t a formulaic structure either. This is meant to be the bones upon which your story is built, but things can be moved around, skipped, etc.

I liked this method because while I don’t 100% adhere to the guidelines, it helps me figure out on an act-by-act basis what needs to happen, where I’m going, etc. At this point, I plan an act, write the act, and once I hit about 3/4 of the way through it, I start planning the next act of the book. This has helped me to have structure and foresight without ruining the discovery aspect of my writing. Sometimes I also have chunks of story in my head, but I can’t quite figure out where they go. This outline has helped me to solidify that before I make a mess for myself. If you haven’t already guessed, I do not like making a mess for myself and will avoid it at all costs, even if it means having three different outlining methods all at once.

Using Note/Scene Cards

Remember when I mentioned having scenes in your head but not knowing where to put them? Making note cards might be a solution for you. I like using physical note cards (as opposed to using a digital whiteboard or the features on Scrivener) because I’m a visual learning and being able to physically move, crumple, or alter a card just works better for me than a digital one. That, and I can’t get as easily distracted with them as I can with anything on the internet or a digital program. I am already easily distracted, and the moment I change windows, I’m a goner.

At this point, I don’t write out a card for every scene. I only do it for the major ones, whether that’s major for a side plot, main plot, character development, etc., but I don’t do it for every single scene. The purpose of them for me is to avoid forgetting something important. Sometimes I have ideas I want to add that I don’t know where to put, so they can’t be added to the main outline, but if I have them as a scene card, they hang out in the pile. Then, when I flip through the stack every once in a while, I see it and go, “Oh! Yes, I need to figure out where this goes.” Repeat that about twenty times for everything in the latter half of the book, and sometimes I actually figure out where it needs to go or at least what it needs to come before or after. That’s really what the cards are for, the general order.

For me, these tend to be scant, like “[REDACTED] turns up dead” or “Oliver runs into his ex.” You can obviously be as detailed as you need or use the front/back of the cards for different things. What I like to do is color code the cards by act. Act 1 is yellow, Act 2 Part 1 is green, Act 2 Part 2 is blue, Act 3 is purple, and the colors are represented as a stripe on the edge of the card or as a strip of washi tape. As I write the book, I put a little check in the bottom corner of the cards to mark that I wrote the scene. The cards help keep me organized while allowing me to move things around and plan as needed.

Other Things I Do That Help Me

Edit as I go- I will give the caveat that I’m not editing for perfection. I’m just tidying up and beefing up the scenes I worked on the day before. Sometimes I go back and plant things that are needed to be cohesive (foreshadowing and such), so I don’t forget when I do edits weeks later.
Edit on an act-by-act basis-once again, tidying and reacquainting myself with what I’ve already written to maintain cohesion and make sure I haven’t forgotten any threads.
Have a running notepad document with random stuff I need to add or what should happen in the next scene/chapter I will be working on. If you have a brain like a sieve, leave yourself notes.
Work on the assumption you will not remember an idea- my brain is like a browser with a hundred tabs open, so I leave myself notes, reminders, etc. for everything. Never assume you’ll remember because you won’t.