Welcome, welcome, one and all, to this grand dance of 2019, where you’ll get to live vicariously through five baby authors as they ride this rollercoaster called The Debut Year. We can promise much fun! and thrills! and anxiety! I am honored and pleased to start this year’s ball, so:
Hi! I’m Kai—and yes, that rhymes. I’m a writer—no, an author—I can say that now, right? No one will come and try to take it from me? As long as I’m wearing this Official Author HeadgearTM, at least. It’s got a little holder for coffee and pens and everything.
Where was I? Oh yes. I am a Serious Author and I have a Serious Background Story. I grew up on Anne McCaffrey, TNT re-runs of Tremors and Jurassic Park, first person shooters, Animorphs, biking to the library, predictable afternoon thunderstorms, and the promise that I could be anything I wanted to be.
Unfortunately I wanted to be everything—astrophysicist! classicist! engineer! teacher! linguist! editor! fine cheese sampler!—and I’ve never narrowed that down.
But—through it all, I always wanted to write, and to be published, and to have people hand their cold, electronic cash to me in exchange for pages and pages of words. I just, you know, also knew I’d need some sort of dayjob.
Which is probably why I’ve been a cashier, worked in foreclosure, been a secretary, built bikes, learned property assessment, and—more recently—developed webtrainings. I’ve also moved from FL to WA to AZ to—again, more recently—MI, and we ain’t settled yet, lovelies.
Because, at the heart of all those choices, I was always making room for my writing. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.
For now, there’s this story, and this story is my debut. It’s not even the story of the book I wrote and that my agent offered on initially, it’s a whole ‘nother story about a book I wrote after my publisher asked for a trilogy. A book I started writing 3 weeks after giving birth. A book I wrote the bulk of during the aftershocks of the 2016 election. A book that sprang from a single character and really wasn’t supposed to be a murder mystery, I swear.
I’m looking forward to sharing that book with you in the coming year, as well as everything that went into it.
So: hi! I’m Kai. Shall we dance?
So you wanted to be everything, too? I feel like this is a common theme for writers…we can do anything, as long as we’re writing at the same time.