How the Story Unfolds: Chapter One
Angry storm clouds, pregnant with rain, screamed with lightning as I gripped the seat handles and stared out the window of the plane, willing this trip to Montana to be over. The dark, tumultuous sky seemed to mirror our family’s last two and a half months. I gazed at my thirteen-year-old daughter, Katie, as she…
Wait… who’s Kate?
Hello! If you’re thinking, “Dear Kate? Wait… who’s Kate?” — fair question. Don’t worry, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. There’s a fun little origin story behind the name, and I can’t wait to let you in on it. The Story Behind “Dear Kate” Kate was the wife of a former (and favorite!)…
Is my story really enough?
Don’t join the comparison Olympics team. There’s a belief most women carry when they think about writing their story. It has to be big. Dramatic. Resolved with a neat redemption arc that feels Hallmark complete. Then they think: Mine isn’t any of those things. So maybe I don’t have a story to tell. Or even…
Prepared in the wrong ways
Freshman year, 1985. San Marcos High School newspaper. That’s me in the polka dots, interviewing President Reagan’s press secretary, Larry Speakes. I was terrified. It was the nicest outfit I could pull together at the moment, and maybe it matched exactly how unprepared I felt. Fourteen years old, holding a tape recorder and a notebook,…
Permission to take your time
On the cost of moving fast before you’ve decided anything Isn’t it interesting how many appeals to potential writers rush you? It starts before you even open a document. “Just write a bad first draft.” “Don’t overthink it, just start.” “You’re thinking too much — you need to do.” Forward motion matters in most things…
What Are You Actually Afraid Of?
I’ve been thinking about fear a lot lately. My own, mostly. The kind that shows up when you’re doing something new — stepping into work that feels bigger, or different, or more visible than what you’ve done before. The kind that keeps asking: what if this doesn’t work? And I’ve been sitting with that question long…
What I wish someone had said to me before I began
I had been writing for years before I wrote the book. Personal journals. The Katie blog, which I’d been writing publicly for almost 25 years. But that was a carefully edited version of the story — the portion I could share without exposing too much. I was protecting everyone (the facade was alive and well),…
Don’t Outsource the Wrong Thing
When I opened my inbox this morning, I deleted five emails after reading the first paragraph because they were clearly AI-generated. And while I’m a fan of outsourcing many tasks to AI, I cannot support “writing” major components of your story through Chat, Claude, or Gemini. As a reader, I deserve more, and as a…
The fear underneath the fear
Last time I told you about the woman who had been carrying her story for years and couldn’t make herself begin. The woman who’d told it privately but couldn’t go public with it. That woman was me, six years ago. And what I said was: I eventually figured out that what I was afraid of…
When the Packing List is On Point, but the Universe Has Other Plans
I just got back from an epic trip to Central Europe with my husband, including a Danube River Cruise from Budapest to Prague — and I packed a carry-on. That’s it. I am a minimalist packer by conviction and also by stubbornness. I know what I need. I know what I’ll actually wear. And I…
She’s been ready for years. She just hasn’t started.
Six years ago, there was a woman who had already written the hardest parts of her story in her head. Probably a thousand times. She knew exactly which moments carried the most weight and which ones she’d have to find a way to write around. She just couldn’t make herself out there where other people…
