Author Katie Keridan spent the first part of her professional life as a pediatric neuropsychologist, working with teens and young adults battling cancer. While rewarding, this wasn’t her true passion, so she eventually followed her heart, despite her fears, and transitioned into full-time fiction writing.
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While Katie has enjoyed writing scientific papers, noting that academic writing also has a story arc with beginning, middle, end and specific takeaways for the readers, she loves that fiction writing enables her to be much more creative with form and language.
She finds creating worlds and characters especially fun, and would enjoy hanging out in real life with her two protagonists, Kyra and Sebastian, if that was possible. As a neurodivergent individual, she strives to create characters who accurately portray mental health challenges. She finds forests magical, and they often play a huge role in her work, as do themes of death, grief and loss. She is an animal lover, so includes them often in her writing.
She had originally hoped to be traditionally published with REIGN RETURNED, the first book in her YA fantasy trilogy THE FELSERPENT CHRONICLES, but when three agents in a row told her, “I love your writing and I love the story, but I’m not taking another YA fantasy author right now,” she decided to invest in herself and go with a hybrid publisher, SparkPress.
She now has published her complete trilogy with them. She has two other books available on Wattpad, as well as a self-published poetry book available on Amazon. Her work has also been featured in many magazines.
As for authors who have inspired her, she notes, “Garth Nix has been a major influence on my writing. He was the first author I read as a teen who portrayed a female character rescuing a male character, and I felt like I’d stumbled into an entirely new world, where girls could do anything boys could. I know that probably sounds silly now but in the 1990s it was pretty revolutionary to me. It’s hard to find someone who writes better fight scenes than Julie Kagawa, and I adore her Shadow of the Fox series. Cassandra Clare redefined dialogue and banter for me in the Mortal Instruments series, and I return time and again to The Arc of a Scythe series by Neal Shusterman when I need to clear my head and just enjoy a great story.”
When she writes a new book, she likes to get it out of her head with an exploratory first draft, not worrying about grammar, spelling and things that can be easily changed when she goes back to edit. Sometimes she even makes notes like, “INSERT FIGHT SCENE HERE.” If she gets stuck on a particular scene, she may work on a different scene or just take a break completely to do yoga or go for a walk. She uses repetitive tasks like washing dishes or folding laundry as opportunities for ideas to pop into her mind.
Katie feels that the business side of writing is the most challenging, mainly due to the fact that many factors are not in her control: “I can’t control what awards I win. I can’t control who buys my books or what people think about them. I can’t do anything but write the best story I can and send it out into the world.” So she focuses on her writing and trusts it will connect with who it’s supposed to. She also loves connecting with other writers, especially women, and supporting and encouraging each other, stating, “There are enough readers out there for everyone.”
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