Losing Kate

I started this blog in 2020 after one of my closest friends, Andrew, passed away. One way I chose to deal with the pain was to pour my time into making a website where I could broadcast my writing to the world. Writing to process wasn’t new, but it was new to take that writing to the internet.

I threw myself into creating a platform that I thought reflected my writing style. I named the blog Losing Kate because I wanted to talk about all the things I’ve lost when I go on vacation. One of my favorite features of the original iteration of the blog was a page that was just a list of things I misplaced while traveling.

• A yellow Croc.
• A knife.
• My wallet.
• My anti-depressants.
• One single Croc again.

The twist, just like in the list, was supposed to be that I would always wind up talking about real loss. Painful loss. Grief loss. But more often than not, I only ever talked about the grief kind of loss.

And now, three years later, the original iteration of this site is not who I am anymore.

Before I was writing because I had to. I had to turn this big ball of pain into something. And I wanted people to read it because I thought that would give it meaning. I’ve been writing angsty poetry for that same reason ever since I could write. But now I’m finally entering a space where I’m writing because I want to. And I’m starting to get serious about sharing that with the world not because I need validation, but because I think it has value.

As I’ve started gearing up to publish a novel that I’m 51k words into, I’ve been researching how to find agents, how to write a query, how to build a brand, and other scary things authors who want to traditionally publish have to think about. And this new step in my journey doesn’t match the old clunky site with bright colors and the tag line “When life gives me lemons, I lose them.” My old brand doesn’t match the professional writer that I hope to become. But with that old brand, came the name.

But I can’t get rid of the name.

Coming up with that name was one of the brightest things during a really dark time. So even though I’ve streamlined everything, softened the colors, and changed the writing to third person, the blog is still Losing Kate because even though my writing has come a long way, I still continually draw from the wells of loss in all of my writing.

But now the blog is not asking what will Kate lose as she goes through life, but what will Kate create in the aftermath? It will be about an author who writes about what it’s like to find the beauty in rediscovering yourself after losing the things you thought you’d never lose.