One Fucking Year

One year ago, an evening motorcycle ride left me broken on Cerrillos Road. Broken bones, surgeries, months of rehabilitation, and nights spent crying when nobody was watching. But somewhere in the hardest fucking year of my life, I found love, purpose, and something I hadn't truly possessed before: a sense of my own worth. I'm not grateful for the accident. I'm grateful I survived it.

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Writing Life, Rants & Raves, Humor Kate Sjostrand Writing Life, Rants & Raves, Humor Kate Sjostrand

Dear MS Copilot, I Can Fucking Write

I’m fucking Gen X. I learned to write by hand, type on an actual typewriter, build an outline, stare at a blank page, fuck it up, crumple it up, and start again. AI can be an incredibly useful tool, but I’m not convinced we should outsource the basic human ability to take a thought out of our own heads and turn it into a fucking sentence.

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Apparently, I’m an Author Now

I fucking hate marketing. I hate self-promotion. But apparently, somewhere between making sell sheets, sending books to festivals, volunteering at booths, and planning a motorcycle trip to Tucson around a fucking book festival, something changed. I finally stopped treating writing like something I do and started accepting that being an author is part of who I am.

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Writing Life, Freedom & Fire, Rants & Raves Kate Sjostrand Writing Life, Freedom & Fire, Rants & Raves Kate Sjostrand

No, You Don't Get a Comment Section

You are completely free to disagree with me. You're free to complain about me, tell your friends I'm an asshole, or buy a domain and write an entire fucking dissertation explaining why I'm wrong. I'll defend your freedom to do it. What you're not entitled to is space on my website to do it. I paid for my little corner of the internet. I built it. I fill it with my words. And I'll decide what fucking goes there.

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My Life. My Rules.

A mortgage application isn't really about buying a house. At least, not for me. It's about finally choosing to build the life I want instead of the life everyone else thinks I should have. Almost dying has a way of clarifying things. I'm done waiting for retirement to start living. The life I want begins now.

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Three Things

Sometimes life has a funny way of reminding you what actually matters.

I thought I was leaving for Colorado on one motorcycle. Instead, a text message changed the entire weekend. Nyx was ready. The repairs were finished. The upgrades were done. And somewhere between picking up my bike and twisting the throttle for the first time, I realized my life had quietly become much simpler than I ever imagined.

There are only three things that truly matter anymore.

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I Came Back

You spend years building a career, convinced that one day you'll finally earn a seat at the table. Then one morning you realize you've been standing outside the conference room the whole time.

I left an organization years ago because I believed it had become a good old boys club. Fifteen years later, I came back believing it had changed. This is the story of what happens when the place you wanted to finish your career starts feeling painfully familiar again.

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I Hope They Get This In Time

The proof copies for A Survivor’s Guide To Survival finally arrived, and for the first time since the accident, this chapter feels complete. This book was designed for people waking up in hospital beds after trauma: scared, hurting, disoriented, and alone. If these words help even one person find their way back to themselves, then the book has already done its job.

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I Accidentally Built a Publishing Team

I accidentally assembled the most incredible team to push my memoir, And So, She Rose, across the finish line. In three days I went from draft cover concepts to final layout, bought my first batch of ISBN numbers, and learned more about publishing than I ever intended. Turns out writing the book might have been the easy part.

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