What the Fuck Am I Trying to Say?

Here I sit, finally obsessing over Undertow, my collection of short stories. I've spent months writing these things, editing them, rearranging them, and wondering whether I've got  enough material to call the damned thing finished. I'm finally getting serious about publishing it. I woke up this morning thinking about cover design, about a lone life preserver floating in a dark ocean, and about finding an artist who could turn that image into something worth putting on a bookshelf.

And now, just a couple of hours later, I'm sitting here clacking away on my iPad, questioning the entire fucking collection.

Not the individual stories. I know those are good. I've written them, rewritten them, and spent enough time with them to know what they're saying. I know the characters, the circumstances, the decisions, and the consequences. I know the messages I've buried in each one, and I know why those messages matter.

What I don't know is what the collection is saying.

And that's a very different fucking question.

Look, Undertow isn't a happy collection of stories. There's heartbreak, betrayal, fear, humiliation, violence, loneliness, and a whole lot of people making decisions that don't turn out the way they expected. Some of the stories are uncomfortable. Some are downright painful. And very few of them leave you with the warm, fuzzy feeling that everything is going to be just fucking fine.

And I think that's the point.

You're probably sitting there thinking, You think?

Fair question.

A writer ought to know what her stories are about. If I'm going to ask somebody to spend their hard-earned money on my book, and then invest several hours of their life reading it, I ought to have some fucking idea what I'm trying to communicate.

And I do.

What I'm wrestling with isn't whether the individual stories have meaning. It's whether the collection, taken as a whole, communicates something larger. Whether the stories build upon one another. Whether the reader finishes the last page with something worth carrying away.

Or whether I've simply assembled a collection of really fucking depressing stories and called it literature.

Because there's something important you need to understand about Undertow.

These stories tell my life story since coming out as transgender.

I've said before that they're loosely based on my experiences, but maybe that's not quite accurate. The circumstances are fictionalized. The characters have been changed. The dialogue, the settings, the details that connect one event to another have been reshaped into stories that can stand on their own.

But the experiences beneath them?

Those are fucking real.

I've been kicked out of a women's restroom. I've sat in a stall, frightened and humiliated, reaching for my pistol because I didn't know what was about to happen next. I've been the other woman in an affair, believing they loved me, believing we had something that would last forever, only to discover that I was being fucking used. I've been misgendered, dismissed, and treated as something less than the woman I am. I've been sexually assaulted.

Those things happened.

They're not inventions designed to make a fictional character's life more interesting. They're pieces of my own life, experiences that left marks on me whether I wanted them to or not.

And I turned them into fiction.

Not because I was trying to deceive anybody. Not because I thought the truth wasn't compelling enough. And certainly not because I wanted to pretend those things hadn't happened.

I fictionalized them because I didn't want to have to tell them as my life story.

There's a difference between writing a story about a woman who experiences something terrible and sitting down to tell the world, Here's what happened to me, and here's how badly it fucking hurt.

Fiction gave me room to work with the experiences without having to stand naked in front of the reader every time I wanted to explore one of them. It let me examine the choices, the consequences, the emotions, and the lessons without turning every story into another chapter of my autobiography.

It gave me distance.

And maybe, in some cases, it gave me enough distance to write about things I otherwise wouldn't have written about at all.

Because here's something people don't always understand about writing. Just because you're willing to tell a story doesn't mean you're willing to tell it as a confession. Sometimes you can put the truth into the mouth of a fictional character more easily than you can speak it in your own voice. Sometimes changing the names and circumstances allows you to examine something you haven't quite figured out how to talk about directly.

And sometimes the fiction tells the truth more effectively than a factual account ever could.

I think that's what I've accomplished with Undertow.

I think it fucking works.

But here's the problem.

When you take some of the most painful experiences of your life, turn them into stories, and then put those stories together in a single collection, you can end up presenting a picture of your life that's considerably darker than the life you've actually lived.

Because my life hasn't been some endless fucking parade of misery.

Far from it.

I laugh every day. I love my life. I have a woman beside me who makes me happier than I ever imagined I could be. I ride motorcycles through some of the most beautiful country on the planet. I've built a career, made friends, had adventures, and experienced more happiness than I could possibly begin to describe.

The good times have far outnumbered the bad.

That's a fucking fact.

But as I've said before, me sitting in a room grinning like an idiot because I'm happy doesn't exactly make for compelling literature.

Once upon a time, Kate was happy.

And then she continued being happy.

The fucking end.

There. You're welcome. I'll send the manuscript to my editor.

Stories need something to happen. They need conflict, tension, uncertainty, and consequences. They need people who want something badly enough that the pursuit matters, and they need the possibility that those people might not get what they want.

Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they get exactly what they wanted and discover it wasn't what they fucking needed. And sometimes they lose something they thought they couldn't live without, only to discover later that losing it was the beginning of something better.

That's life. That's people. That's the human condition, and it's the territory I've been exploring in Undertow.

But when you put enough stories about pain, betrayal, humiliation, and unintended consequences together, you run the risk of creating something that feels relentlessly bleak. Not because any individual story is wrong, but because the cumulative weight of them begins to communicate something you might not have intended.

And that's where I find myself this morning.

Do I need another story? Do I need to finish the collection on a high note? Give the reader something hopeful, something that suggests that all this pain and uncertainty eventually leads somewhere worth going?

Or would that be a mistake?

Would adding a happy ending somehow diminish the stories that came before it? Would it feel like I was apologizing for making the reader uncomfortable? Like I was saying “Sorry about all that misery, folks. Here's a little sunshine so you don't leave thinking I'm a miserable fucking person.”

Because I'm not.

But I'm also not particularly interested in manufacturing happiness just to make a book easier to swallow.

And maybe that's the answer. Maybe the reader isn't supposed to finish Undertow feeling happy. Maybe they're supposed to finish it thinking.

Which brings me to the bigger question: What the fuck am I trying to accomplish here?

Because the goal isn't simply to publish another book. If that were the goal, I'd be done already. I'd slap a cover on the manuscript, upload the files, hit the appropriate buttons, and go back to doing whatever the hell I was doing before I decided to torture myself with questions about literary structure.

I've published books before. I know how the process works. There are plenty of details to manage, and some of them are a pain in the ass, but none of that is what has me sitting here staring at my iPad this morning.

It's the message.

It's always the fucking message.

I've talked about this before, and if you've read And So, She Rose, you already know why it matters so much to me.

Death has a funny way of changing your priorities.

And I'm not talking about almost dying. I'm not talking about having a close call, seeing my life flash before my eyes, or coming away from some frightening experience with a newfound appreciation for sunsets and fucking butterflies.

I'm talking about actually dying.

On June 30, 2022, I died at Jacksonville International Airport. My heart stopped beating. I suffered a full cardiac death, and somehow, after about  ten minutes without a heartbeat, I was brought back.

A little while later, in a local emergency room, I died again, this time for a full twenty minutes.

Then, on July 13, 2022, I died a third time, this time in a fucking hotel room.

Three cardiac deaths in two weeks. Three times my heart stopped beating for extended periods. Not little hiccups. Not momentary interruptions followed by a quick return to business as usual. Full-on cardiac deaths, each lasting somewhere between ten and thirty minutes.

And somehow, I'm still fucking here.

You might imagine that an experience like that would leave a person with a renewed appreciation for life. And it does. But that wasn't the part that burned itself into my brain.

It was the realization that I'd spent an awful lot of years doing the things I was supposed to do, without giving nearly enough thought to whether any of it actually fucking mattered.

I'd worked. I'd built a career. I'd earned a living, paid my bills, and checked the appropriate boxes on whatever list society uses to determine whether somebody has lived a successful life. I'd done all the things that were expected of me.

But what had I left behind? What had I changed? Whose life was better because I'd been here?

And when I looked at those questions, I didn't particularly like the answers.

I'd died three times, and the thought that kept coming back to me was that my life hadn't fucking mattered.

That's a hell of a thing to realize after you've already been dead.

It left me with an urgency I hadn't known before. An almost desperate need to do something meaningful with whatever time I had left. Not just to exist. Not just to work, collect a paycheck, pay the bills, and repeat the process until my heart finally decided it was finished for good.

I wanted to leave something behind. I wanted to change something. I wanted my life to have fucking mattered.

And for a while, that urgency drove me.

But here's the thing about life. Even after you've died three fucking times, it's remarkably easy to get sucked back into the machinery of everyday existence. Work still needs doing. Problems still need solving. People still need things from you. And before you know it, you're back in the routine, convincing yourself that you're making progress because you're busy.

Three years later, I was beginning to do exactly that.

I was slipping back into being the corporate drone. Working, leading, solving problems, meeting expectations. Doing the things I was good at, and allowing the urgency that had once burned so fiercely inside me to get buried beneath the ordinary demands of life.

And then I got hit by a fucking car.

October 27, 2025. Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I was riding my motorcycle when somebody driving a decade-old fucking Subaru Outback hit me.

That crash nearly killed me. It destroyed my motorcycle, left me with devastating injuries, and launched me into months of surgeries, rehabilitation, pain, and the kind of recovery that requires a level of determination you don't really understand until you have no other fucking choice.

But that time, I didn't die.

I came close. But I didn't die.

And the distinction matters.

Because the motorcycle crash didn't teach me that life was short. I'd already learned that lesson in 2022, three times over. What the crash did was remind me that I'd started forgetting what I was supposed to do with the life I'd been given back.

I'd already had my wake-up call.

Apparently, I needed a fucking reminder.

And that's why impact and legacy aren't abstract philosophical concepts to me. They're not motivational poster bullshit. They're not something I think about when I'm feeling particularly introspective over a glass of wine.

They're the reason I write.

Legacy will be the collection of things I leave behind. The books, the words, the ideas, the pieces of myself that might still be floating around long after I'm gone.

Impact is what happens while I'm here. It's the people I interact with, the people I lead, the people I love, and the lives I might influence in ways I'll probably never fully understand.

And the two aren't mutually exclusive.

My writing is part of both.

Somebody might read one of my stories ten years from now and recognize something about themselves that they hadn't been willing to acknowledge before. Somebody might see the consequences of a character's decision and think twice before making a similar one. Somebody might simply realize that they're not the only person who's ever felt lost, frightened, betrayed, or uncertain about who they are.

I don't need to know who those people are. I don't need them to write me letters telling me that I changed their lives.

I just need to believe that what I'm putting into the world has the potential to matter.

Because I've already died three fucking times, and I'm not interested in wasting the life that came afterward.

And that's why the larger message of Undertow matters so fucking much to me.

Each story already carries its own perspective. Each one explores something about people, their choices, and the consequences that follow. I'm comfortable with that. I'm proud of the work I've done.

But a collection is more than a stack of individually good stories held together by a cover.

Or at least I want mine to be.

I want the reader to feel that the stories belong together. Not because they share characters or settings or a tidy little narrative arc, but because they're examining different parts of something larger.

And I think that something larger might be the uncomfortable truth that life doesn't owe us a happy ending.

We make choices. We pursue happiness. We hurt people, sometimes without meaning to. We get hurt ourselves. We misunderstand one another. We fall in love with people who can't love us the way we need them to. We hold on to things long after we should have let them go. We make decisions with the best information we have, only to discover later that we didn't know a goddamned thing.

And somehow, we keep going.

Maybe that's the thread.

Maybe Undertow isn't about suffering at all.

Maybe it's about the forces that pull us beneath the surface of the lives we thought we were living. The currents we don't see until we're already caught in them. The choices that seem insignificant until they change everything.

And maybe the question isn't whether the characters find happiness. Maybe it's whether they understand what happened to them. Whether they learn anything. Whether the reader does.

Because I don't necessarily believe every story needs a happy ending. Some of the most meaningful things I've learned in my life came from experiences I wouldn't wish on my worst fucking enemy. Those experiences weren't valuable because they were pleasant. They were valuable because they changed how I see the world.

And I think fiction can do that, too.

It can make us uncomfortable. It can challenge our assumptions. It can force us to consider perspectives we'd rather ignore. It can make us care about somebody whose decisions we don't understand, and then leave us wondering whether we might have made the same choices under the same circumstances.

That's not a failure of storytelling.

That's the fucking point.

And perhaps that's also why I chose to tell these stories through fiction rather than memoir.

I've already written about my life. I've already put pieces of myself out into the world in And So, She Rose. I know what it's like to sit down and deliberately expose the things that hurt, the things that changed me, and the things I'd rather not have experienced in the first place.

But Undertow is different.

I didn't want to write another book that asked the reader to examine Kate Sjostrand's life. I wanted to write stories that asked the reader to examine their own.

I wanted somebody to read about a woman being humiliated in a restroom and consider what it feels like to be treated as a threat simply for existing. I wanted somebody to read about an affair and understand what happens when one person mistakes being wanted for being loved. I wanted somebody to encounter violence, betrayal, fear, and rejection through the eyes of fictional characters and perhaps recognize something about the way we treat one another.

Because the point isn't that these things happened to me.

The point is that they happen.

To real fucking people.

And those people have lives, hopes, dreams, fears, and expectations that don't simply disappear because somebody else decides to treat them like shit.

Maybe that's the larger message I've been looking for.

Maybe the collection isn't supposed to tell the reader that everything eventually works out. Maybe it's supposed to remind them that their decisions matter. That the way they treat other people matters. That the consequences of a seemingly insignificant choice can ripple through somebody else's life in ways they'll never fully understand.

And maybe it's supposed to remind them that the people carrying those consequences are still human beings.

Still, I haven't entirely answered my own question.

Should I add another story? Should I give the collection a more hopeful ending? Should I rearrange the stories so that the emotional weight rises and falls a little differently?

Maybe.

But if I do, I want it to be because the collection needs it, not because I'm afraid somebody might finish the book feeling sad.

Sadness isn't the enemy.

Meaninglessness is.

And the last thing I want is to take a collection of stories that have something important to say and dilute the message because I got nervous about whether readers would like the way it made them feel.

I'm not writing greeting cards.

I'm writing stories about people.

And people are complicated, messy, contradictory motherfuckers who don't always make the right choices or get the endings they deserve.

That's what makes them interesting. That's what makes them worth writing about.

So here I sit.

I woke up this morning thinking about cover design. I had this image in my head of a lone life preserver floating in a dark ocean, surrounded by nothing but water. No boat. No shoreline. No explanation of what happened or whether anybody survived.

Just a life preserver.

And an awful lot of darkness.

I liked the image because it seemed to capture something about the collection. The uncertainty. The isolation. The question of whether salvation is possible, or whether it came too late.

But now I'm beginning to wonder whether the image says something else, too.

A life preserver doesn't guarantee that somebody will be saved. It doesn't tell you how they ended up in the water, whether they made terrible decisions, whether somebody pushed them overboard, or whether they simply got caught in a current they never saw coming.

It just floats there.

A possibility.

A chance.

And maybe that's enough.

Because not every story ends with somebody climbing safely back onto the boat. Sometimes people drown. Sometimes they survive. Sometimes they spend years trying to understand how they ended up in the fucking water in the first place.

And sometimes the most important part of the story isn't whether they survive.

It's what happened to them, what they did to others, and what the rest of us might learn from it.

Maybe Undertow doesn't need one more happy story to make everything okay. Maybe it just needs to be honest about the fact that sometimes things aren't okay, and that doesn't make the experience meaningless.

Because once the book is published, the stories aren't entirely mine anymore.

They belong to the people who read them.

They'll bring their own experiences, their own heartbreaks, their own regrets, and their own ideas about what the characters should have done. They'll find meanings I intended, and probably a few I never even considered.

And I think I'm okay with that.

I don't need every reader to take away the same lesson. I don't need them all to agree with me. Hell, I don't even need them to like every story.

But I do want them to close the book and spend a little time thinking about what they've just read.

About the choices people make. About the consequences nobody saw coming. About the currents beneath the surface.

And perhaps about the ones running through their own lives.

Maybe that's enough.

I don't fucking know yet.

But I think I'm getting closer.

And in the meantime, I'm still sitting here waiting for my fucking omelet.

Apparently, existential questions about the purpose of literature don't do a goddamned thing to speed up breakfast.