Help Kat Write Her First Book

I am asking for help writing my first book, The Middle: Part 1 of a Series for Survivors. Content Warning: abuse of a disabled adult at home, work, and school. Domestic violence, suicide, PTSD, loss of body parts, mention of a hate crime.

Hi, my name is Kat, please use this name when sharing my fundraiser. In 2014 at age 22, I left home to complete an internship in bird biology that was required for my bachelor’s degree. The experience became dangerous, and after years of sexual harassment, I was unable to leave my employer. My employer, angered by LGBTQ+ marriage equality in 2015, thought I was queer and tried to end my life; my co-worker and I were trafficked, forced to do illegal work, and then I was mauled by dogs.

I had emergency surgery to reconstruct my hand and started excruciating physical therapy days after surgery so that I would be able to use my hand again. I developed PTSD immediately, stopped sleeping, suffered horrific night terrors, was consumed by severe anxiety and depression, and had many other debilitating symptoms. A person in the office at work believed they needed to take care of me and protect our employer after years of being harassed by him. My employer told me I had to be interrogated by a psychiatrist friend of his, who traumatized me further in 2 sessions with him. He then coerced me into signing paperwork to hire a lawyer friend of his, while in an altered mental state and healing from surgery. All of this made me sicker, absolved the organization of liability, caused me to lose my settlement, and blamed the accident on an innocent Native American man (I did not collect damages from him). This event was enough to end my life, but it was only the beginning of the pain I would come to know.

I returned to school with PTSD and my arm in a cast. I was denied proper disability accommodations at work and school which nearly cost me my life. Within the first couple of months back home, the university tried to push me out of school, and a student in one of my classes was encouraged by his advisor to target me for an abusive marriage so he could get a green card. Through domestic violence, he made me so sick I attempted suicide, but I survived. I escaped from my ex-husband in 2019 after being married for just 10 months; I realized he was trying to end my life so he could be supported by my family financially after I passed. He comes from a privileged family and did not do this out of necessity, but out of anger due to the student visa restrictions placed on him. This trauma from domestic violence was worse than losing part of my arm, my career, my community, and more, and also compounded it, which meant I now had to keep myself alive through both the worst days after the dog attack and the addition of a new life-altering trauma. I was very close to death at the end of 2019 and without help from some friends, family, and my now boyfriend of 3.5 years, who was a stranger at the time, I would have died.

In 2020, I had to rush to get a divorce so that my ex would not have control over my finances and life any longer. Even though I am disabled, I supported him financially for years, which cost me most of my health and resources. I was in psychosis for over a year starting in 2019 because he forced me to stop taking 6 psychiatric medications at the same time. After I escaped him I had a six-month nervous breakdown. The excruciating stress of getting a divorce with so many disabilities, without available friends, family, or enough resources, with all my work references gone due to discrimination, concurrent with the start of the pandemic, caused me to have bleeding in my brain. I was very lucky to survive this year. I lost much of my ability to speak coherently and write. This made the divorce process almost impossible. My psyche and health were destroyed from 2016 to 2020.

In the last few years, I have been coping with regular bleeding in my brain, PTSD, the pandemic, following my boyfriend’s career, debilitating symptoms from Long Covid, and healing from a lifetime of trauma. I started reading and writing as much as I could in 2022 so that I could teach myself to communicate well again and to heal from the aneurysm and Long Covid. After 7.5 years, I am now emotionally ready to create a series of books about my experiences surviving many traumas and living with PTSD, as well as the root cause of why I was targeted for so much violence and by whom. In 2019, during child abuse and neglect training I completed for my job, I discovered I experienced violence in my childhood home that makes adulthood very difficult to survive.

I have managed to survive all of this, but I am in a place where I am stuck indoors, have little freedom to leave, my spirit is crushed, and I am devastated that I have to navigate chronic illness, abuse, and instability into my thirties with little support. Right now my partner is shouldering so much expense for my care because it is just him helping me survive, and our lives are stressful because we feel we only have each other. He works hard for us, and I want him to be able to build his savings moving forward and for me to be free to leave our home as needed. I need to contribute to our household for us to succeed and writing is the best way I can do that with my disabilities.

The Series for Survivors will be written as fiction for increased freedom and under a pen name. The stories are told through an intersectional feminist lens. The goal of the books is to demonstrate the function and purpose of power and control throughout a girl's and a woman’s life and how the individual experience reflects the systems that are present in all of our lives. The purpose is to provide an antidote to hate, to heal myself and help others heal, too. These are books about how my upbringing and identity have shaped my life. These are books about survival, healing, and personal transformation. These are books about how control is the opposite of love.

Concepts from human behavior science and psychology including conditioning, the four functions of human behavior, the power and control wheel, and more will be woven into the stories. The books will be written as action/ adventure, fiction, and memoir, and in addition to the pain, I will describe the joy I felt being myself for a few years- climbing mountains, wildlife watching, and more.

This is a book and a series of books for survivors. If you or someone you know has survived a traumatic event, PTSD, loss of body parts, domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, sexual harassment at work and school, Covid, the justice system, a workplace accident, and/ or is navigating life as a disabled person, these are books that will help people feel seen, survive, and stay in their communities. These books are what I am meant to create and share in my lifetime to help myself as well as the people and places I love. 

Please share my fundraiser and donate if you have the means so I can take care of myself and bring this series to life. I am asking for $30,000 over two years so I can be self-employed and gain work credits, write full-time, and publish my first book within a year. I will work on all the books concurrently because moving between projects helps with writer’s block. I am planning to have the first book published by the summer of 2024. 

The cost breakdown is below.

Self-publishing- estimates online between $1,000-$5,000 per book.

Coaching/ Editing - $1000- $5000 per book

Travel to three states for research - $8000

Rent for my domestic partner- $1000/ month x 12 = $12,000.

~ $30,000

My goal- three books describing the stages in my life where people have exerted power and control over me: work/ school (The Middle), marriage (The End), and childhood (The Beginning). The series is structured to reflect how trauma changed my perception of time. The fourth book (The New Beginning) is about healing, staying in community with others, and writing to improve my life and create my own life story.

I have written tens of thousands of words. I have six chapters, a detailed timeline, and most of the dialogue written for book 1. I will update this page with my writing progress every few months. My writing and photography are published in my online Substack newsletter: katamountain.substack.com or search @katamountain. Free and paid subscriptions, $5/ month or $30/ year, bring me closer to my book and career dreams. Thank you to all my subscribers, I am very grateful for you and I appreciate your support. 

Please share this fundraiser often and ask people to donate. Thank you for donating and helping me start my writing career and survive. I believe these are stories that must be told. Thank you for sharing this fundraiser. Thank you to everyone who has helped me get this far. Thank you for supporting my creative projects, health, and freedom. God bless!