Follow along with a new chapter each week here: If I Were Me Novel on Substack

Golden Boy Antonio is a clone with a secret: he sometimes has these…thoughts. Thoughts he shouldn’t have. Thoughts that make him different from other people. He’s always wondered if the person he was cloned from—his genome donor—has these thoughts too. Camila is a genome donor who had her son Gaél at 19. She enrolled them both in the up-and-coming Human Cloning Program to help make ends meet, but neither of them have ever quite lived up to their potential. The decisions she made 24 years ago still haunt them to this day. When clones and genome donors decide to meet, all four people will have to contend with the fact that chemistry isn’t always predictable, and mirrors don’t always show us what we want to see.

Greetings! My name is Kathryn and I spent from 2021 - 2024 writing my debut novel, If I Were Me. If I Were Me is speculative fiction that explores ethics, mental health, nature v. nurture, culture, and family dynamics through the lens of human clones. Although clones are typically the stuff of sci-fi and dystopian genres, readers will find that the world in If I Were Me looks decidedly like our own. The focus of the plot is less on the outer world setting and more on the complex, endearing, sometimes-ugly inner worlds of our four main characters.

In June 2025, I began releasing my novel serially (a chapter a week) on Substack to try and build a readership. We are now 1/3 of the way through (I'll be releasing Chapter 11 out of 32 on 8/11/25) and although my readership is still small, those that started the journey have continued to read and listen in, week after week. I can feel it: there's something there. Now, I want to turn my focus toward what happens when we get to the end: publishing. Right now, I have an AI-generated book cover—a decent stopgap—but I would like to hire a professional designer for publishing. My goal for the GoFundMe money will be to pay that designer and get a few hundred physical copies of my book printed for distribution. And then, of course, a movie deal, and many more novels to come!