Book #2: Fiction Era

Hello all.

SUCH exciting news. I'm thrilled to announce that my second published book, my novella, Views from a Plague Room, is forthcoming from Querencia Press sometime in 2026/27. That makes three genres I've managed to publish in thus far, and more are hopefully coming down the timeline: poems, short stories, and now a novella.

Framed contract---I intend to do this for all my books and line the walls of my eventual study with them. (Hopefully there are enough contracts!)

I wrote this book in January 2024 in a fit of rage: my father had been in the hospital with an ambigiously diagnosed flu over Christmas, and as I watched him wheeze, disoriented, watched as the medical staff (impassive, jaded, no doubt overworked) worked to bounce him from the hospital as quickly as possible, I was reminded how much the American healthcare system is a for-profit enterprise, a system where medicine and treatment has always been a status symbol, and a ruthlessly effective killing machine for vulnerable populations.

Baby Kat from 2024 with Dutch, the venerable plague doctor himself.

But I also have to give credit where credit is due: the initial kernel of the story was embedded when my then-partner gave me a Doctor Plague squishable and I became obsessed. My original concept was to write a romance between a plague doctor and a plague nurse, but oh boy did that concept fly out the window with lightning speed. I wrote the novella in a rush. I am so proud of it, and also understand it's a twisted little book that's meaty and hungry and downright disturbing. Family and friends: you've been somewhat warned.

Here's a plot synopsis for your perusal:

Elise Cassandra Bradshaw is young, rich, and bored out of her skull when a new strain of bubonic plague decimates New York City. The daughter of a Big Pharma executive who manufactures a drug falsely marketed as a cure, Elise spends her days at their summer house paging through Nabokov’s bibliography, snubbing her psychologist mother, Laura, and being snubbed by her father, William. Elise is the only child of a marriage perpetually in crisis; saddled with an overbearing mother and emotionally abusive father; she is categorically alone and vulnerable. 

The signed contract with a few of my plushies from my plague doctor plushie collection---there's a whole box of them at home I couldn't take with me!

When Laura is infected with this new strain of plague, the Bradshaw family has no choice but to employ a doctor and nurse from an organization only known as the Agency, which offers the antibiotics Laura so desperately needs to survive for an exorbitant price. In a world where medicine has become a status symbol and a game solely played by the rich, the Bradshaws are able to afford such a price. The doctor and nurse sent by the Agency, known only as Asclepius and Iaso, are employed to nurse Laura back to health and become a regular fixture in the Bradshaw home. The Bradshaws, used to getting their way, are for once put in the subservient position, and become aware by degrees of how tenuous their power truly is. 

Last night, trying desperately to not get emotional while writing the start of the acknowledgements page. That scowl is holding back many, many tears.

Elise becomes obsessed with Asclepius and Iaso, and soon, a dark spider web of desire and pain unfurls with Elise smack dab in the center. The story of one young woman’s sexual coming of age against the backdrop of her mother’s worsening illness, Views From a Plague Room is a novella in the style of Ottessa Moshfegh and Emily St. John Mandel that asks us to consider how far we will go to satisfy our desires, and how much it will cost. 

Boom! There you go. For kicks, enjoy some of my best friends' comments about Elise when they got the news:

Appropriate response.

Appropriate response x 2

So what next?

It's honestly been pretty demoralizing on the writing front recently: my second poetry collection, GRIEF SUITE, languishes in submissionland at a few places still, but she's recently racked up her 17th or 18th rejection across the disparate versions that have existed, and your girl is TIRED. I'm going to take a little break from submitting it and then return with a vengeance maybe when it's received the responses from the other presses where its currently outstanding.

But! There have been moments of faith still. My good friend, the phenomenal poet and literary citizen Ross White, informed me via text that I was a finalist for this year's Best of the Net. It was very validating and also funny to hear the good news from a friend---wildly unexpected. I'm grateful. I was also nominated by Painted Bride Quarterly for Best of the Net 2026 for my poem: The Old Raptures [Zeus].

But this weird mixture of gratitude and pain, that's the nature of the beast we call writing, so unfortunately, we must endure. But it's so interesting: I wouldn't do anything else with my life. I have so many things I want to do and accomplish and dip my toes into, but it all comes back to writing, my first and appropriately my enduring love.

I'm so thrilled, and couldn't be more thankful to Emily Perkovich for seeing something in this story and being its champion. I am incredibly fortunate to have the village I do. This timeline isn't too bad after all.

See you on the flippity flop,

Kat