Welcome to Live In Story.
I’m so glad you’re here.
Live In Story is a home for creative women who spend their days building ideas for everyone else and quietly carry a speculative novel of their own. It’s a place to take that book seriously, and to reconnect with the imagination your day job keeps borrowing. Around here, the goal is a slower, more artful life with the writing at its center.
Whether you’re already living that life or still making your way toward it, you’re in the right place.
Here’s what lands in your inbox
Most weeks, one letter from me. What it’s about rotates between:
Craft talks from your cinematic book coach. The storytelling lessons behind the books and films we love, and how to bring them into your own writing (i.e. finding the througline so you can write forward).
Becoming a writer. Honest notes from my own path, the real work of writing a novel in the margins of a full career.
The slow creative life. Artist dates, travel, and the corners of the world that keep me inspired, Lisboa most of all.
Writers I love. Conversations about and interviews with the fantasy, dystopian, science fiction, and romantasy writers we all love.
No algorithm decides what you see here. Just letters to your inbox, from one writer to another.
Meet the book coach and writer
Hi, I’m Karen.
I’ve spent my career in storytelling. First in film, then in strategic communications and marketing, where I helped brands and people work out what they were trying to say and how to make anyone care. I was good at it. I could shape someone else’s message all day long.
My own stories were another matter. For years I had a novel in my head, something big and speculative, the kind of book I love to read. I could see it clearly. I just couldn’t get it onto the page. There were notebooks. There were false starts. There was a lot of telling myself I’d write it once life calmed down.
Life did not calm down.
So I started writing it anyway, in the early mornings and the odd stolen hour, around a full-time job. And somewhere in there I trained as an Author Accelerator certified book coach, because it turned out the work I loved most was helping other writers do the exact thing I was learning to do: take a big, tangled idea they love, find the story’s throughout, and give it a shape that works.
That’s what Live In Story is. It’s where I share what I’m learning about the craft and the writing life, and where I help women like me, high-powered creative for a living and quietly writing something of their own, get the book written at last.
A few things about me. I’m American and Brazilian, most at home somewhere over the Atlantic, and lately that somewhere is Lisboa. I read all over the speculative aisle: fantasy (and romantasy), dystopia, and science fiction — and I love genre-blending stories most of all. I think a quiet season is still a chapter. And I think the book that won’t leave you alone is the one you’re meant to write.
Come in and stay awhile.
Abraços,
Karen
Ways to begin
Subscribe. Every letter, the moment it goes out. Start here.
Say hello. Tell me what you’re writing, or what you wish you were writing, at karen@liveinstory.com. I read every note.
