About Me

Hola! I’m Kat, and I am a writer: I write novels, screenplays, short stories, blog entries about music and life and clothes, and other matters.

I have a fancy MFA in screenwriting and film directing from Columbia University. I thought I was going to be a serious hardcore filmmaker, but working on all those films made me realized how much I missed books and reading, so I pledged my allegiance to fiction, essays and blogging.

My first story, written when I was seven, was about fairies who hijacked a space shuttle and went to the moon. That should’ve been my first clue that I’d be writing about vampires, werewolves and ghosts now, after years of trying to be “literary.”

Besides here, my writing has been a part of Jane (R.I.P.), Shop Etc., N.E.E.T and many other places. My films have shown at a bunch of film festivals, the IFC Theater, Anthology Film Archives, the Brooklyn Lyceum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

I’ve been interviewed over One Sleepless Night, Royal Quiet Deluxe, The Happiest Medium and a guest over at Steady Diet of Film. I dig discussing film, writing, pop culture and feminism, so get in touch for guest posts, interviews, etc.!

IT TOOK ME AWHILE TO GET TO FICTION

I started off writing poems in high school and college (and even won prizes for it!), but couldn’t figure out how to get a story to work for ages until I took a screenwriting class with Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, Fur) in college. After that, it was like something in my mind clicked: I could move from A to B much more easily without boring the tears out of myself. Screenwriting taught me movement, momentum, and structure — those things that I needed most as a storyteller. It helped me to strip down a longer story to action, dialogue and images, whereas before I’d get caught up in eddies of stories and couldn’t find my way back to the main attraction.

I moved to NYC after getting my B.A. with honors in English from Duke University. In the big city, I freelanced as a writer, heading up a film section for a now-defunct downtown magazine and writing for various websites and magazines when I wasn’t working in film production. But I kept with filmmaking and screenplays.

Being of the punk persuasion, I also did a ton of zines as well, moved to San Francisco, and in 2003 started my first blog, NOGOODFORME.COM, which chronicled my fascinations with fashion. It’s still going; we still do fashion, but have branched out to film, movies, lifestyle, feminism and other fun things.

I also kept with screenwriting, and finally realizing that I needed some serious growth, focus and community, I went back to NYC to go to film school, where I wrote seven screenplays in five years! I studied under some seriously talented and successful people in a program devoted to classical storytelling at its finest, but I gained the most from being in a community of peers — and having my work critiqued seriously and intensely for five straight years. (Yes, it takes that long to get an MFA in film at Columbia.)

Doing all those screenplays finally gave me the confidence to structure and write a novel, and that’s my labor of love, my passion project now. I document a lot of my learning here; don’t hold it against me!

(I still make little movie sketches, and write screenplays; I’m sure I’ll always have my hand in it in some way.)

WHERE I’M HEADED

These are the future challenges I’m setting myself: being a better reviser of my work, being a better promoter of it, and having better follow-through and just “getting it out there.”

I’m also really interested in getting work out there in new and different ways — bringing that old school DIY spirit to the Internet and mobile and putting work out there without gate-keeping. There have got to be more elegant, innovative models to bring work to the world, right?

But I still want to see my book at the bookstore one day, because who doesn’t love a beautiful book? So that’s why I’ll be submitting my novel for publishing soon. Because deep in my heart I still love old, beautiful ways and things, too. I’ll let you know how all that goes.

You can contact me at kat@nogoodforme.com.