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I’m Kat! Professional Storyteller & Neurodivergent Creative

Here to help you vanquish those story construction obstacles, slay that imposter syndrome clawing at the back of your brain & stomp boredom flat with heart-pounding Boys Love fiction. Join the Saga and choose your inbox obsession, whether it’s helpful advice to get your writing unstuck or an episode of my weekly Boys Love Fantasy series to devour during your coffee break.

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Featured Post

The dreaded Blank Page Syndrome 😱

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 64 Well hello there, Reader! Right before we kicked off our bi-monthly D&D (Dungeons and Dragons) game this past Saturday, our friend asked me for some storytelling advice. “You’ve had writer’s block before, right? So how did you handle it?” She looked beyond frustrated and a bit defeated. But she’s far from alone in that regard. Because if you type “writer’s block” into Google you’ll get about 18,500,000 results. No joke. So clearly a huge amount of...

5 months ago • 3 min read
‘What if “what you know” isn’t that exciting? I mean we all can’t be secret agents and NASA scientists, can we?’ — Kat Vancil, “Write this?! But my life’s so boring”, The Storytellers Saga

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 82 What does it truly mean to “Write what you know”, Reader? Do they mean write a story about an office worker in purchasing who watches a few hours of streaming TV a night with his wife and cat on the couch? Or a retired stay-at-home mom who now spends way too many hours reading social media posts and buying gifts for the grandkids? Or a former picture book illustrator who has never lived further than an hour from where she was born? Click to watch the...

12 days ago • 2 min read
‘No one in Gothic Fiction has a happy backstory. Every Legendary Character in a Gothic story already starts out in a state of wanting to return to a time in the past when things were better for them, personally.’ — Kat Vancil, “In the mood to write someth

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 81 Is it just me, Reader, or does this time of year put you in the mood to write something spooky? Maybe it’s the music I have running in the background while I work. 🎶 Or the fact that I just binge-watched like 5 episodes of Agatha All Along. 🧙♀️ Or the fact that I’m attending a wedding on Halloween and the invite says dress in your costumed best. (I’m going as Persephone goddess of the Greek underworld and my husband is going as a stylish plague...

21 days ago • 3 min read
‘Who knows, that little plot bunny could become your next great series if you’re not running after it like a crazy person with a hatchet.’ — Kat Vancil, “NOOO! Not another plot bunny!”, The Storytellers Saga

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 80 I see things like this every day on Threads, Reader! “I wrote 5K words today. But for something I’m not even working on.😭 ” “I'm supposed to be working on my WIP, but I started another new story. Again.” “Brain you’re being SUPER unhelpful! We’re supposed to be working on THE book! You should not be feeding me M/M fanfic for the anime we just watched!” Does any of this sound familiar? If it does, then you know we’re talking about plot bunnies, side...

28 days ago • 3 min read
‘Dark Fantasies are the sort of stories where the main character can be a terrible person. They can frequent brothels. They can curse and drink and get absolutely covered in monster guts and it doesn’t feel out of character at all.’ — Kat Vancil, “But wha

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 79 Well hello there, Reader! While talking to a friend about her upcoming novel, we got into a discussion about Cozy Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and if there existed such a thing as Dark Cozy Fantasy. Well, one of my upcoming stories—Seventh Swan—is exactly that. It’s a cozy slice-of-life where two young guys run a bakery in a fantasy kingdom’s capital. But also one of them spent a couple hundred years forcibly transformed into a swan 🦢 and might have been...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read
‘Just to be very clear, you’re still a REAL published author no matter how it happens.’ — Kat Vancil, “You’re not a ‘real’ author”, The Storytellers Saga

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 78 Maybe you saw this yesterday, Reader, while scrolling Threads? I mean it had already gained nearly 40K views by the time I clipped this pic. My dude, you just went viral on Threads in the worst possible way. And now all of writer and author Threads is coming for you…and Instagram too. 😬 He’s wrong BTW. And just to be very clear, you’re still a REAL published author no matter how it happens. If your story is trad pubbed… …you’re a real published...

about 1 month ago • 4 min read
‘In this age of generative AI, real artists have to constantly prove we actually created our work.’ — Kat Vancil, “I’ve always wanted to do this but”, The Storytellers Saga

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 77 Well hello there, Reader, The festival this past weekend in my hometown was a blast! We lucked out with the perfect fall weather—a pleasant mid-70s with a light breeze. I signed books, my husband unveiled two new coloring books and explained D&D to bright-eyed festival goers, and we gained plenty of new ideas for next time. But amidst the normal questions, meet-ups with old friends, and befriending of a murder of crows—there was the same wistful...

about 2 months ago • 2 min read
42nd Annual Santa Clara Art and Wine Festival poster

KAT & ALERIC VANCIL THE SAGA QUEST 42ND SANTA CLARA ART & WINE It’s festival time, Reader! This weekend SEP 14 & 15 me and my husband will be at the 42nd Annual Santa Clara Art and Wine Festival in my hometown. Once again, they’ve graciously invited me to be showcased in their juried selection of artisans and craft persons. You’ll find us in the same location as previous years under the shady trees in our story forge in Booth 144. We’ll have our normal selection of Inspurrational kitty...

about 2 months ago • 1 min read
‘The point is, you don’t need a piece of technology to write a story FOR you. You just need YOU.’ — Kat Vancil, “NaNo No-no”, The Storytellers Saga

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 76 Oh boy, Reader, has NaNoWriMo really stepped in it this time. 😬 Maybe you heard what went down last week or maybe you didn’t. And maybe you know or maybe you don’t, but I started my writing career with NaNoWriMo. Yep. It was 14 years ago, back in 2010. When I started writing what would go on to become my first novel Daemons in the Mist. And since then, I’ve participated in more than a dozen NaNo events. However, despite the good they’ve done for the...

about 2 months ago • 3 min read
‘Precisionism—in a nutshell—is the idea that you work to the best of your current circumstances, skill, and knowledge.’ — Kat Vancil, “It’s perfectly okay not to be perfect”, The Storytellers Saga

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 75 Whether your project isn’t exactly going well. Or you’re not putting in 100% effort at work because your cat just died. Or you’ve spent the last 8 months living with an overwhelming sense of dread that this conversation with your mom might be the last you’ll ever have with her because she's just that sick. Know this, Reader, it's perfectly okay not to be perfect. In fact, we should take the whole concept of perfectionism, crumple it up into a ball,...

2 months ago • 2 min read
‘They spend hour upon hour searching desperately for that one perfect word…when instead they could have…magicked new people out of thin air who never existed before that moment.’ — Kat Vancil, “I’ll just fix it in post”, The Storytellers Saga

KAT VANCIL THE STORYTELLER'S SAGA QUEST 74 “What’s this here?” my husband asks. He’s been editing one of my upcoming stories for me. “What’s what where?” “This asterisk next to a misspelling of ‘guard.’” “Oh, that. That’s a placeholder.” “A…placeholder?” “Yeah for a character that didn’t have a name yet. Of course, Find/Replace doesn’t work if you misspell shit.” I sigh. Guard/Guardian. One of those words I mistype like, half the time. But my use of placeholders is the much bigger story here...

3 months ago • 4 min read