We’re thrilled to welcome debut novelist Kathleen Rhodes to the Type Eighteen Books family. Because of her career in the medical field, Kathleen writes under a pen name. We’ll have more information about her book (coming in September 2024!) soon, but for now, here are a few words from her about her inspirations and writing journey. We can’t wait to share her novel with you!

Beautiful Neuroses: Why I Write 

I wrote a book in 2006. Now, I wince thinking about it. I put a pile of unorganized words on paper, got out my trusty Writers Market, and sent letters to various agencies, knowing nothing about the impossibility of publishing a book with little review, edits, or experience.

Between 2006 and 2023, I would start and stop many books. To be fair, I finished one masters, worked full time, then in 2013, entered nursing school. It’s a blur, but I know I got married, had a baby, bought a dog, and started a new career. So, it wasn’t a lot of sitting around. Just not sitting around writing fiction. But this book had been evolving for years, bounced from laptop to laptop, with the hope to finish one day. In 2019, I stepped away from working in crisis care. The mental and emotional bandwidth that returned funneled into writing.

I studied psychology for years but thumbed my nose at the more woo-woo theorists. It didn’t serve me. I gathered resources and studied crisis. There’s no dream analysis, typically, in emergency rooms. At any rate, witnessing human resiliency, over and over, tinges book learning with a strong sense of humility. The years of brief psychotherapy and putting out fires transformed into knowledge-seeking around the impact of trauma and healing.

One of the big names in psychology, Carl Jung, was a man of “two worlds,” hypothesizing about different realms. I interpreted his theory—perhaps too simplistically—that depression,  anxiety, and trauma have a presence, a voice, that can challenge our resiliency. Taking that a step further, if trauma has a voice, would it also have a place in the brain where it lives, a physical shape and its own power? There’s some woo-woo for you.

Carl Jung spoke about protectors in these other worlds,  a presence that steps in to shelter the vulnerable mind. Which is wonderful, but I wanted to write a thriller. Nevertheless, the notion of suppressed memories living in another realm allows much potential for thrilling and scary storytelling. In my first novel and hopefully others to come, the inside voice, self-doubt, second guesses, and things buried in the crevasses of our brain are given center stage, as well as the ways protagonists can ward off these demons and rediscover their power. ~ Kathleen Rhodes