Kat Cataclysm and NaNoWriMo 2023

Some of you who are newly following me may not know this, but in early 2020, I released my debut novel, 99 Erics: a Kat Cataclysm faux novel. The narrator/protagonist, Kat Cataclysm, is a polyamorous bisexual woman and absurdist short fiction writer. And 99 Erics is a humorous account of Kat’s experiences writing a book called 99 Erics, which is about her experiences dating ninety-nine different people named Eric. It is more surreal than slutty. Not that there is anything wrong with slutty.

Despite not being able to promote it as much as I would like due to the pandemic, 99 Erics is the only book I’ve written to date to have ever won a book award: It was the winner of the Publishing Triangle’s 2021 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, an Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) 2021 silver medalist in LGBT+ Fiction, and one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Books of 2021.

The reason why I’m telling you all this now is because, after much deliberation, I think I’ve finally found a worthy premise for the next Kat Cataclysm novel. A few days ago, I sat down and started typing and the words just flew out of me! Unlike my nonfiction books and essays, which come together in a slow and methodical manner, I’ve found that my best fiction arises when I just let my unconscious mind loose and let improvisation take hold.

Given the good start so far, I’ve decided to take part in NaNoWriMo this month. For those unfamiliar, that acronym stands for National Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you try to write every day in November, hopefully coming out the other side with a fledgling first draft of a novel in hand. While I highly doubt that I’ll finish a whole first draft (especially since I have other commitments), I figured I’d give it a go and see how much progress I make!

In the meantime, rather than inundate y’all with those super-rough drafts, I thought I’d share all the publicly available excerpts of 99 Erics, to hopefully whet your appetite for an eventual second Kat installment.

My favorite chapter of 99 Erics—which I believe offers a great sense of both the character and the book—is “Posers.” A video of me reading from the entire chapter can be found on YouTube and a smaller excerpt of the first part of the chapter can be found on Medium.

more evidence that Lisa Marchiano invented "transgender social contagion"

cover image for my recent Medium post
about Lisa Marchiano

In February 2019, on this very blog, I published Origins of “Social Contagion” and “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” which investigated the history of when these terms first appeared online and how they spread. The main finding of that piece was that the concept of “transgender social contagion” appears to have been invented by someone who went by the handle “skepticaltherapist” in a comment posted on February 20, 2016, on the anti-trans parent website 4thwavenow. I was not able to determine who exactly skepticaltherapist was, but I provided evidence that they went on to become one of the founders of the anti-trans website youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org (YTCP).

A couple days ago, I published a follow up piece on Medium entitled Did Lisa Marchiano Invent “Transgender Social Contagion” and “No Transition Before Age 25”? It was based on recent findings that Marchiano ran YTCP (which has since been confirmed; see also below) and that she possibly invented ROGD too. Based on this, I proposed that Marchiano was also likely skepticaltherapist — aka, the person who invented the notion that “social contagion” is turning kids transgender. 

In this post, I provide further evidence that this is indeed the case.