Kristina Mahr's Blog

I blinked, and 2019 is nearly over. It was a truly fascinating year in my life, a test of a year, and it kept my brain and my heart very busy. One of my resolutions going into this year was to focus more on gratitude, and I’m happy to say, mission accomplished. By choosing every day to acknowledge how grateful I am for the things I have, the things I’ve done, and the people in my life, it has been a forward-facing, positive year.

Even so, just for the moment, I’m going to turn around and face...

What can I say about querying…

I loved it and hated it in equal measure.

Each query I sent out felt like a chance at finding my dream agent to carry me forward into the next steps of my writing career, and I loved that feeling.

But also, each query carried with it the potential for rejection. I… was less fond of that feeling.

I have been in the query trenches almost constantly for three years, pretty much one year per project queried. I know that many have been at it longer than me, but those...

Welcome to the world, A Dream Within a Dream!

I love you just as much as your older sibling, if not more because you’re so much younger and cuter and you have so much more war in you.

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No, I couldn’t choose a favorite. They represent such different things to me, this pair. All That We See or Seem was a multi-year battle. It was writing and rewriting and revising and trying to figure out how one goes about writing a whole book. I learned while I wrote it, and I credit that book with so much.

A...

What can I say about this year… it has been a YEAR. An absolute 365 day year.

If you remember my post from last year, 2017 was a true upheaval. In contrast, 2018 has been the pieces that were thrown into the air in 2017 falling into their proper places.

As you probably know by now if you’re here, my debut novel, All That We See or Seem, was published! People got to know Reeve, Bran, and Arden (the optimist, the realist, and the cynic), and it has filled me with so much joy.

I released my firs...

I want every single person to love every single word I write. It’s just what I want. Why is that too much to ask for?

Haha, self. Haha.

I have read NYT Bestsellers that I did not enjoy.

I have read universally panned books that I loved.

There is a reason there are so many genres – there are a lot of different tastes. And tastes even evolve. I used to devour YA Fantasy. Over the past year, I’ve been all about YA Contemporary. When I was in college, I was all about Historical Romance. And I fre...

Here we go here we go here we go!

I am going to use exclamation points in an attempt to fire myself up!

Not that I’m not fired up. I am really, really excited to dive into a fresh new story and play with words for the next three months. But hell if I’m not nervous again. This is my fifth go-around in the novel-writing biz, and it’s still daunting. I’ve written the first page, just exploratorily, figuring out where I want to begin, but then I closed the document and basically acted out this g...

This is the book I wanted to write at this precise moment of my life. Unequivocally.

As scale goes, it’s much smaller than my prior three books. For one thing, it’s almost entirely rooted in reality. There’s just one teeny tiny detail that veers it into the fantasy realm (that whole hearts-going-up-in-flames element, no big.) And it’s contemporary, so no historical research required of me. There’s also no villain. No evil to be vanquished.

I feel like with each book I write, I’m getting close...

Today, I published my first collection of poetry/prose.

Whoa.

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You can find more information about it here, and if you’d like to buy it, first of all: you’re awesome, and second of all: you can do that riiiight here.

Why did I decide to self-publish a collection of my poetry and prose?

Oh gosh, why not, right? I had stacks upon stacks of words from the past two years, so the hard part was done. It was just selecting which ones to include, compiling them, formatting, finding a cover design, an...

Everyone says it feels strange, and I get that. It does.

There’s a book in the world with my name on the cover. People have it in their hands. People are reading it. It’s no longer my sheltered baby that I lean over protectively, my arms circling it, shielding it. As it is in other people’s hands, it is no longer in mine.

So that’s weird.

But everyone said it would feel anticlimactic, in a way. All of this build-up, all of this work, all of this excitement. And then release day comes and goes...

All That We See or Seem comes out tomorrow.

That is a series of words I never thought I’d get to write, for so many reasons.

I’ve posted before about my path to publishing. This isn’t going to be that. This is going to be simple, straight-up, gratitude.

I am really, really grateful.

I have two big dreams in life. A myriad of smaller ones, but just the two big ones. One of them is to have one of my books published.

One of my books is getting published tomorrow.

The first, the OG book, the one...