K. ELISE BOOKS

If you want to know about Kara Ireland, follow her on her real Twitter. This type of biography seems awfully stale to me. The basic stuff: I am a 20 year old author from Atlanta, Georgia. Birthday July 4th, Cancer. I’ve self-published 5 books. I’m in college at Kennesaw State University. I graduate in 2020. Favorite food is pasta. Favorite color is red. Yada yada yada.

My life and upbringing are not that interesting, but my books are. 

My first book, Journals, is my biggest claim to fame. When I was in high school, circa 2014, I used to write about this girl I was so in love with in my journal, and I took it to school every day. If you think that sounds like an awful idea, you are correct. Let's fast forward to the part where she comes to school with a journal that looked exactly like mine. I was horrified and mortified and terrified and all the -fied's you can think of. That was me. After my prompt internal combustion, she proceeded to open it to a page that was unlike mine. Huh? How on earth could she have the exact same copy of my journal? It was happenstance that she had (thankfully) not found me out. I kept my secret a little while longer, and told her about my unwavering and deeply-embedded love for her a few years ago. She took it well. 

Anyway, shortly after that personal fiasco, I was plagued with these recurring dreams... night after night, about what might have happened. Although the possibility of it terrified me in action, I found myself wishing it had happened so that I had an easy way out to my confession. Now that I knew she didn't know, somehow I had transformed into wanting her to. Desperately wanting her to know. I felt restricted, although nothing had feasibly changed. I was too much of a coward to do it in action, so I took to writing. I wrote a book about that exact situation, with some slight situational embellishments. 

Journals is my first, real, pre-meditated story with a plot that was passionately driven. I wrote this book to explore the possibilities and the realms that were not yet available to me at that time. I wrote Journals as part of my self-reflection and part of my own coming out journey. It was the first time I thought I finally had a story that was worth telling. It touched so many people with an authenticity and transparency that was revealed to me upon writing it. I hope you get to read it, soon.️

Walk A Mile was my second book; it has to do with the upper class learning to coexist with the middle class. The idea came to me while sitting in a bathtub one summer day in 2015. I had just finished Journals, was high on the attention it had brought, and I was so eager to replicate that reaction. I did. By then, I had made a brand and a name for myself on Wattpad, although it was only my first bout of success. I didn't want to disappoint my growing crowd. Because I had started off Journals with the eventual lovers already having befriended one another, I thought it might be interesting to oppose the trope I'd been using. Friends-to-lovers is heartwarming and all, but enemies-to-lovers is absolute anarchy. I wanted to stir things up. 

I wanted this story to be founded in the notion that opposites attract. You know the phrase: walk a mile in my shoes. It's only an idiom that suggests before passing a judgment onto someone new, try to resonate with their experiences. There are so many personal challenges, beliefs, and experiences that form the conglomerate of the person you are encountering. Give them a try; you might be surprised. My underlying mantra was that everyone has more in common than we think, whether the similarities are superficial or deeply personal. Soulmates aren't accidental. Sometimes you stumble upon them, often times, they find you; every encounter takes work to make meaning of. I wanted to write a story that highlighted the subtle bonds that link us all together in one way or another; through poetry and literature, music and entertainment, the activities and hobbies we all engage in, there is common ground to find with anyone if you work hard enough to seek it. I wanted to challenge myself with my endeavors in characterization, to see if I was capable of bringing two characters full-circle. I believe I succeeded in doing that with Walk A Mile.  

The Silence is my third published book and my personal favorite. This was the first story that I wrote with the freedom of characterization. In writing fanfiction, you are always working with the same template. You have the same names, the same aesthetics, usually the same personal attributes and personality tics; you never have room to explore what it means to characterize - to create a character of your own. Fanfiction is merely interpreting these entities that are already in existence and adapting them to your world within your story. 

With The Silence, I was finally able to break away from the mold of fanfiction and the restrictions that came with it. The Silence wasn't very popular on Wattpad, and it was by no means a fan-favorite. I used that to my advantage, because I wouldn't be disappointing many people if I decided to make some ambitious changes. And boy, were my changes ambitious. When I rewrote The Silence, spring of 2016, I was a freshman in college. I wanted to reinterpret a story that I had written for a creative writing class I'd taken my junior year in high school. The Silence was the first story that I'd ever written with an intended audience; in that class, I received a grade for completion and it wasn't important to me to make it worthwhile. I hadn't had much experience with writing, then, and I was not aware of my writing process, or what it meant to write, at all. I thought it might be interesting to write a story without any dialogue. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I could write one-sided dialogue, with a person attempting to engage in conversation, but they keep getting brushed off with nonverbal replies. From there, I began to do research for a good reason why someone would refuse to talk, discovered the phenomenon of elective mutism, and the first version of The Silence was born. 

However, when I wrote this story the first time, I was sixteen years old. For this sixteen year old, a love story was comprised of: I meet you; I love you. It lacked any kind of characterization and had an utter lack of pace. Love at first sight never happens in the way that sixteen-year-old Kara assumed it did. Sixteen-year-old Kara thought that love was an impulse you get when you encounter someone beautiful; she thought that trauma could be resolved in one open, forthcoming conversation; she thought that trust could be earned within five brief encounters of one another and that boundaries hardly existed. Sixteen-year-old Kara had a lot to learn. Nineteen-year-old Kara had done a bit of maturing by the time I revisited The Silence, though. In the coming years since the first draft of it all, I had graduated high school, had a couple relationships under my belt, and had generally gotten more life experience. I had the freedom to tell this story anew, and I took to it. I took the time to flesh out my new characters and touch them with realistic influences that wouldn't have made sense for those characters that had to abide by certain templates in the past. This is my favorite story because it is the first time I've ever gotten to edit, rewrite, and explore a concept I'd laid to rest for a few years. In looking back at everything from a different angle, I was able to find the perfect one to tell a more rounded version of the first story I'd ever written. I hope it is as compelling in print as it is to conceptualize. 

The Game Plan was my fourth book that I released. I remember being fascinated by the concept of a set-up. The Game Plan didn't come to me naturally; this one took a lot of careful thinking. Which situation can I curate that guarantees a set-up? What is the set-up? How exactly does it work? I wanted the two parties involved to be truthful, but to be sabotaged by deceit from the outside. I grew up in a family that was centered around sports (No, I am not athletic. At all.) because my dad is a basketball, football, and track coach. We were at games every weekend, all throughout the year. Naturally, I began to understand the gist of all of the games. I especially had a handle on basketball, because that was his primary coaching experience, as he was the head coach. Even so, I am not a basketball fanatic. This was going to be yet another challenge for me, capturing a story that I had to tell authentically. I did so much research on the terms used, the mechanics of the game, and NCAA tournaments to figure out which angles I needed to come from. This story required the most on my part, going beyond the actual writing. I had fun doing it. 

The Game Plan was the second story I had the freedom of breaking away from the tropes that were binding me to fanfiction. Albeit, it did start out as Fifth Harmony fanfiction as well. Soon enough, Bethany and Rhiannon were born and the original characters they'd stemmed from were only shadows. This story has a special place in my heart as well. I wanted a story that was marked by authenticity, and the trials of trust. This story took a love-at-first-sight kind of approach, but I wanted it to happen organically. I had finally found love for myself by then, and I had a grasp on what characterized it for me. I took my hand at replicating the qualities that made us fall for each other, so fast, in my characters and their interactions. This was a situation where I could play with my own strengths and weaknesses by highlighting the faults in my own personality, along with the flaws in my lover at the time. The ending of this story was incredibly personal; then again, all of my stories are pieces of me. I can only hope that the parts I've portrayed paint a flattering portrait of me. ️

Ghosts is my latest release and my most personal book to date. This is another book that I've written in the past and have since reinterpreted and rewritten. I wrote the original version of Ghosts when I was sixteen also. Sixteen-year-old Kara didn't know heartbreak like twenty-year-old Kara knew heartbreak. The content of this book was valuable and worth revisiting, because the growth was evident when I looked at it through a new lens. In the first run of Ghosts, I was very much so under the impression that when someone leaves you in the rubble, a knight in shining armor would undoubtedly come to your rescue. Life rarely happens that way. The original version depicted a heartbroken girl that meets someone new and that new person takes on the challenge of rehabilitation, no questions asked. Sixteen-year-old Kara was still stuck in her idealisms, and couldn't grasp anything beyond the should've's, could've's, and would've's of her situation.

When I reconsidered Ghosts in 2018, I knew this was no longer the story I'd wanted to tell. Now that I was older, reality was a little more tangible. I had the knowledge to retell this story as it should've happened. Ghosts tells the story of a stagnant lover, convinced she's incapable of moving on; it is a willful stagnancy, and a state of willful ignorance to their reality. Quinn has found the person that is her weakness, and she allows her to use her accordingly. Though their relationship has been laid to rest, Quinn refuses to acknowledge its demise because of what could be, one day. It's a story of heartbreak, sure, but in an unconventional manner. Nobody talks about the space in between, just before and after the healing. I wrote a story about the during.

One of the harder lessons I've had to learn is that no one is required to stay with you; people can, and will, leave. The person who promised you forever, the person who swore to be unlike the others, the person that tells you all that you want to hear - they exist, and you are not immune to their disappearance. No single person owes you permanence, although that is what we seek. Let it permeate, because that notion in the back of your mind is what saves you. 

I am a lover, perpetually so. This is the first time I have been honest with myself in my writing, and didn't fabricate a better version of myself to express. I hold onto things dearly and I have immense trouble letting go. This book explores exactly what that can look like for me when I am at my worst. Quinn Daly is a character that is a carbon copy of who I used to be - who I am detaching myself from and growing from. I suppose this writing is transparent and grants you a portal into who I am, how I love, and how I process my events. It is not something to be proud of, being a Quinn, but it isn't something to hide, either. There are so many of us out there, and I wrote this story for the lovers who never learn. 

I do not want to romanticize the idea of a stagnant lover; I want to demonstrate the ugly parts of it that I have experienced while offering a means to rehabilitation. I also want to note that the tactic of using other people as medicine for a past high is just as dangerous as deeming another being as your drug in the first place. People are not meant to get high on. People are not coping mechanisms. People do not heal the hurt. If there is any message I hope Ghosts portrays, it is that healing comes from within. There is no foolproof journey to mending a broken heart, and jumping into new relationships does neither party any favors. It is inherently damaging to everyone involved. And while Quinn admittedly spends the bulk of the book attempting to transfer the unfulfilled desires from her past lover to this new candidate, I am by no means suggesting that this is the rationale to follow. Through Quinn's trial and error, I hope I've succeeded in making the errors very apparent.