Jordan S.Keller shares her journey from studying chemistry to pursuing herr passion for storytelling and publishing a novel during the pandemic.

not so much a cyberpunk writer, but i've always loved writing and storytelling, um, and when i went to college, so in like elementary and middle school, I'd always write in notebooks and stuff I'd skip out on recess to hide out in the library and write about knights and dragons, And when I decided to go into college, I realized that being an author probably wouldn't give me enough money to live comfortably. I'm a type one diabetic and insulin isn't expensive. So I went into like a chemistry field and I almost flunked out and I went back to writing as a journalist and fell in love with radio and print and newspaper and got to meet all these incredible people in Eastern Kentucky. We talked about traditional music, We talked about farming, We talked about shorgun making, And that rekindled my love for storytelling. And when I got out of college, I started working at a property management company, because no one was hiring new journalists, unfortunately, And I went back into fiction writing in my evenings and during my lunch break. And it was the pandemic when we had all this additional time on our hands, that I finished my first novel, Wildfire, which is that superhero novel. and i'm like, oh my gosh. i wrote a novel, i can't believe it, and i felt like i owed it to myself and to my main hero, abigail, to try to get it published. and that was about a year long, or probably a two year long journey: getting the book all polished up, getting a query letter, marketing myself to agents and publishers and then landing our deals to get the trilogy published. Wow, You know, it caught my attention right away. You said that you realized that- I don't know. I'm paraphrasing that authorship wasn't going to pay the bills. It's kind of. I think we've definitely run into some people who have made it work somehow. in a very short time, We had a guy on who was in the game for 5 years and traditionally published and getting advances, and I was like: who's that? oh my gosh, i know that's what i said. like, are you lying to me? or is this? it's just like a fairy tale, because a lot of people would like to know how you make that happen. yeah, uh, i i would love to know too. yeah, i have a question for you real quick, jordan. you said you went to college and you studied chemistry. Was that so that you could learn to make your own insulin? That's what I was thinking when I heard that. No, that's awesome, though I always loved chemistry in high school and I thought like: oh my gosh, I'll just make that my major. And where I went to school at our graduating class at 80, 6 people. it was very like small town farm school and I loved it. But the level of chemistry we were learning there was nowhere near the level of chemistry I needed to know in college, And so I just really struggled and figured out. the reason I love chemistry in high school was because of the professor and not so much the topic of it and everything that was involved with what made chemistry chemistry.

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