With Love and Blood Splatter, Mrs. Wahlund Launches Career as a Writer

By Michaela Coltey ’24

Serial killers, murder, and blood spatter are her main focus five classes a day, five days a week. Mrs. Kate Wahlund loves her job. It shows in the way she teaches criminal profiling, serology, and toxicology are all things. Ms. Wahlund is also a single mother. After teaching for six hours at school, she goes home to her kids, driving them to practices and games and carrying out all the other duties of a single mother.

Teaching and single-parenthood can make for a challenging life, but Ms. Wahlund has an escape from reality and a source of energy: she’s an aspiring romance novelist. 

She began writing at a low period in her life.

“I was going through a divorce, ” she said. “My life was being dictated by everybody else. And so it’s like my brain just shut off part of it and opened up a new part.”

Her writing soon turned out to be less of an escape and more of a self-reflection.

“I didn’t realize how parallel it was to my life at the time. Of course, it’s dramatic, and it’s changed since. But it was like a self-look into my life.”

Even the plots for her novels emerge from her personal life..

“I’ll have a snippet of a dream, and I perseverate on it and think about it. Oh, how could that have happened?”

Wahlund said she’s a plotter. “I have a whole book in my head and I’m just regurgitating it. I wrote the plots to four books in three months.”

Love and blood might seem like an odd mix, but for Mrs. Wahlund, her reading and scientific interests combine in her fiction.

“So it’s crazy, but my books do have crime scenes in it,” she said. “Sherlock Holmes is embedded into the first book pretty well.”

Ms. Wahlund’s book series has a planned total of five books. Three are completely finished and submitted to beta readers who provide feedback on her writing. The mood of the books varies. 

“One? It’s really dark, so I have to be in a mood,” Wahlund said. “And then, there’s book five, which is twenty years later, that’s halfway done.” 

She hopes to have the complete series finished soon. “I would say, I should have my whole series and Daughter of Raw up by summer.”

After meeting with publishers recently, she decided to start her own publishing company and self-publish her work. Starting the company may seem a little ambitious for a single mother with a teaching career, but it makes total sense to her.

“Last summer my dryer broke, so I took it apart. I figured if I can fix a dryer, I can do anything. Start a publishing company, publish my own books? Absolutely!”