I’m a Neurodivergent (Autistic/ADHD) Gen X author who lives in south central Wisconsin. I’ve primarily worked in schools, universities, and libraries and I am currently a teacher at an alternative high school. My stories feature strong Neurodivergent protagonists who live in worlds that accept their neurotypes so we can get on with the main stories. I’ve been developing the world around the Kate’s Family Chronicles series for thirty years, and I hope you enjoy the deeply religious characters grappling with real-world problems in a church that no longer fits them.
About Language/Sexuality/Kink in the Novels
My characters swear, some more than others. Even when my characters have taken religious vows, some, but not all of them, have sex and one couple in particular is kinky which sometimes seeps out into other characters. According to research I did when working on the orphanage section of Scandal, slightly over half of people in religious life at any given moment are in a relationship and most of those relationships are consensual, male-female relationships, though consent is complicated in the case of priest-layperson relationships given that the priest has spiritual authority over the other person. While this is going on, the American Catholic church has gone increasingly conservative to the point where priests are bringing back cassocks and Latin Masses (though the Pope has suggested the division in the church caused by the Latin Mass is problematic, they are quite popular) because those who stay tend to be the MOST conservative of Catholics. My characters, like myself, are confused by how to react to a church we deeply love destroying itself by not confronting the very real societal issues that the average person is concerned about and playing with a fake 1950’s vibe that seems, quite frankly, ridiculously kinky in and of itself. My novels are about consensual relationships and contrasting those with the problematic ones where obedience was demanded. And so, yes, my priests, sisters, and brothers, may have sexual relationships and some may leave their vocations and get married, and others won’t (or may not be ready yet), but when they do, they will absolutely be consensual.