Today we’d like to introduce you to Victoria Crowder.
Hi Victoria, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
If there is one lesson to be learned from me, it is: DON’T PUT YOUR DREAM ON HOLD.
All I ever wanted to do was be a writer. I even started a novel after college, but then life took hold, and I put it away for 30 YEARS! *cue facepalm*
It all went down something like this:
As a Kansas City native, I’ve always enjoyed the culture that surrounds local artists and writers. I was recruited into college as a debater and came out of the writing program at UMKC in 1992 with high hopes for a writing career. I quietly pursued writing a novel while I worked in security which was a great way to start.
As I became a more active leader in the writing community, I co-founded MUMS (the Midwest Underground Media Symposium) in 1997 with Anne Winter who famously owned the Westport record store Recycled Sounds. The annual event provided a weekend long meet up for independent writers and publishers.
It was an exciting time in Kansas City as the Free Speech Coalition was actively growing and local artists were opening up the West Bottoms for cool gallery venues and a thriving coffee house culture. I had already been teaching writing for several years through various organizations including the UMKC Communiversity program where I helped young poets who were struggling to prepare their work for spoken word performance.
After producing a public show at the Writer’s Place that featured censored works of art and a provocative roster of slam poets, I transitioned to teaching an annual summer lab in creative writing at the Kansas City Art Institute which I ran for 17 years.
It was during that time that I started trying to finish writing that first novel. For those in the know, a book length project is a marathon that few are prepared for. Though I dug in my heels, I stalled out at about 25,000 words. And, as is so often the case, life moved on and took me with it.
Factor in the birth of my first child, creating a new art teaching business (The Fearless Studio), a second child, and a battle with cancer, and I eventually found myself reconsidering my life’s direction. I needed a stable foundation for raising my kids and I was ready for a change. I decided to reinvent myself and took an engineering certification and started a new career in telecom network architecture.
The important thing here is that I have never been afraid to try something new. It just never occurred to me to say no when I was presented with an interesting opportunity. Once my engineering work was established and allowed for some flexibility as my kids were older, I decided to get back into security training. In 2013 I founded a self defense training company which primarily served schools and businesses in the Mid West until 2024 when I closed it down to FINALLY get serious about writing.
So what was the catalyst that set me on the author path?
I had the great fortune in 2022 of taking a 10-day trip into the back country of Idaho. It began with a three-hour horseback ride across three rivers into a camp with no electricity or connectivity. It was the definition of “off the grid”. A perfect place to pull out that dusty bit of a novel and see if I could get it up and running.
Not only did it grow into a full-fledged book, but I was approached about writing another book to share the process I’d used to get the novel written! It’s amazing what can happen when you lean into your dream and give it some energy! I resigned from my engineering job to become a full-time author, and here I am!
My book “Zettelkasten for Fiction Writers” is due out this fall (2025) with my novel scheduled for launch in 2026.
[For those wondering, a zettelkasten is a note card system championed by the father of modern sociology, Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) which enabled him to write hundreds of academic papers and seventy books over a 30-year career! I learned the system from Scott Scheper of the book Antinet Zettelkasten and knew immediately that the system was exactly what I needed to finally get my novel written].
In service to becoming an author, and as a lifelong learner and teacher, I’ve co-founded an online writer’s community at the Lilliputian Publishing CoOp where, in addition to workshops and feedback partners, we help writers get their projects completed and published, lead readers in book clubs, network with independent book sellers and inspire all lovers of books.
It all ends with me living the dream. When I”m not hanging out in the writing community or teaching on my YouTube channel, I’m furiously scribbling or chasing my chickens and cats on a cattle ranch in Smithville, MO.
If you are lucky and persistent, YOU will get the chance in life to realize your dream. I am proof that if you commit to it, you can make it happen. But as I said in the beginning, if there is one lesson to be learned from my journey it is: DON’T PUT YOUR DREAM ON HOLD – Go out and get it!
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
In retrospect, my journey finally makes sense. I always found ways to incorporate writing, teaching, or creativity into whatever I was doing, but the real challenge was making the decision to go all in and build a writing career.
I would say that I should have embraced it WAY sooner, but then I’d have missed so many of the experiences that I now draw on for perspective. I also learned to be comfortable with challenging myself which has given me the perseverance to commit to writing for the long haul and give others a leg up!
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’ve been a book nerd since I was a child, so I always knew I wanted to be a writer. No matter what I was doing, I found a way to either be writing or teaching it.
It began with a love of poetry that resulted in some REALLY bad teenage stuff. In spite of that, I got into the UMKC creative writing program where I was lucky to have as a college advisor the Pulitzer nominee Dr. G.S. Sharat Chandra. He cured me of my bad verse and set me on a course to explore short fiction. I embraced it and found that I really enjoyed workshopping with other writers. That led to my love of teaching writing.
For many years, I was satisfied with inspiring others to pursue their dreams of writing while I quietly considered what book I might finally bring into the world. It also gave me a deeper perspective into what a beginning writer needs and how I can be of service to a writing community.
It’s not surprising that as soon as I got my novel drafted, I immediately found an opportunity to co-found an online publishing co-op to teach and help writers with every step of the process that I used to finish my novel. We essentially built the support community that I’d always wanted to belong to but never seemed to find. These days I am thrilled to run weekly workshops and sprints with my online team and am always excited to bring a new writer along or inspire someone who is stuck.
All of this inevitably led to my LiLLiPub tribe (lovingly referred to as LiLLigans) demanding that I write and publish what I’d been teaching. That led to my book “Zettelkasten for Fiction Writers: Where Imagination Finds Order”. It is without question the thing I’m most proud of. Writing it is how I became the AntiNovelist (ANTI being an acronym for the key components of the zettelkasten, or note box, which is a writing system that is: A – Analog, N – Numeric Alpha filing, T – Treelike branching, I – Indexed).
At over 400 pages, Zettelkasten for Fiction Writers is a sampling of my teaching experience combined with the step-by-step system that I used to get my novel written. It takes the last twenty or so years of writing theory and reframes it with the use of a note card system that actually helps a writer get the words out of their head and onto the page!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.VictoriaCrowder.com
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@AntiNovelist
- Other: https://lillipub.org/
