Meet Jessica

And how’d this all start?

In 2010, my brain began to atrophy. Realizing I would die a tortuous, stifling death of boredom in the gray cubes of corporate America, I asked my friend, “But how did you know you wanted to write computer code?” (Because computer coding sounds atrocious, but she loves it in the same insane way I adore stripping wallpaper.) She told me she took some tests.

I paid $600 to a research institute and drove to Texas.

In a benign looking office building, I spent two days arranging eye-shadow samples into color schemes, putting poker chips with words embossed on them onto placemats, and writing really, really fast until a timer freed me.

The tester people said, “You would be good at disaster management and writing.”

Disaster management was all right, but I’d already worked hurricane Wilma and receiving glow sticks when you check into the hotel because they don’t have power is a young person’s game. (I mean I had just turned thirty.)

So, writing it was.

Writing had always been the way I worked through my thoughts. But, after the tests I looked at writing with a fresh eye. I was building a new career, and as with any other career you start at the bottom. I took my blows in writers’ groups, celebrated the sale of my first essay, and steamed in the pit of self-loathing when I didn’t write every day. I discovered the genres that called to me, stumbled into my writer’s voice, and even completed a novel.

Fantasy novels were where I let myself play, but immediate success came with my non-fiction essays. (Serious face. The first essay I ever submitted was accepted, paid for, and published in a real print publication.) Short stories, flash fiction, essays, creative non-fiction, and how-to articles all got published eventually.  My creative non-fiction piece, I Am Descended From Giants was based on my Grandpa and his brothers, which made it extra special when it won first place honors from the Bacopa Literary Review.

In 2017, I signed with the Kneerim & Williams literary agency for The Color Eater, and found a great partner in my agent, Lucy Cleland. Lucy helped me take my novel-writing skills to the next level and showed me how important it is to have a fierce advocate on your side.

While all that writing was going on, I put my business-ing powers to use 2011 found me joining the board of Whispering Prairie Press–a non-profit dedicated to arts and literature. In 2012, I became Managing Editor of Kansas City Voices arts and literary magazine and spent the next five years publishing emerging writers and artists. The years I ran the non-profit and magazine taught me about running a small business and re-delivered a few more lessons about burn-out and what happens when you put other people’s work before your own.

I stepped away from both in 2017 to pursue my own writing and editorial business.

When my editorial clients began asking about publishing logistics and how to build their author platform, I realized my ability to de-scary and simplify business was a sleeper super-power.

Teaching workshops, speaking at conferences, and coaching writers all evolved organically. Strong edits helped my clients become better writers, but good writing wasn’t the main problem. Most of us gave up because of loneliness and other psychological strains.

In 2018, I began experimenting with group coaching for writers—my goal was to help them build a support system, as they learned about the business and improved their craft.

In January 2020, the book Practical Intuition by Laura Day left me with a very strong intuitive feeling that we were going to be home for two years, and then the Pandemic hit. I was better off than a lot of people, because I was an introvert accustomed to working at home. Regardless, the stress of the world reorganizing reality left me struggling to write.

So, in June of 2020, I launched my Patreon, with the main goal of establishing Co-Work Creative sessions.  These virtual co-working/body-doubling sessions were a grounding community to keep creatives connected when COVID forced us to isolate.

Day’s book left me with more than an urge to start a virtual co-working space though, it also left me with a series of handwritten predictions which marked a turning point in my intuitive and energetic learning.

March 17, 2020, was the first time I learned a prediction I had made came true. My friends moved cross-country and upon their arrival there was an immediate case of mistaken identity–something I had warned them about before they left Kansas City. Over the next several years prediction after prediction came true. I didn’t talk about it publicly, because I didn’t understand it and was worried I would be judged or labeled “crazy.”

2021 hit with a massive, monstrous download of an idea.  I was supposed to use my gift for simplifying and de-scarying business to change the way creative industries worked. I was supposed to build a company that would help people live their creative dreams. Teach them how to make money from their creative endeavors, introduce them to a constructive support system and help them be happy in the process. After a shell-shocked week of sitting with that bit of info, I set out to transition my editing business to a coaching business.

Within a matter of my months my mom was diagnosed with liver cancer. It was fascinating to building such a hopeful business for my creative future in the midst of losing all hope my mom would survive.

The next sixteen months of my life were carefully divided into public and private. Publicly, I announced business updates, workshops, and leaves of absence to care for mom. Privately, I tried to make sense of all that was happening—it felt like the closer mom got to death the stronger my energetic experiences became.

No one could explain why a conversation with an old friend sent a tsunami of energy so strong it brought me to my knees, or why I could feel a friend’s headache when they were half way across the country, or why I knew a person was waiting on something very impatiently—even though we hadn’t talked in weeks.

I began to doubt if physical pains and emotions I experienced were mine or if they actually belonged to other people. I quickly learned discussions on the subject made others uncomfortable. Questioning looks and swift topic changes reinforced my fear that something in me was broken, and I pulled back from relationships, situations, and obligations.

In August of 2021 an advertisement popped up on Instagram for Jeffrey Allen’s Duality class. The class said it dealt with moving stuck energy. The memory of that energy tsunami suddenly made sense. Energy I had blocked for over a decade became unstuck, and there was so much of it stored up I physically couldn’t handle it. I dove into Jeffrey’s class with hope—maybe I wasn’t losing my mind after all.

Duality confirmed I wasn’t crazy. I just had a sensitivity to energy that no one in my immediate circle experienced. The class gave me tools to choose when (and how) I would engage with others energy. By the end of the class I had moved from fear to curiosity.

December of 2021, I learned mom wasn’t going to get better and my BFF cousin, Kelly, revealed her own cancer diagnosis.

Kell was nine months older than me; my first friend as only a cousin could be. She had been my sole confidant in ALL things energy since the day things started to get weird. Kell was a scientist; she found my energy oddities fascinating and there wasn’t a drop of judgement in her questions—just curiosity and concern.

The impending loss of two of the people I had loved most and longest had me reeling.

My logical brain made the only sense it could and concluded one was only given a month like this if they’re supposed to be learning something. My, still unbridled, energy brain kept getting the message everything is going to be fine—but I knew fine didn’t mean mom or Kell would live.

2022 was erratic and eye-opening.

My first big lesson was in gratitude for the flexibility owning my own business provided. I put growing the business on hold and spent as much time as I could with mom.

I began to see a pattern in how energetic lessons showed up in my life. Often a very emotionally “negative” experience would be immediately followed by a “positive” one. The extreme emotional contrast made the lessons memorable and began to show me there was a different way to approaching work. Things didn’t always have to be forced, willpower, and grind; when I leaned into the energy of a situation, problems could resolve unexpectedly, surprisingly, and with ease.

Finite time had me living in my moments with mom with a level of presence and focus I had never experienced before. The ticking clock taught me my real priorities and to let go of my attempts to control anything.

My energy and attention varied from day-to-day, and I knew I didn’t have the capacity to deliver high quality work to clients consistently, so I stopped taking new clients and put all marketing and promotion on pause. However, I decided if I could learn how to find the good in this burned-to-the-ground season of my personal life, I could teach that to clients moving forward.

I escaped into learning because reality felt too hard. I studied intuition, energy, habit building, happiness, behavioral economics, business—anything and everything that would help me (and my clients) as we navigated the hard parts. Throughout 2022 I completed the life-coaching certification program at Evercoach by MindValley and became a certified Six-Phase Meditation teacher.

Mom died in June 2022 and of course I was sad—but mostly I felt relief. Relief she wasn’t in pain any longer and that I would have time for myself once again came immediately. But there was a quiet relief I couldn’t identify immediately—the relief to explore my energetic skills and learning openly and fully.

Mom had been very religious. Anything that wasn’t firmly grounded in Christianity was the work of the Devil and evil. Something to be cast out.

I was too scared to share my energy oddities with her while she was alive because I feared her religious beliefs would overshadow her love for me. I feared she would tell me I was broken and evil and she would go to her grave thinking something was wrong with me.  I was scared her final memories of me would be that I was possessed with something she could not love.

Over the 4^th of July weekend I visited Kell for the last time, and the months until her death in January of 2023 are all a bit patchy.  Somewhere in there I completed Shirzad Chamine’s Positive Intelligence coaches training, which reinforced my mindfulness techniques and gave me something to have my clients experiment with.

Month-after-month, I floated on tidal waves of grief, and energetic experiences kept intensifying in depth and frequency.

I desperately sought connection with people who had similar skillsets. I read books by Caroline Myss (and many other energetic practitioners) and took every class Jeffrey Allen had available. All of that was learning from a-far though. What I really longed for was a person with similar skills who I could talk to and ask ten-billion questions.

In April 2023 Jane Friedman offered me a huge opportunity to present a workshop for her audience. I delivered an informative and impactful class on Beta Readers—but nowhere in the class did I incorporate any intuitive or energetic lessons. I was still hiding behind my technical know-how and terrified of being rejected for anything energy related.

To celebrate the workshop, I ordered a 30-minute intuitive reading from any energy practitioner I’d seen online. He knew nothing about me. We had never met. The opening of that video started with him saying he’d been instructed to tell me about two past lives. Those past lives were a culmination of all of my fiction writing, which had been completely unpublished at that point in time. That was the validation I needed to confirm he was my teacher and invested the entire remaining paycheck from Jane’s workshop into a month of one-on-one coaching with him.  Finally I had someone to answer my questions. And I was so grateful to have someone tell me, “Yes, energy hangovers are real.  You need to eat more good carbs if you’re going to sustain yourself.”

May of 2023 The Oddest Little Business Book (TOLBB) started floating around my brain. I thought I would write about simplifying and de-scarying business, and maybe weave in a bit of what I’d been learning energetically. I hadn’t written seriously in the grieving years, and had no idea what my agent would think. I began toying around with it as I slowly reintegrated myself back into reality.

By October 2023 I realized TOLBB wasn’t a business book with energy as a sub-plot. It was an energy book with business as a sub-plot. I scheduled a call with my agent and held my breath to see if she thought I’d lost my mind while she reviewed the initial pages.

I entered 2024 with a new understanding of all tools available to me, intuitively and practically. I expanded my energetic work beyond one-on-one coaching and ran pilot workshops for small groups where I incorporated creative energy education with creative business knowledge.

As I saw the success my clients and I had with the new techniques it became Creative Energy was going to be a defining lynch pin of my work. In May 2024, I renamed my company The CE Coaches.

June took me to the Nebula’s conference in Pasadena, CA as a panelist for the SFWA association. My focus was still on mental health and how to have a sustainable writing career. I hinted at the energetic components of my work but was still holding back. I feared I would be too weird—which looking back on it is completely ironic as SFF writers are some of the most open-minded, forward-thinking people on the planet.

It took me until Fall 2024 to have a full non-fiction book proposal. Lucy and I were pulling together comparative titles, and she suggested the book Sensitive: The Hidden Power of Highly Sensitive People in a Loud, Fast, Too-Much World by Jenn Granneman.  As I tore through the pages of the comp, the final puzzle pieces about what was “wrong with me” (nothing, btw.) fell into place. I learned I was an HSP.

And in the final months of 2024 I would go on to learn I was also an empath with mirror-touch synesthesia.

Something about having the science words: HSP EMPATH MIRROR-TOUCH SYNESTHESIA empowered me. It helped me accept that I was just wired differently than a large portion of the planet, and that if I had these unusual skills I may as well learn to love them because I clearly couldn’t divest myself of them.

Jan 2025 began with a motivational experiment I named 8 is Great. By February I learned it was a great tool for helping people recognize their innate intuitive guidance.

I began to rely more on my intuitive guidance than my analytical mind and was sent on a series of unexpected trips. A road trip to visit a client in Wichita, Kansas landed me a free place to stay in Vermont where I went to meet two mediums who also have mirror-touch synesthesia. Another client took me for a first-class working week to Miami, where I got to watch the sun come over the Atlantic. A dream about a writing room delivered me the words “Dairy Hollow,” and I found myself on a week-long writers’ residency in Eureka Springs, A.

May 2025 Lucy moved to the Frances Goldin Literary agency as a VP and Senior Agent. I went with her, with full confidence it was an energetic alignment on both our parts.

That same month I found the courage to publicly incorporate my intuitive skills into all aspects of my business and had great success and encouragement by the massive acceptance of my Empowered Querying workshop.

The second half of the year my goal is to truly, openly integrate energy concepts into all aspects of my business. I’m terrified and excited, which normally means I’m on the right track. Guess we’ll find out together over the next few months.

*For rights inquiries contact Lucy Cleland at Frances Goldin Lit.