Katherine Blakeman's Blog, page 12

I didn’t realise it was possible to have impostor syndrome about a diagnosis

This may sound like an abstract concept, so bear with me.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you may recall that I posted a few months ago about life without a formal diagnosis of my chronic illness. For years I’ve been battling through chronic pain and other assorted symptoms, without a single person able to give me a definitive answer as to WHY these symptoms existed. When I last wrote about this back in early summer, I was just beginning to explore the possibility of having ME/CFS (Mya...

My version of living dangerously is going out without my epi-pens.

Picture, if you will, a restaurant. It’s a normal day – diners are dining, waiting staff are waiting, and everyone’s having a grand old time.

Then a young woman with pink hair enters. The nearest waiter approaches her, and she asks them for a table.

“Sure thing! Any allergies?”

“Actually, yes,” she responds.

The waiter’s face drains of colour. In their head, blue lights and sirens begin to flash and scream. Their eyes go distant, and a look of horror passes across their face. Just for a second, ...

Whoops, I accidentally wrote a novel...

So most of you know me as the author of The Silent Chapter, a chunky 120,000-word tome split into eight substantial chapters (none of them actually silent – to understand its name, you need to read it). Thing is… it was never meant to get that long. In fact, the first seven chapters were never meant to exist. Here is the story of how The Silent Chapter evolved into the ‘cracking debut

,novel’, (thanks, ,Loz!) it eventually became.

Up until the age of thirteen, my literary repertoire stretched n...

The big question... why do I write?

One that a lot of writers ask themselves regularly. Would you judge me if I said I ask it every day? Okay, maybe not every day, but when I refresh my sales dashboard to find a zero for the day’s sales, it does tend to pop into my brain… anyone else?

To explain why I write – to myself, as well as all of you – I will start with yet another rhetorical question.

Has a book ever changed your life?

I dare anybody to say no. If you’ve read at least one book in your life, it will have changed you, ev...

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?! Life without a diagnosis.

Deep breath.

Writing this is probably going to make me upset.

I struggle to say that I have a chronic illness, because although for several years I have had various chronic pain flares, nobody has been able to put a name to them.

It all started with scoliosis: a condition in which the spine curves and twists. In my case, my spine curved and twisted so much that it began to crush my lungs. Looking back on it now, my first awareness of this was when I had constant asthma attacks in Physical Edu...

My spine curved. It's called scoliosis. So I had surgery to straighten it out.

June is probably my favourite month of the year. Not because it’s my birthday month – that’s July – or because it’s the start of summer, but because it’s both Pride Month AND Scoliosis Awareness Month.

Not many people seem to know about scoliosis awareness month. I haven’t heard anything about it since I left the online scoliosis community a few years ago. It was all over the place then – I even made some YouTube videos to create awareness (they tanked). You may remember an act on Britain’s Got...

I wrote a book in my teens. Why is everyone so surprised?

I know, I know. Writing a book isn’t quite the activity of which the average teen partakes. Believe me – in seven years of being at secondary school, I learnt that.

Before secondary school, I still wrote (nothing very good, but I did write short stories), and everyone accepted that. “Oh, that’s just Katherine, she writes. Mr [Teacher] reads out her work sometimes. It’s just what she does.” But come secondary school, everything changed. Suddenly I was the ‘weirdo’, ‘little Katherine Blakeman’ (...

Why self-publishing is the hardest AND most rewarding thing ever

I made the decision to self-publish my book after several months of frustration with querying agents. Agent after agent either rejected me – which I was less upset by, because after all, it’s their call – or completely ignored me. I posted something about this on Twitter, hoping that it wasn’t just me, and one of the comments I got was “Why don’t you try self-publishing?”

I have to say that I hadn’t even considered it before. I had heard of it, and indeed one of my teachers used it to publish a...

I went on holiday at the weekend, and I used a mobility aid

And it was, without a doubt, one of the most mortifying experiences of my life.

It shouldn’t have been.

Let me just preface this by saying that I am not elderly. In fact, I am very young. I’m not even into my twenties, and yet last weekend I poked my way around York using a walking stick.

I ordered it specially for this trip. I knew I was going to be doing a lot of walking, so I ordered a fold-up walking stick, and it arrived a couple of days before we left. I unfolded it and stood in front o...

My Second Official Blog Post. It's About Food.

The title for this one came to me a couple of days ago, on the train on the way back from a literary convention. I thought, “Brilliant! Who can resist a blog post about food?”

The only problem is… I don’t have much to say about food. My creative process often happens that way: I get a flash of inspiration, then as soon as I sit down and start writing, the magic’s gone. So I’ve sat myself down with my laptop and a homemade chocolate muffin (okay, to be honest, the muffin’s already gone and I’m ...