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’ (...