So, I’ve realised it’s time for me to start another blog. I’ve been writing occasionally for other people’s blogs for the last 5 years, and this time I think I should write my own one again. This blog will function as a kind of newsletter/update about how my writing is getting on.

When I wrote my blog How To Walk from my brain injury rehab unit in Leicester after my unexpected brainstem haemorrhage in 2018, I realised that maybe writing was my thing. I had always written before but never considered it as a future for myself. After my year of rehab, I moved back to Sheffield with a powered wheelchair to complete my BA English Literature where I wrote a dissertation entitled Disney Vs Miyazaki: Gender and Animal Companions. Then I spent a year where I wrote a trilogy of middle-grade children’s novels (average quality), then I moved to London to do a part-time MA Children’s Literature. Mid-way through, I completed the first draft of Becoming Sweetwood, the novel I am working on now.

I handed in my dissertation titled Where Do All The Ugly Children Go? about the presentation of disability in fantasy to children, and promptly couldn’t find anywhere accessible to live in London. This was stressful and I went through the homelessness team in my local council and all at once, have ended up with a tiny flat all to myself that was made accessible for me! So here I am, still in London, working on Becoming Sweetwood. It’s about a 16-year-old girl who turns into half a tree.

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I actually had the idea for Becoming Sweetwood way back in the brain injury rehab unit and I wrote it as a poem in How To Walk. I thought the concept would make a great book, then eventually realised I should be the one to write it. I’ve always loved mythology and read a lot of Greek mythology in particular when I was young. In myths, you get a lot of people being changed into something else. For the ancient Greeks, there is a good chance this ‘something else’ will be a tree. I’ve always loved trees: the feeling of peace that comes with climbing to the top of a tree, skin on bark, hands ever so carefully gripping the branches to reach the top, resting there alone in the canopy surrounded by leaves, but you don’t feel alone, is like nothing else I’ve ever felt since. As a child, I was always aware that at some point I’d grow up and have to stop climbing trees and the feeling would end. However, the perfect tension of being really careful and brave anyway is a feeling I still get to experience daily navigating my powerchair around a society that is just about accessible. I never expected to find adult life this much of a game of risk.

My point is, these stories of bodies changing into trees seeped to the fore of my imagination after my experience of my body changing because of a random change in my brain. In 2020, I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and this line of poetry from Chapter 15 written once most of the myths are told, reflections two thousand years old, impressed itself on me:
“Our bodies also are constantly changing and never at rest;
what we were once and we are today, we shall not be tomorrow.”
Human bodies have been changing ever since human bodies have existed. Yes, my body changed, but so that’s what bodies do.

I didn’t know my body could do that. So I put this into my story. When Sky’s body unexpectedly turns into half a tree in Becoming Sweetwood, she had no idea such a thing could happen to her. Over the course of a year, Sky comes to understand her body and how to think about it as something to work with, not against. Of course, in Greek myths when humans bodies are changed it is always some wily god at work, but we get very little about if this is a good thing or a bad thing, or how the human feels about it. This makes me think of disability, and how there are a lot of opinions out there about why it happens and the good and bad. Becoming Sweetwood explores Sky’s feelings towards her changed body and some of other people’s responses to changing into trees. Is it inherently good or bad, or is change what you make of it?

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In the rest of this blog, I’ll be writing about my journey of revising this book, working with agents to discover the publishing industry, and my experience of disability through all this. Everything is new to me, so I’ll write about it as I go. For the header picture of this post, I’m using a picture of a camphor tree from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 film My Neighbour Totoro. In this part of the film, the children wake up in the middle of the night to find the forest spirits outside, growing the seeds the children planted. They run outside to help grow the seeds and the plants shoot up into a huge tree that towers over the house. In the morning, the children awake to find the forest spirits and the enormous tree have gone from their seedbed, but when they look closer they find their seeds have begun to sprout. I love to equate writing with growing plants (well, everything is growing plants for me. And dragons). My hope for this blog is that the writing will become a huge wise old tree that will hold everything in its shade, and when we climb its branches, we’ll find that sense of peace together among the leaves at the top.