It’s another month until I’ll hear back if Alice in Wheelchairland has been longlisted in David Fickling Books’s Search For A Storyteller competition, so in my next blog post I’ll relay what has happened. I don’t know for sure when I’ll hear back, I’m assuming it will be announced on Instagram. At the moment, I’m reeling through doubts about whether my book is financially viable, whether the writing is good enough, whether the publisher wants to promote a disabled author.

Because that’s what it’s about isn’t it? Yes they are looking for good writing, but they are also gambling on a person. DFB don’t have any wheelchair users on their list, so what I don’t know is do they want one? I know that publishing is looking for diverse voices at the moment, but am I good enough?

How publishing works is that the editor will look at their submissions and acquire books they would like to work on that they deem have potential. I’ve looked up the staff at DFB, a family-run independent publisher, and they seem nice, but then, so does everyone in children’s publishing. I don’t want to research them more at this stage, because I don’t want to become emotionally invested if it’s not to be. But I would love a chance to work with an editor to sharpen my story.

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Now that I can play music again, I’ve gone back to the first kind of writing I did, which was writing lyrics. In the year before I became a wheelchair user, I played around with my guitar so much I was writing sometimes multiple songs a week. I would never refine them, just record the song as it was and put it on YouTube. I recently read through my old writing folder, and with half of the songs I’d written I didn’t even bother to write the chords down, I focused on them so briefly, so it was like reading a collection of raw poems.

Looking back, I can see that this was a clear sign that I was a writer. In these last few years where I haven’t been writing music, I have learnt how to edit, to redraft and to think over what it is I am writing. How to tell a story. I’m sure everyone can look back and trace the line of their interests through their life, where their current creativity and passions first expressed themselves. As we grow up we all learn how to edit in a loose sense, re-going over parts of our lives, whittling our stories down into easy-to-understand narratives, with our experiences and imagination.

The freeing thing for me about songwriting is that it’ll never be a creative form I try and make a career out of. Becoming disabled is a very drastic way to learn how to channel your creativity into something else, but it’s true for me. Growing up has been learning where to have discipline in my writing and where to be simply spontaneous, where to polish my creativity and where to simply have fun.

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Speaking of passions, I’ve done two weeks of volunteering in the primary school reading with kids. I have 20 minutes each with three children in Year 1 and Year 2.  I really enjoy being with them, not being their teacher but just someone who’s working with them. I love the structure of reading. One of the kids is particularly chatty and we had a long chat about disability. I’ve talked to quite a lot of kids over the years about why I can’t walk, so our discussion was very fluid and funny. I told him that your brain controls your arms and legs and my brain bled and that meant my legs don’t work the same. I told him the doctors were very surprised, as it didn’t happen for any reason! He wasn’t very phased by what I told him, but I think his parents will be surprised when he babbles the story to them!

I’d love to be able to talk to more kids about disability and reading if my book is published. I want to show them that sometimes things happen that we don’t expect (like brains bleeding!) but life continues and we keep on becoming who we are. We can read stories and also we are a story. I know I don’t have to be published to be a storyteller, so in the meantime, I’ll keep on learning how to tell stories.
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(Featured Image is ‘The Storyteller’ by Scott Gustafson, 2026)