KA Hitchins

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What I Learned Walking the Dog

24th May 2017 by KA Hitchins 2 Comments

In 2011 we rehomed a 16 month old Rhodesian Ridgeback called Harley. He’d been living with a young couple and their new baby in a one bedroom flat with no garden. Every time the baby cried the dog barked. Every time the dog barked the baby cried.

I’d been searching for a dog for some time. I didn’t want a puppy because there was a lot going on in the family at that time and I didn’t think I would be able to dedicate myself fully to the house training. Conversely, we didn’t want a dog who was too old to learn new tricks. My husband wanted a big dog. It’s a macho thing. I wanted a short-haired non-moulting dog. It’s a vacuuming thing! Harley was perfect in every respect.

 

 

Neither my husband nor I had lived with a dog before, although I always wanted one. I loved the idea of the kids coming out with us on long family walks at the weekend, and all of us curling up together on cold winter nights. What I was less sure about was the thought of walking the dog every day in all weathers.

Six years have passed and, as it turns out, walking the dog has been the best part of being Harley’s ‘Mum’. I’ve seen the seasons change in ways that would have been unimaginable to me during my 20 years of commuting to London: frost on cobwebs, striped caterpillars on nettles, ears of wheat clicking in the shimmering heat.  I’ve learned the names of trees and wild flowers. My fitness has improved. I’ve made new friends. And the slow rhythm of walking and looking and thinking and breathing has kick-started my writing career.

 

 

Those family rambles never materialised. It’s as much as I can do to get our teenagers out of bed and down the stairs for lunch at the weekend. And they’re too busy curling up with their play stations and iPads in the evenings to worry about their parents or Harley.

So, here in brief, are some valuable things I’ve learned from walking the dog.

  • You have to do it regularly (at least once a day).
  • You have to do it whether you feel like it or not.
  • It gets easier the more you do it.
  • You will start enjoying things you never thought you would.
  • There will be unanticipated rewards.
  • Your observational skills will improve.
  • Your insight will deepen.
  • You will need to shake up the routine to keep things fresh.

I’ve discovered that these truths apply to many other aspects of my life: housework, cooking, communicating with teenagers, helping with GCSE revision, writing my next novel, and  – last but not least – spiritual growth.

Who would have thought that walking the dog would teach me so much about walking with God?

 

Filed Under: Uncategorised Tagged With: cooking, GCSE Revision, God, housework, novel, Rhodesian Ridgeback, Spiritual Growth, Teenagers, Walking the dog, Walking with God, writing

Blogs are like Buses

24th March 2017 by KA Hitchins Leave a Comment

Blogs are like buses. Nothing for ages then two come along in quick succession. But it seems important to acknowledge that it’s a year today since the publication of my debut novel. That’s my excuse.

I was expecting to spend 24 March 2016 on social media posting and tweeting about The Girl at the End of the Road, which was being officially released by bookshops and online retailers that day. I should have been enjoying the experience of achieving a lifelong dream, relishing the congratulations from friends and family. I certainly didn’t expect to be rushed into hospital.

 

The previous night I’d gone to bed with some unpleasant blood blisters in my mouth. I must be really run down, I thought, with the pressure of editing my first book, organising a mini book tour for the following months, and beginning my next novel. When I awoke on launch day, I noticed a rash of red spots on my throat and arms which didn’t blanch when pressed. I was queuing at the receptionist’s desk at my local surgery at nine o’clock sharp and was shown straight in.

As soon as the doctor saw me, he telephoned the hospital and told them to be ready to receive me. Once in Accident and Emergency, I was fast-tracked through the system. When asked to change into a hospital gown, I was shocked to see that my legs were covered in a livid non-blanching rash and purple bruises. I must be very ill indeed!

I’ve often speculated what it would be like if I was suddenly faced with a potentially life threatening condition. I’d seen my own father die from cancer a few years previously, and had sat by his side as he slowly slipped away. I’d wondered if he’d been able to hear me, and whether he was afraid or peaceful as he faced the end.

With doctors coming and going from my little cubicle, I felt surprisingly calm. When a registrar from the Haematology Department sat next to my bed about three hours later, I knew from his face that he had discovered what was wrong. He explained that normal platelet readings were between 150 – 400 per microliter of blood. A life threatening reading was anything below 20. My platelet levels were 3. My immune system was destroying my platelets and my blood could no longer clot.

 

 

I was given clotting medication and taken to the Critical Dependency Unit to be observed overnight in case I was bleeding internally or into my brain.  I was told I probably wouldn’t sleep because of the drugs I’d been given. I lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the hospital, and the cries of the elderly lady opposite who kept asking where she was and if anyone was there.

The irony of my situation didn’t escape me. I was half way through the first draft of my second  novel, a book about a woman in a critical condition in hospital. As she lies in bed, she desperately tries to remember what happened to her and questions the beliefs she’s built her life upon. Now I was lying in a hospital bed thinking about the meaning and purpose of my own life.

By the next morning the ulcers in my mouth had stopped bleeding. My blood pressure was stable and I was sent home with high dosage steroids to switch off my faulty immune system. During the days that followed I spent most of my time in bed. But sleep eluded me. Although physically exhausted, my mind was wide-awake. I decided to continue writing my manuscript, tapping away on my laptop during the night while everyone else was asleep. Having just experienced my own life-threatening moment and spell in hospital, ideas poured out of me. Within a week I’d completed 30,000 words and finished the first draft of The Key of All Unknown.

We have to use our imaginations to understand the lives of others. While writing this book, I was imaginatively lying in my heroine’s sick bed, whilst lying in my own. Without that personal experience of hospitalisation and vulnerability, I believe the book would be a poorer version of itself. Things happen for a reason.

I’m delighted to say that I’ve made an amazing recovering. There’s a one in three chance that the idiopathic thrombocytopenia could return, and like all of us I walk the fragile path between life and death. Nothing externally has changed, but I’ve become more aware of my own mortality. I’ve also learned that it’s not the strength of one’s faith that counts, but the strength of the One in whom you put your faith that’s important.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorised Tagged With: Debut, Faith, hospitalisation, Idiopathicthrombocytopenia, ITP, novel, The Key of All Unknown, writing

I Dreamed a Dream

20th March 2017 by KA Hitchins 2 Comments

It’s just over a year since I set up this website. I was clear at the start that I didn’t want a blog page. I would have a news page instead. The main reason was that I enjoy writing at length and in great detail – exactly the opposite skills required for a blogger!  Also, I wasn’t sure what to blog about. But I think perhaps the thing that’s been holding me back is that it’s much easier to inhabit a character and hide behind them than to speak directly as myself. As you might have gathered, I’m an introvert.

So what’s changed? Suddenly I find I have lots of ideas to blog about. I want to review other people’s books. I want to share what I’ve learnt about publishing. And if I can overcome my fear of public speaking – as I’ve had to do since having two books published – then surely I can overcome my fear of blogging.

So I’m going to start right at the beginning. How I became an author.

I dreamed of being a writer throughout my childhood and teens.  When I realised stories were created by people and weren’t magically ‘just there’ to be plucked from the library shelves, I knew I wanted to create these worlds for myself and for other people.

 

 

I’ve always made up stories in my head. I do it unconsciously, imagining other people’s lives and setting myself in different situations and dreaming impossible dreams about the future. As I grew up and began to tell people I wanted to be a writer, there were the usual negative comments.

“It’s so hard to get published.”

“It pays so badly.”

“You have to study the great works of English Literature.”

“You must stick to the grammatical rules.”

“You must write about what you know” – not what you love or what excites you or what obsesses you.

“Why not go to secretarial college and learn to type? You’ll always be able to get a job.”

 

 

I left school at sixteen, went to secretarial college and began working  in London from the age of 17. I kept writing in the evenings and enrolled for writing classes and residential weeks.  Finally I listened to the advice I was receiving and signed myself up to do an English A’Level in evening classes, eventually managing to secure a place at Lancaster University when I was 21.

I read solidly for three years, writing essays about other people’s stories, feeling intimidated that I would never be able to write as well as them. After graduating it was easy to slip back to being a secretary in London, though I continued to write in the evenings.

But at the age of 28 I gave up. Blame a heart break which made me feel I had failed as a human being. The rejection silenced my voice. I no longer believed I had anything to say that was worth listening to. I lost faith in the magic of fiction and the happy ever after. It was time to knuckle down, put my dreams aside and concentrate on the real world, which meant having a better career and earning enough to pay the bills.

 

 

When I married my husband in my thirties, he knew I’d once dreamed of being a writer and encouraged me to take it up again. I refused to countenance the idea. I was a different person now. Older, wiser. I couldn’t bear the hurt of facing my broken dreams. Besides I was busy bringing up our two children and working part time as a Learning Support Assistant.

Then I had another heartbreak: the loss of my beloved father from cancer. With two young children, a job, a widowed mother and all the tasks in the house and garden that needed to be attended to, I didn’t have time to process the grief properly and pushed on through the pain.

As months turned to years, I became conscious of the most tremendous mental and emotional pressure. At the beginning of 2012 I started jotting down my feelings at odd moments in the day to try and put things into perspective. At first this made me more unhappy. I read back my personal rants at how miserable I was and they sounded petty and ungrateful. There were so many others in the world suffering more than I was. To them, my life must appear unimaginably comfortable and blessed.

 

In order to gain some emotional distance, I projected my grief onto a fictional character of the opposite sex. He was in a different situation from me, grieving the loss of his job in the financial crash, but experiencing similar emotions. Thus the shallow, materialistic character of Vincent Stevens was born.

I didn’t tell anyone I was writing. I didn’t know if I would be able to finish a complete novel, and didn’t want to have to answer the question, “How’s the book going?” only to have to tell people that I’d given up. If I was going to fail, I was going to keep it to myself.

I planned what I was going to write when walking the dog. I scribbled the ideas down whenever I could, particularly when sitting in the car waiting to pick up the children from school. Within two months the first draft of ‘The Girl at the End of the Road’ was finished and I plucked up the courage to tell my family. My husband, sister and a couple of friends heroically read it and made encouraging sounds.

The difficulty of writing a book is nothing compared to the difficulty of trying to get one published. I sent off my manuscript to agents and publishers and the rejections started to trickle back. I edited and revised and sent out another batch of submissions. Strangely I found that the pile of rejections toughened me up. My crippling fear of failure and rejection stemming from the broken romance in my twenties was disappearing.

I’d given up writing after my first real experience of loss. I’d taken it up again two decades later during another period of devastation. Older and wiser, I now knew that pain, failure and rejection were inevitable aspects  of life. Although they make you vulnerable, giving up on something I’d loved because I didn’t want to be a failure at it was not the answer. I learned that doing nothing is much more undermining of a person’s confidence than doing something and falling flat on one’s face. It’s better to be a failure at the thing you love than to be a success at something you hate.

 

In May 2015 I heard back from a small Independent Publisher called Instant Apostle. They liked the sample I’d sent in and wanted to see the full manuscript. I emailed it to them on a Friday morning, and by the following Monday I receives a phone call offering me a contract.

Reading and writing are transformational processes. We have to use our imaginations to understand the lives of others and to enter into their experiences. Stories offer the possibility of going inside the Other – the princess, the superhero, the detective, the murderer – to experience vicariously a little of the strange and wonderful and terrible thing it is to be human. And that’s a miracle.

I hope that if you are grappling with a sense of failure or loss and are tempted to give up on something, you’ll be encouraged to continue with that thing you love but which seems so fraught with risk.

As the saying goes, ‘If you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat’.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Uncategorised Tagged With: author, blog, blogging, dream, failure, heartbreak, loss, novel, publishing, rejection, story, The Girl at the End of the Road, transformation, writing

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