Tag Archives: book

KEEPING TALKING

November 11, 2013 By in OTHER Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Katie Green Signing Lighter Than My Shadow

It has been quite a month!

I wrote on my website recently about how strange it is that Lighter Than My Shadow is now finished and ‘out there’. After working on it in virtual isolation for so long, it has been odd (and quite wonderful) to at last be sharing it, and hearing what people think. I’ve spent the month since publication traveling all around the UK for launches, book fairs and events to talk about the book. I’ve been interviewed in The Guardian and I’ve even been on Radio 4.

I spent a long time preparing myself for these months. I knew, to some extent, what I was letting myself in for: that, for a while at least, my identity might once again be defined by the illness I’ve experienced. I decided I was OK with that. But still it’s been weird and hard to stand up and speak and answer questions from strangers who now know so much about my personal life. But it’s also been wonderful to talk. Part of why I wanted to write the book is because I don’t think we talk about the difficult things enough. And so I intend to keep talking.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use this website going forward, especially the blog. I’ve still got some more things I can share about making the book, including a considerable number of ‘deleted scenes.’ But I’d also like to open the conversation, and use the space to answer questions – about the book or about recovery in general – so if you have a question please do contact me. I’ve loved hearing from everyone who’s written to me in response to the book so far. Though I sadly haven’t had time to respond to every email individually, I have read and appreciated them all. Thank you.

 

 

THE WALL CHART

June 28, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

wall-chart

With the time for faffing drafting and redrafting over, I had to find a way not to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of drawing ahead of me. I used a very simple formula: divide the number of pages that need drawing by the number of days I have to draw (allowing myself the occasional weekend, and a week’s holiday halfway through). The number I came up with was 12 pages a week. So long as I could stick to that target, I could stop worrying about the whole massive thing and worry only about 12 pages at a time.

This wasn’t quite enough to settle my nerves, so I made a wall chart breaking down exactly when I would tackle each section. Seeing it all laid out in front of me, with clearly enough space to hit the deadline, felt very comforting.

It’s perhaps important to acknowledge that this extreme level of meticulous planning is not dissimilar to the way I used to plan my meals when I was anorexic…

FIRST DRAFT

June 14, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This post is the last in a series about a writing retreat I took in 2010. Please click here if you’d like to read from the beginning.First Draft

At the end of three very challenging weeks, after a lot of sketching and stressing and screwing up paper, I did indeed manage a first draft.

Jonathan Cape were not going to know what had hit them.

SITTING WITH IT

June 13, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

What happened during those three weeks tested my stability in recovery. The flashbacks, which I’d had to induce by choice, were indeed overwhelming as I had feared, and I was completely alone with them. With my mind finally going to the places I needed to write about, I couldn’t run away, distract myself, eat (or not eat) as I always had done before. I had to sit with it, sit with it, sit with it.

And write it down.

Write It Down

This post is the fourth in a series about a writing retreat I took in 2010. Please click here if you’d like to read from the beginning.

RECONNECTING

June 11, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

This post is the second in a series about a writing retreat I took in 2010. Please click here if you’d like to read from the beginning.

Hard to Reconnect

Despite my fears, what I found at the start of my retreat was that it was hard for me to be affected by my past, even when I wanted to be. Perhaps I’d left it further behind than I’d thought. Perhaps I’d become so used to avoiding the difficult stuff as a way of protecting myself from the emotions it could stir up. I could reason out why I had suffered from an eating disorder, but I couldn’t remember what the suffering had felt like. I found it surprisingly hard to reconnect. I needed to find a way to remind myself.

In the earlier stages of my recovery, I had written in a journal every day, sometimes several times a day. Years later, when I was having one of my moments when I decided that writing a book would be a stupid cliché, and I wanted to forget it all had ever happened, I destroyed every single one of them…

Burning Ceremony

I wish I hadn't done that...

FEARS

June 10, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This post is the first in a week-long series about a writing retreat I took in January 2010, to work on the first full draft of Lighter Than My Shadow.

Looking Back

I was afraid of being alone with all of my ‘stuff.’ I was afraid that putting myself back into an eating disordered mindset in order to write about it would make the behaviour all too tempting. I was afraid that in three weeks without anyone to check on me, I would find myself fully entrenched in a relapse.

I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to cope with flashbacks or anxiety attacks, and that the pain would become overwhelming and result in a complete nervous breakdown.

I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work at all.

This illustration was created in 2009, before I signed the contract with Jonathan Cape. Some variations on the concept have appeared in the book, but this exact image didn’t find a place. However, it seemed perfectly fitting for this blog post.

AVOIDANCE

June 6, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I'll just write this email...

For a long time, I dabbled. Even after signing the contract and everything becoming real and official, I think there was a level of denial. The project still felt overwhelmingly big, the deadline incomprehensibly far away. There was always something else I found to do that was smaller or had a more immediate deadline. I told myself “I’ll just do this [insert justification here] and then I’ll really get started.” It took a few months of still not starting for me to notice the pattern.

Clearing Space

I decided the best way for me to clear a space was to go away. Away from my computer, away from my part-time job, away from my friends and family and other work. To be completely alone with just pens, paper and the story in my head, and no choice but to get the heck on with it. I went for three weeks (next week I’ll be blogging about what happened while I was there).

THE BOX

May 29, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Lighter Than My Shadow Display Box

In working on Lighter Than My Shadow as a college project, I knew I couldn’t tackle the whole thing. Instead I picked a few moments from different stages of the story to work up into comics, giving an example of what the finished work might look and feel like.

At that stage, I was a lot more shy about things being made public than I am now. I don’t think I ever really believed the book would be published, and I was horrified enough that my college work had to go on public exhibition. I set about thinking of a way to display the work that felt less exposing than hanging the images on the wall. I wanted people viewing the work to have the intimate, private experience of reading a book, but equally I didn’t want my exhibition to seem unenticing and visually dull.

I came up with this book-box-thing, housing each of the short extracts in a separate compartment. I think this helped the viewers/readers to understand that these were disparate parts of an incomplete project, rather than something finished. The box was displayed on a plinth, and above it I hung a wire sculpture of the snarling black cloud that appears in the first illustration. I WISH I had taken some photographs – the cloud was an unwieldy 3ft across and so I decided to throw it away after the show. Perhaps I will recreate it for the book launch…

These extracts, along with a vague synopsis and some notes about why I wanted to do the project, became my book proposal. I graduated in June 2009, and showed the pages to Jonathan Cape in September of that year. In January 2010, thrilled and in utter disbelief, I signed the contract that made everything real.

BEFORE IT WAS A COMIC…

May 9, 2013 By in MAKING THE BOOK Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

…Lighter Than My Shadow was going to be a prose book.

I’d always enjoyed illustration, and indeed always wanted to be an illustrator. But I was one of those people who thought that books with pictures were for children, or perhaps for those who weren’t able to read ‘proper’ books (you can imagine what I thought about comics).

Until I stumbled upon the book that changed everything.

The Red Tree

The Red Tree by Shaun Tan is a picture book, but in its few short pages of sparse text and deeply allegorical images, it resonated more with my experience of mental illness than any prose book ever had. I’d never seen pictures so eloquent, nor found so few words to be so profound. There was something about the combination, the two working together…

I felt like I’d struck the most unique and exciting idea anyone had ever had, and a whole world had opened up to me. Books with pictures tackling serious subjects: imagine that! I enthusiastically told my friends that this book idea I’d been harping on about for years was going to have pictures, and be unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

Maus

…and so I read my first comic in 2005.

From there it was only a short step to discover a whole world of people telling serious stories with pictures. With every new book I read I was filled simultaneously with inspiration, and with crushing despair that I could never live up to the quality of storytelling these artists were achieving.

And yet, there were hundreds of books about eating disorders. If I was going to bother telling another story about anorexia, I wanted to do so in a way that might bring something different to the conversation. Though I lacked confidence in my skills as an illustrator, I was pretty sure I was a better artist than I was a writer.

The change was like flicking a switch. Once I discovered graphic novels existed, I knew that was how I needed to tell my story.