WATCH: Blind author tells her story
When asked how her self-published novel had enriched her life, she said it proved to her that she could do it and gave her a huge boost in confidence.
Calmly navigating about the house she shares with her architect husband, *Kathryn Ford (32) envisions her own world, and in it, she wrote her first novel.
The blind Clearwater Estate resident’s novel is titled The Transfer and tells the story of Ashlyn Cooper.
Ashlyn is your average teenager in her final year of high school. She isn’t too bad at school and is quite sporty. She has a good group of friends and even though her parents are divorced, she is not a troubled teen.
Her neat little world comes crashing down when the transfer swaggers into her life. Enter Jamie Russle – he is tall, dark and cute. His hazel eyes sparkle with mischief and with one look he turns Ashlyn’s world upside down.
As Kathryn explained the premise of her young adult romance novel, she also explained how she was born blind due to cone dystrophy.
“I can see light and dark and a few shadows, but nothing more.
“The cones deal with the light in your eyes, so I find bright sunlight quite painful. Unfortunately there is nothing they can do to fix it. But I am content with who I am,” said Kathryn, who grew up in Kempton Park.
Her favourite stories growing up were JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien. As an adult, she mainly reads epic fantasy and paranormal romance and dystopian novels.
However, she adds: “I must give a special mention to Simon R Green, who writes something that is urban fantasy mixed with crime, mixed with black comedy, mixed with a whole dose of originality.
“His books have opened my mind and made me realise that the sky is the limit.”
Kathryn has always been fond of writing and started young, writing “childish stories” about ponies having a picnic or a girl finding a stray kitten.
When asked about her challenges as a blind author, she said: “My biggest challenge is my bipolar disorder. I was diagnosed in 2009. It made writing very hard because some days I’d have very bad days and wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.
“This was debilitating and brought my production level to a bare minimum. In February 2019, I spent a month in hospital.”
When she came out, she said it was as though a veil had been lifted, as if she was experiencing the world for the first time.
“One day I picked up my keyboard and just began to write and I didn’t stop until the whole story had been written.”
In terms of her blindness, Kathryn said she has challenges in that she doesn’t always know what things look like.
“Luckily I have my husband and parents to help me in this regard. I often struggle with facial expressions and people’s body expressions.”
She uses a program on her computer called NVDA.
“It is a screen-to-voice program. So, say I type an ‘A’, it would read it back to me. If I write a word and press the space bar it would read the whole word to me.
“I also have an old-fashioned Braille machine which I seldom use now. But I do use it to make quick notes and will be using it at any signings I do, to do my signing in Braille.”
She also explained the process she underwent in self-publishing The Transfer: “I wrote the novel and let it lie for a month before I did the first edit. I finally sent it to an editor and to some beta readers.”
She took all the feedback and tried to listen to as much of it as possible without making serious changes to the book.
“I started a Facebook page where I would post updates on the book and how the publishing process was going. If you’d like to follow me on Facebook, just type in ‘Kathryn Ford – Author’ and you’ll find me. It will be great to have each and every one of you on board.”
The Transfer is available here.
*Pseudonym used by the author.
