Adrian’s Journey

Hello out there,

I wanted to talk a little about Adrian, the book I wrote. It’s currently being edited and I talked a little about that in the First Adrian Excerpt.

Lets start at the beginning. In October of 2018 I found a lump on my right breast. I was extremely scared and made a doctors appointment immediately. I did this without telling anyone about it.

They signed me up to get some tests done. A mammogram and a biopsy. I made an appointment but it was two months away. For all of November and December I was freaking out.

Luckily it didn’t seem to be growing. My doctor also had me get blood tests and I was seeing him around once a month.

Around that time I started re-reading this really great online serial. Its name is The Saga of Tuck. It’s about a boy in 1997, that as a joke his girlfriend dresses him up like a girl. He ends up fooling everyone. It’s a really great story and I’ll leave a link to it here.

I read the whole thing while I was waiting for the appointment. Around January 1st after I finally got the tests done I started panicking and entered a deep depression. To save my sanity, I decided to throw myself into a project. 

That’s when I started writing Adrian.

At first I started the book as if it were my life, however, with the best possible outcome for being a trans person. I felt as if I were dying and needed to get my story out. So much of the book is crammed with experiences from my life.

Around march of 2019 I told my parents about what I’d found and that I was waiting for biopsy results. They were very supportive and tried to make me feel comfortable. 

Around mid March my mom and I went in to get the results. They told us it was benign.

It was a huge weight off of my shoulders. However, it didn’t diminish my depressed state. I had survivor’s guilt.

As time passed I learned how to use my emotions and put them into my work. I started feeling better and then my grandmother died. I used my new emotion redirection skills and put them into the book. 

Then I finished it on June 9th. I was in the middle of editing it with my good friend Leila from a writers group when my cat died.

I had a hard time writing after that. I wrote a few screenplays and recorded them with our film group. (Which you can read more about here.). They were small, 1 to 2 pages long, and didn’t really feel like an accomplishment.

Getting out of the house to film them was really good for me. Filming introduced me to some really nice people.

By the end of the year I thought that 2020 could never be as bad as 2019.

I was wrong obviously. Between the protests, the pandemic, being stuck in the house when I had just found new friends, was all pretty devastating. I dealt with it by writing. I started around 3 new projects, one of them being a sequel to the first book.

Now Adrian is being edited and I’m trying to be patient. I want to tear into it and fix it so I can sent it out to an agent or self publish it.

The sequel is around half way finished at 40 thousand words. I’m optimistic about the future and am excited to see these works to completion.

Thank you for reading my story about Adrian,
Katherine