Blindness Awareness Month: What it’s Like to be a Blind Author
October is National Blindness Awareness Month, and I’m coming in at the last minute with a blog post about what it’s like to be a blind author. My novel REDSIGHT doesn’t actually come out until February 27, 2024, but I’ve been involved enough at this point to give you all some insight into the process.
No one I can model my career after
One of the most obvious challenges for me as a blind writer was the absence of other blind authors to model my career after. This is an issue for many authors from marginalized communities, but sometimes, you may find other authors pursing traditional publishing in your same community. I haven’t really been able to find that either.
Which leads to the second problem.
No one to tell me what the difficult parts of the publishing process would be with my vision
For most things in life, I am not the first blind person to attempt something. In my day job, I’m a lawyer, and there are quite a few blind lawyers, even in my same legal practice area. I had blind classmates in law school. So I always had someone I could speak with about my studies or my work who understood what I was going through.
There are parts of publishing a novel that require authors to have vision. That doesn’t seem like it would be the case, because reading novels doesn’t require vision at all. Until I went through this process, I didn’t know it would be that way and no one warned me about it.
Relatability is another way to say Marketability
It’s common to get passes on material if the agent/editor doesn’t think the protagonist is relatable. The word “relatable” has become such a loaded term for that reason. Diverse books are getting acquired now, but only if they think they can easily market your work to a general audience. If you are from an extremely small marginalized community, or a community they’ve never heard of, they can’t imagine how to position the book.
Performative Allyship
Lots of people in book publishing bend over backwards to say they want submissions from marginalized creators, but they don’t take any steps to learn about those groups. Disability issues, especially, are forgotten in these blanket statements that the industry wants diverse books. In reality, they just don’t want to seem like a bad person in public.
Complete Disinterest in the Intersection of Possible Futures and Assistive Technology for People with Disabilities
I write science fiction and fantasy. For a genre that allegedly loves new worlds and strange concepts, most people in this genre have no interest in what the future could look like from a disability lens. Most science fiction that gets published today completely avoids examining the future in any way. It’s almost nostalgic in its complete focus on space opera adventures with ragtag crews. Books like that are fine, but the side of science fiction that’s focused on the technology we could have in the future—those stories are almost completely gone.
This is disappointing to me because I’d love the chance to examine sensory impairments in the near future, or the implications of high-functioning prosthetics 100 years from now. But the industry is not interested in stories like that because they’ve already picked one lane for sci-fi.
The Same Problems Regular Authors Have
Being a blind author does not exempt me from any of the regular issues authors deal with, such as having short deadlines or doing a ton of work on top of a day job. I still have to make silly social media posts when I’d rather be writing, I still have to worry about how well the book performs, I still have to work on projects with no assurance they’ll go anywhere.
Buy My Book
One of the best ways to support marginalized authors is to buy their books. I’ve included the pitch and a buy link for REDSIGHT below.
“An imaginative new space opera for fans of Gideon the Ninth filled with sapphic romance, space pirates, a blind witch and powerful priestesses
Korinna has simple priorities: stay on the Navitas, stay out of trouble, and stay alive. She may be a Redseer, a blind priestess with the power to manipulate space-time, but she is the weakest in her Order. Useless and outcast. Or so she has been raised to believe.
As she takes her place as a navigator on an Imperium ship, Korinna’s full destiny is revealed to her: blood brimming with magic, she is meant to become a weapon of the Imperium, and pawn for the Order that raised her. But when the ship is attacked by the notorious pirate Aster Haran, Korinna’s world is ripped apart.
Aster has a vendetta against the Imperium, and an all-consuming, dark power that drives her to destroy everything in her path. She understands the world in a way Korinna has never imagined, and Korinna is drawn to her against her better judgment.
With the Imperium and the justice-seeking warrior Sahar hot on her heels, Korinna must choose her side, seize her power and fulfil her destiny—or risk imperiling the future of the galaxy, and destroying the fabric of space-time itself.”