The Realm of Katherine Vick

  I’m not one of life’s natural proofreaders. There. I've confessed. This is a realisation that has come to me during this publication process as I have taken to my own work with a fine tooth comb to ensure that it is as mistake-free as possible for the attention of my publishers. Because one thing that undertaking this has really brought home to me is how the human brain works when it is reading – that it doesn’t read every word but gap fills the meaning for you. This, I’m sure you are aware, is a well known phenomenon and it’s one my brain seems particularly adept at – I have no problem with reading those strange sentences that people write in memes when they leave the first and last letter in place in a word and shuffle the inner letters, for example. I have a brain that, in that respect, likes to be helpful and extracts the meaning without taking any great note of the technicalities. The trouble is that doesn’t really help when one is trying to spot mistakes. My brain has a...

 The human imagination is an extraordinary thing, when you stop and think about it. Being as I am not of a scientific bent, I have no idea of the ins and outs of how it can possibly work, how it is that a lump of grey meat inside a wrapping of bone could possibly generate images, ideas, unheard sounds, regurgitate things once seen and create whole new universes out of nothing. Indeed, to be honest, I don’t want to understand how it works - that would destroy the magic. I’m quite happy just to have the means to play in new and never before seen realms in the depths of my own head. But there is another special thing about the imagination – it is unique. It is a strange thing to consider that no one will ever see my characters exactly how I do. Oh, I can describe them down to the freckles on their noses but one of the beauties of books and taking a world out of words rather than pictures is that everyone’s imagination will give it their own slant. Even the finest description in t...