About

About

My name is Abi Payton and welcome to my website!

I’ve long enjoyed writing as a creative outlet. As a teenager, I wrote a lot of fan fiction and some of my own original fiction; I wrote about mental health, about difficulties at home, and about being gay, as fiction.

I started properly writing When the Lonely Walk in 2020, when lockdown hit, and being inside all the time led to me thinking over bad memories. Just prior to this, I was published in Rife magazine, where I wrote an article about leaving hospital and rebuilding my life in Bristol (you can read the article here). This was so well received – especially by friends and family – that these two events combined gave me a nugget of an idea of something I could write as fiction.

The story focuses on Heather and a lot of her story is based on my own experiences, most specifically of being a struggling teenager and of turning eighteen within the mental health system. I was first admitted to psychiatric hospital aged 16; as my mental health declined, writing fiction started to take a back seat. Whilst I did complete some writing projects at times in hospital, I tended to veer instead towards writing in my diary about how I was feeling and the things that were going on around me. I didn’t realise at the time that I would end up turning these things into fiction.

When I was looking through my computer one day during lockdown, I found an old draft of a short story about an incident where I myself climbed over the back fence of the hospital and went on the run. Something about it struck me, and I suddenly decided that I was going to develop the idea properly – and so ‘When the Lonely Walk’ was born.

My second book is very nearly finished and I’m very excited about it. The second book is a sequel to ‘When the Lonely Walk’ though it draws less on my real-life experience, and instead tells the story of one of the characters that features in my first novel – to tell you which character would unfortunately give too much away! I hope it is something that you will consider looking out for and reading when the time comes.