What it’s like to make news

• 11th January 2014
• 2

• Categories:

•  
  • Mary Shelley
  • Uncategorised
  • writing and story telling

• Tags:

•  agents, fiction writing;, novels, Writing

Over the last three days I’ve experienced at second hand what it is like to be sought after by the media. It’s been exciting. My friend Nora Crook, Professor Emerita at Anglia Ruskin University and a noted Shelley scholar, has discovered some Mary Shelley letters in the Essex Record Office and the news ‘broke’ while she was staying with me.

Phone calls from PR people. A live telephone interview for the radio. Two national newspapers vying for the story. The requirement to write 250 words  within two hours.

Then the rushed departure for home to get to the hairdresser’s before a television interview.

Nora coped smilingly with it all while her husband Keith and I tried to keep equally calm.

Now they have gone I am back to my own little worries: will the agent take me on? And will I reach the short list of a novel competition in which I have been long-listed? Oh, if only I could have been married to Percy Bysshe and written Frankenstein…