By Gary Dalkin

I volunteered to write this post – no one else wanted the slot due to a very tight deadline – because I thought I had an inspiring story ready to tell, a story that began on Monday 9 June and was still unfolding. (It’s Wednesday 11 June as I write this, and the post is due at Write Path Towers by Friday the 13^th — what could go wrong?)

But then real life added a plot twist. One I had considered as a possibility, but figured wouldn’t really happen, so I wrote most of the post, and then the twist happened anyway. Perhaps knowing the way publishing sometimes works it was too obvious, too predictable.

All of which means that this is a story about how yesterday (10 June) I came to think I’d been published by Princeton University Press but hadn’t known about it for the last nine months. Which I imagine is a bit like being pregnant for nine months before finding out, if less painful. Though in Frankenstein Mary Shelley wrote that ‘Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.’ And given she had five children, she should have known.

It’s also a story involving the Bournemouth Romance Writing Festival, which is a new sister festival to the Bournemouth Writing Festival, which I’m very involved with … and… this is getting complicated, so let’s pretend this is a movie and have an info dumping flashback!

Mary Shelley and her family, including the heart of her husband, the great romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, are buried in the dead centre of Bournemouth, where I live, and back in 2010 I organised a crossover event between the old Poole Literary Festival and the Purbeck Film Festival which included showings of the 1931 Frankenstein, and Gothic, the 1986 film about the sojourn in Switzerland in 1816 when Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein and began writing it. That event included a panel beforehand with screenwriter John Foster, local writer Christine Aziz, and myself. Writers meanwhile, note the themes; festivals, Romantics, panels, Frankenstein. Suffice to say, I’ve long been fascinated by Mary Shelley, her world, and her most famous novel.

Now imagine it is Monday 9 June 2025. I turn on my phone and am astonished to see a message from the director of the Bournemouth Writing Festival, Dominic Wong, asking if I’d like to chair a panel at the Romance Writing Festival in October exploring the idea of ‘A Sense of Place’. The panel is to feature the bestselling novelists Phillipa Ashley, Holly McCulloch, Jo Thomas, and President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, Sue Moorcroft.

Of course I replied, ‘I’d love to.’ Who’d turn that opportunity down?

My wife, when I told her, and who always says I’m such a romantic, was bemused.

Since becoming involved with the Bournemouth Writing Festival, and especially following this year’s festival in April, a lot of very good things have happened regarding my work as a writer and editor. I was discussing this with a friend recently (Sophie Beal, the director of Cadence Publishing, with whom I gave a talk with at the festival, Organising Chaos: Turn a Messy Draft into a Publishable Book) and she said that she thought it was because if you build a positive culture in which we all lift each other up, everyone benefits. Organising Chaos had sold out at the festival in 2024, and this year it proved to be the most successful talk, panel or workshop of the entire three days.

Now the amazing thing is, and this is a coincidence that wouldn’t fly in good fiction, that when Dominic invited me to chair the panel about a sense of place it had nothing to do with the fact that I had written four chapters for a book called Literary Wonderlands (2017) and a further chapter for the follow-up, Literary Landscapes (2018). Both of which were published by Modern Books in the UK and Blackdog & Leventhal in the US. The idea behind these beautifully illustrated books was to explore classic novels from the perspective of the places in which they were set, whether imagined or real. My chapter in the second book was about Jane Austen’s Persuasion, which I think you’ll agree is a very romantic book. But Dominic didn’t actually know any of this.

So on Tuesday morning (yesterday as I’m writing this) I thought I’d let him know, and went online to find information about the two books. Now back in 2019 I was commissioned to write a chapter for a third book in the ‘Literary’ series, Literary Journeys — a dream project for me, as I was asked to write about Mary Shelley and the travels in Frankenstein. But then, after I submitted my chapter the book was cancelled, and before we knew it, we were deep into a global pandemic, like a rehearsal for Mary Shelley’s ‘other’ science fiction novel, the far less well known, The Last Man.

Back in the present, there I am, searching for Literary Landscapes on the internet, and I see a book called Literary Journeys. The cover is in exactly the same style as Landscapes and Wonderlands. The book has finally been published, five years late, in September 2024 as it turns out, nine months ago, and not by Modern Books, but by Princeton University Press in the USA.

This is an amazing discovery.

I’ve been published, in hardback, by one of the top academic presses in the world and I didn’t even know it!

But already there is one little doubt. There was no Kindle edition where I could download a free sample and see the contents pages, and no listing that I could find online documenting the contributors.

But surely, I thought, it’s the same book.

I must be in it.

Of course I did what anyone would do, and ordered the book. But then I decided to contact Princeton University Press and request a contributor’s copy. I received a very nice email back, apologising that no one had let me know the volume was published and for not sending me a copy, though explaining that the contractual obligations to contributors were the responsibility of a co-publisher, but that Princeton would still send me a copy asap anyway, and thanking me for my ‘fantastic contribution’ to Literary Journeys.

Then last night I received an invitation to write this post, and the whole story unfolded fully developed in my mind, an inspiring piece about how when we all work together to lift each other up as writers wonderful things happen, the example being that in the last two days I’d both been asked to chair an amazing panel at the Romance Writing Festival which linked directly into my interest in place going right back to when I took a geography degree over 40 years ago, and then I’d found out as a result of that invitation that a book I contributed to six years ago on one of my favourite subjects – and one closely tied to local literary history – had finally been published.

The request for the post was for a helpful or encouraging story about a personal writing experience or journey. Indeed, a literary journey. My wife, who says I sometimes take things too literally, would appreciate the irony.

And so to this morning. Wednesday. The copy of Literary Journeys that I ordered yesterday arrived. And while there’s a chapter in it about Frankenstein, it’s not the one I wrote. But I don’t know who did write it, because while in the back of the volume there’s a list of contributors along with thumbnail biographies, there’s no indication of who wrote what. All I can conclude is that when the project was revived with Princeton the new editor, whose name I forget, didn’t like my chapter and commissioned a replacement. And because I wasn’t included in the finished book, naturally I was never notified of its publication or sent a contributor’s copy. Even though a nice person at Princeton yesterday thanked me for my ‘fantastic contribution’. Wires have been well and truly crossed.

Oh well, for a brief few hours I enjoyed the prestige of being published by a heavyweight university press. But I’m still chairing a fantastic panel at the Romance Writing Festival in October, and the editor of L******* J******* (whose name I still can’t remember) isn’t.

Gary Dalkin is an editor and writer, including Senior Associate Editor with Cadence Publishing. He writes every month for Writing Magazine, the UK’s bestselling magazine for writers.

Gary is online at: https://tothelastword.com/ where you can find out much more about him, including contact details should you wish to discuss hiring him to edit your book

You are invited to join To The Last Word on Facebook, a group Gary administers about writing, books, authors and publishing: https://www.facebook.com/groups/tothelastword

Follow Gary on Bluesky at: @garydalkin.bsky.social‬

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