Mary Shelley: Knock, knock. Who’s there? It’s me, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. I know everyone loves it, but darlings, that wasn’t the half of it. What I wanted to write, what I needed to say, I couldn’t. I couldn’t even think it. Then I got a cancer of the brain and I couldn’t write at all, so I died. Immediately I woke to find myself here, wherever the fuck here is. And here I’ve stayed for centuries, trying to find some way of getting this tumor, this dream, this story out of my head. Darlings, something is cracking. The words are beginning to come. Is it a ghost story? A horror story? Or most frightening of all, a love story?
That is how it is sometimes, a tumor or a dream trapped in your head. You want to make it come alive. You have to. You have to get it out somehow.
But it never is exactly how you plan it or picture it. You just let it happen. You let your fingers start typing.
Then you put it out into the world because you want them to know. You want it to come true.
If you don’t say it out loud, then there is no way it can, right?
Lisa Gray 