About Marilyn Francis
This story is an amalgamation of two separate pieces that I'd been working on. Neither seemed to be working out particularly well and I began to think that it might be interesting to see whether I could weave the two into a single story. I thought it might be fun to attempt a light parody of both ends of the literary spectrum – popular fiction and literary fiction. To that end, I included references, some more oblique than others, to both popular and elite culture – Raymond Chandler and Tom Waits/ Virginia Woolf and D H Lawrence.
I haven't been writing fiction very long. Most of my writing has been about British Cinema (so far unpublished!). My meagre published works to date consist of three disgusted-Tunbridge-Wells letters, and one poem. Two of the letters were published in the Guardian Saturday arts review and the other was in the London Review of Books. The poem 'Happily Ever After' has been recently published in an Earlyworks Press Poetry Anthology, Digitally Organic.
I'm always trying to keep to a writing schedule, but tedious things like having to earn a crust keep getting in the way. I do, however, try to do some writing every day. I find that keeping a notebook provides invaluable source of inspiration and I always have two on the go; one to carry around and a larger one at home. But, when I actually get down to it I type directly on to an old Toshiba laptop that I picked up cheap on ebay.
I live just outside Bath in, what was once, the Somerset coalfield (now defunct), with Paul the would-be famous photographer and Mary the would-be world class mouser... .
Read Marilyn's short story Pulp Fiction