UNDER THE COVERS
Author IRL
After two years of virtual meetings, the prospect of an actual face-to-face with her editor sends Gillian Harvey into a right old tizz
Gillian Harvey
Since 2020, we’ve all become more used to living virtually. In March 2020, like so many of us, I watched my ‘real life’ events and meetings get cancelled one by one and got used to meeting people via Zoom and Facetime. I live in France, which made travelling and in-person meetings a challenge even when the world opened up. Bizarrely this meant that I never met the two editors I worked with at my previous publisher, and never got to see my book in a UK bookstore (other than via a photo). Sometimes, my overactive imagination had me wondering whether my publishing ‘journey’ was all an elaborate hoax. Did my editor really exist? What about my agent? Was I really communicating with a publishing house in the UK, or some dark-web scammer in an unknown location with a penchant for editing and humorous prose?