Mike Murphy's writing diary

Monday, 3 August 2015

Back on track
For a short period there, after receiving no feedback from a submission to Allen & Unwin with Murder For A Grandmother, I almost gave up writing. I told me dear friend and critiquer Paula Boer and she told me I was being silly.
She's right, of course. This morning I started preparing a submission to Fremantle Press and I have re-visited a cover design I had previously started for A New Era For Manny Youngman which I now intend to self-publish, Alisa Krasnostein of Twelfth Planet Press has offered to help me with that,
I have an idea it's necessary to set up your own publishing company so I'm toying with possible names for one, Deep End Publishing, New Era Publishing and Never Too Old Publishing are some of the ideas I've had,
I have also, obviously come back to this Blog page and I will be doing more work on my webpage at mikemurphythewriter.com. The theory is the web-page will be a fairly static promotion of what I have done and what I am doing while this page will be where I run my thoughts and theories,
Time will tell if it is going to work,
Of course, I'm not getting much response from either page, but I am going to work on that too. I'll try to attract people to them and, hopefully, get into some conversations,
All part of the way forward, which is the only way I can go.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Authors I like

Anna Jacobs

A mentor in my early writing days and still one of my favourite authors. Her sagas about family life in Lancashire are among my favourites but she is a prolific writer and it's all good.

Michael Robotham

Michael urged me to keep writing when I was in a depressed period after another publisher's knock-back. He is basically why I kept writing and turned to self-publishing. I've read all his books and I'm always waiting eagerly for the next one.

Dave Warner

I only recently discovered Dave as a writer after having had his Dave Warner and The Suburbs album since it was on vinyl. It's interesting having another writer who sets his stories in Western Australia.

Dick Francis

I've read all his books at least twice and sometime more often. He's the writer I always return to when I need to feel totally in my comfort zone. Good stories, tight plots, easy writing style. I'd love to know if it really was his wife Mary who wrote them. His son Felix is doing a great job of keeping the family business going.

Leslie Thomas

Ever since Virgin Soldiers I've been hooked on Leslie Thomas and his Dangerous Davies series are among my all-time favourites.

I am because I write

I come across a lot of people who would like to be writers and I often wonder why. For me there has been no question. Since a very young age I have been a writer. Certainly not a famous or even successful one but while other people were doctors or teachers or sportspeople, the thing I did best and was most comfortable doing was writing. For some reason I had a natural flair for it and that raw talent was honed when I became a journalist and learned that what bubbled out of my head was not what was needed. I had to to be able to write to order. One of my earliest lessons came from Bob Duffield, a reporter who took the story of the closure of Perth's Roe Street brothels and wrote different versions of it for convervative, sensationalist, religious and sociological publications. I learned that writing was a craft to be learned, and I have spent many years learning not only the craft of writing, but of story-telling, which is an art in itself. Whether it's a poem, a short story, a novel, my family history, one of my blogs or web sites, I will always be writing something. It's simply who I am and what I do.