Mike Murphy's writing diary

Wednesday, 5 August 2015

The first 1800 words of Why Kill A Grandmother are down on paper. The two main characters for this book are Joan and Tom Burton, very different to Debby and Athol and able to give a new slant on what it means being a Grey Nomad Detective, on their friends, and on life in general.
I've set it in Rockingham, which I know well, but I may shift it later because Rockingham is rather a large town and it will be hard to create the "tight community effected by murder" which was one of the basic concepts I had for the series, I didn't have it in the first book so perhaps it won't prove so basic after all.
I've started with Joan in the caravan park laundry where she meets a tall woman with long silver hair and a pale lilac kaftan, This is actually a character I created and then dropped from the first book. She'll be a mysterious hippy type with something going on in her life which will intrigue Joan and become one of the sub-plots,
Tom is in the the woodwork shed at the local autumn centre helping with one of their projects and finding out what he can about the murder of Sylvia Marchant, a very ordinary, much loved grandmother who was found bludgeoned to death for no obvious reason.
I know the reason - but not much else about is going to happen in the next 80,000 words,

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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.