Mike Murphy's writing diary: Steaming ahead

Sunday, 20 August 2017

Steaming ahead

Eight months since my last post and in that time I have completed the first draft of The Man Who Didn't Like People and most of a structural edit and revise. The finished novel is going to be somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 words and I am much more satisfied with the build up to the final scenes than I was with the first draft. I have not yet decided on the exact ending and will be offering two possible endings to my Beta Readers to see their reaction. This is perhaps not as dramatic as it sounds as both versions will have the same outcome but one will leave the reader with a slightly softer, more gentle feeling.
As soon as I get it finished and off to the Beta Readers I will be returning to my Grey Nomad detective series with the plan being to get one off to a possible publisher as soon as possible. Two of the novels are written and others are partly written or in outline form but I made some significant pov changes in the final version of the first of the series and will have to adapt the rest to be consistent. It is not a major task and something I can get on with while the publisher is making a decision.

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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.