Mike Murphy's writing diary: May 2018

Saturday, 26 May 2018

Interesting times

I have a lot going on in my writing - one novel about to be published, seeking a professional editor for another and writing another.

The one about to be published is The Man Who Didn't Like People. I'm doing it through Ingram Spark and it should be on Internet book sites and available to book shops in a few weeks. I had hoped it would be earlier but there was a hiccup with the wrong version being uploaded at one stage - all my own fault.
Here's the cover:

That's me in the picture. I took it on the back firebreak with a sensor-triggered camera.
It's the story of a man who has been a recluse for about twenty years after leaving his wife and children and going bush. Now he has to return to find them and make some decisions that will effect all of their futures.
As with my first novel, A New Era For Manny Youngman, I have taken a man with unconventional views of life and faced him with a situation that challenges those views. The aim is not to discredit them but to explore them, to see how they came about and whether they have any relevance to the rest of society.
It is strictly fiction but I have drawn heavily on where I live and my thoughts about the Australian bush and living in a small country town. They always say write about you know.

I am seeking a professional editor for Murder For A Grandmother, the first of a series about a group of elderly people travelling around in caravans solving murders. I have been sitting on this for a long time while I have partially written a second and third book in the series. My aim is to bring out the first and have the second and third available while readers are asking for them. So far I have a short list of two or three possible editors and will be making a decision in the next couple of days.

The new novel I am writing is A Vote For Australia Day, based on the debate over whether Australia Day should be celebrated on April 26th. My protagonist is a British-born migrant who finds himself caught up in the debate because his Australian-born daughters are on opposite sides. He is also faced with making a business decision which involves some controversial aspects of multiculturalism and a brother who arrives from England to head-up the takeover of an Australian business by foreign interests. Add in an MP friend who has had to resign for having citizenship rights in another country, and a romantic interest with a woman of Chinese ancestry and it is shaping up as an interesting story.

While doing all of this I am maintaining my websites mybigbangthoughts.com, mikemurphythewriter.com and deependinhabitants.com and keeping up a strong presence on my own and other Facebook pages.

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.