Mike Murphy's writing diary: August 2018

Tuesday, 14 August 2018

Heading for sun and research

I'm heading to Broome next week to, among other things, do some research for one of the Grey Nomad novels that will be set there. So far I have booked for visits to a crocodile park, a bird sanctuary, a pearl farm, a hovercraft flight and 4WD expedition and sea plane flight. It's the Shinju Matsuri festival so there will be dragon boat races and float parades and a lot more besides. Should be plenty among that to add colour to the story of my Grey Nomad detectives solving an old murder.
Meanwhile I am waiting for a report from an editor on the first in the Grey Nomad series and hope to have that published later this year or early next. The second is two thirds written and won't be long after that and a third is also well on the way.
Hesitating at the moment over whether to write this series under a pen-name. My two published novels, as Mike Murphy, are a different genre and I'm not sure whether it is a good or a bad thing to use the same name in different genres.

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.