Mike Murphy's writing diary: November 2019

Tuesday 26 November 2019

The new first novel in the Grey Nomads series is coming along nicely. I have been able to salvage quite a lot of material from Murder For A Grandmother, particularly in the background to the characters and the caravan park setting in the early chapters. Once I move into the investigation itself there will be less similarity because the murder and the characters involved in it will be quite different. I've written 6 chapters now for a total of more than 12,500 words. The aim is a minimum of 80,000 so I only have 34 more chapters to go. Allowing for Christmas interruptions that should be achievable by early next year.
I spent a lot of time at the Rockingham Writers Centre Book Fair over the weekend. I found it motivating to talk to the other writers there. Even though we work in different genres, the problems of writing and marketing are the same and it is always possible to pick up new ideas.
As usual the romance novels were the most popular but The Man Who Didn't Like People was among the books that achieved sales, so that was encouraging.

Thursday 21 November 2019

I haven't written anything here for months because I have been through some upheavals in my life and my writing. I'm not sure if the two are related.
In my life I sold my Walpole home and I now live in Rockingham where I am embarked on a bucket list programme, having been to Broome, flown in a helicopter over the Bungle Bungle and visited Paula Boer in NSW for the launch of her latest novel, The Bloodwolf War. Coming up next year are the Tamworth Country Music Festival, the Ghan and a Country Music cruise around some Pacific Islands.
Meanwhile I struggled with the Man Who Voted For Australia and Murder For A Grandmother before deciding to kill both darlings and launch into a new novel to replace Murder For A Grandmother as the first of the Grey Nomads series.
Working title Genesis, although the final title is almost certainly going to be The Grey Nomad Detectives to get the series off with a bang, as recommended by Kate Goldsworthy, who did a structural edit for me on Murder For A Grandmother.
It will have many of the personal story lines of Murder For A Grandmother but the murder itself is very different, and a lot less complicated (which was part of the reason that books wasn't working). I will also use a lot of Kate's other recommendations on character and story development.
I've written four chapters and I am now developing the outline to ensure all the clues, red herrings and crises come at the right places. It feels very good to be writing regularly again.

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.