Mike Murphy's writing diary: 2021 Update

Friday, 29 January 2021

2021 Update

The new year has started off brilliantly. I am writing again after a long spell thinking I wasn't going to write another word.I am compiling an anthology of about 30 of my short stories, writing two short stories for the up-coming anthology of the Rockingham Writers Centre and starting to put down some ideas for my next novel.

Meanwhile, my two novels: A New Era For Manny Youngman and The Man Who Didn't Like People; are among the best sellers at the Friends of Rockingham Arts Community exhibition which has been running all this week and will be on again in March. I'm not sure why there has been this burst of interest in them but it may be because I have become more involved in the Writers Centre activities and have taken over as convenor of their short story group. Some of the members who hadn't heard of me may have decided to check out my novels to see if they are any good.

Not that I worry why people read my books as long as they do.

With the anthology of my own stories. it may take some time as a lot of my early stories were pre-digital and will have to be transcribed from the hard copies I have kept in drawers for a couple of decades. The earliest go back to the 1960s.

It has been fascinating to revisit them. I can see a period in my twenties when I was first published and sent off story after story, a long hiatus while I aimed at a more up-market publication without any success, then back to where I could get published. By then my life had moved on, I was married and had children and was busy running my writing business, which included writing for clients and not for publication.

During this time I started writing a number of novels without getting any of them to publishable stage. That was very much a learning period. I did write some short stories, mainly aimed at competitions.

Around 2011 I had success with a couple of minor competitions and that set me off on a burst of short story writing.

Finally I started writing novels again, having by then learned what I needed to do, and A New Era For Manny Youngman and The Man Who Didn't Like People were published.

However, trying to write another novel took me down a dead end, mainly I believe because I was trying to write for a market and not what I wanted to write. That dried up and I stopped writing for about a year. Now I'm back in the writing harness again and it feels good.

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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.