Mike Murphy's writing diary: On a roll

Wednesday 3 February 2021

On a roll

Not only can I transcribe my old hard-copy stories using the OCR capacity in Onenote, but I've realised I can read them direct into Word using the "dictate" feature in the top right corner of the Home page. I really should have read the manual when I started using computers. I wonder what other clever things it can do?😊

So, I have been transcribing stories for my anthology using both methods (my voice gets a little tired doing only dictation), I have completed a first draft of a christmas children's story I am so pleased with I am thinking of making it into an illustrated book, and the germ of an idea for a new novel is starting to sprout into something more tangible in the back of my mind.

I have one other short story I have to get beyond the first opening sentences and then all my current writing projects will be moving along nicely.

All this has been helped immensely by being in lockdown because of Covid. There's no pressure on me to get out and make as if I want to be part of the rest of the world. I suspect it was the feeling I had to do that and have a busy social life that contributed to the hiatus in my writing through most of last year.

Now I am back writing I know what I always knew before - that this is who I am, misanthropic old hermit or not.😉

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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.