Mike Murphy's writing diary: July 2021

Sunday 25 July 2021

Successful launch

Good crowd of past and present friends and family for the launch of A Life In Short Stories today. Son Darren gave the official launch speech and commented on how I had been writing all my life, sometimes going away from it but always coming back.
In my speech I talked about how much of me there was in the stories, not as a person but in the feelings my characters expressed. At least one other writer who was there was nodding vigorously,
Sold enough copies to cover the cost of the launch and go some way towards covering printing costs but that is not what I do it for. I am more than glad that there are now people out there reading what I have written.
Now I go on to my next projects, a collection of poetry and songs and a new novel,

Friday 9 July 2021

One new book and one new cover

Copies of my short story collection 'A Life In Short Stories' and the second edition of 'A New Era For Manny Youngman' have arrived and both should be available through Ingram Spark and on-line sites like Booktopia, Goodreads, Amazon and Kobol.

I am going to be interested to see the reaction to 'A Life In Short Stories'. In some ways it is a memoir, with notes about when and where I wrote each story, starting with the earliest written in the 1960s. Looking back over them now I can see themes that I have worked through around fairness and tolerance but there is no fixed theme or genre. My approach to writing them was always to write the best story I could, whether it was romance, science fiction or comedy.

To prove that they have stood the test of time, I selected a humorous story I wrote in 1967 and submitted it to the 2021 Best Of Times Short Story Competition. It won second prize.

Meanwhile, I have received favourable reaction to the new cover of "A New Era For Manny Youngman' Hopefully it results in more sales.

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.