Moving in several new directions,. I have downloaded Scrivener to put together the second novel in the Grey Nomads series and also to take a second look at some of my earlier novels to see whether they are worth resurrecting.
I can see some immediate advantages in having all the files in one place where it is easy to change from one to another but I am not sure about some of the other features. I guess tome and practice with it will tell.
At this stage I am developing the various threads of the Nomads story - the main investigation of the murder - sub-plots for each of the main characters. At the same time I am writing character sketches. Trying to stick to the KISS principle - I don't want to bog down on this preparation, just use it as a framework to start writing around.

After some fiddling to get the technology sorted out I have finally been able to access my old floppy disks on which most of my earlier writing is stored, It has been a fascinating experience.
I found a story called Dear Girl, written in 1992, which turns out to be the earliest version of what eventually became A New Era For Manny Youngman, It contains none of the male/female relationship theorising I later included and started with Manny, a plumber, not an architect, arriving home to find the pink car parked outside his flat, A lot of the events survived but I later used them in different ways. I guess if I kept a writer's journal I would have a record of how the final novel evolved from those beginnings.
I also found "Capricorn" - 12,000 words of a proposed novel about a man who wakes up from unconsciousness to find he has been dumped in a desert by the husband of a woman he has been having an affair with. Attempting to walk to safety he comes across the woman, who has also been dumped out in the middle of nowhere, and the two of them find a way to survive together, plotting to get back and take their revenge on her husband, I remember the genesis of that story. We were driving north along the coast on our way to Exmouth and there is a stretch where there are huge areas of craggy limestone desert. I imagined being stranded in it and the story grew from there, Not sure why I stopped writing it. It still sounds like a good plot.
I also found the beginnings of a novel that was originally titled "Rebecca" and was about a young woman who had been sacked from her job but was reinstated when the ownership of the company changed hands. I'm not sure now where it was headed because I obviously launched into it without a plan. Again, the premise sounds good, She could rise through the ranks, take revenge on whoever sacked her, etc etc. It could become a romance or a story about the difficulties of being a modern woman in a world that still largely male dominated, Maybe I should take another look at it.
The trouble is there have been so many ideas over the years. Perhaps I should leave them as that - old ideas - and concentrate my efforts in new directions.

Past 3,000 words on the first draft of the second Grey Nomad novel, The second chapter starts with Joan's feelings about herself and about the caravan park. Working from her pov is fascinating as I have to imagine myself as an elderly, gossipy woman without having someone else physical describe her. How to show my reader that she is short, has frizzy white hair and her shirt always falling out of her jeans without having someone else saying it. I think I have found a way by having her thinking about herself and about how other people see her. It's been an interesting exercise but I need to move on with the story now, introduce some of the other characters and some tension to hold the reader's interest.

It's funny how things combine to give you a new idea, In the first Grey Nomads book I had a character named Sissy Wildflower who was meant to be a willowy hippy type who drove a chartreuse mini-bus with flowers painted on the side, She dropped out of the story mainly because I had too many other characters who were more important to the plot. Now I'm on the second book I was thinking of bring her back, Then I watched a video on Stevie Nicks and saw her gypsy/fairy like images floating around, and I was watching a Black List DVD which mentioned gypsies and the idea started to take shape. I make Sissy one of a band of gypsies or gypsy-like people. It would be natural for the Grey Nomads to meet them. travelling on the road. The way it would fit into the story is that the gypsies could have been travelling this route for years and some of them could have been around at the time the murder was committed, They would't have spoken to the police or may have been suspected at the time, but they could supply the Grey Nomads with information that helps solve the murder, It makes a good thread to try out in the outline I am working on.

Have started on the self-publishing process for A New Era For Manny Youngman. It isn't simple, not for someone who hasn't a lot of computer skills outside straight word processing and desktop publishing, There is a lot of software and online sites around but knowing which is the right one is not easy, Started off in something called Canva but discovered when it said design a book cover it meant a kindle cover, not a full back and sides with spine book cover. However, they did have a good picture I was able to purchase for only $1. Finally found Adobe Cloud In-design which allows for the full cover design and the internal text design. Being helped by my daughter who is more tech savvy and by Karen McDermott of Serenity Press who has been down this road many times for herself and others and has given valuable advice like the fact that I need an ISBN number. Seems we have to decide the inside first before we can see how many pages there will be, which will decide the width of the spine.
This afternoon I wrote the dedication and the blurb about myself and the book to go on the inside and back cover. Also re-edited the final draft to single spacing and deleted the title page I sued for submissions. Somehow I always thought someone else would be doing all this but if this is they way I have to go to see myself in print, then so be it.

The first 1800 words of Why Kill A Grandmother are down on paper. The two main characters for this book are Joan and Tom Burton, very different to Debby and Athol and able to give a new slant on what it means being a Grey Nomad Detective, on their friends, and on life in general.
I've set it in Rockingham, which I know well, but I may shift it later because Rockingham is rather a large town and it will be hard to create the "tight community effected by murder" which was one of the basic concepts I had for the series, I didn't have it in the first book so perhaps it won't prove so basic after all.
I've started with Joan in the caravan park laundry where she meets a tall woman with long silver hair and a pale lilac kaftan, This is actually a character I created and then dropped from the first book. She'll be a mysterious hippy type with something going on in her life which will intrigue Joan and become one of the sub-plots,
Tom is in the the woodwork shed at the local autumn centre helping with one of their projects and finding out what he can about the murder of Sylvia Marchant, a very ordinary, much loved grandmother who was found bludgeoned to death for no obvious reason.
I know the reason - but not much else about is going to happen in the next 80,000 words,

Back on track
For a short period there, after receiving no feedback from a submission to Allen & Unwin with Murder For A Grandmother, I almost gave up writing. I told me dear friend and critiquer Paula Boer and she told me I was being silly.
She's right, of course. This morning I started preparing a submission to Fremantle Press and I have re-visited a cover design I had previously started for A New Era For Manny Youngman which I now intend to self-publish, Alisa Krasnostein of Twelfth Planet Press has offered to help me with that,
I have an idea it's necessary to set up your own publishing company so I'm toying with possible names for one, Deep End Publishing, New Era Publishing and Never Too Old Publishing are some of the ideas I've had,
I have also, obviously come back to this Blog page and I will be doing more work on my webpage at mikemurphythewriter.com. The theory is the web-page will be a fairly static promotion of what I have done and what I am doing while this page will be where I run my thoughts and theories,
Time will tell if it is going to work,
Of course, I'm not getting much response from either page, but I am going to work on that too. I'll try to attract people to them and, hopefully, get into some conversations,
All part of the way forward, which is the only way I can go.

After many years of saying I would never self-publish I am about to succumb. My latest novel has received its first rejection and while I have been down this path many times before I know at my age the chances of eventually finding a publisher are diminishing exponentially.
I am going to self publish "A New Era For Manny Youngman" because, of all my novels, it is the one which contains something I want to say and is not just a story for the sake of telling a story.
I am also going to put my short stories into a book and self-publish that.
Meanwhile, however. I am going to perservere with Murder For A Grandmother and will submit it to Fremantle Press to see if it can find a home there,
If it it doesn't I will probably give up trying to continue the Grey Nomads series, Instead I will try a one-off novel so that I am not locking myself into an on-going commitment, My idea of a man returning to find and anonymously review the family he left behind is a possibility.
Another meanwhile is that I still have the next in the Grey Nomad series.

Draft completed

I have completed the first draft - 87,000 words - of Murder For A Grandmother. Two people have seen it and their view is that it is good but still needs work. Now I have to decide where the work has to be done. Some of it is obvious but other areas are subjective matters of judgment and at the end of the day I am the one who has to decide. I plan to work in scenes with a checklist of what that scene has to achieve and what has to be done within it. Along the way I hope some of the broader issues will make themselves clear and I will work through them. Hope to start on it tomorrow or maybe Monday.

So much has changed - but not my writing

A lot has happened to me in the  past eighteen months. My wife died and I moved from my home on a remote property on the south coast, where I was becoming increasingly lonely and depressed, to a suburban lifestyle sharing a house with my daughter.
So much has changed, but one thing is constant - my writing. I have completed the first draft of my latest novel and I'm two thirds of the way through the first major edit. It will be ready soon to go to a writer friend to be critiqued. In some ways my writing was my salvation. By making myself sit down at the keyboard every morning (well, most mornings), I gave myself goals to work towards and an intellectual exercise to keep my mind what was causing me to be depressed.
There were days when I had to force myself to write and, in the rewriting process, it is very clear where that happened. The important thing is that there is a framework there, an on-going story line within which I can now improve the writing.
I have had to close the writers retreat but it was pleasant on those occasions where I did have writers in residence. Now I am working on the creation of a writers centre near my new home. An invitation to local writers to attend the launch later this month produced more than 30 responses so I am very hopeful it will be a success.

I am a writer

When I was eighteen, which happens to have been more than half a century ago, I wrote a poem titled "Shall all my tears" which asked "Shall I be a writer?" and said "writers have a meaning, what meaning have I?". Borrowing from Omar Khayam, I concluded by wondering whether me tears would wash out every word.
Looking back I believe now I missed the point. Writers don't need any deep meaning, they just have an idea and the inner drive to shape words around it. More than that, they have the inner drive to write better, to work at their words to give that idea life.
The reason I am writing this today is that I have been thinking a lot lately about how I want my life to be in the fifteen or so years I probably have left of my life, and the one constant is that I want to be somewhere I can write. To that extent I can answer myself of 1959 that I have indeed become a writer. Not a published novelist, which I would have liked. Certainly a published short story writer, although none of my stories is likely to be studied in literature classes. I write. It's who I am. It's as simple as that and it's nothing to cry about.

Personality types

I Googled personality types and found a web site which sets out 16 different personality types according to the Myers Briggs code. I have no idea whether they are realistic, although I understand they are used by many companies to vet staff and allocated them to positions etc. For me, as a writer, they provide outlines for characters I can use. For example, one of my characters, Will, is a thinker, ex military analyst. One of the types outlines has just such a personality - always studies things carefully before making a decision etc. I can use these traits in my character to (a) differentiate him from other characters and (b) make him consistent throughout the novel. When I came to Debby, my main character, I could not find a type that matched, which possibly means I have created a character who does not fit any norm. I can't see anything wrong with that, so I have selected traits from a number of the personality types and used those to create my personality outline for Debby.The reason I needed to do this was that I wasn't sure that I was making her consistent. She was changing as she reacted to different situations I created instead of staying consistent in the way she reacted to them. Now I have an useful tool to check if I have her acting consistently or not.

Problems with Grandma

I'm having problems with the character of Debby, the POV character I am using. Part of the reason is that she is one of a set of characters who are all of equal importance but using her as the POV gives her weight over the others and this is not helping the structure of the story which depends on the interaction between them and the different skills and personality traits each contributes.
Originally I wrote in omniscient but changed to one POV after someone told me this is the latest trend and that omniscient isn't acceptable any more. Maybe I misunderstood that but it doesn't matter. Looking over Grandma's shoulder isn't working.
My alternatives are to rewrite the whole thing in omniscient or, as one person has suggested, write each chapter from a different character's POV.
Either would be a massive task given the current partly completed draft is around 80,000 words. Still, may be better to rewrite now than to wait until I have a draft of 100,000 plus.
Another part of the problem is that I am finding being this close to a character is uncomfortable. I need her to take various actions but find it distracting if I have to justify why she is doing it. As soon as I write this I begin wondering if this is not a serious flaw in my writing, Perhaps I do not get inside my characters enough but use them as pawns or cyphers to tell my story or get my own views across. If so, I need to do some hard thinking about what I am writing and why I am doing it. It could explain why I have been successful with short stories, where there is less time for character development, and not with novels where the reader wants character development often at the expense of plot development.
A lot to think about.

Ubud workshop worth the trip

Just back from the Australian Writers Centre workshop in Ubud, Indonesia, with Patti Miller. The theme was writing about the senses and what I got out of it was a refinement on the old show don't tell. When you are writing about how someone is feeling or acting, get inside their body and look at how they would be feeling and acting. Then write about that. Don't say someone was scared. What does someone do when they are scared.? How do their eyes look, the fingers, body? Describe that and let the readers work out for themselves that it means the character is scared.
In a scene I happened to be writing in my current novel this instantly translated into a description of a woman who puts her jacket on, takes it off, holds it at arms length, puts it back on and then goes out through a door to where others are waiting. Hopefully the reader sees she is uncertain about the coming meeting without me saying that.
As Patti put it, let the scene tells its own story.
Of course there was a lot more to the workshop than that. All the senses come into play and we were looking at ways to use smell, taste, touch and sound as well as sight to give each scene more meaning and colour. I'll write some more after I have gone through my notes and absorbed it.
There were a lot of exercises I found fun. One was to find a new experience and describe it. I chose eating a local fruit I had never seen before. Another was to imagine an experience you had never had and write about that. I had fun describing how I would put on a bra. In another we each described a location and a character on separate pieces of paper, then shuffled them around the group. Each member had to create a story with the location and character they ended up with.
Patti has a website at http://www.lifestories.com.au for those who want to look at more of what she does. Her focus is mainly on writing memoirs but a lot of what she has to say is applicable to writing fiction as well.
Dr Dawn Porter
I also went to an AWC gathering in Perth to hear Dr Dawn Barker discuss her two novels Let Her Go and Fractured. Dawn's a child psychiatrist but also a young mum and her stories draw on both sets of experience. Haven't read them yet but have put them high on my to read list. They're published by Hachette. Dawn was successful in winning one of that publisher's mentorships and worked with an editor, publisher and agent on getting the ms of her first, Fractured, into publishable shape.

I'm 73 this year and still battling on as a writer. I tell people it's what I am and that is exactly what I feel. Whether it is writing a blog like this one, which no-one seems to read, a short story or some scrap of an idea that has come into my head, I need to write and I feel most whole and complete when I am writing. It is what I do, what I have always been better at than most other people and the way in which I somehow or other identify myself and justify my existence.

Lots of interest in writing retreat

The article in the Writing WA newsletter saying I am providing accommodation for writers who want to come for a week or two and get some serious writing done in a quiet, secluded environment, has produced instant response.
A woman who is writing a historical family saga set in Scotland has booked in for two weeks in November/December, an author/illustrator of children's books is coming to check out if the place is suitable, and a man writing a YA novel has tentatively booked for January.
I am getting quite excited about the prospect of meeting other writers with the opportunity to talk in depth with them and see how they go about their work. Meetings at festivals and other events are usually short and fairly superficial.
If there are any more writers out there who are interested, the idea is you come and stay with me on my bush property near Walpole on the south coast of Western Australia and write to your heart's content. There is good accommodation, you share meals and contribute to the cost of food and other household running costs and hopefully, there will be lots of opportunities to talk about our work and writing generally. Email me on mjmurphy@westnet.com.au if you want to know more.

Go Grandma ! October 2013

My latest novel, Murder For A Grandmother is rolling along since I went back and changed a lot of my original chapters. It was the old kiss principal. I cut out a lot of complicated plot twists and some sub-plots and got back to the main theme, which is Grandma solving the murder and saving her grandson from the hangman. I still have a tendency to try and save some of the original but I find it much easier to delete it and trust my subconscious to remember any particularly good bits that should go back in.
I also googled faces for my characters and pinned them up on my wallboard, which I find helps as I can glance up and say "how do you feel about this" or "what are you going to do next" and their faces often give me the answers.
Since I already have a publisher who has at least expressed interest in the idea for this series I am feeling quite confident about it. Ideas for sequels are bubbling in my brain and it is hard not to stop and write them now. Priority has to be to get one complete draft of the first one which I am happy with. Then maybe I can jot down some notes for others before coming back to the revisions.

My current work

A New Era For Manny Youngman

The final draft has gone off to Fremantle Press and I am once again an author in waiting.

I put more work into revising the final draft of this novel than any of the others I have written (which perhaps explains why they were not accepted by publishers). In this I was greatly helped by fellow-writer Paula Boer, who did the most amazing critique of the ms and pointed out so many ways in which the writing (as opposed to the plot) could be improved.

In A New Era For Manny Youngman I tell the story of a man who believes the feminist movement gave women a new role in society but did not balance that with a new role for men. He is President of the New Era Men’s Support Alliance, which seeks to work out what this role should be, or at least help men who are confused by what is expected of them.

Giving a talk on this subject, he is confronted by ex-girlfriend Katie Frank, who at first attacks his views and then backs down and hurries away.

A few days later he arrives at his apartment to find Katie there with Jenny, a 15 year old girl she tells him is his daughter. Katie is going to prison for throwing a bomb into a men’s club and asks if he can take care of Jenny.

Manny sets out to establish a relationship with Jenny based on his unconventional theories but finds it far from easy. Having a daughter stirs up unexpected emotions in him as he confronts the feminist ideas inherited  from her mother, problems she is having at school and her worries whether a boy likes her. Complicating the plot are conflicting reactions and advice from his parents, an important woman client, a social worker, his men friends and Katie’s women friends.

Manny starts to realise there is more to the incident in the men's club than he has been told. He also starts to question his own beliefs and to realise that it is one thing to theorise about relationships but quite another to put the theories into practice.

A triangle of conflict emerges between Manny, Jenny and Katie which is only resolved when Jenny confronts her parents with some home truths and they are forced to re-examine their beliefs and their relationship.

Murder for a Grandmother

I am now about 30,000 words into a revised draft, working mainly at this stage on getting the plot and the sequence of the scenes right. 

Like so much of what I write, I have found it necessary to chop out more than half of the original material I wrote. Whole sub-plots and more than a dozen characters have disappeared and I have honed the story down more and more to keep the pace up and the action moving.

This will be the first of the Grey Nomad Detectives series I am planning. I have drafted outlines for half a dozen more and have more than half written what will eventually be the third in the series.

I found this was necessary to get it clear in my mind what the series would eventually look like, as this made it easier to come back and write the first book.