Stuff of minor interest

    There are things of which I sometimes speak and there are things which go unmentioned. If you have heard some of this before, forgive me. If not, then read on and perhaps, learn a little of what goes through my mind as I create. What I create may not be to your taste, or liking, but you are free to move on to some other author if you feel compelled to do so.    I will begin with the earliest novels I have written, which so far, have not been published. First, there is a series of five novels based on the similarities I noted in a variety of ancient mythologies. Gods and Goddesses who held the same attributes and things which happened to one which were replicated in the myths of yet another, or more than one, culture. Rather than write about the major gods and goddesses, I wrote about a very minor one, who by virtue of marriage was made all-important to the major deities because his wife, who became a major deity out of her desire for revenge for his death. In the myths, he was indeed killed by order of his brother, but in my story, he used subterfuge to avoid death and spent thousands of years trying to assuage his wife's anger and rectify the wrongs she had done in his name. The story becomes more complicated because though he loves his wife, he was destined to be the husband of yet another woman. As you can see, this situation gave me ample opportunity to inject a great deal of drama. After five novels, the story is finished. Or, is it?    Next up is my vampire novel, A Taste For Blood. One of the greatest tragedies of all time is the story of Oedipus and it has spun off a variety of themes that continue to be popular today. I twisted it a little, feeding off a little-known Nordic saga and was surprised. The story received little attention, though having a fair number of favorable reviews, and I believed it would someday pass into the realm of 'out of print' books. I was on the point of 'unpublishing' it on Amazon when I decided, just for the heck of it, to make it available in a free promotion. This is where the surprise comes in; it became the #1 English Language vampire book available via the Kindle Store in France and Germany for an entire weekend.    Next is my novel, Stitch in Thyme. I wanted to write an interplanetary story and of all the familiar Terran animals, landed on the cat as the beast most likely to fill the bill I needed for the story. The beast had to be sensuous, engergetic and powerful. It also had to be anthropomorphised into a form acceptable as a possible love interest. I afraid I plowed over old ground that has been cultivated by a great many science fiction authors far too many times. Though I like the story, the setting has been a disappointment for me. The premise leaves something to be desired also.    A Quart of Djinn: I was still trying to use wordplay to arrive at acceptable titles and before I go any further, I must reveal that I sometimes get these flashes of wordplay and I write them down. I'm afraid that I arrived at the idea to write a story to fit the titles I dreamed up instead of the other way around. the story is okay, but simply that. Given time and effort, I could turn it into a much better story. maybe someday I'll take the time to do so.    One of my personal favorites is Congruencies; a time travel story in which I poured all the energy and angst I felt for a period of my life for which I feel sorrow to this day. The present edition has formatting and editing issues that I really need to address. I feel that it could be a better seller than it is if I devoted some time to making it better. Oh, I wouldn't rewrite it; simply make the corrections it needs and is crying out for.    Behind the Stone: A daydream I had as a boy, born of a boulder that sat beside a ridge in a residential section of my hometown. I like the story but feel that there is something missing. Maybe I'll revisit the land behind the boulder someday.    Eggs of Empire: For some reason, I have always been drawn to the story of the Empress Theodora. I am unable to say why, the words just aren't there for me to explain the attraction. Maybe it was the humble origins of the Great Lady, juxtaposed against the heights she scaled and refused to give up, making her husband a greater Emperor than he might have been. Add to this the fact of her early death, due to the life she was forced to lead as a child, I don't doubt, and you can see that the story has the makings of a first-rate tragedy. In this story, I created the nucleus of the Shepherd, Tanner and Decker Detective Agency, intending them to be 'throwaway' characters, but found that I was loathe to waste the effort I had spent in creating them. Thus, they acquired their own series of novels. I mean, just look at all the TV shows which use characters with those names as heroes. Keep that statement in mind the next time you watch a science fiction TV series and maybe, if you're lucky, you'll see what I mean.    Taken Apart: I wanted to write from a character inside a character. Demonic possession stories have been popular off and on for the past forty years and I wondered why it had never occurred to anyone that in the event of a possession, the possessing entity would know the host far better than anyone ever could. If it was possible for a demon to know love of any sort, might they not be drawn to their host, given the intimate knowledge they had of them? And, to bring such a love to fruition, the possessing entity must be forced from the host. I failed to mention when discussing A Quart of Djinn that I had injected some of the characters from the first series of books into the story and I did the same in this one. I mean, demons are supposed to be fallen angels and if the God who created them had any compassion, mightn't He not wish to show mercy for one of His creations who had shown remorse and a desire for forgiveness?    Gulf of the Plains and Gulf of the Plains II: Fog and Bog: I intended this as a simple Post-apocalyptic story but it grew into a series. The inspiration for it was the great number of earthquakes we had been experiencing for a number of years, all around the world, in conjunction with Global Warming. That a number of those quakes occurred in Oklahoma, of all places, only gave greater impetus to my personal theory that what was once the bottom of a sea could be again. I have wanted to build an earthquake-proof, tornado-proof, fire-proof house for a long time and the way I designed and drew it up, it became a fortress of sorts. The only way I could ever afford to build it the way I wanted it was to become wealthy; a thing which will never come to pass, so I decided to make the fortress a partial reality by giving it form in a book. The characters were secondary to me in the beginning but when I began writing the story, I began with the character, Paget Redpath. Her father is a secondary character in A Quart of Djinn, and I wanted to show that when the world as we know it ends, it will end for all, no matter what their walk of life. So, why not begin with a former pop-star/party-girl? It was necessary to use two books to show the evolution of her character from a pampered pet/sex slave of a couple of wealthy men into a killer without remorse. Yes, Paget grew full-blown from my mind, like Athena from the mind of Zeus. How could she not be a major player in the story?    It Happens Every Day: A fantasy. I was processing the grief I felt for the death of a former paramour, much deferred for a number of years. I felt that she deserved remembrance beyond that of a few flowers upon her grave. This story, more than any other, was a labor of love. Her face, limned in the moonlight upon her pillow still comes to me in sleeping and waking moments.   

Storylines without fear

Sure, "without fear"; that's what I said. When you're working on a storyline and you believe something is missing in it that would make it better, though some of your readers may be displeased; go ahead and write what makes the story better. Think the story you're writing is too 'vanilla'? Think the difficulties faced by your characters are too mild and 'anybody' could prevail in the same situation in real life? Think your characters don't experience enough heartbreak? Kill off a sympathetic character. You can even kill off an important character if you want. Make it shocking and sudden. That's how it happens in 'real life', by the way. Show your characters carrying on without their friends. Show how your characters have to push the grief aside in their efforts to come out on top of the situation. In 'real life', we all have to do that. I've never understood how others could put their entire lives on hold to deal with their grief for days, weeks or months. Whatever situation I was in never afforded me that luxury and if you will take a look at the best action/adventure books and movies of our time, you will see that the authors didn't allow their characters the extra time to wallow in their grief. There was always a 'baddie' to be resisted, a life to be saved, a death to be revenged. Since I have always had trouble understanding setting aside the life I have yet to live for grieving over a death; perhaps that makes such writing easy for me. I don't know and I'm not going to try to understand it. I just use it to make my stories as believable and 'true-to-life' as I can. Of course, some of your readers may have so much empathy invested in whatever character you kill off that they are unhappy about it, but if you make the story better, they will remember that character fondly and continue reading your work. The character may be sympathetic but have certain flaws that the reader is uncomfortable with, though they like him or her anyway. By killing off the character, you can remove the uncomfortableness and let them remember the character as he/she was. This lets them overlook the uncomfortable things about the character and 'rewrite history', so to speak. Then if they re-read the book in the future, they see that the 'uncomfortable' feeling they had can be set aside and they will see that with the character flaws, the death of the character made the story better and they will see that the story wouldn't be the same if the character came out unscathed. As I've said before; I am not trying to teach a course in creative writing or anything like that. This blog is only supposed to show you, the reader, how I write what I write. Thank you, Derek A. Murphy Author of Dolly Games, Laying Ghosts, Gulf of the Plains and others.

Rewards for writing

Sure, the first thing people think of when they think of any rewards for writing is the money that the big authors receive. Then they think of the perks of celebrity; the appearances on late-night talk shows, trips to LA to see the progress made on movies taken from their work, trips to location shoots, that kind of thing. Well, for most writers, there is very little money, no appearances on TV, no trips. Just the satisfaction of having some of their books rise in the rankings and possibly get nearly as far as becoming a bestseller.

For myself, I have one book that has achieved a very minor milestone that is useful only for 'bragging rights'. Gulf of the Plains has been in the Top 100 Kindle Genre Novels at least one day every week since it was published in May of 2010. And, it has been in the Top 25 in the UK at least three times. A small but enthusiastic fan group has latched onto it, and me, and is helping to drive sales. That is gratifying for a small-town boy who never had anyone pay any attention to him or his efforts at bettering himself. While I was a highly competent Mainframe Computer Operator and Communications Specialist for 34 years for a major oil company, there was always this need to write and tell stories that people might enjoy. My writing career might have been much further along if I had been able to write while I was still employed there, but I doubt it. There was little free time and my frame of mind was centered more on the job than it was on fulfilling my potential as a writer.

Now, I admit that my achievement in writing is very small; almost negligible compared to many much younger writers, but it is more than I ever accomplished before. I doubt that I will ever become one of the big authors, able to command million dollar advances or anything like that, but I enjoy what I am doing and will continue to write. If a few hundred or thousand readers recognize my name and picture, then that's more recognition than I had before.

Thank you,
Derek A. Murphy
Author of Gulf of the Plains, Gulf of the Plains II: Fog and Bog, Congruencies and others.

Genres

Which genre do you like to write in? Sometimes I begin a work, thinking that I'm writing in a particular genre and find later that the story has 'morphed' into something else. Now, that can't be all bad, but it can't be all good, either. You have to have the discipline to do one of several things: throw out the story, file it for later use when you are in the mood to write in the genre it has 'morphed' into, or continue writing and hope for the best. For instance, when I began writing Eggs of Empire, I believed I was writing a fantasy with macabre overtones. Little by little, the action/adventure aspect of it crept in, along with a small dose of sci-fi and before I knew it, the book was complete and I was left with a book that I felt was almost impossible to categorize. Thanks to the folks at Amazon, the book was included in several categories and just last month, it was the number one, English-Language, Tales of Intrigue or Spy Story, available in the Kindle Store in France and Germany. How's that for serendipity? ********Spoiler Alert!******** Genres come in a variety of 'flavors' and something that may turn one person off may appeal to someone else. In Eggs of Empire, I began writing a book that I thought was to be about undying love and devotion, centered around a modern (and doubtful) form of reincarnation. The premise was that an individual's memories could be stored in their DNA and awakened in a clone. The story was to be about the devotion that the Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora held for each other. It still is, but along the way, the Peter Sunday character became an action hero of sorts. When the action carried the story quite far afield from the original premise, I killed Peter off and put Dorothy(Theodora) and her friend and ostensible sister, Toni(Antonina) in a position to demand that Peter be cloned. Since I had established that memory could be transmitted through the centuries via DNA, it was presumed that Peter would regain not only his Petrus Sabbatia(Justinian) memories, but also his Peter Sunday memories. To determine if such was actually the case, please read another of my books in the Port Morgan Cycle, Questionable Interests. That book followed the guidelines I had set for a not-quite-what-it-seems action/adventure story. With the addition of a vampire of my acquaintance, it became something different than it was intended. I know, I know, I haven't really touched on genres very much in this post, but the point, at least for me, was to get my thoughts out about how I felt regarding genres and the discipline of writing. Thank you, Derek A. Murphy Author of Dolly Games, Laying Ghosts, Eggs of Empire and others.