As many of you will know, I’m currently in that rather hectic place between projects—a place that finds me doing more edits on The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost, arranging promotional bits and pieces for The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts and preparing for my next project (which I hope to begin writing some time in April) Recalling Calloway Vaughan. It’s exciting, this much has to be said. But it also very easy to lose track—to feel as if you’re getting nowhere fast.
So, a short summary of what’s been happening this week.
- The latest round of edits on The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost are close to completion. Extremely happy with this project. Expecting publication sometime between March and September 2013.
- A few more promotional website “appearances” have been arranged in my Hungry Ghosts Blog Tour (anyone else interested in hosting/interviewing me, please give me a shout).
- I managed to answer a few of the questions I still had regarding Recalling Calloway Vaughan. The chapter outline is already complete, but I have been a little uncertain about how best to approach it from a stylistic point of view. As I mentioned in an interview, recently, this is probably going to be my most post-modern piece to date, but don’t want it turning into Gary William Murning does Paul Auster. I now know how best to avoid this.
This week also saw me interviewed on the LaeLand website:
The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. What’s it about and where did you get the idea from?
It’s very much about the driving need that we as individuals have to constantly strive for more. The driving force, I guess, behind cultural development, the building of civilisations and so on – but also, when given free rein, the possible architect of dissatisfaction and despair.Hungry Ghosts are taken from The Tibetan Book of the Dead. They have these huge cavernous stomachs and are constantly hungry. They also have, however, very small mouths (or thin necks, in some versions), so they can never consume enough, quickly enough, to satisfy their appetites.
Although I don’t use these specific ghosts in any literal sense, I like that image.
And so I started playing with it, settling on a fairly suburban setting – a very ordinary family, a group of friends who, like said family, have problems of their own, and the discovery of an old diary buried in the back garden, a diary that belonged to a rather hedonistic occupant of the asylum that used to stand where the housing estate in the novel now stands.
It’s a pretty full on novel. Lots going on, lots to think about, and it’s probably my most complete novel to date. To use the vernacular, they go on quite a “journey”.
Finally, my good friend Frederique Murphy recently asked me to write a piece for her Mountain Moving Mindset newsletter. This was a fairly new experience for me—sharing my story—and I thoroughly enjoyed it:
Dreaming isn’t enough. Sitting back and waiting for things to happen will only very rarely achieve anything. Yes, vision is of vital importance. Without it the incredible developments we see around us every day wouldn’t even get onto the drawing board, never mind off it. But without commitment to hard work, to putting one’s shoulder to the wheel, all the dreaming in the world will be in vain. These things I was fortunate enough to learn very early in life.
Read the free sample of The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts here.
Pre-order your copy of The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts now!
© 2012 Gary William Murning
