The Long Overdue Roundup.

Two days on the trot. See? I’m starting as I mean to go on—loins girded and more resolute than I’ve been since … well, the last time I was resolute.

I thought today I might gently ease myself back into this whole blogging malarkey with, as the title suggests, a bit of a roundup. I’m going to try my best to keep it brief and to the point, but I ain’t promising.

Most of this year has been taken up with my new work in progress, Juniper Faraday. I started the actual writing about five months or so ago after initially outlining a completely different novel (Recalling Calloway Vaughan). As with The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost, Juniper Faraday came to me pretty much fully formed. It excited me immediately and within a month or two the outline was in place and I was working on the first draft. The working draft now stands at 110,000 words and I expect to finish it either just before Christmas or just after. A pretty tense “social drama”, I think it’s my most understated and thoughtful piece so far—exploring questions of trust in a literary form that will be primarily entertaining and highly readable. Again, it’s quite different stylistically to my other work (especially Lorna Lovelost) but I believe it’s a very solidly recognisable Gary William Murning novel.

Apart from this, I’ve also been exploring publishing possibilities with The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost. Believing it a good fit with my Legend Press novel, If I Never, I offered it to Legend. In all honesty, my hopes were not that high—as Legend did not feel my earlier novel, Children of the Resolution, to be a suitable follow-up, either (Children is now my only novel to still have 100% five-star reviews on Amazon). And sure enough, Lorna was ultimately deemed too “philosophical” for their list. Which, of course, is perfectly acceptable; it’s pretty clear we have very different readers in mind. (It isn’t actually all that philosophical. No more so than my other writing.) And so I’ve made the decision to once again publish through my own imprint GWM Publications. I did think of approaching other publishers but, as this is a novel that is especially close to my heart, I decided that retaining complete control was something I welcomed. The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost, therefore, will now be published in paperback and for Kindle sometime in October next year.

As well as this, I have over the past few weeks started making tentative notes on my next project. A large canvas novel intended to explore “disability identity” from both a historic and contemporary perspective, it stands to be by far my most challenging (to write) work so far. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to it. (No, really.)

And that’s pretty much it. Over coming weeks, I hope to fill you in on more of the details regarding all these projects—with prepublication samples of Lorna probably coming early next year. I want to get back in the habit of occasionally providing a little insight into how I work and what’s important to me in my fiction.

Hopefully it will be of interest.

Read the free sample of The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts here.

Buy your copy of The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts now!

© 2012 Gary William Murning

Creative Flux Article.

I have been doing more articles than I usually do just recently. Thoroughly enjoying writing a little non-fiction for a change. My latest article on Being Prepared to Be Wrong appeared on the Creative Flux website yesterday. Here’s a taster for you:

One of the first things anyone working in any creative field discovers is just how diverse opinion is (and, following on quickly from this, just how willing the majority of people are—whether qualified or not—to share that opinion). Generally, this is a positive. Ideas, opinions, suggestions, these are the things that can, with the right attitude, spark creativity. They can also, however, utterly and completely stifle it.

Read more…

Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts – Final Cover Unveiling.

I am delighted to reveal the cover for my next novel (to be published on 31 March 2012) The Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. The first novel to be brought out under my own micropublishing imprint, GWM Publications.

Designed by the very talented Gudrun Jobst, who also designed the cover for my first Legend Press novel, If I Never, I think you will agree that the end result is pretty striking.

Front cover (click on image to enlarge):

Full cover (click on image to enlarge):

© 2011 Gary William Murning

BBC Tees Radio Interview—BBC iPlayer Link.

For those who missed it live, you can catch my BBC Tees Phil and Amy radio interview here http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00hrddb Fast forward to 2:40:00.

UPDATE: As this interview is no longer available on iPlayer, I have, with kind permission from BBC Tees, now made the interview segment available here. Please do not repost without prior permission.

Broken Angel—An Exclusive Kindle Short Story.

Today I made available, exclusively for Kindle, my short story Broken Angel.

Something of an experiment, I’m encouraging those of you who are interested in buying it (for only seventy-one pence) to hold fire until the weekend. Ideally, I would like as many people as possible to buy it on Saturday. The reason for this is to, hopefully, push it up the ranking as high as possible in a relatively short space of time—with the intention of increasing visibility on the ranking lists. How successful this will be, I don’t know, but if you are interested in joining in the experiment (and buying a pretty cool exclusive short story in the process) please let me know by commenting below!

Broken Angel is available here (US, German Amazon).

PLEASE NOTE: for those of you without a Kindle, free apps are available on the product page for all mobile phone operating systems, iPad, PC etc.

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Northern Echo Feature.

Today I was featured in the Northern Echo… click on the image to enlarge…

Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Looking Forward, Looking Back.

I haven’t written a great deal about my latest project, The Legacy of Lorna Lovelost, here (though I have tweeted about it considerably). This is, of course, the result of my generally blogging less these days rather than any conscious decision to deny my blog-readers, and, rather ironically, I’m now mentioning it only in passing as I look forward and look back—contemplating my next project and the recently published Children of the Resolution.

As is so often the way, common threads tend to run through some of the projects I write. Lorna Lovelost, for example, has certain connections to my first published novel, If I Never. Similarly, it’s beginning to look as though my next project—tentatively titled The Wisdom of Closed Worlds, is going to have thematic links with Children of the Resolution. (More of this at a later date.) Consequently, today has found me revisiting some of my blog posts from the period during which I was working on Children. And it occurred to me that said posts might be of interest to old and new readers alike.

So, a brief selection of those I still find interesting:

Good to Be Writing Again—my first post upon starting work on the novel itself.
On Writing Child Characters for Adults—addressing some of my concerns; a half decent insight into how I work.
Death Off-Stage—how the most difficult scenes can often be far easier to write than we expect.
The Final Curtain—on leaving behind “old friends”.
The Difficult Questions—looking at how I deal with “bullying” in Children of the Resolution.
Burning Love—a brief, light post on one of Carl Grantham’s childhood heroes (and my own).

Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Newcastle Libraries Interview.

My latest interview with the fantastic people at Newcastle libraries has just gone live. Snippet follows below—but don’t forget to click through; there’s still much, much more to read over there.

What inspired you to write ‘Children of the Resolution?

Children of the Resolution is an unusual novel, for me. Normally, my work is quite removed from my own, personal “story”. The novelist William Boyd once posited the idea that there are, essentially, two kinds of novelists – those who draw heavily from their own experiences, and those who write novels about things they, before researching, know little about. I’d always considered myself to be the latter, even though I do, naturally, use my own emotional experiences etc to breathe life into the characters and stories.

But there had been one particular story – heavily autobiographical – that I’d been trying to write for a number of years that contradicted this. That story, after three attempts, was to become ‘Children of the Resolution’.

The main inspiration was, simply, that there was a story here – more an anthology of experiences, I guess – that needed to be told. In the 1970s, as a child, I’d been among the first disabled children to be integrated into mainstream education in the north-east of England. It had been an exciting time. It had had that revolutionary feel about it. Even as a child, I got a real sense of that. Something new was being tried and, everyone seemed to think, it could only ever end well. Naturally, the initial enthusiasm – somewhat naïve, in many respects – of those implementing the new ideas was, to say the least, challenged.

For a while, I looked around for a written experience of the implementation of integrated education and I wasn’t really surprised to find that there were none. I felt it was a rich and important period. There were many lessons to be learned from those of us who had gone through the system (lessons, sadly, that simply haven’t been learned, in many areas) and, without wishing to sound too grand about it, I felt obliged to write it. Apart from the issues – which, I hasten to add, are not the driving force behind the novel – I very much wanted to give a sense of what it was like, the friends I made, the lessons I learned about life in general. It’s very much a coming-of-age story – rather sad in places but also, I’ve been told, laugh out loud funny.

Read More…

Read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Local “Children of the Resolution” Press Coverage.

Today I was featured in the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette. The full article can be read by following the link below.

Gary, 44, said: “My first concern was to entertain, to write a semi-autobiographical novel that wasn’t overly-political and didn’t proselytise. But, more than anything, I think it was about ensuring some of those experiences were on the record. I felt obliged to write it because, to my knowledge, no one else has addressed it in this way.”

Read More

(Please note: the paper version of this article has a caption referring to my childhood in Guisborough. Whilst I was indeed born in Guisborough, I did not actually grow up there—and the novel itself does not reference Guisborough in any meaningful way.)

To read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning

Send a Sample Saturday.

As many of you will already know, I’m always on the lookout for new promotional ideas. The publishing world is more competitive than ever—new start-up independent publishers competing with the growing phalanx of writerpreneurs, as well as the more mainstream “big boys”. Sometimes it gets difficult. Sometimes, with the time commitment of actually writing the novels, one can find oneself stuck for ideas.

Today, however, I seem to have awoken with promotional ideas pulsing through my veins (well, it’s either that or a blood clot—let’s hope the former, then!) And, so, without further ado, I would like to introduce Send a Sample Saturday (#SendASampleSaturday on Twitter).

I’m a firm believer in the concept that if people read samples of my work they will, generally speaking, be far more inclined to splash out the requisite spondoolicks to buy it. I will therefore, every Saturday from now on, be encouraging my friends, readers and followers to download the samples of Children of the Resolution and either e-mail them to friends or, even, print them out and pass them over to those less computer literate. The other, far simpler alternative, of course is to simply share the link to the document itself via Twitter, Facebook etc.

And, so, all that remains is for me to declare Send a Sample Saturday officially open. Do please participate and, where possible, encourage friends to participate. When you forward information on, PLEASE request that, should they actually like it, they in turn forward it on to other people and so on.

Let’s see if we can get Children of the Resolution going viral. Thanks in advance!

Download the sample here.

Sample the link:

Click to access children-of-the-resolution-e28093-sample.pdf

To read your free sample of Children of the Resolution, please click here.

To buy from the UK, click here – and American customers can buy here. (Also available on Kindle. UK. US.)

© 2011 Gary William Murning