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

Historic Cleveland.

Today, whilst toodling around this here InterWeb thing, I happened upon a surprisingly good website on Historic Cleveland (the UK “county”, not the US city.) On it, I found the diaries of North Yorkshire landowner and businessman, Ralph Jackson, and a concise and yet wonderfully informative timeline.

As is so often the way, I learned a few things that I didn’t previously know and “coloured in” a few facts of which I was already aware — such as:

• We have a stone circle at Commondale, dating from the Neolithic period (3500-1700 BC.)
• The fort on Eston Nab (I look up at Eston Nab as I write this) was Bronze Age (1700-600 BC.)
• “In the mid-1300s [BC] the Black Death and floods ravage North Yorkshire.”
• Tocketts Mill dates from Medieval (1066 to 1500) times.
• “Natural disasters hit Cleveland in the mid-eighteenth century. Food shortages in the Great Winter of 1739-40 lead to riots, rinderpest epidemic closed cattle markets for up to six years, floods and frequent outbreaks of smallpox, cholera and typhus.”
• In the 1800s, “Stokesley is a centre for printing and publishing (Braithwaite, Pratt, Tweddell) but by the end of the century has lost much of its commercial importance.”

I’ve never written an historical novel but…