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

The Wisdom of Closed Worlds.

A decision has been made, arrived at, pounced upon unceremoniously.

As it was with Children of the Resolution, I will, with my next project, The Wisdom of Closed Worlds, log in intimate and intricate detail every aspect of its development on this here much-neglected blog. Every lingering ellipsis and every quivering colon will be given due recognition, studied, interrogated and lauded—and if you’re really lucky (or unlucky, depending on your viewpoint) I may even share considerable chunks of the first draft and, even, the initial outline.

Never let it be said you weren’t given fair warning!

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

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

Happy New Year!

May I first of all wish each and every one of you a very happy 2011. Here’s hoping it brings you everything you wish for and more.

For me, 2011 is already off to a good start. My new novel, Children of the Resolution, rolled out on Amazon.com on Christmas Eve and is now, finally, available through Amazon.co.uk. The catalogue listing process has just begun so the blurb etc is not yet available on the Amazon.co.uk site (also I’ve had to make corrections to a misspelling of my middle name, which is still being processed and is therefore still affecting author name searches), but orders can be taken now and will be delivered a lot quicker than the “temporarily out of stock” notice suggests.

What’s being said about Children of the Resolution:

“Children of the Resolution is more than a novel, it is a commentary on the work of educationalists, practitioners and politicians who see education through their own eyes and experiences and not those of the real participants, our young people.” Lord Willis of Knaresborough.

So, if you haven’t yet made your New Year’s Resolution, yet, why not make one to read Children of the Resolution 😉

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.

Pausing Briefly.

The past few months have been fairly hectic and, yet again, I find I’ve been neglecting my blogging duties. This is something I deeply regret, and something I still keep promising myself I’ll rectify, but the simple truth is my current novel in progress, the editing of the next novel to be published and my constant attempts at promoting If I Never are now taking up most of my time.

This week, however, I am taking a few days off. The latest pass of edits on Children of the Resolution were completed on Monday and I’ve promised myself I won’t return to writing As Morning Shows the Day until next Monday. So I thought I’d spend a few moments “filling in the gaps”.

1. As Morning Shows the Day is gradually moving towards its conclusion. I now have about 154,000 words written, I’m expecting to write close on another 50,000 and will probably edit the same again! Probably, with the edits, another 4 to 6 months work.
2. The edits of Children of the Resolution are coming along nicely. Have trimmed by about 15,000 words and I’m just now waiting for more input from Team Legend. I think we’re pretty close but there may be more tweaking, yet.
3. My latest interview with fellow Legend Press author, Josie Henley-Einion, is now available here. Always enjoy chatting to other Legend authors and in turn I’ll be interviewing Josie here in the not too distant future. Keep checking back.
4. Also, my guest article — Stopping Short of an Obituary Notice — has just been posted on the excellent literary magazine website The View from Here. Take a look when you have time and please consider subscribing to the paper version. Fantastic content of interest to readers and writers, and it looks really snazzy, too!

Finally, I’d just like to once more draw your attention to the right hand sidebar. Whilst I don’t manage to keep up with my blogging endeavours as much as I once did, I do have a number of other platforms I use to send out short updates quite regularly. Take a look and take your pick.

Thanks for the continuing interest!

A sample chapter of If I Never can be read here.

To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.

© 2010 Gary William Murning

Productivity.

My regular readers will probably already be familiar with my habit of churning out, as some would have it, pretty big chunks of writing at regular intervals. I’ve always enjoyed getting words down and, it’s true, I can be a little obsessive at times.

That’s why at the beginning of the year I didn’t make any resolutions to moderate my output. After taking time off over Christmas I had a sneaking suspicion that 2010 would find me, creatively, at least, even more fired up than I have been in the past.

And I wasn’t mistaken. Whilst I have managed to keep a fairly healthy balance, taking time away from all things writing-related, as much as possible, I have so far this year nailed down 25,000 words — taking As Morning Shows the Day up to 128,000 words. It’s a huge project which should, fingers crossed, be finished late spring/early summer, but it has been and continues to be a delight to write. Part of this, of course, as I may have mentioned before, is the fact that I’m now writing as “a published author”. Knowing that the piece you’re working on is — unless you really louse it up — going to end up “out there” with your other work is a great motivator (for me, at least.)

I think with this project, however, it also has a great deal to do with the novel’s origin. It isn’t an entirely new piece. In fact, I wrote the first version of it something like fifteen years ago. The kind of tail that requires distance, a sense of nostalgic retrospection, I didn’t do too bad a job with that earlier version — but it did have a number of problems, all largely centred around lack of experience, both personal experience, that is, and writing experience. The essence was there, but it lacked scale and skill.

How much of these qualities I now possess, I don’t know, but it’s certainly safe to say that I am more accomplished as a writer — and hopefully as a human being! And I’m extremely happy with the results so far.

I think I may have mentioned here in the past that writing this novel feels very much like an act of remembrance (which, of course, it is, though not quite in the way I mean.) My approach has been to write it without looking at that earlier version, to wander through my memories of what it was and recreate from that, and I think this is more than anything is helping me achieve the nostalgic tone I’ve already mentioned. It’s as if I lived it rather than wrote it. The old informs the new and lends it something I couldn’t otherwise have achieved.

Which actually fits rather nicely with the whole theme of the novel: “the childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day” — Milton, Paradise Regained.

I wish I could say I planned that, but I didn’t 😉

A sample chapter of If I Never can be read here.

To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.

© 2010 Gary William Murning

Character Competition!

Today, my recent interview with the good people at the Struggling Authors website went live. Some really interesting questions and, perhaps more importantly, the announcement of what I think is a fantastic If I Never-related competition. Trust me, you really don’t want to miss it!

Below is an interview-taster. To read more and for your chance to enter the simply splendiferous, stupendous and utterly stunning competition (I’m not over-egging it, am I?), click on the link below.

Your first book, If I Never, is out now and doing very well. Is there anything about the book you want to tell us that’s not in the blurb?

Well, funnily enough, yes! The first thing that struck me when I read the blurb (which I didn’t actually write), was how successfully it gave a sense of what the central elements of the plot were. But, of course, given the limited space, it simply couldn’t mention the way in which I tried to break a few rules and write the kind of novel that plays with convention. Something that most readers have grasped quite readily is the fact that, in places, I quite deliberately push it as far as I can — layering plot and character, adding twist after twist and generally having a great deal of fun in the process. In some ways, I have to admit, I was sticking two fingers up at those who had told me in the past that a novel has to be written a certain way. I wanted the plot structure to suggest the unpredictable, unrelenting nature of life and, fortunately, the vast majority have the seemed to understand that.

To read more and enter the completely unmissable competition, click here! 

A sample chapter of If I Never can be read here.

To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.

© 2010 Gary William Murning

Books, Italian Gardens and Dumplings.

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mandy the Bookworm, who was “lucky” enough to win a copy of If I Never in a Goodreads.com book giveaway not so long ago. Below are a few of her excellent questions with my quite often long-winded answers.

Is the setting based on a real place; is there the Italian Gardens, Lovers’ Leap, et cetera?

It is based on a real place — an amalgam of real places, actually, with lots of fictional meddling! Redburn is actually based on a place in the north-east of England called Saltburn. The Italian Gardens, in a slightly different form, certainly exist, though Lovers’ Leap doesn’t.

Tara’s mother seems quite accommodating, is this a bit of wishful thinking of how a mother-in-law should be in your mind?

I don’t think so, no. I would never want to write a stereotypical representation of “the mother-in-law”, so it’s probably true that I’m inclined to shy away from anything bordering on that! However, Tara is someone who’s had some pretty difficult things to contend with over the years. Her mother, naturally, is well aware of this and when she sees how happy, relatively speaking, Price makes her, she wants it to work. There are enough obstacles without her adding more, I imagine her reasoning to be, and so she makes Price as welcome and comfortable as possible — to the point of overcompensating, at times! Plus I think she genuinely likes Price.

Will we be seeing any characters from If I Never in any future novels?

I very much doubt it. There are, quite deliberately, a number of sequel setups in If I Never, but my aim with these was to simply suggest the various paths their lives might take — the uncertainty of it all. A full-blown sequel would weaken the concept but… never say never, right? I suppose they might turn up again one day.

To read more, please click here.

A sample chapter of If I Never can be read here.

To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.

© 2010 Gary William Murning

Have Yourself an If I Never Christmas!

Seasons Greetings from all at Gary William Murning Online (okay, that’ll be me, then)! Have a wonderful, safe holiday and I’ll see you in the New Year.

Thanks for helping make 2009 a great year for me!

A sample chapter of If I Never can be read here.

To buy your copy of If I Never, please click here.

© 2009 Gary William Murning