Authorpreneur Dashboard – Jim Murdoch
Living with the Truth
Literature & Fiction
An old bookseller sitting in his flat in the seaside town of Rigby hears the door. Is it Death? No. It’s the truth in human form. Truth takes him on an emotional journey through his life providing him with many of the answers he might have sought, if only he was the kind of person who went looking for answers, and a few he would never have wanted to know.
Book Bubbles from Living with the Truth
Truth
If your book has a protagonist it stands to reason there will also be an antagonist only that's not how I see the character of Truth at all. He's a foil. He's the funny man to Jonathan's straight man. Death personified appears regularly in fiction from The Seventh Seal right though to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. I've never seen Truth tackled this way although in the Canadian TV series Call Me Fitz a man does get to meet his conscience.
Jonathan Payne
This is the book's protagonist, quite possibly the last person you would expect expect to play the hero in anyone's novel but that really is the point. He's the epitome of the reluctant hero who gets dragged along by events outwith his control very much like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Stranger than Fiction
Literature & Fiction
A sequel to Living with the Truth, the book is set in a landscape generated by Jonathan's memories of his past life. In this pseudo-reality he has to face more truths about himself and learns that the universe may not be in safe hands. By the end of the book he realises that you don't always need to get all the answers, and never to say die.
Book Bubbles from Stranger than Fiction
Lying
All writers are liars. We make things up, ergo we lie. The odd thing about the lies that writers tell is that they somehow manage to communicate often very profound truths. Jonathan Payne is a work of fiction and therefore his opinions are a work of fiction (it is a big mistake to assume that a character believes what his author does) and yet I wonder how many of you will be able to relate to what he has to say here about lying?
Death
Writers have had to square up to death for a long time. It's one of the big topics that can't be avoided. But what happens when you've killed off a character and have to bring him back? Well Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't have any real problems since the corpse of Sherlock Holmes was never found but when Spock's body was fired into space at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that seemed to be that until Nimoy indicated he might be willing to play him again. Well we all know how the writers got around that problem. In this book you'll see how I decided to tackle the problem when my early readers wanted more.
Milligan and Murphy
Literature & Fiction
On one level this could be a farcical tale reminiscent of the work of Flann O’Brien about a pair of Irish layabouts who somehow run away from home by accident and are helped find their way by a number of eccentric characters; on another it might be a metafiction about the nature of writing inspired by Samuel Beckett or maybe it’s just a silly book like ‘Puckoon’. Then again it could be all three.
Book Bubbles from Milligan and Murphy
How to throw a brick
Most of us have never had to kill anything. We go to the chilled goods aisle in the supermarket and there's our meat, cooked, sliced and pre-packaged with use-by date and everything. Milligan and Murphy do not have that luxury. While Murphy is away answering the call of Nature Milligan decides he wants something hot for his dinner. It doesn't look as if God is going to drop quails from heaven in his lap so he's going to have to get creative.
The point
I've always believed that a book can get by without a plot but it can't get by without a point. I don't usually know what that point is when I start writing but at some ... well, point in the writing process I write something and go, "Aha!" This is what happened in this excerpt. Our two feckless protagonists are trying to understand why, for no good reason that they can see, they've run away from home. Just as you would imagine that a book would have a point you would also imagine that an action would have a reason. But perhaps not.
Making Sense
Literature & Fiction
How do you make sense out of life? Some say that it doesn't and you shouldn't bother. Instead most of us try to impose a sense of sense on it. We dream up reasons, justifications or excuses to give our lives meaning. In this collection of short stories we meet twenty people who have nothing in common apart this need to make sense out of their lives. We have a murderer, a gambler, an adoptee, a stand-up comic, a teacher; we have men, women, parents and children, all doing their best to answer the self-same questions and where their five senses fall short they have to rely on their other senses: their sense of humour, of justice, of right and wrong, of decency...
Book Bubbles from Making Sense
Odd Thomas
Writing in a voice that's not your own isn't easy. I never explain what's wrong with Thomas--I don't think it needs to be defined--but it's probably something like Asperger syndrome. He's obsessed by numbers as you can see from this short excerpt. He also never uses contractions. That seemed to me a simple and effective way of conveying an awkwardness to his speech patterns. Just think Commander Data and you're there.
