P.J. Murphy's Writer Site

Guess what? I didn’t do the Geneva 20km run this morning. Call me lazy, but having been kept up half the night by the wind, I decided that running for two hours in heavy rain and extremely gusty conditions wasn’t my idea of a fun Sunday morning. Maybe my younger self would have enjoyed it; all I know for certain is that my present-aged self very much appreciated being in the warm and dry.

To redeem myself, I had a productive morning – inspired largely by the sessions of the Geneva Writer’s Conference I attended yesterday. I sent out a design brief for Yesterday’s Shadow to a graphic designer recommended to me by one of the participants. I also contacted a few people (who to my shame I haven’t been in regular enough contact this year) to see if they would like to receive an advance copy of the novel, ahead of its planned release in February. If you’re interested in being an advance reader and I haven’t contacted you, feel free to get in touch.

Finally, and most excitingly, I sent up a brief for a narrator to record an audiobook version of Dead Letters. I had held off doing this for a while, considering doing the narration myself, but then two realisations hit me:

1. It wouldn’t be very good.
2. I can’t stand to hear recordings of my voice, and I couldn’t think of any way to get around that part of the process.

So, I put together the details for narrators to submit a kind of ‘audition tape’. I’ll give more details about this in a future blog, but for now just to say that I found it quite cool – kind of like putting together a movie version of your work. Time will tell if the process turns out to be as glamorous as that sounds.

Back to the Geneva Writers’ Conference, I joined for two workshops in the afternoon. The first was on self-publishing and marketing, where I hoped to pick up a few tips. However, given that I have self-published twice and most of the audience not at all, the questions from the floor tended to be on subjects I already knew about.

The second workshop was about comedy scriptwriting for TV, and was run by Emmy Abrahamson, who had some fascinating tales to tell, from her experience writing for Swedish TV comedies. She told us that it was a revelation to her when she discovered she could write comedy, as she had never considered herself to be funny. Conversely, I do consider myself to be funny, and I struggled with the exercises we did to brainstorm ideas and get stuff out there. Oh dear. It seems that TV works at a faster pace than I would be able to cope with. Still, it was great to get some insights about how it works.

The conference finished with a panel session about appropriation, which is a subject that’s seeing a lot of writers and publishers getting tied in knots about. The uniting theme of the different perspectives was empathy, but I wonder how far that takes you when social media shouts you down. We live in a tricky time.

That took me to the end of my first writers’ conference. I’ll definitely go to more. Now, I just need to take a bit of time to absorb… and maybe have a short run, to make up for things.