Please welcome R. Murphy to this stop on her blog tour!Before we get started, go here to
enter to win a $25 Amazon Gift Card
On to Bob At The Lake!
Blurb:
Blurb:
Take a crabby
woman of a certain age, move her to the wintry shores of a New York lake, and
then throw in a martini-loving ghost from 1920s Manhattan. Last, stir in the
good-looking grape grower who lives up the hill. Now there’s a recipe for a
potent screwball cocktail!
Excerpt:
Bob, [my new
ghost], looked around at my quiet, carton-filled house. “But don’t you think
you’ll ever get lonely way out here? You might miss having a man around.”
“Well,” I
responded, “I’m human, so of course I’d like to have a guy around on a regular
basis. But by the time you get to be my age most of the good guys are taken. My
grandmother used to say, ‘It takes a very good man to be better than none.’ She
was right. If I can’t find a good guy, I’m not going to waste my time and
energy on a fixer-upper. You know what they say about teaching a pig to sing.”
“Huh?” he replied,
bewildered.
“You know, ‘You
can’t teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.’ I feel
the same way about spending my time with an inappropriate man. I’m sure they’re
all fine, they just don’t have what’s right for me. I’m tired of pretending
that underneath all the nuttiness, I’m not smart and competent. I just don’t
feel like putting on the ‘Love me, oh, please, love me’ song and dance routine
anymore.”
“Good one about
the pig. I should jot that down.”
“Feel free.”
Thus began months of the strangest dinner conversations I could ever imagine. Topics ranged from the sex life of newts to the menace of buttered toast. We spent several days talking about Bob’s bone dust theory (he believed the kind of person you were was determined by the amount of bone dust in your body). I started buying my semi-dry riesling by the case and developed a taste for very dry martinis. Half of our dinners wound up with me yelling, throwing my hands in the air, and storming out of the kitchen. The other half ended with us laughing so hard tears streamed out of my eyes. What a blast.
Author Interview
Linda, thanks so
much for inviting me to join you today. I’ve been having so much fun meeting
readers on my blog tour. It’s been a delight!
1.
Tell us a little about yourself: Your hometown, your age, anything cool!
Brooklyn-born and Jersey-bred. Does it get any better than that?
2.
How did you know you wanted to write? I come from a long line of readers.
In fact, in my family, we call reading ‘The Murphy Curse.’ Dishes and laundry
go unwashed, homework goes undone, bills go unpaid, all as we breathlessly try
to cram in ‘just to the end of this chapter.‘
Although I made my living as a business writer for decades, I would
never have aspired to being a novelist; I don’t have the chutzpah. To me, being
a novelist is just one small step down from being Ruler of the Universe. I hold
good writers in that much esteem.
3.
What inspires you on those inevitable rough days? After years of writing
to business deadlines, I still try to keep time-frames in my mind when writing
fiction. So many words by such and such a date. I’ve found, though, that the
worst thing you can do when you’re imagining your way through your first draft
is to criticize your creation and your writing. That stops me cold every time.
So I try to kill my internal editor while I’m drafting, and then bring her back
to life when the rewrites start.
4.
Tell me some of your current projects - your works in progress, ideas, or
any crazy off the wall things. I’m almost finished with rewrites of the second
Bob book, Bob at The Plaza, where Roz finds herself going toe-to-toe both with
a flooded lake and with the ghosts of The Algonquin Round Table. It’s been
quite the roller-coaster ride! As far as ‘crazy off the wall’? Right now, I’m
mapping out how to rebuild my stone lake wall that was demolished by ice this
spring. There’s nothing quite like standing calf-deep in frigid water to get
your mind churning with writing ideas!
5.
What are the aspects of your writing that people don't see? What would
you like people to know about your work? I loved doing the research that
underpins the Bob books, especially reading about members of The Algonquin
Round Table. The letters of Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber’s novels,
Benchley’s essays, Harpo Marx’s hysterical autobiography--it’s been so much fun
learning more about these people. As to my hands-on research on the panic of
living through a spring flood? Not so much fun...
6.
This question is a chance to meander or talk in greater depth if you'd like.
Here you can talk about what hobbies you pursue, how you refresh your well of
ideas, what you would recommend to other writers. My hobbies--like my reading
choices--are all over the map. I love grand opera; I also sort of love pushing
large rocks into a lake wall under the broiling summer sun. I strive for a
frugal life, but somehow there’s always money in the budget for blue pearls.
Usually
unwittingly, I manage to interject lots of drama into my life. For instance,
even though I’m kind of tired of cooking, I signed up for a farm share this
summer, so I predict lots of sturm und drang as I try to figure out what to do
with my newly-picked peck of peppers. Pickle them? (you did say I could
‘meander’…)
I guess I refresh
my well of ideas through variety and pushing myself into slightly uncomfortable
situations. It’s a great way to keep growing and to keep my writing fresh.
(Even though I still have no clue how I will deal with all those peppers…)
Great questions,
Linda! Thanks so much for inviting me today!
Roz
Roz Murphy is the
pseudonym of a shy, retiring writer who doesn’t want her neighbors to know how
nutty she really is. Brooklyn-born and Jersey-bred, Roz now lives on the misty
shore of one of New York’s beautiful Finger Lakes. Prior to that, her business
writing career took her to many locations, including Manhattan, where she
worked for a number of years. As a freelance and corporate writer, Roz won
several national and international writing and communications awards.
Now Roz is
pursuing her first love—fiction. She’s writing the ‘Bob’ books, the humorous
chronicle of a crabby ‘woman of a certain age’ who moves to the wintry shores
of a New York lake—and gets a ghost. And not just any ghost, mind you. Bob’s a
plump, middle-aged ghost from 1920s Manhattan who swans around in a silk
smoking jacket and drinks far too many martinis. Stir the good-looking grape
grower who lives up the hill into this mix and you get a pretty potent
screwball cocktail!
When she’s not
reading, writing, hill-walking, staring mindlessly out the window at the lake
or piling rocks onto her ever-diminishing lakefront, you can usually find Roz
hanging out with her family, travelling, or exploring the amazing wines and
wineries of the Finger Lakes.
‘Bob at the Lake’
is exclusively available as a Kindle download from Amazon. Please join Roz
Murphy Author on FaceBook for updates on the many adventures of Roz, David—and
Bob.
Amazon buy link:
http://www.amazon.com/Bob-at-Lake-R-Murphy-ebook/dp/B00F3O9G4Y/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1388423123&sr=1-1
