A nice review of The Last Weekend of the Summer

THE LAST WEEKEND OF THE SUMMER by Peter Murphy is a revealing tale of one family brought together in the hopes of healing old wounds before it is too late to ever do so. A loving and slightly quirky matriarch has a secret to share, and wishes her family to come together for one last summer weekend at her lakeside home. Is Gloria dying? Is she finally unable to live on her own?

Emotional and relatable, readers will find at least one character they recognize from their own families! Witness the dynamics, the shortfalls, the personality clashes, and the role each member plays, regardless of the generation they belong to. Then be part of the secret that is revealed, feel the torment, the turmoil, the anger and the love as one family finds growth, change and renewal through healing and reaching out to one another.

Thought provoking, sometimes humorous, sometimes agitating, this is a true slice of life being part of a family of flawed humans.

First published at Tome Tender

Publication Day

August 28^th, 2018 is the day my fifth novel, THE LAST WEEKEND OF THE SUMMER, goes out into the world. I wish it well and that it meets kind readers along its path. It is a good book—if I may say so myself—and early reviews suggest that I am not alone in thinking that. I take book writing very seriously and am happier when the result is taken seriously.

However, I have learned not to take myself too seriously and with growing insight I am able to separate the value of a book from its reception in the market place. I had to. Back when I started out, I had but an academic view of the business of writing. In frivolous moments I even indulged myself in the fantasy many people share that authors were respected and revered, adored and well-rewarded.

While I wait for that to happen to me, I have found something much more suited to the person I really am. The small, but growing, band of people who have enjoyed my books and have taken the time to express their thoughts and reactions. Now that is the real prize and it is far more useful. Hearing about what resonates with readers, and what does not, helps the receptive author with future books. Like most people, I could be tempted into believing my own hype, despite leading a very contrary life.

I had wanted to write since I was young, but did not get around to it until I was in my fifties. Life, addiction, recovery, reformation, love, marriage, and children, all had to be experienced before I was “qualified” to write the types of books that I would write. I am not unhappy about that as I like to think of all of those years as my time spent in research—and time very well spent.

By virtue of all that I had learned along the roads I have traveled, I was less bothered when my books elicited less than favorable responses from some. Readers, who are people, come to books with their own experiences and in an age of trolling and sniping, civility can sometimes be overlooked.

Likewise, consumerism and marketing strive to lead us to believe that everything we buy and consume should enrich us the way we want to be enriched. That is not always the case and especially so with books. Some books should shake us out of our complacencies. Some books should confront us and entice us to look at things differently—especially when they expose us to viewpoints that we might not already share.

Now while I do understand the vital roles certain genres of books play in offering comfort and enjoyment, I am a great believer in mixed diets. In my own reading, I do pick up books that might seem to have less appeal and often encounter pleasant surprises. I also think it is a recipe for being a better human being. Living in psychological ghettoes and only going to the churches of the like-minded disconnects us and makes us very prone to being misled by vain populists, and the like. But that is just my opinion—based on observations and experience from a very varied life.

Writing books has become essential to my health and wellbeing. Without that I could be roaming the streets, snapping and snarling at all who do not live their lives the way I think they should. Instead, I wander around and study them. I try not to judge and prefer to try to imagine what made them what they are. I believe in trying to be kind—which can be very trying—but when it comes to the characters I write, I believe it is essential. Even villains must be crafted with some love and understanding, otherwise they could turn out to be very one-dimensional caricatures. That might work in some forms of storytelling like pantomime, or history, but it just won’t cut it when writing fiction.

So after I mark the “birth” of my new book, I will get back to working on my next, next one.

In the meantime, for giveaways and other things, check out the happenings below.

http://peterdmurphy.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Peter.Damien.Murphy

https://peterdamienmurphy.blogspot.com/

A simple solution for Brexiteers

I hate seeing people suffer angst so it pains me to see the British people trying to come to terms with the reality delivered by the referendum of a few years ago. In voting for the “Leave” option, they are now confronted by a prospect few really understood, and even less know how to implement.

Steering clear of the rhetoric and other noises, I have a very simple solution. Given that most of the “Leave” voters were older it is possible for everyone to go around saying Britain has left Europe until they have all died off.

It can be easily done. By determining where they get their “information,” a steady stream of post Brexit “facts and figures” can be fed to them while having little of no adverse effect on the younger population who had voted to “Remain.”

Of course they would have to go along with it all and mind their “P’s & Q’s” at family gatherings, and the like.

And Facebook might have to come up with the necessary algorithm to ensure that the appropriate “facts” are fed to the correct demographics. 

I am sure Cambridge Analytics could help, too. Even the Russians might want to get involved. As for Trump—well it might just be better to not mention it on Twitter.

“But people will be able to see through it,” you claim.

Remember the red bus?

A few helpful tips on writing about family.

Writing about family can be a very dangerous business because not all families teem with the ideals of unconditional love and the consistent and constant support so often attributed to the institution.
   

Many, it would seem, are populated with jealous and cranky contrarians who have the ability to see slights in everything, said or unsaid, action or inactivity, presence or absence; the types that will see themselves in books that are not about them and cannot when they are.

These are the sort of people that will never be happy with how you have written them. If presented in less than flattering light, they will threaten legal action, disowning, or shunning. While if you choose to be more positive, they will go around telling everybody that they were your inspiration and that your book would not have been any good without them.

And if you decide to leave them out and write about other family members you risk being accused of favoritism, or worse.

So, if you do come from one of those families, it might be better not to write about them at all. Even if you know it would get you on an Oprah-like show. In addition to the points raised above, this world is already full of those kinds of books and given the times we live in, dysfunctionality has become the new norm.

I jest, of course.

Writing about family is for many writers, like hitting the mother lode, particularly those with axes to grind and old scores to settle. Those with scarred and twisted emotions that are often the legacy of growing up in, what from the outside appeared to be, a normal family.

This should also be a major consideration before starting a family and entering into parenthood. And, if you must, then teach your children to read and leave it at that. Whatever you do, don’t teach them how to write. No good will come of it and besides, they can get by in today’s world with emojis, and the likes. Or they can take selfies to express their emotions if they are especially needy and attention driven.

Teaching a child to write is not much different than inviting an investigative journalist into a cult. Even if there is no story to tell, they can make one up and sell it as creative fiction.

But it you have already, then you could consider a preemptive strike. You could pen your version of MY LIFE WITH THOSE HORRIBLE KIDS THAT SUCKED THE MARROW FROM MY BONES AND THEN COMPLAIN THAT THEIR INHERITANCE WILL BE TOO SMALL. Or something with a catchier title.

Whatever you do, even if your offspring had taken to following you around with a notebook—or modern equivalent, don’t think about deserting them. As tempting as it might sound it really would just be dowsing the smoldering embers of angst with gasoline. The deserted child who becomes a writer will make you out to be a drunken philanderer who ran away from all responsibility, even if you had been abducted by a landing party of malevolent alien intruders.

Or course, if that happened, you might just have a best seller on your hands, as well as some really sweet vindication.

And children, if you find yourselves the offspring of a writer, just put yourself up for adoption. Despite the obvious downside, it could be far better than growing up with all the neglect, moodiness, self-doubt, and obsessiveness that writers are known for.

But if that is not the life for you, try sucking up to them. Bring them coffee. Keep the dog and the cat out of the study. Learn to cook and wash, and iron. Tell them their work is brilliant. Tell them whatever it takes to get them to finish the book. Who knows? They might get famous after they die and leave the royalties to you.

And if you are the sibling of a writer . . . well as a writer with siblings I just happen to have a few opinions on that.

First of all, buy their books even if you have to take out a loan to do it. It will be cheaper than having to listen to them moan and complain about how the world is incapable of recognizing their genius when they come over to crash on your couch for a few months.

Secondly, loan them money even if you have to sell blood for it. It’s the only way to get rid of a writer and you can get your couch back.

Thirdly, never publicly criticize anything they write about you. Always be supportive and encouraging until they have made it. Then write your own tell all and cash in.

But I jest . . .

My family-centric novel The Last Weekend of the Summer comes out in August: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1611882575

And in the meantime, I will be writing a few blog posts on family—for better or worse.

You can read them at: http://peterdamienmurphy.blogspot.com/

Or my website: http://peterdmurphy.com/

Writing about Family

Just as the next (last) book is about to go out and meet the world, I got a nice message from my publisher informing me that the number of requests to review were encouraging. It was tempting, but I am too hoary to be getting excited about chickens and eggs. Not cynical, just experienced enough to take it all—success and success deferred—for what it really is.

Like most writers, I had hoped that my first book would change the world and set all to rights. It did for a few, but most people remain blissfully unaware of it and I learned to be okay with that. I just went on and wrote some more.

That is why I use the term “next (last).” Because right after I send a manuscript off to the publisher, I start on the next one. And so it is now. The Last Weekend of the Summer comes out in August and I am half way through the next, next one.

I do it because it is only from this safe distance that I can look back at what I have done. The Last Weekend of the Summer was a bit of a departure for me in that Ireland, and things Irish, gets no mention throughout. I am still Irish, I suppose, but I am . . . in recovery.

The Last Weekend came about after a conversation with my editor and publisher, the great human being that is Lou Aronica at The Story Plant. Having finished the Life & Times trilogy, I asked for his advice as to what I should do about growing my audience—a question, he told me, he is often asked.

“Write to your strengths,” he told me. “You write convincingly about interpersonal conflicts.” (Or words to that effect.)

So I did, and while I have had varied experiences with interpersonal conflicts, both my own and others, in all the areas of life that I have wandered through, the most obvious one, to my mind, was the ultimate testing ground of human interaction; family.

Family is the whole world in a microcosm. It is where we begin to understand that we are not alone in the universe and that we are not the center of it all, either. Although, through personal experience and observations of all that was going on around me, it seems to me that some of those understandings can elude certain people—or be contorted into something else, entirely. You know the ones I mean . . . we all have a few of them hanging from the family tree.

Now I had delved into family in the Life & Times story, but it was just one of the motifs in a long, arcing chronicle of the world that I had lived in—and no, I am not the protagonist even though he and I shared many experiences. With The Last Weekend of the Summer, I wanted to show a family in a much smaller environment. I wanted them to be the front and center of the story. And because I have lived so much of my life in Canada, I set it in the most Canadian setting I could think of; the cottage.

Going to the cottage with family, and extended family, should, in my opinion, be a rite of passage for any who would dare put pen to paper and write about humanity. From the multi-hour drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic in a car overloaded with all the comforts of home from home, in the swelter, with the kids getting antsy, to that moment when you arrive and unpack everything that you could not possibly need even if you were holing up for the winter, you are nothing more than a prisoner of ritual.

Of course, when it is all unpacked and put away you do get to start relaxing by the lake, but then the others arrive and before long bedlam reigns again with more unpacking, loaded commentaries about who brought what and why, fighting over fridge space, and all the other things that are like matches around touch paper.

However, usually the peace and tranquility of the great outdoors can calm the nerves and allow a fragile truce that can last through the first night of fires and marshmallows and everyone slowly drifting off to sleep, but the next morning . . . that’s when it starts to get interesting. There are never enough tire swings, or paddle boats, and some of the kids can only go out in the canoe if an older kid goes with them. The older kids—the teenagers—are far too busy being bored and hostile and, when separated from their electronic gadgetry, are only too happy to set off any and all rivalries that still exist between their parents and their aunts and uncles—and better yet; their parents’ parents.

Then it is like the approach of a thunder storm that could bang and clatter for hours; with the ominous risk of a lightening strike that could start a roaring inferno in dry undergrowth.

By the second night, alliances have been established and the tribe is divided. Everyone hopes that the uneasy peace can dampen the smoldering coals of old umbrage so easily fanned to flame by any slight new or old, real or imagined. All around the fire, strategies are contrived to include, or exclude, by the well-meaning peace-keepers and the score-settlers alike. Ah, a weekend at the cottage; a rich and fertile setting for any story to be set.

But for the sake of the story that is The Last Weekend of the Summer, there had to be more. Family skeletons had to rise from their shallow graves and haunt them all; ghosts of past misdeeds pleading for forgiveness and understanding from those who had been shaped or warped by all that had gone on before.

Now in fairytales they would have all been moved to serene resolutions and lived happily ever after, but this isn’t one of those stories. Confronted by family secrets that some had been oblivious to, and some in denial of, each had to find their own way through it all—with the help, or hindrance, of the bindings that are family ties. How did they all fare? Well, as the author, I am more than happy to have the reader decide that for themselves.

The Last Weekend of the Summer comes out in August: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1611882575

And in the meantime, I will be writing a few blog posts on family—for better or worse.

You can read them at: http://peterdamienmurphy.blogspot.com/

Or my website: http://peterdmurphy.com/

Me, my younger self, and I

There are moments when I have reason to stop daydreaming and pause to consider the greater questions in life.

It is not a very fashionable practice anymore, but I suppose I have become a bit—what you might call—old school.

There was a time when such an admission would have been too distasteful—you know, when I was young and was going to tear down all that was old and staid. We—my generation—were going to make this world a better place. The road to hell . . .

On the grand scale, I doubt I have had much impact in any of that, but on a more local level . . . sure only time will tell.

I am, now, what my younger self would have called ‘old’ and one piece of evidence that my journey has not been without progress is that I can now forgive my younger self his arrogance and vanity. After all, what is the point of youth without these things—inverted or otherwise?

Having been indoctrinated from infancy by well-meaning zealots, I struggled with the meaning and purpose of life for far too long. Who wouldn’t after being told that there is a great power above that oversees all—and that it was a power for good?

It made such little sense when all around me was Bedlamic.

That, I was told, was self-will run riot. It was our true test, they told me: overcoming the self to be part of the one spirit of the universe. To be one with our God-like nature!

That made a lot of sense when I was high but shriveled up when I had to go out among the other inmates of the planet we all call home. They told me, in words and deeds, that it was really about taking as much as you can, giving only what you had to, and to always look out for number one. After all, they told me, God helps those that help themselves.

Contradiction?

Yes, but I learned how to deal with things like that. My younger self worked on the buildings sites of London, along with the swearing Paddies, drinking our evenings away in the pubs and parks of Kilburn, with a crumpled, dog-eared copy of The Prophet in the back pocket of my jeans.

The others would make fun of me, but with a certain kindness that wasn’t their normal social currency. They, in a sad kind of way, encouraged me—if only not to become what they had become; trapped in caricature. Not that being a philosophical labourer didn’t come with its own baggage.

Add to that I was, back then, what was once called a wandering minstrel. I played guitar and sang the songs that would change everything, if only people listened to the words. They didn’t and the world went on about its way to whatever end we are designing for it.

With all that we now know about ourselves and the planet we all call home, it could become a source of dread, if you let it.

Be positive, they told me, and always look on the bright side.

Jaysus wept, said I to my younger self, are they all mad?

Now, my older self, knows that we are. We are all mad and we live in a Bedlam of our own creation.

Only we don’t admit it—that would be madness. Instead, we all stick to our agendas, personal or public. We find rationality in our tenets and our causes and we get to look down our noses at any and all who think differently. We demand that we, and those who think like us, be treated fairly while we hurl intolerance and abuse at those who don’t. We are right and everyone else is wrong. 

My older self has come to the sad realization that it has always been like this. All of our great movements; Royalism, Nationalism, Sectarianism. Secularism, Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, Genderism, all things that were to have united us in cause or purpose but, in the end, became little more than reasons to divide ourselves and render us to those who would conquer us.

But here’s the part that my older self believes is the point: none of that matters.

Life is all that we say it is. It is the bitter, sweet journey from the cradle to the grave. Full of wonder and woe and all the things in between. A test? An experience? A chance to atone for past crimes against out better natures? Why not? It makes as much sense as anything else.

Despite the challenges of the future, and the numbing nearness of our long-prophesied and catastrophic doom, my older self is accepting of our fate and strives to be no more than happy in just finding the right word, or gesture, that might help another along their way. Because, looking back, I have come to realize that my better moments came about because of the kindness of others.

And that is enough to be getting on with for today. Good luck to you all.

I am rubber; you are glue . . . and other thoughts about the Presidential election.

While reading a recent online discussion about the American election, there it was: two old-enough-to-know-better adults were going at it about the demerits of each other’s candidate and having abandoned all pretext at civility or decorum, were down to name calling and the online version of sticking their tongues out, culminating in the childhood taunt of: I'm rubber you are glue, your words bounce off me and stick to you.

And while this could be seen as very entertaining, it did cause a shiver of dread when I remembered that these people will get to vote in an election that has enormous impact on the entire population of the planet – existing and future.

I have no dog in this fight and have long ago lost any hope for the electoral process. For me, it is no more than divisive and mean-spirited reality TV at its worst. And my issue with that is that, for most part, it divides rather than unifies people. 

Add in the fact that it is also a massive advertising campaign where money dominates and you might begin to see things the way I do.

As we all know from our daily lives, money doesn’t come cheap. Those who “invest” in candidates have agendas that rarely surface during what passes for debates and are never scrutinized by analysts and experts who form many of the opinions of those who go off to vote.

It has been a long downward spiral to this particular election. In recent years we have seen processions of ‘Gee-Shucks’ cardboard cut-outs trying to out-Jesus each other; new and improved versions of smooth, slick, salesy types saying nothing and denying all that they previously might, or might not, have said, and visionaries who will lead us to Promised Lands where we can live free of all those who are not like us.

The Election industry has created a toxic environment where efforts at the reasonable debate of complex matters have long been abandoned in favour of cleverly tailored sound bites that are repeated like jingles.

Not surprisingly, elections for the most part have become less and less about intellectual civic exercises and more and more about emotional venting and the rejection of the ideals of people we hate, fear, or envy.

A compelling and recent example of all of this was the British referendum and I follow the resulting gyrations with a mixture of amazement and trepidation. There, a majority of voters followed leaders who, on winning, resigned and in doing so forced the country to actually begin to discuss what it was they had done.

Similarly, in the first American Presidential debate, the matter of Syria did not merit a mention.

Regardless of your views on the horrible war in that country – and finding a clear picture in the haze of misinformation is a particular challenge – surely a future president’s views should be examined and understood? Or are we to wander into a new world war without even the pretext of political rationale?

Perhaps it is the only logical way after the farce of the great WMD issue when the Coalition of the Willing, made up of the democratically elected governments of the free peoples of the world, attacked and destroyed countries that now seem to have had little or nothing to do with 9/11 – and all in the name of defending our freedom and democracy.

Not that any of that matters if we are all transfixed by the circus this election presents. Never mind that the world is being brought to rack and ruin by the privately plotted actions of State and Corporate interests, let’s get enraged about what the other candidate may have done or said, or looks like. Then, in place of real debate, let’s all turn on each other and call each other names, and worse.

As stated, I have no dog in this fight and, while one candidate is probably unfit to be allowed out in public and the other has the lingering odour of shady deals, I would be far more concerned with who is paying for all of this and what their real agenda might be.

It is one of the great flaws of democracies that so much of what is done in the name of the people is done behind closed doors. You can cite security, confidentiality, or whatever, but how can it be called the will of the people when they have no idea what is really going on?

Sure, many of us are happy to be sloughed off with media information from the sources that we trust implicitly, but that, at the end of the day, is little more than going through the motions so that we can pay lip service to the principle that democracy is supposed to enshrine: that “the informed voter is the sword of democracy.”

I began to question that long ago and now find myself more aligned with the great wit, Oscar Wilde, who has been quoted as saying: “Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”

Yes, it had been a long and torturous slide to where we are now and, far from being the shining light of freedom and democracy, this election may well be the beginning of the final act in the tragically comedic story of the decline and fall of human civilization.

And yes, I do have ideas on a better way. I might even get around to sharing them one of these days so if you are interested, check back in a while. I’ll be here, thinking about things.