Please welcome, friend and author, Gianetta Murray ...

... to the blog this week.  Hi, Gianetta and thanks for making time to be here.  So, let's talk about your anthology.  When did you publish that?

GM Just before Christmas, I published a collection of humorous paranormal short stories titled A Supernatural Shingdig.  Probably should have pushed for Halloween based on the subject matter, but my annoying perfectionism reared its well-formed head!  The book contains fifteen tales involving ghosts, vampires, zombies, werecreatures, etc.  One of my favourites is a story completely written in dialogue between two archangels discussing what to do with the first prayer request from an AI system.

AW  Ah, yes.  I remember that one well, but I really enjoyed all of those stories and readers can find my review Here  What first got you into writing and why?

GM I’ve always been into it.  My parents saved a story I did in kindergarten written from the point of view of a thermos inside a lunchbox.  I was an English major, and I’ve spent my professional life as a technical editor/writer, librarian, and knowledge manager.  But always, at the back of my mind, was the urge to write fiction, to get stories out there and see if people would enjoy them.  There’s not much to enjoy about a technical manual, even a well-written one!

AW You write crime and supernatural/fantasy fiction.  Is it all imagination, or do you do research?

GM  I wish I could say more of it was imagination.  As a past librarian, research is my joy and I over-research everything to give me the confidence to sit down and write.  And a lot of the personal interaction in my books is based on my own experience, which is one of the advantages of starting to write later in life.  But I do find, now that I am writing, that my imagination is coming back to life.  I suppose it’s like a muscle: the more you use it, the fitter it gets.  Lots of things I’m reading or watching are giving me ideas to write about.

AW  Have you tried/dabbled with other genres or writing for other forms of media?

GM I’ve written very technical white papers, lots of website copy, newspaper articles, and scripts for videos selling semiconductor programming tools.  I’ve also got a bag full of stories in various genres written in classes and seminars, just waiting for me to revisit them.  But basically, I can only write about things that interest me, and evidently that’s mysteries with a humorous and/or paranormal element to them.  I’ve been married for half my life, so writing about the first excitement of romance might stretch my new imaginative powers.  Then again, I’ve never actually murdered anyone either, yet my first murder mystery comes out in June, so who knows?

AW  Famous authors such as Roald Dahl and Dylan Thomas had a special space for writing. Do you have a writing shed of your own?

GM  If only!  When COVID hit, my husband and I took turns sharing our home office, which I’d decorated in all things Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  But when I quit my job to write a couple of years ago I ceded it to him as the sole breadwinner.  So I write at the dining room table, which fortunately we rarely use.  I do face the conservatory, where I can still look out on greenery and wildlife.

On the plus side, the office desk is over a radiator and my husband is frequently disturbed by the cats sleeping on his laptop and getting fur between the keys.

AW  And finally, if you had a whole afternoon to yourself and could choose to spend it with any one individual, living or dead, or a character from a book, who would it be and what would you discuss?

GM  I used to get crushes on fictional detectives when I was younger and then was massively disappointed when I got to the end of the author’s work.  So I would have Josephine Tey’s detective Alan Grant over for tea or maybe a stroll next to a river.  He’s always just the right combination of politeness and practicality, and it would be fun to find out what he really thought about some of the characters in her books.  I’d also have to challenge him about his theory that he can identify criminals by their faces, which I don’t feel was a valid defense of Richard III in The Daughter of Time.

about the book … A time-traveling senior citizen.  A ghostly eighteenth-century dandy.  A hippie with a genie.  A famous bon vivant with vampire trouble.  All these and more await you in this pageant of paranormal short stories set in locations around the world from Shakespeare's time to the present day.

about the author … Gianetta moved from California to England almost twenty years ago when she married an Englishman, and she now lives in South Yorkshire with said husband and two cats, Cordelia and Winifred.  She has worked for many Silicon Valley companies and as a librarian in the public, corporate, government, and university sectors of both countries. Despite her love of her new home, she still sometimes forgets the British pronunciation of basil and oregano, and refuses to say ‘aluminium’.  

The first in her Vivien Brandt mystery series, Moved to Murder, is scheduled for publication in June 2024 by Troubador Press.

You can follow Gianetta on her Website on Facebook and on Instagram and you can get her book on Amazon