Two events and experiences came together to trigger the development of Blood and Water.
I wish I wasn’t a cliché but I always knew I had a novel in me. At least one.
I had been playing around with short stories, flash and micro fictions for a long time, I think partly out of a lack of confidence in my ability to commit myself and follow through with a project that felt as huge as a novel. Short fiction is arguably harder than long fiction to get right, but there’s a certain satisfaction to starting and finishing a story in the space of a couple of weeks/months. Staring down the barrel of a project that could take years felt intimidating, to say the least.
It was mid/post a minor health scare (ie, there wasn’t a thing wrong with me besides a bad dose of covid inspired anxiety) that I really kicked into gear. In the depths of planning my own funeral, I thought about how sad I was that I was going to die without having written my book. Thankfully, all results came back totally normal, and I was left with the important lesson of what had actually mattered during those couple of weeks of unnecessary hysteria – the novel must be written.
Sitting Down to Write Blood and Water
When I sat down to write, another, sadly very real, health experience shaped the content, characters and themes that I wanted to write about. I had been struggling to get pregnant through IVF for a number of years, and the obsessive planning and thinking about this had narrowed my life and it’s all I could think or write about. I absolutely did not want to write non-fiction about it, it felt too vulnerable, too self-indulgent. So I took some of those experiences, some of those dark moments, and gave them to someone else who would respond to them differently, make different decisions, and would take me somewhere interesting, narratively.
Five years later here we are, with my debut novel being published by Mercier Press, thanks to the RTE Today Show Novel Competition
Blood and Water
Blood and Water is about Susan, who travels to the fictional Dune Island, ostensibly to settle up her deceased uncle’s estate. It’s clear quite early on that Susan is going through a lot, and it also becomes clear that the habit of fleeing and hiding from problems runs through her family like DNA. Susan’s grief follows her to the island, and even as nature blooms and the sea roars around her, she feels crushed by it.
I’m immensely proud of the novel, and I hope that there will be women particularly who read it and feel less alone, or will be kinder to themselves about their grief, their sorrow and even their rage.
Stephen King reckons you should finish the first draft of a novel in 3 months. I am no Stephen King. It took me about 3 years from when I wrote the first word to when I finished the first draft of my manuscript, and while part of me wishes I could have done it quicker, I know that every delay and false start fed into the novel and shaped the book it is today. Moving from first draft to a decent manuscript suitable for querying agents, competitions and publishers took a further year, and during that time I received a scholarship for the Faber Academy’s Finish Your Draft course with Dr. Natasha Bell. I learned a huge amount about plot, characters, story, analysing and editing your work, and polishing it.
The RTE Today Show Competition
The RTE Today Show Competition offered the chance to a debut, unagented author to get their manuscript published by Mercier Press, Ireland’s oldest independent publishing house, based in my beloved hometown of Cork city. It was sent across to me in a whatsapp group, writers sharing different opportunities. I glanced it over, got my submission ready, and sent it in. I updated my submissions spreadsheet, and to be honest, I didn’t even think about it again.
Rejection is part of writing life, I’d been experiencing it for years with my other experiments in short fiction. The disappointment and the frustration and just never knowing – ok but was I anywhere in the right zone with this, or is my writing absolute trash? I found the only way to avoid the total destruction of my soul was to entirely wipe any submissions I made from my memory.
Still Sinking In
It very quickly leapt from the spreadsheet back into my brain when I got a reply to my email about a month later, asking for further contact details. I had won! It wasn’t a rejection! It took a while to sink in. It was still sinking in when I sat in the RTE studios under the bright lights, beaming from ear to ear, it was still sinking in when I started working on the final edits and proofreading months later, and even now, as I’m holding a hard copy of my debut novel, as reviews and blurbs are rolling in, and as my Instagram is lighting up with pictures of the book landing in people’s post boxes, being spotted in book stores, it still doesn’t feel fully real.
I’m so grateful for this opportunity, to share a story that means so much to me, to learn and grow in my writing, to develop skills and knowledge in an entirely new area of life. It’s been a great adventure so far, and I’m so excited to see what the next few months will bring.
(c) Rebecca Murphy
Rebecca can be found on insta @rebeccam_ire and on www.rebeccamurphy.ie
About Blood and Water:
Susan arrives on Dune Island with a plan, settle her late uncle’s estate, sign the papers, and leave within a week. The inheritance is simple, a weathered cottage, a small distillery, a stubborn dog named Walter. On paper, nothing she couldn’t sort in a week.
Except Susan isn’t just there to close a chapter. She’s running, from Jen, from a loss she cannot yet name, and from a life that has quietly unravelled.
But Dune Island has been keeping its own secrets.
Cut off on the edge of the Wild Atlantic Way, where the ferry runs on Mick’s time and every glance carries a question, Susan begins to uncover what her uncle Frank left behind, not just property, but a lifetime of silence. And the longer she stays, the more the island reveals, buried stories, unspoken grief, a family history shaped as much by what was hidden as by what was known.
And as the past begins to surface, Susan must confront the truths she came to escape.
She came to Dune Island to be alone. The island had other ideas.
Blood and Water is a haunting, beautifully observed novel about identity, inheritance, and the quiet devastations that echo through generations. With warmth, wit, and emotional precision, Rebecca Murphy introduces a striking new voice in fiction, one that lingers long after the final page.
Winner of the RTÉ Today Show Novel Competition.
Order your copy of Blood and Water online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles on Writing.ie here.
