But she's also ready to bid the story farewell after having spent so much time with it.

"Once it's published, you have to stop thinking about, oh, what could I have done differently? Should I have changed this? Is that the right ending?" she said.

"Once it's gone, it's gone. And now I feel like my mind can concentrate on another story."

Ms Murphy published her first book, the memoir Scrapbooks And Broken Strings, at the end of 2021, but her new work is something very different.

Titled Bluebottle Poison, it's set in the 1980s in Australia as 11-year-old Bridie embarks on a holiday with her family on the NSW South Coast.

"She has a younger sister and she's quite torn about her relationship with her. She's very protective of her, but also a bit jealous of her, and striving to get a little bit of independence from her," Ms Murphy said.

"While she's down on holidays, some pretty awful things happen to her.

"But what I was trying to do was capture the mind of an 11-year-old that isn't quite experienced or wise enough to be in the world or to understand the consequences of their actions.

"So she's incredibly anxious and, at every turn, it feels like her world is going to fall apart, until actually it almost does."

While there are some dark themes in it, Ms Murphy said she hopes that readers "feel that it ends quite hopefully".

The book is dedicated to Ms Murphy's younger sister, who she wrote about in Scrapbooks And Broken Strings.

"When I was 10 and she was almost eight, we wandered up to a highway together and she was hit by a car in front of me," Ms Murphy said.

"So it was really, really tragic.

"For obvious reasons, I'm quite interested in the relationship and the bond between sisters and the level of responsibility that one sibling should have for another, especially when they're children.

"A lot of it [the new book] is about that."

An English teacher who has worked across both the Denison College campuses in Bathurst, Ms Murphy is a long-time reader.

"When I left school, I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I got a job in a bookstore and I got the sack because I was reading books all the time," she said.

"So I figured I might as well go to uni and study what I enjoyed doing.

"I went to uni, studied literature and, as a lot of people with an arts degree do, I also did a Bachelor of Education.

"I ended up teaching and I've been teaching for 23 years."

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She said she loves the fact that she's now got two published works.

"I feel like it's a nice way to kind of counteract the old 'those that can't, teach'," she said.

"I think it's really lovely for me to be teaching language and literature and writing to students from the perspective of this actually has real-world value.

"I hope that I will find the motivation and discipline to write something else. At the moment, I've got a few ideas in my head, but nothing set in stone. But it will.

"When it's ready, it will."

There are less nerves with Bluebottle Poison than there were with her memoir, Ms Murphy said.

"The memoir was just so raw and so personal and those who have read it have actually said to me 'my goodness, I read the first chapter and just cried and put it down and couldn't even touch it for another couple of weeks'.

"And I was like 'oh, please read on, there are funny bits in it too'.

"I've had a difficult past, like a lot of people, and it was a very cathartic experience to write it, but it was very dark and very personal and very revealing and very candid.

"People have said that to me: it was really, really honest.

"Whereas a work of fiction, it's really just your fantasy."

Having said that, "there is a little bit of the author in everybody's story", even fiction, she said.

Pre-orders for Bluebottle Poison, which is being published by Ginninderra Press, are available now.

The book will be officially released on April 23 and Ms Murphy anticipates that Books Plus will be stocking it in Bathurst.

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