Blog tour ~ guest post: The Vision Board by Siobhan Murphy

I am delighted to have Siobhan with a guest post today  ~ thanks toRachel’s Random Resources for organizing.

Follow my fellow bloggers on the tour ⤵

Genre: Romantic Comedy / Destination Romance

Publication Date: August 28, 2025

Estimated Page Count: 368

Standalone Novel

Get your copy on Amazon  ➡ https://amzn.to/4pPQ8aW

I’m Siobhan Murphy – Author of The Vision Board – an enemies-to-lovers vacation romance. Here’s a little information about me. I have always wanted to write, and now I’m wondering why I didn’t start my writing career a bit earlier, given I’m now in my late-50s. Pre-Internet, I loved writing letters to friends, I wrote short stories as a child and embarrassing diaries as a teen. Later, when I travelled, I used to send home long emails filled with funny anecdotes and random travelling disasters, which people loved to read.
I’ve done lots of different jobs over the years, something that is the curse of the multi-passionate, easily bored individual. However, all of these have given me insights into different kinds of lives and cultures. Along the way, I’ve encountered a whole range of emotional situations and met people with various character traits. Naturally, these all feed into my writing. I’ve worked for the British Government in Kenya and Tanzania. I’ve worked for a medical magazine. I’ve been a PA, a barmaid and a barista. I’ve worked for a private equity firm. I’ve worked for a company selling tanning products and one selling Cannabis tea. I’ve worked on a racing yacht in paradise and a cheese stall in a local market. I am an avid people watcher, and so all these jobs have planted ideas in my mind that may appear in a book one day. For the last 20 years, I’ve been a photographer. At the start, I photographed weddings, and these days I photograph families, children and newborn babies. I also do personal branding shoots for people in different professions. Lots of things happen at weddings – funny, bizarre, embarrassing and sad. The whole spectrum, and so I’m sure some of these events will sow the imaginative seeds for future romance novels. All heavily disguised, of course.
When it comes to my writing process, I’m mostly a pantser; my first book was created without a pre-planned plot or outline. I enjoy discovering where a story might go. Again, ‘The Vision Board’ started with me writing to see what might happen, but the romance genre has well-defined beats and plot arcs, so once the characters arrived, I shaped the plot to fit what the reader would expect to see. That said, the characters still surprised me in a few places, and it’s always fun when someone pops up out of nowhere to provide a bit of comedy. This happened a couple of times in ‘The Vision Board.’
The next book I’d love to write is interesting. This one arrived in my head fully formed. The whole outline was there, together with all the characters, complete with all their names. I’m very excited about this story, but it does involve a lot of research, so I need to find more time to write. It begins in 1969, and a large part takes place in the ‘70s, so I want to ensure I get the era right. It horrifies me that books set in the decade I grew up in are now considered “historical fiction” – surely that’s books set in Elizabethan times or during the 1st world war? I must be getting old.
I hope the readers of your blog will check out The Vision Board. It’s a great beach read or a great excuse to escape the UK winter. So, if you aren’t heading on holiday anytime soon, you can travel from the comfort of a snuggly blanket on the sofa.

Book blurb:

Two best friends. Two one-way tickets. And a future that might just surprise them.
Bex and Amy are best friends and total opposites. Bex is cynical, Amy is romantic. Bex is chaotic, Amy is organised. With the prospect of turning 34 just around the corner, neither is where they expected to be at this point in their lives.
Bex is exploring her sexuality and has a string of failed relationships, while Amy is newly single and desperate to fall in love. Armed with a photographic vision board of the future, Bex and Amy put their trust in ‘The Universe’ and fly from London to Bali, then on to Australia in search of adventure, cocktails on the beach and maybe even love.
Almost immediately, Amy finds someone who is the perfect fit for her dream life. While Bex is stuck playing double dates with his best friend, the most pompous man she has ever met, but also one of the hottest. Travelling via white sand beaches, lush rainforests and road trips through idyllic scenery, the images on their vision board begin to transform into reality.
However, people are not always what they seem, and first impressions are not always accurate. Add in a queer, charismatic love interest and a vindictive ex-girlfriend, and the path of true love begins to get a little more complex.
When ‘The Universe’ has its own agenda, is it possible to manifest a happy ever after?
An Enemies to Lovers destination romance with a sprinkling of Pride and Prejudice vibes.
Purchase Link – https://amzn.eu/d/7RHRCoc

Author Bio –
Siobhan Murphy is a writer and photographer based in the UK. She writes (and reads) both light-hearted romantic comedies and contemporary women’s fiction/Bookclub fiction.
Her writing hours are sponsored by Earl Grey tea, chocolate bars several glasses of wine. When she is not writing, reading, or working in her photography day job, her hobbies are eating haribo sweets, talking nonsense and walking into rooms wondering why she is there.
She loves to travel, laugh at the absurdity of life, and enjoy a glass of wine with good friends. She loves a good TV binge session, especially shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Virgin River, Emily in Paris, or This is Us. She can be an emotional wreck who often runs out of tissues and when she was a child, her dad had to constantly reassure her that programmes on the TV weren’t real. The upside of this is that she can legitimately class her habit of binge-watching RomCom films as ‘research.’
Siobhan loves to escape into books and live in other worlds. Like most writers, she has been an avid reader from the second she hurtled into the world (well perhaps a little bit after that). Over the years she’s drifted around the world in search of adventure, hoping to figure out what to do with her life. She is not sure if she has the answer yet but writing certainly comes close. Though she suspects her long-suffering family, and her liver might not agree.
She’s impulsive and easily bored, so she’s turned her hand to many jobs over the years. She’s worked in places as diverse as the High Commission in Nairobi; a market stall selling cheese in the UK and an 80ft racing yacht in Australia. Been a secondary school English teacher and a Barista with no discernible talent for making coffee. She’s done admin work for a number of businesses but discovered that offices aren’t really for her. Her favourite job was as a bookseller for Waterstones, she loved recommending books to customers and applying those 3 for 2 stickers that people find so hard to remove. For the last 19 years she’s been a professional photographer, taking portraits of humans – often the really, really small ones.

Social Media Links
Instagram @siobhanmurphywriter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/siobhanmurphywriter