C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 101
February 20, 2014
Recent Reads: The School for Manners
My reading lately has not been going so well. I’m bouncing off a lot of well-reviewed books hard, and I’m retreating to fun and easy reads.
I’ve said before that I enjoy reading MC Beaton’s books because they take me about 70 minutes and therefore allow me to feel like I’m reading a lot, even if in wordcount I’m not really. I’d been reading Agatha Raisin and Hamish McBeth, but I picked up one of her Regencies lately and it was great fun, so I’ve recently blown through the whole School for Mann...
February 19, 2014
Picoreview: August: Osage County
Picoreview: August: Osage County is a story about a wildly dysfunctional family, with an absolutely dreadful matriarch played by Meryl Streep and–primarily, although really not at all singularly–her personal war with her oldest daughter, played by Julia Roberts. The real skill of the performances is that although many of the characters are just awful people, they’re all *understandable*. At moments they’re all even sympathetic, which, given how dreadful most of them are, is pretty impressive....
Reader Questions: Doing it all
Thirzah asks keeping kick-ass real? Why is it ok to have a hero/ine shoot people in fiction, when we’re opposed to guns & violence in real life?
Well, I write about a god-fighting shaman, so I’m not sure how *real* I keep kick-ass, but… :)
I think it’s all right for us to explore violence in fiction precisely because we don’t in real life. It’s a way for us to imagine and experience things we actually really hope we don’t encounter in real life. A lot of fiction is about heightening experienc...
February 18, 2014
GGK Book Club: The Wandering Fire, ch 9-12
AKA “the first time I ever threw a book across the room.”
Cutting straight to the chase here, I was about 17 when I read THE WANDERING FIRE (in fact, I was 17, because I was in my dorm room at UAF sitting on my bed reading when I pitched the book across the room, and remember it quite vividly), and I was enraged at Kevin’s death.
Nigh unto 25 years later, coming into it again, I obviously knew what was going to happen, and had a really vague idea it had…something…to do with the goddess, but…I w...
February 17, 2014
Scrivener
When I first encountered Scrivener I thought, “Wow, this is a really great way to spend a huge amount of time doing work that isn’t writing.”
I still think it’s that, but I’m coming around to seeing how it’s also got the potential to be an incredibly useful tool. I’m working on a couple of projects where I need to be able to keep track of a lot of names and relationships, and my general method (methos) of doing that is by keeping document files with random information inserted into them, and n...
Patreon update :)
So I logged into the war room after launching the MAGIC & MANNERS Patreon project and got hit with a bunch of suggestions on how to improve the page, which I’ll be doing, but one of them was “more explaining about how the funding works”, so I’ll do that in a blog post.
So. Funding with Patreon is Not Like Kickstarter. Patreon does not ask for one large donation; it asks for many small ones. And when we say small we can mean “ten or five or even one cent”–micropayments are totally cool with the...
February 14, 2014
Magic & Manners: Chapter Five
My gift to you this Valentine’s Day is chapter five of MAGIC & MANNERS!
(Start here if you haven’t been reading along!)
And, okay, folks, I’m doin’ it! I’m crowdfunding this baby! If you’ve enjoyed MAGIC & MANNERS thus far, visit my Patreon page to support its continuation!
Patreon’s not like Kickstarter: it’s for small projects rather than big ones, and relies on small, regular donations instead of one larger one. So you might decide to donate $1 per chapter, and if 250 people decide to donate...
dorktastic fangirl squee!
Yesterday for some reason Scalzi was listing his 5 favourite John Cusack teen movies and I volunteered that mine was The Journey of Natty Gann.
Meredith Salenger, the actress who played Natty, responded with an “Awesome!” and I am now totally full of dorktastic fangirl squee. OMG. #dorktastic
Seriously, that movie could be the place my great love of unrequited/impossible love stories comes from. Even now I think Natty and Harry’s story was utterly heartbreaking in the best angstful way possible...
February 11, 2014
Character Development
A while back, I put forth a general call for questions about writing that people might want to ask me, and, er, I just remembered that I had the list stored, so I thought I’d answer one! :)
Heather asks: Character inspirations – from whom did you draw the personality traits of Joanne, Gary, Morrison, Margrit, Alban, Janx, Daisani, etc.
This one’s particularly entertaining because Heather’s a high school friend of mine who has never been able to see herself or anybody she knows in any of my char...
the next big thing
I imported the Scrivener files for my next project this morning. I still don’t really have my brain wrapped entirely around Scrivener, but this is going to be a big project and it’s clear that Scrivener’s project management system is going to be extremely useful once I understand what I can really do with it. Even just having the character names/bio available at a click is obviously helpful.
I knew I’d written some little bit on the project last year, or possibly even the year before that (ai)...
