C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 11

a pokemon weekend :)

I spent basically the entire weekend playing PokemonGo, and it was GREAT. :D

Please know that I do not expect many of the following words, in these sequences, to mean much to most people. :D

It was the PokemonGoFest weekend, and I got in the region of 2 million XP, which is an extremely large amount for me. I am T R Y I N G to reach 50th level in this wretched game because, see, I do not play video games, and I never level out in them on the rare occasions that I do, but I happened to hit 40th...

irritated rant

IRRITATED RANT INCOMING

I just got one of my trad publishers’ for-the-authors newsletter arrived and one of their topics is “how to grow your newsletter organically!”

You know what the #1 best way to grow it would be?

The NUMBER ONE BEST WAY to grow it would be for THE TRAD PUBLISHERS to let us put OUR NEWSLETTER LINKS into THEIR EBOOKS

But they don’t want to do that. Not because it’s hard, because it isn’t: they could just put it into the About The Author at the end, or on the Also By page. It ...

Irish govt climate crisis survey

The Irish government is asking people to take a survey on climate change action. If you live in Ireland, this affects you. It took me about 20 minutes including the screed I had to cut down because it was too long, because apparently you’re only allowed to have a certain amount of opionion on the climate crisis. It’s worth filling out.

But then, why would I let a good screed go to waste? I wouldn’t, so here it is in a blog post. Feel free to adapt any of it as you see fit to your own needs as y...

Recent Reads: Fake Flame

Recent Reads: Fake Flame: very cute.

This is a a fake-dating book that has the brass tits to actually examine the trope of fake dating from within it own pages. Our Heroine, an English lit teacher, is being harrassed by her ex who won’t take no for an answer; in an attempt to get rid of him, she ends up almost setting a piano on fire, and Our Hero, a firefighter, arrives on the scene.

Sparks, as one might say, ensue. Our Hero ends up offering to be her fake boyfriend in hopes of driving the ex a...

critical for author websites – summary!

So I got about forty responses from my question a few weeks ago about what was critical to have on an author website, and the overwhelming response was that these, in more or less this order, are what readers are looking for:

What’s NewWhat’s NextALL THE BOOKSReading Order, particularly if that’s different from the publication orderCURRENT! INFORMATION!

Okay, so this was pretty interesting! I’m gonna go into some of these more, and then touch on some of the less-widely-asked-for-but-still-...

Picoreview: My Lady Jane

Picoreview: My Lady Jane – actually quite entertaining

You know how I wrote MAGIC & MANNERS after a PRIDE & PREJUDICE watching-and-reading binge caused me to ask “what if the Bennet sisters had too much magic instead of too little money?”

Well, My Lady Jane feels like somebody did that with Tudor England, except their all-consuming question was, “What if instead of Protestants, England had shapeshifters?”

Now, lest you think this means we’re pro-Catholic in My Lady Jane‘s fantasy England, let m...

trying out kobo+

I am, with extremely mixed feelings, trying out Kobo+, which is Kobo’s subscription service, like Kindle Unlimited for Amazon.

Here’s the utterly ridiculous thing: I have zero problem with people using KU or Kobo+, so why do I feel weird about it? I do not know. But I do. If I were more likely to get through books faster, I’d just check them out from the library, but I’m all too aware that many, indeed most, of my books lie around waiting for months or years for me to read them, and libraries st...

Kitsnaps: Sligo Sunrise

I was up very, very early recently to go across the country for a PT session (that’s a totally normal thing to do), and there was a lovely sunrise going on a bit after I got on the train. My phone, which turns to greyscale at 10pm and stays that way until 7am to remind me to sleep, was still IN greyscale when I snapped this shot through the speeding train window, so I really had no idea if it had turned out nicely or not for another, like, 90 minutes.

But it had, in fact, turned out QUITE beauti...

art post: NOT-Saturday-sketches

I’ve been really, really busy and haven’t really made it to the Saturday night art zooms for a while, but I did buy a couple of new sketchbooks with the goal of filling them over the summer. One’s going to be a summer project with my son, I hope, just fast sketches stuff, and the other is a smaller one for me to just pick up whenever.

So I did a couple sketches this week. My rules were “no more than ten minutes and no erasing.” (Actually I did 3 but the one I like best/gave myself 20 minutes on ...

Picoreview: Hit Man

Picoreview: Hit Man: fairly entertaining

I like actor Glen Powell, and the reviews said he was good in this Netflix Original (at least, I think it’s a Netflix Original; it’s on Netflix, anyway), which they also said was sexy and funny and stuff.

To my surprise, it’s actually pretty sexy, which is very unusual for modern movies. And it is funny, if also sort of over-the-top unbelievable in ways that I didn’t just settle into, but instead kept kind of looking askance at. But it’s also apparently s...