C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 16

CITY OF HEROES is back!!!!!!!!!

GUYS!

GUYS!!!!!

The ONLY MMORPG I have EVER HAD ANY INTEREST IN IS BACK!!!!

My BELOVED superhero game, City of Heroes, has been resurrected as City of Heroes: Homecoming after TWELVE YEARS! Officially licensed from the original creators, NCSoft, with five servers up and running!

I AM SO EXCITED I ACTUALLY KEEP TEARING UP, GUYS, I AM SO HAPPY!!! I loved this game!

For those of you who don’t know, it’s an original-world superhero game that launched in (apparently) 2004, and was hugely popular, but...

Recent Reads: The Dark is Rising

I have read THE DARK IS RISING many, many times in my life, far more than I can count (I mean, it’s probably a countable number, but it’s not like I have been counting!). It is, perhaps, not quite my favorite of the sequence (I have a soft spot for GREENWITCH, which was the first of them I read, and which features Jane quite heavily, which, I mean, like, y’know, female protagonist, so…), but I’m fairly willing to concede it’s the best of the series, arguably by a long shot.

The last time I wrote...

a bad haircut :(

I am currently growing my hair out in the sense of “I haven’t had it cut in six months and it was a pixie cut so that’s a lot of growing out,” rather than “I am deliberately growing my hair,” but it looked like, you know, like a pixie cut does after 6 months of not being cut, so Indy (who was in a similar situation but his hair was longer to begin with) and I went for haircuts yesterday.

And since it’s January and my FRICKING HELIX PIERCING is still not healed after 15 months so I can’t wear a ...

borking my websites

So apparently for the new year I’ve decided to bork my websites.

Not a great plan, overall, IMHO, but here we are. And, well, okay, I didn’t actually bork this one; I updated it, and think I’m vaguely happy with the look and feel for the moment, but I mean, god knows. Anyway, it’s the professional site that’s currently broken, and not even in a way that makes it unusable, just a way that is…utterly baffling. It might be due to having updated the PHP. It might…not be. I don’t know. I’ve asked for...

Happy 2024!

Happy New Year, mes amis. I decided to go in to the office today for the precedent of it, although I have no particular expectation of getting anything done besides a blog post or two, which I could have done from home. :)

Last year was not awesome for me/us, and I’m not going to dwell on it much, although I was surprised a couple of days ago to realize I’d published three books and two novellas in 2023. Four books if you count URBAN SHAMAN’s re-release:

DEATH IN IRISH ACCENTS (writing as Catie...

A Melodrama In Sligo

The scene: I am arriving back in Sligo after a couple of days in Dublin.

The setting: Sligo Train Station

The performers: Myself; my father; a random older woman sitting next to Dad in the train station as he awaits me

Dad, rising from his seat, hands extended to capture mine: Catie, Catie, *Catie*! Oh, my darling! Let me *look* at you! Oh, *honey*! Let me look at you, let me look at you!

Me, embracing him: Oh, *Daddy*!

Dad: It’s been so long! My darling girl!

Older woman: -happy weepy face-

Me,...

Don’t Quit Your Day Job, They Said…

Do you know what today is?

Today is the TWENTIETH (20th) ANNIVERSARY* of me becoming a full-time writer!

I did not, in fact, quit my day job; it quit me, and I never got another one.

I have written…well, I’ve written 53 full length novels and collections now, something like 48 of which have been written since The Day Job Went Away. I’ve written a dozen novellas, and a ton of short stories, and…I literally couldn’t have done it without all of you.

I also literally couldn’t have done it without m...

A-conventioning I go

This weekend I went to the National Irish SF Convention, Octocon, for the first time in *years*. Since 2017, I’m pretty sure.

It was lovely to see everyone. I wasn’t sure until Friday that I was going at all, so I didn’t mention it to anybody except one friend, so people were Very Surprised Indeed to see me, and almost immediately upon arrival I was invited to do a panel, which was both flattering and funny.

Furthermore, to my delight, the panel was with my friend, the magnificently talented Sar...

Recent Reads: Starbridge

Recent Reads: Starbridge, AC Crispin (amazon affiliate)

This is one of my favorite books. It’s a first contact story, led by a teenage girl, and I was the same age as the protagonist when I first read it, which probably helped cement its place near and dear to my heart. :)

Mahree Burroughs (I only noticed the nod to Edgar Rice there in this reading!) is a human from an Earth colony, on her way to Earth for the first time to go to college. Their ship, captained by her uncle, picks up a signal tha...

Recent Reads: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches

This is one of many books I’ve bought because someone on Twitter (in this case, fantasy novelist Stephanie Burgis) recommended it. For a platform notorious for Not Selling Books, I gotta say, I’ve bought an awful lot of books because of it. RIP Twitter. Anyway.

IRREGULAR WITCHES is a contemporary rrrrromantic fantasy, I guess, because there is a romance storyline of some importance, but it’s really about Found Family, and like a lot of what I’ve been reading lately, it was a balm to my weary sou...