C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 17

inspiration has terrible timing

I was very tired last night, and had a HUGE amount to do today, so went to bed at a very sensible hour, ~10:30pm.

I then utterly failed to sleep for 90+ minutes.

Shortly after midnight, having tossed and turned and gotten up to pee and to make sure my son had done his Pokemon for the day so he wouldn’t lose the 20 day streak he was aiming for for a task, I finally thought I was comfortable and worn out enough to sleep.

And the first line of a new book, a project I’ve been developing the synopsis...

Preorder: Wear Wolf

My next Zoe Chant paranormal romance, WEAR WOLF, will be out this weekend! Preorders are now available!

Guys, I’m not gonna lie, I love writing the Virtue Shifters. They make my heart happy. Numerous readers have said they’re like reading a warm, comforting hug. I don’t know what else I could ask for, in this era of strife and stress. And I have so many ideas and plans for the world, I swear I just need a Tardis for a few months… (Well, I mean, I guess I only need one for a minute, given how the...

living ‘on the road system’

In one of the chat rooms I frequent, Snowqueen, a fellow chatter, experienced a small earthquake in a not-very-usual earthquake zone, and found it very disquieting. She does live in a Cold Place, so as she said, “I don’t know how people live in earthquake zones but I guess I live in a place where the cold could freeze your eyeballs so apparently you just get used to things.”

Well. I mean. I grew up in an earthquake zone where the cold froze your eyeballs! All at the same time! But, indeed, it ne...

Guest of Honor in Orlando, March 2024!

Guess who’s going to be in Orlando next month?

I’m one of the guests of honor at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts conference in Orlando from March 13-16, 2024! It looks fun and exciting, and I’m really looking forward to it!

I’m sorry I haven’t made this news public earlier, but last year was so difficult that I wasn’t sure until quite recently that I’d actually be able to participate in the conference, so I’d been keeping quiet until I was sure I wouldn’t be disappoin...

Picoreview: The Mitchells vs the Machines

Picoreview: Mitchells vs the Machines: did not finish

This was one of those I’d been meaning to get around to seeing because the reviews were so great, so I finally started it, and…half an hour in, I paused it, read the Wiki, and decided that yeah, no, it was not going to redeem itself and I didn’t need to finish watching it.

I 100% believe all the good reviews, honestly. The art style is fun, the animation is engaging, the characters are plausible, etc. It was subtly clear from what I watched t...

Aeon Timeline & Scrivener: a how-to for syncing

Okay, background:

I have spent years fiddling with Aeon Timeline. I love the visuals on it, I like having a timeline for my books, and I know it’s way more useful than I’ve been using it for, but I have not, for the life of me, been able to make it sync with Scrivener, which it’s Supposed To Do.

My HOPE was it should probably let you put all the information into Scrivener, which would then magically populate the information into Aeon Timeline in some way, but…well, I’ve spent ages looking for tu...

The Great Tisane Experiment

My workplace is, as you will no doubt have heard me complain vociferously if you follow me elsewhere, Cold. I am colder in general in Ireland than I was in Alaska, which Irish people keep telling me is due to it being a wet cold, but as I’m colder inside rather than outside, I think the fundamental problem is a combination of lousy insulation and a radically different idea as to what constitutes an acceptable indoor temperature.

(And the outside door, which I am unfortunately close to, just stuc...

how many words is that, anyway?

Whilst I was being celebratory about 50 published books, one of my friends asked how many words that was, anyway.

Anybody wanna take a guess? (You can put it in the comments BEFORE you finish reading this post. I’ll put some spoiler space in, or something. :))

The thing is, I used to have a pretty good idea, actually. I’d kinda kept track up through the end of the publication of the Walker Papers, but that was…a while ago now. So I had to go add it up. And I did include the standalone novellas, ...

Release Day: DEATH BY IRISH WHISKEY

Today is the release day for DEATH BY IRISH WHISKEY!

Do you know what’s special about this book? (Go on, guess, I’ll wait.)

(No, I won’t, never mind, I’m impatient.)

It is my FIFTIETH PUBLISHED NOVEL.

FIFTY. PUBLISHED. NOVELS. That’s a lot! A LOT a lot!

One of the two items I remember on my bucket list* that I wrote when I was about 17 was “have 50 books published by the time I’m 50.” I admit that in that scenario, I was thinking of book #50 coming out before I turned 50, rather than ‘in my 50th...

Process Post: on edit letters

There was a discussion going on over on Bluesky about dealing with edit letters, and this truth came up: “Editors aren’t always right about the solutions, but they’re nearly always right about the problems.”

That thread went on to discuss how the person quoting it, who happens to be KJ Charles whose books I read all of last year and who is also an editor, approaches edit letters; her approach involves suggesting ideas to fix the problems, because it opens the writer’s mind to the possiblity that...