C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 21

taxi drivers & electric cars

My taxi driver today had just bought a new electric car and was so pleased with himself that it improved my entire day.

It was a 45K car, but he got a 15K grant, so that brought it down to 30K. Then he got a 12.5K trade-in on his old car, which was obviously quite decent, but only had 4 years left on its 9 year run as a vehicle acceptable as a taxi (I didn’t know there was a limit, but there is), so he got a 45K car for 17.5K AND electric vehicles have a 12, not 9, year limit as a taxi, so he’s ...

Release Day: Death of an Irish Mummy

Hey, today really IS launch day!

Book 3 in my Dublin Driver cozy mystery series, DEATH OF AN IRISH MUMMY, is out today!

If you’re just here for the links, it’s available now on: Amazon (affiliate link) || Apple || Barnes & Noble || Kobo

Squiring a self-proclaimed heiress around Dublin has got limo driver Megan Malone’s Irish up—until she finds the woman dead . . .

American-born Cherise Williams believes herself to be heir to an old Irish earldom, and she’s come to Dublin to claim her her...

heat? in the house? i do not understand

So it turns out that the heat’s never worked properly in this house since we moved in.

Here’s the thing: the heating in Ireland is such shit that this never occurred to us as a possibility. We’ve been trained to think sleeping in gloves is just a thing you have to do sometimes.

The radiators were gurgling horribly & Ted tried bleeding them (again: this happened a few weeks ago & we eventually turned the boiler off & back on again & the heat came back, but THIS time) the whole system shut down & ...

Launch Day: Practical Boots

I am lying. Today is not launch day. Today is the day I remember to post about launch day. :]

But: launch day! New novella! PRACTICAL BOOTS, a story of the Torn, is now available!

These boots are made for walking…

The disappointing daughter of a Lord of the Torn, Cat Sharp was dumped in the shapeless Waste to prove herself or die. Seven years later, she’s honed the Artificer magic that saved her in the Waste, and her courier business is booming: after all, no one else can step from ...

things, they are a-changing

I recently decided that I needed to tidy up the professional side of my website, and, since I’m not blogging much anymore, came to a crisis of conscience: did I want to turn mizkit.com over to a professional-only website?

Mes amis, I did not.

So I registered Catie Murphy dot com (because CE Murphy dot com has been taken as long as I’ve been using that name, and I’m now also writing under Catie Murphy, which was available as a domain name :)), and have set up shop there.

It’s a very simple site w...

Launch Day: LIBRARIAN BEAR

Mes amis, I am so delighted to announce that the second book in my paranormal romance shapeshifters series, LIBRARIAN BEAR, is now available!

LIBRARIAN BEAR, Book 2 of the Virtue Shifters, is written under the shared pen name of Zoe Chant; so far, the Virtue books are my only Zoe books. I think these are pretty funny, charming, sexy little shapeshifter romances, and I hope you’ll think so too. :)

Also the covers are HYSTERICAL. :D

Sarah is looking for love under the covers…of a good book!

...

is this thing on?

*tap, tap* is this thing on?

Apparently long-form blogging is simply no longer something I do, which is sad. Well, I guess it’s sad. There’s no audience for it, is the thing. My audience is on Twitter, mostly, these days, and to a lesser degree, Facebook, but FB’s algorithms…well. You know how it is.

I’ve been very, very busy this year. So far I’ve done copy & line edits on DEATH OF AN IRISH MUMMY, revised SKYMASTER & LIBRARIAN BEAR, did copy edits etc on BEAR, written 13k of the book I’m not wr...

Release Day: Wintergate

A new short story (technically a novelette, as it weighs in at 16K, which is longer than an official short story but not as long as an official novella :)) has dropped on Amazon Kindle & Kindle Unlimited!

Wintergate is set in the same world as my Beauty and the Beast retelling, ROSES IN AMBER, and is itself something of a retelling of The Snow Queen. It was inspired mostly by the pre-made cover art one of my patrons bought me, and Im really happy with how it turned out!

No one has traveled...

Hnh. Thoughts on 10K hours.

Ted’s reading this book about learning stuff, and the 10,000 hour thing. The author kinda posits that the first 2K hours are foundational, the rest are mastery. I’m generalizing wildly abt the author’s stance here bc, like, I haven’t read it, BUT:

I think that’s a friggin intriguing place to start. Like. Like. I’m sure that over the course of my life I’ve spent somewhere between 5-600 hours studying Spanish. Definitely not more, maybe not even more than 500. But we’ll give me the 600, because wh...

Release Day: STONE’S THROE

If you’re just here for the links, here you go: amazon (affiliate link) || barnes & noble || apple || kobo

If you’re here for incoherent squealing on the part of the author, JUST LOOK AT THIS COVER ZOOOMMMMGGGGG!!@!!@!@!E

I wrote this book several years ago, but felt it kind of slid under the radar because it was a commissioned tie-in work (you don’t need to know anything about the world it came from for it to work, though!), and one of the things I’ve wanted to do for ages was re-cover it and r...