C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 24

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...

An Open Letter to the Irish Government

Feel free to share and/or use/amend it for your own purposes.

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To the Irish Government:

I have watched the ‘return to school’ plans develop over the past week with increasing horror and dismay and am now writing to ask you what the actual fuck the government thinks it’s doing.

The HSE’s guidelines indicate a 2-meter, masked distance between individuals is the minimum safe requirement, and that participants in indoors events are to be limited.

Evidence from the United States (see the Georgia ...

Kitsnacks: Pecan Pie (updated)

My husband is starting a new job on Tuesday (a promotion! Yay!), & upon hearing he was leaving, his coworkers offered the appropriate congratulations and speeches of woe, the latter of which included, “b..b..but…but…pecan pie…???”

So I’m making them a pecan pie, & have finally perfected my process for the recipe I invented several years ago. It is as follows, although it should be noted that I tend to make deep-dish pies, and for your average 9″ pie this should probably be cut in half. Or you...

Writing Career: Running the Numbers

I’ve had A Thought, and tweeted about it some, and now I’m going to discuss it with you!

My Thought was about how much transparency readers want. And…see, on one hand, writers feel like they’re talking about this stuff ALL THE TIME, and it’s information we all know, so it’s sort of hard to tell where the line between “I have told you this one thousand times and you are bored with it” and “this is completely new information to me!” lies. :)

And then the other reason we’re never sure how much we s...

Picoreview Round-Up

A series of picoreviews for things I’ve watched on streaming lately:

The Old Guard: Loved it. Want more. Fave bit: not the Romantic Speech scene, but its aftermath when it cuts back to them. Although the speech itself, and those characters, are wonderful. Solid movie, will watch again v. soon.

Warrior Nun: The pacing of the first 3-4 episodes is *terrible*. I feel as if they expected 6 episodes & got 10 and had to Fill The Time. But it evened out, and by the end I definitely wanted more.

My Spy:...