C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 27

trying to get flu shots

I’m trying to get flu shots for Young Indiana and myself. This should not, you would think, be particularly hard. (You would, in fact, perhaps THINK that the schools do them, but they don’t.)

It’s super easy for *me* to get a flu shot. I can just stop by any ol’ pharmacy and do that. But Indy isn’t old enough to get a shot at a pharmacy, so I made us appointments at the GP for Thursday afternoon. “It’ll be €25 each,” the receptionist said.

“We both have asthma, which puts us in the risk group...

a random bit of angsty romantic fiction

I was looking something up and came across this bit of, like…angst with…like, a faintly smutty edge, that I posted on Patreon a while back, and I thought I’d post it here now. :)

***

Thin, expressive lips, always teasing with a smirk that hid the promise of a heartbreaking smile. She knew the other one better, though. The one made of real laughter, changing hazel eyes to green. The one that came with the way he would play with his clothes, a black coat with a red lining. Sitting, he would fli...

Launch Day: THE PRETENDER’S CROWN

Well, if last month’s release, THE QUEEN’S BASTARD, was sex, politics, murder and betrayal, than its sequel, THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, is betrayal, murder, sex and politics, more or less in that order. :)

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Assassin. Seductress. Bastard.

Witch.

Belinda Primrose has lied, murdered, and seduced her way through the deadly courts of Echon, all in the name of solidifying her queen mother’s power. Now war follows in her wake, and with it, the underpinning...

gym: week one

As I said to the PT who fixes me when I do stupid things like cartwheels, “I started going to the gym this week!”

“Yay!” she said.

“I hurt myself right away!”

“Oh,” she said. :)

It wasn’t really an injury, per se. It’s just that my damn hip flexors are incredibly tight, and using the rowing machine made the left one go “what the actual fitzsimmons?” I worked it out with assiduous stretching over the next day, but also, y’know, in a fit of Not Being Stupid, didn’t row again last week.

I did so...

Launch Day: THE QUEEN’S BASTARD

Sex, politics, murder and betrayal arrive with this re-release of THE QUEEN’S BASTARD!

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Belinda Primrose deals in secrets.

Since childhood, Belinda has known she was the unacknowledged daughter of Lorraine, the unwed queen of Aulun, an island nation on the edge of the vast Echonian continent. Belinda is a spy, an assassin…and a danger to her mother, should she ever be discovered. She can be anyone, and will do anything, to cement Lorraine’s posi...

Worldcon 77: The Monday

Clearly by the Monday of Worldcon I was too tired to even be writing about it a week later. :)

I’d actually been doing very well up until the Monday morning, really. I hadn’t been getting enough sleep, but apparently going home to sleep in my own bed made a real difference, because I didn’t get properly incoherent until Monday, and usually Saturday afternoon is when that sets in with these long cons.

I forgot that on Sunday (I think) I was sitting around chatting and our illustrious guest of...

Worldcon 77: The Sunday

I actually still have the event app on my phone so I can even REMEMBER what I was doing on these days.

Sunday I had an interesting panel, “Fantasies of Irish emigration,” about why so much fantasy–especially urban fantasy–seems to get written ABOUT Ireland without much of it being set IN Ireland. I called out RF Long as somebody who’s written UF both in and about Ireland, and I think there were a couple others I could think of, but it was a really fun panel (and my friend Deirdre was on it wi...

Worldcon 77: The Saturday

I am forgetting SO MUCH STUFF it isn’t even funny.

Like moments where I saw a friend Thursday evening, gave her, in fact, a Word Warriors ribbon, and then saw her again at the Friday morning Word Warriors meetup, then saw her AGAIN on Saturday and was like “OMG I haven’t even seen you AT ALL this weekend! …oh, except the meetup…” and she was like “…and Thursday night…when you gave me THIS…?”

It reminds me of when Dublin actually got the Worldcon bid, and I saw Ian McDonald (whom I’ve met seve...

Worldcon 77: The Friday

I remember what I did on Thursday for lunch! I had lunch with an editor!

A couple years ago, at Worldcon 75, I got to go to the Hugo Loser’s Party, and I was going around taking pictures of the winners in their silly hats. A Tor editor who was following the party on Twitter asked if I could get a picture of her colleague who’d won, so I went and found the winner, asked if I could take and post her picture, and within about 10 minutes of the request, had done so. Beth said “It’s almost as good...

Worldcon 77: The Thursday

After years of preparation, Worldcon was held in Dublin this week, for the first time ever. A month ago I was, I confess, pretty exhausted by the very idea of it, even knowing that I tend to dread, rather than anticipate, big events. By a couple of weeks ago, though, my friends feeds were starting to fill up with variations on “Ireland, I am in you!” and I was starting to get pretty excited about the whole shebang.

I’d been claiming it was CatieCon, and while I *guess* there was maybe an AWFU...