C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 29

missed connections

It’s been a week of missed connections in the funniest of ways. :)

Last week I was going out to work, which my friend Sarah and I have been meeting up to do in this sort of inept way–neither of us has WhatsApp notifications turned on because they’re too distracting, but also neither of us ever thinks to text or call, so we attempt to communicate in what amounts to telephone tag except both of us have the phones with us all the time.

In this scenario, I am taking public transport and it is Po...

Ten Years of Word Wars

Ten years ago today, I started a “word wars” chat room because I had a book on short deadline and needed people to prod me to get it done. I invited a bunch of my writer friends and hoped it would last six months.

Today is its tenth anniversary. At least half a dozen of the people who started in the war room with me ten years ago are still there, and there are many, many others who joined a little later, or even quite recently, who are in there working daily, encouraging each other, ranting,...

March Thinks To Done

I literally only made two posts in March, one relating my February thinks to done and the other, halfway through the month, explaining my otherwise total radio silence. Now, for the March thinks to done post, I explain the REST of the radio silence. I mean, like, man, I even went to movies! But I didn’t picoreview any of them because I was too goddamn busy!

In March I did a much deeper-dive revision on THE CARDINAL RULE than I expected to. I mean, I’d gone in with the vague intention to Honor...

Cover Reveal: THE CARDINAL RULE

If you’ve been watching me on Twitter the past couple weeks, you know I’ve been eyeball deep in what I’ve been referring to as “The Impossible Task”. It wasn’t an impossible task save that I hoped to get it done in about three days and, uh, well, as you see, it’s now two weeks later… :)

Anyway, the Impossible Task was the deep-dive revision of my 2005 “action-adventure romance*” novel, THE CARDINAL RULE, which was originally written under a pseudonym, and languished in relative obscurity for...

Thinks To Done, February 2019

A while ago I’d gone off to work for a few days and when I returned my sister said, “So how’d you do?” and I said, “Well, I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to,” and she said, “Do you ever?” and I felt really called out, like, y’know? @.@ So anyway, I’m going to try not to start these Thinks To Done recaps with “I didn’t get as much done as I wanted to” because…do I ever? :}

So the studio didn’t work out and I decided I’d move into the room in the house meant to be my home office. It took...

A note about Irish distances

This is especially for people coming to Dublin 2019:

If an Irish person (or website, for that matter) tells you something is a 10 minute walk, they are almost certainly lying to you.

It’s a well-intentioned lie. They reckon anybody can walk for ten minutes, I think, so if they say it’s ten minutes, well, that sounds grand and not a bother and you can manage that. But if it is actually a ten minute walk, that is a matter of sheer coincidence and should not be used as a measuring stick for othe...

Picoreview: Glass

Picoreview: Glass: This is definitely the kind of movie M. Night Shyamalan would make to wrap up his Unbreakable trilogy, and not the kind of movie I would make. :)

I liked it better than I expected to, really. I didn’t see Split, which looked too horror-ish for me, and also because of the political aspect of how badly disassociative identity disorder is portrayed in it. That said, I mean…they’re comic book movies, so if we pretend it’s not intended to be a real-world portrayal of DID and tha...

CE Murphy & the Great Newsletter Tragedy

Ten days ago I accidentally deleted my entire newsletter mailing list, backups, old newsletters, and all, and it cannot be retrieved.

For the TL;DR crowd, you can (please please please) sign up (again) at https://tinyletter.com/ce_murphy/

For those who enjoy stories of epic EBCAK, let me share the sad, mortifying tale.

It was so so so so stupid. I was trying to set up a NEW mailing list for blog posts, and tried using the same email address figuring it would say “that email is already in use”...

Picoreview: Alita: Battle Angel

Picoreview: Alita: Battle Angel : This was much better than I expected it to be. OTOH, I expected it to be very, very, very, very bad indeed.

I thought the story might be okayish but that the CGI would be–I was not convinced by it in the trailers. It just looked creepy, the anime face. The proportions looked wrong. I thought they’d landed squarely in the uncanny valley and had been unable to do anything about it. So I was really surprised to find that the CGI is by and large very good. It’s...

Thinks To Done, January 2019

Last year I tried to make a Thinks To DoDONE post every month to keep myself from feeling like I was drowning under work and not accomplishing anything. I think I managed to post…twice…which wasn’t enough to make me feel very accomplished. :) Trying again!

I finished the second Dublin Driver murder mystery, which was great. I wrote the next section of my REDEEMER/Captain America fan fiction for my Patreon.

(A few days after I posted it, Dad, suddenly, said, “I wish you’d write more of that Ca...