C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 3

july: state of the cate

I am not prepared for it to be July. I mean, I know I’m never prepared for it to be the next month, but I only wrote 7200 words in June (taking two weeks off was…IDEK if it really rested me any, so…anyway…).

So this month is…book proposals and finishing a novella and…well. There are 2-3 book proposals to write, so honestly, if I get the novella and the proposals done that’ll be quite a lot of work. Especially if I do as well with the one as I’d like to.

On other fronts I have a series of…challen...

Picoreview: Infinity War & Endgame

Picoreview: Infinity War: I still love this movie, but for my reCap purposes, it turns out Cap is actually barely in this one until the end. We get the amazing arrival with a beard scene, and a good fight there, and then basically there’s very little with his storyline until the end, where he faces Thanos (and Groot, with that amazing “I am Steve Rogers” line, which honestly is also still just so in keeping with the character.)

But by this point he’s fully transformed from Righteous Soldier into...

Recent Reads: The Keeper’s Six

Recent Reads: The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott – I loved this!

Aside from an awareness that Kate had, at some point in the what-feels-fairly-distant-now past, taken up the mantle of the idea of writing a protagonist who was a mom, I didn’t have any idea what to expect from THE KEEPER’S SIX, and I was enthralled and fascinated by the world and story all the way through.

It’s a CRAZY complex world (which, well: you do know Kate Elliott, right? :)) and lands squarely in the middle of SFF vibes: I c...

Picoreview: Civil War

Picoreview: Civil War: This is probably my second favorite MCU film*, in part because Evans & RDJ do SUCH A DAMN GOOD JOB in their roles. The scene where Tony brings those pens to the table is SO GOOD. They’re really powerful performances from both actors, and without their convictions being so believable, the story wouldn’t work at all.

And it not only builds on Steve’s isolation and his desperation for a connection (connections; there’s the whole Peggy thread of these two movies, too) to the w...

pretending to be someone who sews

In my ongoing quest to pretend I’m someone who actually sews, I bought some fabric and a couple of patterns today. One will work just fine, but my plan was to do the other, which looked really quick and easy, first.

Buuuuuuuut the very quick and easy looking one didn’t have the outer envelope for the pattern, so I wasn’t absolutely sure what kind of fabric I should use. I thought probably a knit.

Somewhat unfortunately for me, upon the advice of the woman at the shop, I did not get a knit. I got...

Picoreview: Aftern^H^H^H^H Age of Ultron

Picoreview: Afternoon of Ultron: Doing these picoreviews has had me reading the original ones I did when some of these movies came out, and I was kinder to Age of Ultron when it came out than I was in memory and am on rewatching. I mean, I’ve seen it at least three times post-theatre, and it was apparently satisfying at the time, but ultimately remains a pretty bad movie, tbh. It has a number of good PARTS, which I think is what made me like it oriignally, but from more than a minute after that,...

on hairdressing

I went for a haircut this weekend, my second haircut with this woman, whom I found by accosting some other random woman on the street and asking who did her hair because she had a great pixie cut and I was desperate. (The accosted woman was bewildered by the whole situation, but gave me the info.)

Anyway, Sylvia, she’s Eastern European and very good and isn’t afraid to cut short hair. I mentioned this at the beginning of the appointment – that the really good short haircuts I’d gotten in Ireland...

bad cover art

This morning I saw an indie pub cover that’s so bad it makes me want to cry (no, I’m not going to tell you what it is). Everything about is bad. There are at least 4 focal point elements, meaning there are none. The colors are garish. The text treatment is illegible. The background is too busy.

There’s so much decent pre-made cover art (ie, art that indie cover artist/designers have done for the fun of it/to sell on spec rather than because they’re making it specifically for a hired project. It’...

Picoreview: Winter Soldier

Picoreview: Winter Soldier: Still the best movie in the MCU for my money.

So, like, I’m watching these in order, right? And after First Avenger, Disney+ spins up Winter Solider and I was 15 minutes into it, dangit, before I realized Avengers came between them. So I had to stop and go back to watch Avengers, which is honestly tonally a bit of a shock in the midst of the Winter Soldier setup.

But anyway, yeah, it certainly played up how completely unexpected Winter Soldier was after Avengers and t...

Picoreview: Avengers

Picoreview: Avengers: This remains a pretty solid film, although wow his costume was awful in this one. Well, the cowl is awful. The body of it is fine. But wow.

I thought at the time that its strength was that for once, Joss Whedon hadn’t made it sound exactly like Joss Whedon, and all else aside, that remains true. In retrospect there are a few really Whedony things that make my teeth clench – although it could have been in Ultron, I think this is the one where somebody falls on top of Black W...