C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 33

Marvel Movie Marathon: Avengers

Marvel Movie Marathon: Avengers: I love this movie.

I would have loved writing this review more if my browser hadn’t eaten it when it was halfway written, but I’ll try to recreate it with as much enthusiasm as the first go had. :p

The truth is I was really not confident about Avengers. I’ve watched a lot of Joss Whedon’s stuff, but I’d never drunk the Kool-Aid, and I was grimly afraid we were going to end up with Magic Widow the Superhero Slayer for this movie. We didn’t, and I’m still both a...

Picoreview: The Shape of Water

Picoreview: The Shape of Water: pretty sweet.

I haven’t seen Get Out and I’m not likely to, because I really don’t like horror movies, but having now seen The Shape of Water and not Get Out, I pretty well suspect that Get Out was more deserving of the Oscar for Best Picture (assuming it was between those two, which, for the purposes of this discussion, I am. :)). The Shape of Water is a largely sweet, charming, beautifully filmed, well written love story to the movies, which is why, I think,...

A Brief Lesson on Feminism & Queen Elizabeth I, by Me

On the way home from school, Indy asked about King Henry, and I said there had been several of them, from about 1200 to about 1550 (I was wrong, they started in 1100, but close enough). I said Henry VIII was the last one, and that after him his son Edward had been king, and then his daughter Mary had been queen, and then finally his daughter Elizabeth had been queen for a long time, and she’d never married or had any children.

Why not, queried my child, and I said well, she wanted to be queen...

A Comedy of Oscars

I didn’t really find the Oscars all that comedic (save for the dynamic duo Tiffany Haddish and Maya Rudolph, who should absolutely 100% host the Oscars next year, and possibly every other award show ever), but the home events around the Oscars were sort of comedy-of-errors-ish.

Anyway, so I haven’t watched the Oscars since I came to Ireland, because the state station only carries an abbreviated version, the night after, and what’s even the point. But I really, really wanted to see Keala Settl...

February To-Done

February has not been quite as busy as January, because January was shockingly busy, but I have also not slept enough in February, either, which is definitely one thing I did the same as January. Still, I got quite a lot done:

– finished dissecting a book to see how it worked. it was really interesting and the post about that will be up soon at my Patreon
– wrote a fairly intensive 40 page grant proposal
– did about 15K on the new book
– read a couple of research books
– roughed out 3 short s...

low blogging month

Yeah, so this is a low-blogging month, partly because I didn’t want to review Black Panther the day I saw it because I got to see it earlier than Americans and spoilers, sweetie!, and partly because we’ve fallen behind in Marvel movie watching, and partly because I’ve been working a lot, or alternately, because I haven’t been working much at all. It’s hard to tell.

Anyway, mid-term break was the second half of last week and the only thing that kept me writing at all was doing this #100DaysOfW...

Recent Reads: She-Wolves: the Notorious Queens of England

Recent Reads: She-Wolves: the Notorious Queens of England was a Christmas gift, and I’m making an effort to get through my stacks of non-fiction this year (oh, god, I haven’t updated my TBR page for 2018 yet…), so I dug right in.

It’s what it sounds like: a history of England’s most notorious queens, and it reads, I’m afraid, like someone’s dissertation. There’s a great deal of “this is what I’m going to say” “here’s me saying what I’m going to say” “now that I’ve said it, let me summarize wh...

Picoreview: The Greatest Showman

Picoreview: The Greatest Showman: I am conflicted about The Greatest Showman.

I wanted to love it unconditionally. I went in prepared to. Unfortunately, I ended up liking it conditionally, perhaps because I grew up doing musical theatre and I have Far Too Many (Entirely Correct) opinions about what makes a musical work, and The Greatest Showman…missed a lot of them. I felt like it’s a musical by people who don’t fully understand how musicals work (which, given that the music was written by th...

gym post: i did the thing!

I…have been complaining bitterly on Twitter, and somewhat less bitterly here, about the buses in Drogheda. To summarize: they suck. They are either late or early and when they’re late it can be “I’ve been standing here in the cold for 70 minutes” late and if they’re early it can be “I got to the bus stop on time and never even saw the damn thing,” so it’s EXTREMELY DIFFICULT to get to the gym by relying on it. Like, I tried to go to the gym 3 times last week, and only made it once, because of...

January To-Done

January was an excrutiatingly busy month and I don’t actually know how I got this all done, but somehow I did. I:

– submitted a manuscript to three publishers
– submitted a proposal to a publisher
– wrote & delivered an Old Races short story for and delivered a novella to the patreon crew
– wrote a 2 page book proposal
– wrote a grant application, including a 12 page book proposal
– wrote a 10 page book synopsis/proposal
– hashed out a film synopsis (still needs work)
– got halfway thru a dis...