C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 33

nano success!

For only the third time in however many times I’ve actually tried it, I have achieved Nanowrimo success. Honestly, I wrote quite a lot more than 50K this month, but I managed to get 50,000 vaguely useable words on this project, which is…slightly more than half…of what I was going for…well, we’ll take what victories we can, wot eh? So now I have to get the other half of it written in the next…week…ideally…o.O…and then for a rarity actually send it to a few beta readers for commentary/insights....

this has not gone well

Yes, well, things have not proceeded apace.

I’ve had a cold for the last three weeks straight. Or, more accurately, I’ve had two, possibly three, colds, for the last three weeks straight. It is very tiring and I am very done with it, except for the part where I’m still sick and therefore not done with it at all. :p Ted’s had a cold about 2/3rds of that time himself, so we’ve been having a lot of fun! :p

Due to general malaise, we decided not to have our big American Thanksgiving this year, a...

nano: halfway mark + gym, tv, & life

I’m supposed to be at 45K on Project One for November. I’m at 29K and have to revise again, but after two days of grim effort I may actually have a plot now, which should help. :P Technically I guess I still really only need 4K a day to make goal by the end of the month, but IDK if I’ll get there.

I haven’t gone back to Project Two yet. Project Three is underway in terms of layout. Waiting on the cover art for it, which is going to be AMAZING and I can’t wait to show it to you. (You all wante...

nano: i missed a day

Yesterday involved the sort of chaos that sometimes erupts when one has a small child, and I was too tired to do my words. It has not, however, thrown me hopelessly off track, mostly because I’ve already finished Project Two, and getting it done was kind of the bit that Not Missing A Day was critical for.

Besides, I’d had to concede on Friday that I’d screwed up Project One and had to go back and delete 7,000 words, so I was off count anyway. I fixed P1 and have recovered the wordcount, so I’...

nano update & other stuff

I’ve managed at least NNWM wordcount on Project 1 for 7/8 days, putting my overall wordcount for the month around…29.5K, and done the first pass of revisions on Project 3.

Tomorrow I theoretically start Project 4, although in practice I might put the shoulder to the grindstone for a couple days with P1, and do some research for P4.

In the meantime, I have tried three times this week to go to the gym. The first two days I missed the bus, which was running unusually early. Today I hustled my a...

it’s a nanowrimo month here

So far I’ve written about 22k in November. I’ve been working on two projects, one of which is codenamed Project One, which I’m now 16K into, and the other of which, Project Two, which is KISS OF ANGELS and I have JUST FINISHED IT and I’m extremely pleased about that. It does what I’ve said it would all along, which is sets up the Old Races world for more full-length novels should I ever be moved to write them.

I’m quite sure that when people read it, they’re going to kill me if I don’t write...

a busy bank holiday weekend

Young Indiana and I had a positively splendid, utterly exhausting bank holiday weekend while Ted was off gaming.

Saturday we defied the not-running trains to go to the zoo (a thing we would not have done if I’d known the trains weren’t running, but I didn’t find out until we got to the train station, at which point a bus was available, so…we went. Later than we intended, but we went.) We had breakfast out and went to the zoo and the lions were in fine form & I got the best picture of the croc...

DuoLingo & Me

I’ve done a whole 12 day streak with my Spanish DuoLingo. Dad & Indy were both interested in it the other day so I showed it to them. Dad started doing French, and Indy got quite excited when it turned out Irish was an option, so he and I started doing it together.

A lot of what I’ve learned from doing the Irish is that I’m remembering a great deal more of the Spanish than I imagined (I had four years of high school Spanish but gave up in college when the first year class was just…way over my...

Picoreview: Loving Vincent

Picoreview: Loving Vincent: an amazing work of art that proves worth it in the end.

I’m not a particular Van Gogh fan, or at least I wasn’t before Vincent and the Doctor, which–I will fight you on this–is one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever filmed. So I wasn’t going to Loving Vincent because I love Vincent, but rather because it’s been billed as an astonishing work of art.

And it is. They filmed it about five years ago and have spent the intervening time in post-production, hand paint...

making honey apple butter

“So what is apple butter anyway,” you ask suspiciously, because frankly that sounds pretty weird.

It’s not actually all that weird. It’s really a kind of apple jam. It’s a baked reduction and you can flavour it in a bunch of different ways and I’m getting better at it and it’s getting better as I do. I believe it’s called ‘butter’ because it’s lovely and smooth with maybe just a hint of apple graininess in the texture, not because there’s any actual butter involved. It preserves FOREVER–the s...