C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 34

Octocon 2017!

Octocon was this past weekend, and a fine Octocon it was!

I decided to do a dealer’s table at the last minute, and it went…well. I brought jam and books. About…70 jars of jam, and 30-40 books. In fact, I had to restock for the second day, because what I’d brought on day one had sold out to the tune of about 80%, which was sort of Beyond My Expectations. I don’t seem to have gotten a picture of the books on day one, but (first photo courtesy of, by which i mean ‘nabbed from the twitter feed of...

i got nothin’. or too much.

I keep doing things and not having time to blog about them. Or not thinking to. Or thinking to but deciding sleep is better. Or that making pear jam is better.

(It turns out making pear jam is a GREAT idea.)

yeah, so the thing is that I have, like, a ton of jam-making posts to do, except they’re all just pictures of jam in the process and that starts seeming boring and…anyway, I made crabapple jelly that’s perfectly gorgeous and I made…in fact I made 4 kinds of jam last Sunday. Pear, blackber...

how earning rewards works for me

Me: I will watch s5 Orphan Black when I have launched BEWITCHING BENEDICT

Me: I will watch s5 Orphan Black when I’ve got REDEEMER sorted

Me: I will watch s5 Orphan Black when I have this unexpected thing sent off

Me: I will watch s5 Orphan Black when KISS OF ANGELS is written

Dear Me: when the fuck am I really going to be allowed to watch s5 Orphan Black?

Apparently Me: when the entire 22 book to-do list is done.

Sometimes I hate me.

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Blackberries: from bramble to bread

I went blackberry picking this morning, which I’ve been feeling torn up about having had no time to do. (I genuinely feel better for having gone.) I’d found a good run of them a couple weeks ago and went to check it out, to great success:

That’s over a kilo of berries picked in about 45 minutes, which I felt was a pretty good haul. While I was picking, one woman walking by said, “Good day for picking!” and another one who had been out picking yesterday actually stopped to talk to me (Her: I...

Picoreview: Inhumans

Picoreview: Inhumans: not *as* bad as the reviews said. To further illuminate that comment, I also went to see Rough Night this week, and of the two, Inhumans is not the one I wanted to walk out of.

That said, you should not in any way mistake it for *good*.

I went because I was sort of horrifiedly fascinated to see just how bad it was, after all the scathing reviews. The result may be that my expectations were SO LOW that I could not actually be disappointed. Also, there were only four peopl...

unplanned day

Today has not really gone as expected.

Poor Indy has a quite awful cold, and woke up around 4am miserable with it, so that pretty well shut down my night’s sleep. I spent most of the morning sure I would still manage to get some work done somehow anyway, and then the poor kid fell asleep on me after throwing up a few times, so I gave up on that and had a small nap myself. Which I really needed, with the 4am wakeup call, so that was all good. :)

And then he woke up and I actually did manage to...

gym blog day four well sort of

I WENT to the gym this morning. I barely caught the bus and I’d been thinking if I missed it I’d go for a good long Pokéhunt and get some new goggles because the ones I’ve been using are Indy’s and they’re not very comfortable but I can’t find mine, but I caught it so I was like: yay I will swim.

Only I got to the gym and into my swimsuit and then remembered I had not brought my swim cap, which is required. And the only ones they have to buy are silicone and I don’t like them so I didn’t want...

gym blog day two gosh i’m cool

guys i went to the gym and i swam 600 meters which is 1. embarrassingly little from my POV & 2. enough to just about kill me omfg *ded*

and then i studied spanish with duolingo for a few minutes while waiting for the bus and then did a rather nice 10 minute meditation on the bus on the way home and GOSH AREN’T I COOL?

it looks pretty apparent to me that “go to the gym immediately upon dropping indy at school” is the way to make this work for me. no chance to go home and find an excuse to not...

back to the gym, day one

I done dooed it. I went back to the gym. I dropped Indy at school and hurried for the bus and caught it and went and worked out and I’m glad I did. So there. :p

I was in a pretty terrible mood, actually, when I got to the gym, because Indy had been obstreperous about breakfast and I thought I’d miss the bus and catching it didn’t really improve my mood.

But there’s a punching bag in the gym’s dance studio, and there was nobody around to mock me, so I put on “Under Pressure” and punched the ba...

Launch Day: Bewitching Benedict!

BEWITCHING BENEDICT is now available on practically all your favourite e-platforms!
iTunes || Kindle || Kobo || Nook

Go forth! Enjoy! And if you’d like a taste of what you’re in for first, read the first chapter here!

This book was a lot of fun to work on, and I learned a great deal about Regency England in the writing of it. For example, I’ve always gone along with the oft-touted belief that young women of quality in the Regency era were ancient and decrepit if they weren’t married by 21. It...