C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 35

Bewitching Benedict teaser chapter!

Bewitching Benedict is currently available for pre-order on:
iTunes || Kindle || Kobo || Nook

Chapter One
The Season had, in Miss Claire Dalton’s estimation, come early, and come directly to her. It had arrived—or was soon to arrive—in the form of her cousin Charles, whom she had not seen since childhood. More interestingly, it was to arrive in the form of two of Charles’s friends, young men he had seen only a few times since leaving for the Coalition Wars more than seven years ago.

Claire’s...

Picoreview: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets

Picoreview: Valerian & the City of a Thousand Planets: much worse than it had to be.

I went to see this with a friend who’s visiting, and we agreed that it really was much worse than it had to be, which is different, perhaps a step up from, “not as good as it could have been.”

The dialogue, specifically the dialogue between leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne, was excrutiating. They had roughly the chemistry of two wet paper towels (although that may be doing wet paper towels a disservice),...

Bewitching Benedict for pre-order!

My charming little Regency romance, BEWITCHING BENEDICT, is now available for pre-order at Amazon!

I *may* have pre-order links for other sites by tomorrow, but if not, I should have most of them for Friday when it goes live. With luck I’ll also have print edition links, but it’s possible that will take another week, and the audio book, which is in the works, won’t be out for a couple months. Still, it’s coming together QUITE NICELY here at the end. I’m pretty excited. :)

This constitutes a m...

theoretically ideal

I went to bed around 10 last night and, not at all to my delight, woke up at 10 to 6. I lay around for a while sullenly considering that this was, in fact, the ideal I’m nominally going for: earlyish to bed, early to rise, get some work done before bringing Indy to school and all that.

Except not on a Sunday, dammit.

Anyway, I got up after half an hour or so and spent a couple hours getting increasingly tired while working on an e-book layout, and I’ve concluded that probably if I can do this...

fitness & writing

A while ago Ted said I had the kind of work/life balance that most people really dreamed of. That I had this incredibly rewarding creative *job* that I love passionately and then on top of that I had all these completely amazing HOBBIES that I’m actually quite good at and that most people would try to have as part of their ‘life’ balance around the, you know, job as a cop or whatever.

That made me reel a bit, because I never think I have a very good work/life balance. I’m…extremely focused, s...

an avalanche of ducks

I’ve had this to-do list for…ever. Forever. Very little of it is the fun kind of to-do, which for me is YAY WRITE A WHOLE NEW BOOK YAY THIS IS MY FAVOURITE PART. It’s all the other stuff. It’s edits and copyedits and guilting over unwritten short stories

(I was going to really try to focus on writing…I was going to say ‘good’, but I write good enough short stories. But twisty, deep ones, perhaps. I want to add that to my skill set. So I was going to try focusing on learning how to write those...

Wonder Woman’s gonna break $800m next week

I’ve been–I don’t think I’ve been doing it on the blog, but on Twitter and my FB page I’ve been keeping pretty close tabs on Wonder Woman all summer long. I’ve seen it five or six times in the theatre (including infamously flying to Liverpool to take my friend Leah to it to make sure she’d see it when her husband didn’t particularly want to!). I’ve been watching it break record after record–it was the biggest opening for the first weekend in June ever, it’s the biggest female-led, female-dire...

Here’s a script. Call your reps.

Or don’t, as you see fit. But if you’ve ever wondered how ordinary decent people let Nazi Germany happen, if you’ve ever thought “I would have done something, if I’d been alive back then,” well, this is how it happened, and what we do now is what we would have done then.

Hi. My name is [   ] and I’m a consitutent in [   ], zip code [   ]. I don’t need a response to this, but I do want this message passed on to my [ Senator / Congressperson ].

I’m calling to tell the Senator/Congress(person) t...

Worldcon 75: Day Five

Sunday morning at breakfast looked like everybody at the con hotel had just gone, “…yeah, no, screw it,” and not gotten up to eat. :)

*I’d* gotten up because I wanted to go to Walter Jon Williams’ guest of honor interview, which I did (although I went into the wrong room first and was pretty torn about leaving what proved to be an astronaut’s lecture, but did anyway). The first half of it was full of what I thought were really great general questions for a writer and I wanted to be answering...

Worldcon 75: Day Four

The trouble with the first several days of Worldcon was that I was having so much fun I kept lying awake at night grinning like an idiot and keeping myself awake with happiness, which meant that although I technically went to bed about 3:15 on Saturday morning, it was tragically closer to 4 before sleep actually arrived.

I considered showing up to the panel like this but then I remembered I was a Very Serious Author. :)

And I had a 10am panel.

Frankly, my friends, I did not expect it to go we...