C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 36

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...

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...