C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 46

2016 in under the wire

A couple days ago my writer friend Tim Pratt said he couldn’t do his year-end round-up of what he’d written yet because he might still get that last short story finished. I was working on a comic script and felt similarly.

I managed to get the script done, in fact, just now. It’s for my artist nephew whose birthday is tomorrow, and I genuinely don’t know if he’ll draw it, but I promised him I’d write him something and now I have, so mission accomplished.

I got a huge amount of work done in 20...

2016 Round-Up

2016 in review is a work related round-up, because it’s been an absolutely awful year personally. The other day somebody sent around a “some good things must have happened at least on a personal level in 2016, please post them!” and I honestly couldn’t think of anything actively good enough to stand out.

So, this year in publication review: startingly good, actually. I had 5 books come out, including the graphic novel of TAKE A CHANCE, which we’ve all been waiting for forever. :)

To wit:

MAG...

Slaying the Dragon: A Walker Papers short story

Once in a while I manage to have my act together enough to present a holiday short story to my readers. This year’s story was inspired by visiting North Carolina for the first time, and driving some of those twisty twisty roads that Joanne is so fond of.

Slaying the Dragon is set five years after the end of SHAMAN RISES, and as such, contains, if not outright spoilers, certainly spoilers by association. :)

Slaying the Dragon (pdf)
(turns out wordpress won’t let me upload epub or mobi files,...

a live blog of the solstice

9am:
#ThinksToDo:
wrap gifts
put tree together
hold my head still so snot doesn’t swirl around & make me dizzy
work on leah’s comic

10am:
so far i’ve:
emptied dishwasher
cleared wrapping table
gotten laundry going
fetched wrapping paper
located indy’s gifts

11am:
have now:
wrapped, if not ribboned, indy’s gifts

must now:
store them
find ted’s gifts
wrap them
shower
eat something besides sugar cookies

12pm:
have now:
found ted’s gifts
disovered i hadn’t [redacted]
proceeded to [ redacted ]
wra...

no time for your unexamined patriarchal party line

Indy had a dentist appointment today. The dentist, who is a woman, and who keeps up a pretty constant stream of chatter to reassure her child patients, made no fewer than four separate comments to Henry about how “girls talk a lot.”

By the third I was livid. What I do not need is a woman–perhaps ESPECIALLY a professional woman, A DOCTOR–reinforcing stereotypes that my six year old son has *certainly* never come into contact with from me, and which I wish him to be armed to resist when he does...

oh god my shoulders

I have terrible knots in my shoulders, and a perpetually over-stretched subscapularis nerve under my right shoulder blade. I mean, like, this is a decades-old injury. My friend E, who is a massage therapist, used to tell me she wanted to spend some quality time with her fingers in my armpit, which I always thought was a joke until she got her hands on me and spent some quality time with her fingers in my armpit. Turns out that, since the subscapularis is entirely covered by bone, the way you...

An open letter to the electors

I’ve written an open letter to the electors via DearElector. There’s a copy of the letter posted here, where you can add your name as a signator, if you feel I’ve said anything worthwhile, but the body of the text is also replicated in this post.

Dear Elector:

These are the things I can probably safely say I know about you:

You have deeply held convictions.
You are politically active.
You are a Republican.

That’s it: that’s all I know about you. I know those things because you’re a Republican...

a Walker Papers 2016 election prediction

I *do* have a throw-away comment about the 2016 election in one of my #WalkerPapers short stories. I thought I did.

The protagonist is Ashley, the little girl from #ThunderbirdFalls, 20 years later:

“I had a grenade launcher.
I wasn’t supposed to, of course. Nobody was, especially since the country-wide crackdown after the election riots when I was seventeen.”

The story was written in 2012 and was a deliberate (given the Walker Papers timeline) reference to the 2016 elections, and I kept the...

a Beauty and the Beast tangent

So I’m on a Beauty and the Beast kick right now and I mentioned to Ted yesterday morning that if your favourite fairy tale is BatB (as mine has always been), that it is very likely that at some point quite early on you realize that having the Beast transform back into the Prince is a terrible disappointment. The thing is you (we, Beauty) have fallen in love with the *Beast*. We want the *Beast*. We don’t want a stupid prince.

Ted’s response to this was pretty much O.O

So he mentioned the topi...

Picoreview: Fantastic Beasts

Picoreview: Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them: really not very good.

It started out slowly and took far too long to end. There were tedious bits in between occasionally interrupted by charm, but the charm was rarely presented by Eddie Redmayne’s Newt, who, as the lead, literally had a line about how people didn’t really like him very much. But that was okay, because Katherine Waterson, as the other lead, was also almost entirely unlikeable. (Wait…)

To make it worse, though, the second lea...