C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 5

it was HOT

I went and jumped in the sea this weekend, it was that hot.

…the sea, for the record, was VERY COLD and I wish I’d brought goggles, a thing I purely didn’t think of when I went to jump in. As it turns out, I also wish I’d brought ear plugs, because the water in my ears HURT and IDK if that’s because it was so cold or if my ears have become unreasonably sensitive, the latter of which will displease me considerably, but can be dealt with if I actually start swimming again, like, ever.

But! in a go...

Picoreview: Brave New World

Picoreview: Brave New World: This is the weakest of the Cap films, but it’s still in the top third of the MCU, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe the top ten, but I haven’t stepped back to do a top ten list lately. But I thought it was solid and sort of uncannily timely.

Prior to its release (possibly in the relatively early stages of production) I’d heard that it was going to be “Sam’s journey toward earning the shield” which would have been FINE if they hadn’t JUST DONE THAT in Falcon & Winter Sol...

Recent Reads: Rose & Thunder

Recent Reads: Rose & Thunder by Lilith Saintcrow – I loved this.

ROSE & THUNDER is a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and look, I’ll be honest, you have to really fuck it up for me to not like a BatB retelling. Lili is not an author prone to fucking things up, and she loves BatB as much as I do, so… yeah, I loved this.

The setting is more or less the real world. It was published in 2015 and sort of feels like it’s set around 2005, but it’s basically urban fantasy; the world as we know i...

Release Day: Renaissance Bear

If you’re just here for the links, RENAISSANCE BEAR, the third book in the Renaissance Shifter series, is now available at Amazon!

There was an unavoidable delay with the print edition, which will be out in a couple of weeks. Sorry about that!

AAAAAAH I love these covers/this series so much I’m having so much fun with it breaaaaaathes okay here you go:

Grizzly shifter Jon Torben is planning a summer of sword-fighting and beer-drinking at his home town’s annual Renaissance Faire…up until the mom...

Picoreview: Falcon & Winter Soldier

Picoreview: Falcon & Winter Soldier: I liked this show a lot the first time I watched it, and I think I like it more the second time. The storyline I’m more invested in is Bucky’s, because I am a SUCKER for a good redemption story, but Sam’s arc is a really good one, and the eventual payoff of the title changing to Captain America and the Winter Soldier was emotionally really satisfying.

I now recall how much I despised the extreme closeups on Bucky & the shrink in his sessions in the first epis...

Call of Cthulhu: Pour One Out For Dillon

I was sick the last two gaming sessions, and in my absence, Our Heroes gathered a lot of information, and…lost a hero.

Dillon, who if you will recall from the end of the England adventure, came away with compromised lungs, was caught in a cloud of icy lung-sucking horribleness, which worked as advertised, and killed him dead.

Of the various players and DM, it appears that Ted (Dillon’s actual player) was the only person even KIND of emotionally prepared for this possibility, and even he was a li...

july: state of the cate

I am not prepared for it to be July. I mean, I know I’m never prepared for it to be the next month, but I only wrote 7200 words in June (taking two weeks off was…IDEK if it really rested me any, so…anyway…).

So this month is…book proposals and finishing a novella and…well. There are 2-3 book proposals to write, so honestly, if I get the novella and the proposals done that’ll be quite a lot of work. Especially if I do as well with the one as I’d like to.

On other fronts I have a series of…challen...

Picoreview: Infinity War & Endgame

Picoreview: Infinity War: I still love this movie, but for my reCap purposes, it turns out Cap is actually barely in this one until the end. We get the amazing arrival with a beard scene, and a good fight there, and then basically there’s very little with his storyline until the end, where he faces Thanos (and Groot, with that amazing “I am Steve Rogers” line, which honestly is also still just so in keeping with the character.)

But by this point he’s fully transformed from Righteous Soldier into...

Recent Reads: The Keeper’s Six

Recent Reads: The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott – I loved this!

Aside from an awareness that Kate had, at some point in the what-feels-fairly-distant-now past, taken up the mantle of the idea of writing a protagonist who was a mom, I didn’t have any idea what to expect from THE KEEPER’S SIX, and I was enthralled and fascinated by the world and story all the way through.

It’s a CRAZY complex world (which, well: you do know Kate Elliott, right? :)) and lands squarely in the middle of SFF vibes: I c...

Picoreview: Civil War

Picoreview: Civil War: This is probably my second favorite MCU film*, in part because Evans & RDJ do SUCH A DAMN GOOD JOB in their roles. The scene where Tony brings those pens to the table is SO GOOD. They’re really powerful performances from both actors, and without their convictions being so believable, the story wouldn’t work at all.

And it not only builds on Steve’s isolation and his desperation for a connection (connections; there’s the whole Peggy thread of these two movies, too) to the w...