C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 55

Launch Day: Atlantis Fallen

Today is Launch Day for ATLANTIS FALLEN, first of the Heartstrike Chronicles! This is a book of my heart, with a long and sordid history; it’s undergone major revisions, and I still basically love it and hope you all will too. :)

Without further ado:
ATLANTIS FALLEN for Kindle!
ATLANTIS FALLEN for Kobo!
ATLANTIS FALLEN for iBooks!
ATLANTIS FALLEN for Nook!

ATLANTIS FALLEN can also be found on Scribd and Inktera if you don’t buy from the above links. It might be available other places, too, I...

Picoreview: The Huntsman: Winter’s War

Picoreview: The Huntsman: Winter’s War: even worse than I expected. I said that to Mom, that it was worse than I expected and I went in expecting to be disappointed, and she said, “I’m glad there was SOME surprise!” *laughs out loud*

You can tell it’s bad before the credits even really get rolling, because Liam Neeson starts doing a completely unnecessary voiceover, and he keeps at it periodically throughout the film.

I believe that if they had given Charlize Theron a piece of furniture she...

Kitsnaps: Two-Toed Sloth

I actually brought my camera out to the zoo the other day. It’d been almost a year since I’d used it. *wince* Anyway, among other things, I kind of randomly decided to set it to RAW format, because, well, because.

I will never go back to shooting just JPG, OMG.

I mean, I knew RAW was supposed to be swell, but I did kind of assume it would be difficult to learn to manipulate the format. It’s not; there’s a Photoshop thing that opens up to deal with it automatically, and there’s almost certainl...

I cast on!

I cast on! I cast on! I don’t know what to do next, but I cast on! (I’ll figure out what to do next tomorrow. I felt casting on was sufficiently impressive for one day. It only took three tries and watching a video 15 times. :))

I’m terribly proud of myself. :)

The post I cast on! appeared first on The Essential Kit.

ATLANTIS FALLEN cover reveal!

A city hidden for five thousand years.

A man so ancient his early history is lost to time.

A woman who has nothing to lose…

Lorhen, oldest and most ruthless of the immortal Timeless, put aside the sword long ago for a quiet life. But peace doesn’t last forever, especially for a man whose age can be counted in epochs, and the mortal life he’s built unravels as the Keepers, a society of historians who record Timeless lives, learn that he’s been hiding in their midst.

Then an archaeologist’s cla...

a bit of coloring

It’s taken me about two weeks to do the fourth Elfquest graphic novel coloring book page. I reckon at the rate I’m going, I’ll do about one issue a year, and be finished around 2036. :)

I hadn’t posted page three yet, so here you go. I also hadn’t figured out how to manipulate the levels with Photoshop (or possibly I didn’t have photoshop installed) yet, so the color in it isn’t as representative of the TRUE BEAUTY OF MY WORK as I might like. :)

For page four I had Photoshop for sure and the...

atlantis fallen on the verge

So it turns out that in a lot of ways the ATLANTIS FALLEN revisions instigated by my cover artist weren’t as overwhelming as I thought they would be. I revised two chapters completely, retaining necessary information but basically presenting it almost entirely differently, and a third chapter…almost that significantly. Not quite. But almost.

Another 5-7 chapters had much less significant revisions, although in fact the last thing I did tonight was flag five of those chapters in a project note...

To-Done, Q1 2016

My To-Done 2016 (Work Version) thus far includes finishing the REDEEMER rough draft, revising ATLANTIS FALLEN (twice, and am partway through a third), launching MAGIC & MANNERS, writing 3 short stories, and revising one short story.

Somehow it doesn’t seem like very much when I write it down like that, and that just seems unfair. It’s felt like a huge amount of work. It’s BEEN a huge amount of work. It just doesn’t…look very impressive.

Anyway, that really is quite a lot to have gotten done,...

an unlikely knitting conviction

I apparently have some kind of conviction that I’m going to knit something, because I keep stopping and staring avariciously at yarn. I don’t knit. I mean, I knitted something once. A scarf. It turned out well! But…I don’t knit.

Despite that, today I came across this really pretty inexpensive dark blue sparkly yarn and…folded. I bought four skeins and two of black sparkly yarn and I have vague thoughts of a matching hat and scarf. And then since I was on the road to hell anyway I got some ch...

a terrible thing happened on the way to the revisions

I’d quite deliberately handed ATLANTIS FALLEN over to beta readers who didn’t know the world the serial numbers had been scraped off, in order to see if the worldbuilding held up! Because that was my big concern!

Except I also sent it my cover artist, who did know the old world, and she emailed me in the middle of reading it and said “So how come you didn’t do X with this instead of sticking with the Y you had in place?”

…well, because I didn’t think of that. God damn it.

She said, “You can...