C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 6

beaten & bruised, but better

Holy mother of frogs am I tired.

I got up at about 5am to do an arguably insane thing I do every once in a while, which is travel half the length of the country (literally: it’s 250km to drive there, and from the northern tip of the Republic to the southern tip, it’s about a 550km drive, BUT because the train is not direct, it’s probably more like 300km of travel one way) to visit my very excellent PT. It’s expensive and time consuming and it’s possible that each of the two or maybe three times ...

Kitsnacks: Chocolate Meringue Cookies

I have a lot of left over egg whites after making lemon curd last week and in my kind of never-ending quest to find things to do with them, I made these actually quite intensely chocolately meringue cookies. I tried one, thought it was pretty good, offered one to Dad, he thought it was good, so I went to Indy and said, “My son, the moment has come when I must call upon you to perform one of the sacred duties of childhood.”

Indy: ::groans loudly::

Me, handing him a cookie: Taste test this cookie....

Call of Cthulhu: The Forces of Darkness

The game started this evening with my dad walking by the room and saying, “Good luck to Teddy as he faces the forces of darkness,” which was overheard in the chat, causing everyone to laugh and ask if that was our son.

“No!” we said. “It’s my dad/father in law!”

“Oh!” they said. “Would he like to play?” ::laughs::

One of our players has had to drop out, so we’ve got a new character, Caliope Baxter, a disgraced socialite who now studies parapsychology and whose presence Lord Summerset, the classi...

Call of Cthulhu: Teddy, Irritating Moral Compass

This week’s CoC session began with us still in Derby, where we spent a while trying to figure out how to break into the walk-in safe on the factory floor (a factory which, if you will recall, two of our party broke into “because we hoped there might be monsters,” only to be told straight-up by the GM that there were no monsters here, lads, you’re just criminals. :laughs:), a conversation that eventually went:

GM: You do have dynamite.

Dylan, sharpshooter: That’s right, I do!

Teddy, horrified: We...

Release Day: PEACOCK ON PARADE

My new shifter romance PEACOCK ON PARADE is available now!

This is the second in an ongoing story of novellas set around the fictionalized Fota Wildlife Park in Cork, Ireland; in these books, it’s the Shamrock Safari Wildlife Park and many of its residents–either permanent or temporary–are shifters who can transform from human into an animal form and back again. They’re light, fun, and charming, and I got to borrow a friend’s name for the heroine of this one, which made it even more fun to write...

Call of Cthulhu: Teddy, Part Deux, Dude

Today I bring you the writeup for our second Call of Cthulhu with Teddy, my dumb, dumb, DUMB, but darling, arteest who is involved in this entire game simply bc his affianced, Beloved Alice, has lost her marbles.

We have spent a month in Scotland, at fellow player Summerset’s estate. Alice has not recovered. Teddy has flirted with Summerset’s wife, Rose, who is politely impressed that he’s an artist: Very nice blues, dear.

Teddy: Thank you! It’s my favorite color! Would you like to hear some of ...

things you shouldn’t say to writers

Elsewhere, when I posted the DEMON HUNTS cover, a reader responded with words to the effect of “I’d rather have new books than new covers.”

::looks into the camera::

Another reader stepped in to try to head them off at the pass, said I’d gotten the rights back and that I was re-releasing them with my own covers and that the story was finished. Unfortunately, the OP responded with “if the main character isn’t dead, the story isn’t over!”

::LOOKS. INTO. THE CAMERA::

Part of me wants to say “I made...

Bon Jovi discography revisitation – the 80s

Over on BlueSky, my friend Mame and I decided we were gonna do a chronological Bon Jovi discography revisitation and pick what we thought were the three best songs off each album. We’re going to include live albums and some compliations, as well as Jon’s solo stuff (at least, we’re going to do BLAZE OF GLORY. I assume we’re also doing DESTINATION ANYWHERE, but I haven’t verified that yet). That’s more than twenty albums, and IDK if we’re doing weekends, so it’ll take a while to get through it al...

the crisis is averted…

…but hoo boy did i have a Very Bad Weekend with regards to Dropbox. At this point I do not require assistance. I’m just regaling you with the tale of Catie’s Very Bad Dropbox Experience.

So. I discovered late-ish last year that I had some kind of catastrophic Dropbox failure EARLY last year for things I don’t need 99.9% of the time, so I only discovered it months after the fact. Like, in the end, it turned out that nearly half my files were showing as zero bytes. To the REALLY TENTATIVE best of ...

Call of Cthulhu: Enter Teddy

For the past eight months or so I’ve been playing in an online Call of Cthulhu game which I did not intend to play in, because as you know if you know anything about Cthulhu as a game setting, first everybody gets really paranoid, then they go insane, and then they die, which didn’t sound like great fun, tbh. However, the GM then said the first adventure was going to be set in 1920s Peru, and…that sounded like too good a setting to pass up (and it was, he’s done an AMAZING amount of research and...