C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 61

To Be Read 2016

I’ve just moved most of our TBR shelf into the living room, where it can be seen and therefore perhaps take on greater urgency than being in the library (which seems like the sensible place for it, but we, y’know, *live* in the living room…). 90% of the books on it are more than 6 months old; 75% are more than a year old. Anything LEFT on it at the end of 2016 is going to the used bookstore unread, because enough is enough. I personally have about 40 books on the shelf, excluding graphic nove...

2015 Reading Stats

My major goal for 2015, as far as reading was concerned, was to try to clear out the TBR shelf. I started the year, AFAICT, with 79 books on it; it now has 46. I bought 17 new books, 15 of which I read, and I bounced off five books entirely.

According to Goodreads I read a total of 59 books. According to my own recent reads page I read 66; the latter is more accurate although not necessarily spot on. I read most of them, by a considerable margin (30+), in the 8 weeks we HAD NO INTERNET this s...

heading in for the holidays

School’s over for the season. The house is full of empty boxes and not enough, relatively speaking, wrapped gifts. I’ve made several batches of fudge but gone totally AWOL on actual holiday baking, and I’m astonishingly full of not caring. One of my jars of homemade applesauce (from the batch I think I forgot to put lemon juice into) has gone moldy and now I’m slightly frantic to get the rest of it to other people so they can eat it before it goes bad. We’re having chicken soup for dinner bec...

so dinner. much friends.

A couple of girlfriends are back in town for the holidays, so our little Lady Writers Group went out to dinner last night. I’d put on one of my 1950s style dresses (at home, obviously) and was looking at myself dubiously in the mirror when Young Indiana came in and says, “You look BEAUTIFUL, Mommy! Wear that! Wear that!” So I wore that. :) We went into town, and Indy entertained a 9 month old baby girl on the train for the entire trip in, and I dropped him off at his grandparents’ and went...

holiday prep

Yesterday we went to Dublin to do any shopping that could be done in the real world. I was moderately successful; Ted was not. He was, however, very, very tired after tromping all over hell and breakfast without finding anything. Poor guy.

I had some kind of story I was going to tell about the shopping, but I seem to have forgotten it. Unless it was the fact that when I stood to get off the bus, coming home, the bottom fell out of one of the bags I had, and everything in it fell to the floor....

Recent Reads: Little House books

I bought the Little House series (the proper edition, illustrated by Garth Williams) for Young Indiana last year for Christmas, thinking that sometime in the next year or so he might be about ready to start having them read to him. A few months ago he got LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, brought it to me, and said, “Maybe we could read this book! It has a FEW pictures!”

I told him we had to start with LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS, but that I would love to read them to him. So he went and got BIG...

worst. cooking. ever.

I have, in a really stunning run, made two bad batches of fudge in a row and followed it up with pie crust worse than what I made at Thanksgiving, which was, up until then, easily the worst I’d ever made. But that’s okay, because the pie I then made was too sweet, too!

Srsly. *dies in a pit*

I’ve now gotten all the necessary ingredients to make experimental allergy-safe fudge for my friend’s dairy-and-eggs-allergic son, and since I was in the market anyway I also got enough to make dairy-free...

Nano No More

I made it through about 35K in November, then totally failed in the last ten days to get the last 15K in. Still, it means that after today’s writing session I’m at 70K on REDEEMER, which means I have somewhere between 30-50K to go.

I hate having that broad a target to shoot for. I usually have a much better sense of my wordcount, going in. I suppose I’ll see when I get to the end, though.

What else. Not much else. I have ambitions of 80K by the weekend but I think I’ll have to accept 75 as a...

Ten Years In Ireland

I was just thinking that I’ve been a freelancer ten years today, and then it slowly dawned on me that no, I’ve been a freelancer *eleven* years today; I apparently missed last year’s anniversary totally.

*Today*, we’re ten years in Ireland. I am, in fact, ten years and 24 days in Ireland today, but Ted, who came a month after me, arrived on the 1st. Or possibly the 5th, but anyway, we count from his arrival at the start of December.

Ten years. Wow.

People still ask if we think we’ll ever mov...

Picoreview: Jessica Jones

Picoreview: Jessica Jones: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

I had a concerned rant about Jessica Jones after the first trailer was released, and I am very very glad to say that my concerns were unfounded. The story was not, as it seemed from that trailer, “the girl is a victim but now she’s Fighting Back.” It was considerably more “the girl’s abuser returns and she fucks his shit up,” only vastly more awesome. It also wasn’t a *horror* vibe so much as a noir one (some of the CAMERA WORK, OMG!...