C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 69

purging boxes

I’ve spent this afternoon Getting Rid Of Stuff. Some of this was of the prosaic “empty the trashes” nature, but the bulk of it was involved in going through boxes that have been sitting around with the intent to be gone through. The big thing to tackle was a large box of received correspondence from roughly 1990-1998. A few months ago in another one of these Getting Rid Of Stuff binges I almost threw it out wholesale, but held off, and days later realized with a shock that I was really glad I...

the actor’s nightmare. ish.

I had dreams between 5:30 and 7:30 in which I could not tell if I was sleeping or awake, even though several times I recognized I had to be sleeping.

The point at which I was doing a stage play with Christopher Lloyd (Doc in the Back to the Future movies) was not enough to make me realize I was sleeping, although my absolute failure to remember any of my lines or even the gist of them after a week without rehearsal was.

The point at which my phone melted and morphed into something that didn’t...

Recent Reads: Shaman

I’ve owned Kim Stanley Robinson’s SHAMAN since it came out, but hadn’t read it because I was still writing the Walker Papers, and regardless of how different his shaman and mine were likely to be (which was very, given that his book is set 40,000 years ago), I didn’t want to be reading about somebody else’s shaman while writing mine. :)

SHAMAN is one of those books that’s either going to work for you or it isn’t, I think, although a lot of KSR’s work can be summarized that way. I mean, I’m a...

Picoreview: The DUFF

Picoreview: The DUFF: conflicting.

The DUFF is sort of this weird mashup of a high school makeover movie and, like, Juno, or something. DUFF stands for Designated Ugly Fat Friend, which the main character, played by Mae Whitman (who, at age 26, is a moderately convincing 18 year old), discovers she is one of. Except it appears the only person in her school who actually knows the term is the one who first uses it to describe her, the boy-next-door/jerkface/love interest, played by Robbie Amell...

Free Comic Book Day

Ireland isn’t doing very well at spring this year. There was a week of warm afternoons a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been clear a lot, but quite cold. Today it seems to have moved directly into November, with wind and rain and 6-that-feels-like-0 temperatures.

On top of that, there’s a 48 hour bus strike going on in Dublin this weekend. However, it’s Free Comic Book Day, so I was determined that we were going to Get Out, and so Young Indiana and I went forth to have an Adventure In The Rain...

Picoreview: A Little Chaos

Picoreview: A Little Chaos: Entirely fictional, but charming.

I mean, entirely fictional: Kate Winslet’s character is an invention, no one like her existed at all, and…I wish they wouldn’t do that. It’s like Disney’s Pocahontas: why drop a couple of historical names on top of characters who live lives completely unlike the real story?

The answer, obviously, is because people recognise names like Pocahontas and Versailles and King Louis, which establishes the story, but…look, Belle was not an...

Five years old. :)

And very excited about it too. Very clear on YESTERDAY he was not yet five, even if we had a birthday party yesterday. (“My birthday celebrated!”) Definitely not five last week when I, being old, started saying he was five. “NOT YET. NOT FOR TWO WEEKS.” (We’re still a little unclear on time. :))

But today, oh my. Today the first words out of his mouth were, “NOW I’m five years old!”

And indeed he is. :)

The post Five years old. :) appeared first on The Essential Kit.

Bewitching Benedict!

Okay, the decision is official: the straight-up Regency romance (no fantasy elements involved!) that I’ve written will be coming your way soon! In July or August, if all goes well!

BEWITCHING BENEDICT is (potentially!) the first of a new 7 book series about the Lovelorn Lads. Think 7 Brides for 7 Brothers meets PG Wodehouse: seven friends (not actually brothers, except in spirit!) attempt to navigate the Regency marriage market, while an interfering valet helps them avoid bad relationships an...

Picoreview: Age of Ultron

Picoreview: Age of Ultron: We saw it twice in a row.

We were going to ANYWAY, I mean that was our plan, we had tickets for the 10:15am 3D IMAX showing, which was as early as we could see it without going to last night’s midnight showing, and then tickets for a 3:30pm 2D showing, so basically we had time enough to go get lunch and come back to the theatre. And that’s what we were going to do ANYWAY.

But we were also glad we did. :)

First and most importantly, you actually *don’t* need to stay...

Writing Wednesdays: Synopses

My latest question from the peanut gallery was about how I write synopses. Or at least, I think that’s what it was about: the entirety of the question, actually, was, “Synopsis?” :)

I’ve talked about writing synopses before at least once, in depth, as part of the Great Plot Synopsis Project (warning: that contains the entirety of the (2 page) synopsis for URBAN SHAMAN, and is therefore spoilery). However, that was written in early 2008, and I have Changed My Process since then.

Specifically,...