C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 71

The Sorrow of Thin Mints

When I was a kid, she said, hunched over with one hand in the small of her back and the other waving an imaginary cane, they made Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies Differently.

They had the chocolate cookie base and the thin chocolate layer, but between them they had a thin layer of mint candy, like one might find in a peppermint patty or Junior Mint. The chocolate cookie base had a slight ridge around the outer edge, so the mint candy fit inside that, and one could scrape one’s teeth across the m...

writer alarm: engage!

So I’ve been looking into what’s necessary for submitting self-published books to major review sites (RT, PW, etc) and the answer is primarily “a long lead time.” Several months. Four, for RT, ideally four but 3 is bearable, for PW.

Which means if I want to get REDEEMER in for a late October launch, just post-Octocon, I have to have it written and edited by 21 June.

AAAAAAAAAAGH.

Written, yes, it will be written. But *edited*? Like to the editor, returned to me, and revised? That seems…unlike...

Writing Wednesday: Outlining a Series

Beth Cato, author of the splendid CLOCKWORK DAGGER books, said she’d love to know more about my outlining process(es) for series.

bahahahwoooohahahahahaha ahahaha bahahah hee hee hee

*wipes eyes*

Okay. No, seriously. *laughs* Seriously, it’s an excellent question/thing for me to think/write about. The truth is I’ve become much more serious about outlining in the past few years, but I haven’t yet taken it to the series level that I’d *like* to. (I should, in fact, be looking very hard at REDEE...

Recent Reads: A Little Princess

I’m pretty certain that if I’d been introduced to the idea of “desert island books” as a child, A LITTLE PRINCESS would have been on the short list. I can’t possibly count how many times I read it, although I either didn’t own it or had a hardback edition, because I did not, as I did with my paperback THE SECRET GARDEN, read it to literal pieces.

I re-read THE SECRET GARDEN last year and found it, if possible, even better than I had remembered it; A LITTLE PRINCESS is every bit as good as I...

Dysprosium!

I’m home from Dysprosium, which was a very pleasant weekend away. All my panels and things went well–the kaffesklatch was full!–and I spent most of the rest of the weekend at BarCon, without going to many panels, although I went to a few and had fun at them.

It was *great* to see Jim Butcher again, as it’d been since, like, 2008 or 2009 since we’d met up. It was also pretty funny to hear him telling stories about things I’d been there for, especially the origin of the Codex Alera, which I’d r...

Picoreview: Insurgent

Picoreview: Insurgent: A lot better than Divergent.

This is damning with faint praise, as I thought Divergent was pretty awful, or possibly even worse than “pretty awful” in that you could see where it could possibly be good but MOSTLY what you saw was how it Wasn’t Hunger Games.

Insurgent didn’t have as much of that This Is What It’s Failing To Be feeling to it, so that helped a lot. It’s–pretty predictable, although there were a couple of nice twists, particularly with an unexpected action...

Six years!

Six years ago today I started a writing chat room colloquially known as the War Room. Its purpose was to create a space where the writers I knew could log in and encourage one another to write. The idea is basically a chat room where you don’t chat, you just shut up and write, but in the presence of others, so that there’s some accountability. It’s a way of creating a work environment for a job that often expects you to get it done with nothing but your own self-discipline ruling you. We gene...

Kitsnaps: St Patrick’s Church, Dundalk

The Church of St Patrick, Dundalk

St Pat’s ediface, which, lacking a wide-angle lens, I had to lie on the ground to capture.

“The Church of St. Patrick is a very large Roman Catholic church,” says Wikipedia.

Yes. Yes it is. :)

This is St Pat’s in Dundalk, up near the border, and it’s really rather ridiculously splendid. I could have spent a quite considerable amount of time trying to get some really good pictures of it, and going inside to get more, but I was travelling with a small child, wh...

TV on DVD: Sleepy Hollow Season One

TV on DVD: Sleepy Hollow Season One: That went more or less where I expected it to, but I enjoyed the ride. There was…it’s not a long season, but I kind of felt it could have been a little shorter without losing anything, as some of it managed to feel samey-samey despite being a new show and all of that. It’s probably hard to feel entirely fresh and new in a supernatural TV show at this point, but even so.

Nicole Beharie and Tom Mison have wonderful chemistry. I couldn’t decide which of them...

EasterCon 2015

As mentioned previously, I’ll be at Dysprosium, AKA Eastercon 66, from Friday morning to Sunday evening.

My schedule is as such:

Friday, 6:45 pm – 7:45 pm: The Ultimate Urban Fantasy Panel
Something nasty in your neighbourhood? Everybody wants to go to the big cities, so why not the supernatural?
with Charles Stross, Mike Carey, CE Murphy, and Alice Lawson as Moderator.

Saturday, 10 – 11:15 am: Kaffeklatsch
“Armstrong,” my information says. I’m not sure if that’s a location or if I’m kaffekla...