C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 72

Young Indiana’s Song of Sorrow

A certain young man does not wish to go to sleep. He is serenading me from his bedroom. His song goes like this (and this is verbatim, I’m typing as he sings):

We’re a mom and son
Moooom and son
and we have to stick together
or we’ll (mumble)
and that would be unnecessary
and i’d be sad forever
and you’d be sad too!
because i’d be sad until
the end! of! this! day!”

Please listen to me
or it will be the end of the world
and we won’t be together anymore
and we won’t be able to stick together ag...

Writing Wednesday: Elevator Pitches

A fellow writer over on Twitter was asking for example elevator pitches to show to some of her friends as examples, and since I’ve got, oh, eight or seventeen of them that I’ve been using for years, I threw several of them at her.

An elevator pitch is what you want to have prepared for when you find yourself in an elevator with the high-powered head editor of your favourite publishing house and she says, “Oh, you’re a writer? What are you working on?”

This is not the moment to give a sevente...

Recent Reads: The Dragon, the Witch & the Railroad

I have loads of personal history with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Seashell Archives series, which she wrote in the early eighties, and which I discovered, uh, probably in the early 80s, although possibly in the mid-80s :), and quite adored. They were light funny epic fantasy with cursed or bewitched heroines, and I’d never read anything quite like them.

I met Annie in Ireland in the early 90s, and she was very supportive of me being a writer. I sent her a copy of URBAN SHAMAN when it was publ...

International Transgender Day of Visibility

I didn’t know when I got up this morning that March 31st is the International Transgender Day of Visibility, but I discovered it was when I logged into Twitter. Its purpose is to support transgendered people and to raise their profile to help cisgendered people to start recognizing that there are a lot of transgendered people out there.

(Cisgendered: identifying with the gender one is assigned at birth. I’ve only come across this term in the past year or so, and I’m not particularly proud to...

Picoreview: Cinderella

Picoreview: Cinderella: Surprisingly good. Surprisingly dark! And that dress, wow.

Cate Blanchett is, of course, splendid as the Wicked Stepmother, who was–in Ever After they managed to make the stepmother a more interesting than simply evil character, and Disney stepped up the game again with her. In everything save her treatment of Cinderella, I frankly admired her. She wasn’t good, but she was willing to use what she had to get what she needed, and…yeah. Pretty terrific characterisation fo...

Easter!

It was a great day when I realized I could make egg salad any time I wanted, but Easter is still a favourite holiday because it’s the Egg Salad Holiday. :)

We had Easter yesterday, because I’ll be at EasterCon in London on Easter Actual. Young Indiana got up at 5:30 (well, 6:30 with the clock change, but still) because he was So Excited, but he was thrilled to pieces to find the eggs that it was hard to hold it against him. His Easter basket had (among other things) a chocolate bunny and two...

*incoherent squeeing*

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON WILL BE IN DUBLIN IN APRIL

*DIES OF EXCITE*

Seriously, you have no idea. Meeting him is like bucket-list material for me, and I was SO HAPPY to get to meet him at Loncon, because I figured it was a once in a lifetime chance. And now he’s gonna be doing a thing in Dublin in TWO WEEKS and I’ll get to meet him AGAIN. #diesofexcite

In fact he’s doing an entire week of teaching and lectures in Limerick and Ted was like “Are you going to Limerick?” and I’m like DO NOT TEMPT ME!...

Kitsnaps: Botanic Gardens Hailstorm

Last Friday Young Indiana and I went out to the Botanic Gardens and got caught in a rain-and-hailstorm. It was great fun, actually, and involved a lot of running from one hiding place to another, playing keep-safe games and dancing.

I had my camera, having intended to pursue my self-directed photography ‘classes’ some more, although I haven’t advanced much beyond practicing shallow-depth photography. On one hand that’s fine, because as it happens I Really Love shallow depth photography and I’...

Recent Reads: Citadel of the Sky

Make room, GRRM: Chrysoula Tzavelas knows how to bring on the pain.

I’ve just finished CITADEL OF THE SKY, which Chrysoula is in the midst of Kickstarting, and, like, whoa.

This is not GRRM-style fantasy, let me make that clear. You don’t spend every turn of the page in fear that your protagonists are all going to be dead on the next one. It’s a cast of several, but not thousands. It’s also under 300 pages, which is like a quarter or a third of the length of a GRRM book. And in voice it’s–it’...

Picoreview: Step Up 2: The Streets

Picoreview: Step Up 2: The Streets: As good as your average dance movie, which means less good than Step Up, but possibly good enough to explain why there ended up being FIVE Step Up movies.

It turns out this is the first one I’d seen in the theatres, and I don’t think the dancing is quite as good in it as in the first film. A lot of it seems less…controlled, although that may be deliberate, because that’s kind of the thing the main character lacks, so it may be that the whole vibe of the str...