C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 73

viral!

I’ve had something go viral! I think ~160K reblogs qualifies as viral by anybody’s standards. #beams

Look, I’m dorktastic, I knew that already, but it’s kinda cool to see something get so many hits. My previous-ever best was several hundred retweets when I bitched about being able to read faster than any news video so please always just GIVE ME A TRANSCRIPT. So this is neat.

Also it makes me wish I posted more original content on Tumblr but I don’t so oh well. :)

The post viral! appeared fir...

Writing Wednesday: Discipline

@kit_flowerstorm on Twitter asks me to discuss how to practice the discipline of writing.

This is a question I get a *lot*. I don’t know if all professional writers get it a lot or if I do because I seem to have a particularly impressive output (or if it’s just that, as I actually *noticed* a few weeks ago, I work a lot).

There is not a romantic answer to this question. The truth is that when writing is your day job, you sit down and (if necessary) struggle for the words just like you might g...

Good job, Adobe.

I’ve had an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription for a few years now, under the monthly subscription where you don’t pay for it the months you don’t use it, and I tend to use it about…once a month. I sort of realized today how dreadful a scam that was/how much I was paying for it, and went and bought Photoshop Elements, which has really got everything I’m realistically going to use, in order to replace the Creative Cloud subscription.

They made me talk to a customer support person when I tried t...

chd: my brain is trying to trick me

I’m suffering from a bad case of compulsive hair disorder and my brain is trying to trick me. I just saw a woman (a Topshop model, actually, featured in the image on this post) with a good layered haircut, chin-length layers around the face and blunt-cut shoulder length layers for the rest. I thought, “That looks great, I could do that!”

Except I hate layers on me. I have a great deal of hair, but it’s too straight: layers end up making it look thin and limp. (Yes, I know, that’s exactly what...

Picoreview: Seventh Son

Picoreview: Seventh Son: I can’t tell if that was subjectively bad or objectively bad.

The problem is that I’ve read the source books, but not for quite a while, and they’re a terrible adaptation of the source books but because my memory of them isn’t clear I spent a great deal of the movie going, “Wait, is that…did that…was that…okay, that’s DEFINITELY not from the books…,” which left me uncertain at the end if I’d seen your bog-standard bad fantasy film, in which case, for a bog-standard ba...

KSR at Hodges Figgis

Last night was Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at Hodges Figgis. It went really well: the audience was full and there were a lot of great questions, almost none of which I can remember right now. :) Someone asked about ESCAPE TO KATMANDU, which I haven’t read and which apparently I must, and ANARCTICA, which is actually one of my favourite KSR novels (and turns out to be one of his favourites, too, although it evidently made no blip at all when it came out) was mentioned, and there was someone wh...

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...