C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 73

I saw the eclipse!

It was significantly cloudy in Dublin at Solar Eclipse time and I had no real hope of seeing it. In fact, it was *raining* lightly, but I was still out and about and keeping an eye on the sky. Suddenly the clouds broke just enough to keep a haze over the sun, allowing me to look directly at the eclipse, which, at 9:23am, was close enough to the 90% totality seen today from Ireland to count.

I am not lying, guys: it was fucking awesome. And that’s from somebody who knows what an eclipse is. It...

I work a lot.

This morning as I was doing revisions on the 4th project I’ve worked on this month I had the shocking revelation that I work a lot.

I can hear people rolling their eyes at me from all over the world right now, but it actually was a shock. I think it was because it was the fourth project (REDEEMER synopsis, MAGIC & MANNERS revisions, short story revisions, now SKYMASTER revisions) that I’ve worked on in the past 3 weeks that it really hit me. And if I get this done by the weekend, which I shou...

I hate revising.

I hate revising. I particularly hate it when I’m going over a manuscript that, when I finished writing it, I thought was REALLY BAD and probably needed to be totally thrown out, and six weeks later when I look at it again I’m like “this appears to mostly work and i can’t tell if it actually works or if it’s just this HUGE GAPING BLIND SPOT OF DENIAL.”

Even more aggravating is that the last 3 chapters of my printed manuscript mysteriously disappeared and so I was left in the lurch and still do...

trying to develop a blog schedule

I want to do a thing. I want to develop a blog schedule, so like on Tuesdays or whatever I post a Recent Reads, and on Fridays it’s Picoreviews, and so there’s a Kitsnaps day and a Writing Topics day and a I don’t even know what else day. A Recommended Reads, which would be different from Recent Reads. Stuff like that.

This is a thing I want to do. Plus other random stuff that comes up too, and the boring “now i’m writing and all i can talk about is writing!” posts (okay, i don’t actually thi...

Recent Reads: The Invisible Library

THE INVISIBLE LIBRARY is the debut novel from another TooMUSH alumni, Genevieve Cogman, so I was predisposed to like it. OTOH, it’s a Library Story, and Library Stories are never…quite…what I want them to be. I don’t even know what I want them to be, save that I haven’t encountered it yet, so I was also moderately trepidatious.

As it turns out, THE INVISIBLE LIBRARY is pretty splendid. In a nutshell, the Librarians are in search of unique books, ones that only appear in one alternate universe...

catch-up post

Young Indiana and I went to see Home, which was a sweet little film. It’s also the first animated film I can think of since Prince of Egypt where white people were only incidental background characters instead of the homogeny, which was great.

Today is Mother’s Day in Ireland. I have been greeted with a lie-in, a homemade card, and waffles with strawberries, which is a pretty nice start to the day. I was gonna go see Insurgent, except it doesn’t start until next week. Darn it. Maybe I can se...

Small Gods

I was not a fan of Terry Pratchett.

I read several of his very early Discworld books when I was still in high school, probably around 1988. The fact that I read *several* is more an indication of how much I read than how much I liked them, but I actually stopped reading them before I ran out of them to read, which *was* an indication of my dislike. It wasn’t Pratchett in particular; I eventually realised I didn’t care for most satire in prose form.

In 1996 I was flying all around the country...

whoosh!

MAGIC & MANNERS is off to the editor. I’ve lined up a copy editor, the cover artist is working on the cover art (as she can; poor woman broke her arm!), and I’ve got a couple people I need to talk to about book layout. I also need…to think about what I’m doing with ISBNs, and I need to grit my teeth and delve into the Ingrams system, as I don’t see myself suddenly being flush enough with cash to hire someone to deal with that for me, much as I’d like to.

I see that my prediction three weeks a...

Recent Reads: Hurricane Fever

Tobias Buckell’s terrific ARCTIC RISING was one of my favourite books the year I read it (2012, looks like), for its near-future SF climate change worldbuilding and its heavy focus on the Arctic, which is obviously near and dear to my heart. I liked pretty well everything about it–setting, queer POC female lead, slam-bam adventure plot–which meant that HURRICANE FEVER, set in the Caribbean, had a big hill to tackle as its sequel.

It didn’t quite succeed, in that I didn’t love it as much as I d...

We have synopsis!

I *just* about finished up the REDEEMER synopsis last night. In fact, I called it done even though I knew there was more I could put in. I thought it was primarily emotional storyline stuff and probably wouldn’t make *that* much difference to the synopsis as a whole, but in a fit of Covering All Bases (I guess) this morning I decided to go ahead and put those bits in.

Somewhat to my surprise, what happened with the addition of those 400 words was the whole thing suddenly came together in an un...