C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 74

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...

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...