C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 75

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...

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...