C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 76
March 15, 2015
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...
March 13, 2015
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...
March 11, 2015
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...
March 9, 2015
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...
March 6, 2015
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...
March 4, 2015
great photo archive project
I thought maybe I’d tackle the Great Photo Archiving Project again and took out the box of photos I’d weeded down from literally thousands to…well, probably still over a thousand, really, but no longer three or five thousand.
However, I have been pretty much instantly defeated by realising this is a job that basically requires having every photo album I’ve got opened on a table in front of me so I can figure out quickly where to rough-sort the pictures. I mean, they’re rough-sorted already, bu...
March 3, 2015
still synopsizing
I’m still working on the REDEEMER synopsis. I’d been living in this magical-thinking place where I thought I could the half-worldbuilding-totally-SPLAAAH synopsis I was roughing as the Actual Synopsis, since I wasn’t going to have to send it to anybody.
Turned out I can’t, even if it’s *not* going to anybody else. It was too chaotic and unstructured, so despite the fact that I’ve got thousands of words of worldbuilding & synopsis, I’ve now got…thousands of words of new synopsis. I did about 8K...
March 1, 2015
falling behind!
I’m falling behind on my Recent Reads and film commentary stuff. Suffice it to say we just got to s3e9 of Person of Interest and they could probably hear our scream of agony in Australia. And I’m not speaking in the royal We, I’m speaking of me and Ted both shrieking “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” at the television.
A friend of mine says she’d read spoilers and that she will not go beyond s3e8. This is not necessarily a bad solution. #heartbreak
I went to see Jupiter Ascending a second time, and liked...
February 27, 2015
two steps forward…
I’ve been working on my detailed synopsis for REDEEMER this week. It’s going pretty well, actually: I’ve done about 5k–well, I’ve probably written 7 or 8K, including random thoughts about worldbuilding and stuff–and I’ve opened it up to my Brainstorming Filter, which–I’ve always brainstormed with Ted and my friend Trent, but previous to STONE’S THROE I’d never done *much* brainstorming outside of them. I needed help with STONE’S THROE and opened it up to a small group of friends and writers (...
February 25, 2015
Recent Reads: The Art of Asking
I found THE ART OF ASKING to be a rather strange read.
A lot of it was familiar to me in one way or another: I’ve watched Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk, I followed her Kickstarter and its aftermath, I periodically read her blog, I used to read Neil Gaiman’s blog regularly, etc. I’m not a fan of either Palmer or Gaiman, which is to say their art doesn’t particularly speak to me, but I’ve met them both, albeit briefly, and it’s hard to be in my line of work and not know who they are.
So basically the...
