C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 76

tap class

I walked like 8 miles yesterday and then went to 2 hours of tap dance class last night. My legs are a bit weary today.

Class was…it was all right. I went to both the beginner’s and the intermediate class, and am nowhere near good enough for the latter. It’s not that I can’t do the steps, but I can’t process them at the speed they’re given.

Truth is I could barely process the combinations in the beginning class, and I knew how to do all the footwork, which no one else did, as they were all *actu...

oh, *wow*

I have the most amazing readers and friends in the world. Oh my goodness. I just received a package in the mail filled with incredibly warm snuggly crocheted things: fingerless gloves, a shawl, a shrug, and neck warmers. Oh my gosh. So, so snuggly. So cuddly. I will never take this shrug off.

And the *stitching* on the shawl! Oh my gosh! You can just sink your fingers right into it.

Joliene, who sent these, exhorts me to stay warm and healthy with these items. I think that is a very, very good...

rough start, sterling finish

I got up early(ish) this morning to get an early start on MAGIC & MANNERS, in hopes of reaching the 9.7K I’d have needed for a 15K weekend. Only I opened the Scrivener app and…a full chapter was missing from yesterday’s work. Over 2000 words.

I lost my shit. One of Scrivener’s perks is that this is emphatically Not Supposed To Happen, and I honestly still don’t know *what* happened, because there was a conflicting file version from Saturday at 4:45pm, 45 minutes before I even got home from wri...

too much story or not enough

A common symptom of a writer at work: vacillating between being confident I can bring this book in at 100K and being sure I can’t.

On one hand, I’m feeling like if I’m not careful, MAGIC & MANNERS is going to end up *longer* than PRIDE & PREJUDICE. It certainly is if I keep following P&P as closely as I’ve been doing, although it’s also diverging more, so I don’t necessarily have to follow so closely. The second half of P&P has sort of a lot of faffing around with characters I’ve essentially...

Downton X-Men

Not that I need anything else to do in my Copious Free Time, but last night I wasn’t even thinking about my Downton Abbey/X-Men mashup (did I mention that? the other day I had an X-Men/Downton Abbey dream and thought, damn, that could work. WWI-era superheroes, that is, more than actually fitting Downton Abbey to the X-Men (which could also work but I don’t see getting to do that any time soon :)) and I realised I could use that world to do Evil Hat Fred’s “World War G” idea, which was a thou...

Recent Reads: Edwardian Murder Mysteries

Last fall sometime I read MC Beaton’s SNOBBERY WITH VIOLENCE, which I enjoyed very much (as I do nearly all of Beaton’s historical romancs) and asked for the rest of the quartet for Christmas so I could finish them all before doing a Recent Reads on them.

A couple weeks ago I picked up the 2nd book and found it…incredibly disjointed. There was no flow from book 1 to book 2, and while it had been a few months since I’d read the first, I didn’t think it had been *that* long. I couldn’t remember...

I need a TARDIS.

I don’t know what happened to January. I mean, yes, I know what happened to January: we had the flu, or something like it, and totally lost a full week or more to being sick. And then Ted had a week off and somehow I got a lot less work done in that time than I imagined I was going to, and now it’s the end of the month and I’m sick again. For God’s sake.

I’ve gotten…15K or so done on MAGIC & MANNERS, which is pretty good, but it’s not *done*, which is what I was hoping for. I crossed the 70K m...

bloody monday

This morning as I was getting dressed, Young Indiana appeared in the doorway and said in his Confessional Voice (which is slightly tragic and solemn), “Mommy…I have something to tell you. I washed the blood off in the sink all by myself.”

Then he proudly displayed his hands, which were red with dried blood, and said, “I was putting my fingers in my nose last night because it was drippy.”

Yes. Yes, it apparently was. And then it was very bloody, to the degree that he brought me to show me the b...

Picoreview: Into the Woods

Picoreview: Into the Woods: Not bad. Not *nearly* as bad as it could have been, which sounds damning with faint praise and isn’t intended to. It may even verge on satisfying, although it’s not entirely satisfying, because I’m too familiar with the stage play.

Many of the performances are very, very good. Most, even. Chris Pine is terrific as Cinderella’s Prince, Shatnering it up way more than he does in Star Trek, and, as everybody has said, the Princes’ Agony is very funny indeed. Meryl Stree...

re-learning photography

I’ve said before that there’s an alternate universe pretty close to this one where I’m a professional photographer instead of writer. Back in the day I was good enough to get a scholarship for photography, but I only pursued it half-heartedly, and after a while digital cameras started doing all the work for me and I forgot what I’d learned. I do manual photography as a kind of crap shoot (ahahah) anymore, without any real sense of how the light or depth of field is going to work.

I can afford...