C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 77
February 24, 2015
Family dynamics FTW :)
Over on FB I linked to this website about a sustainable village being developed in Ireland and said I still wanted go live there.
My mom said I could be the Village Writer. My sister has friends living there and they’re the Village Dancer and the Village Baker.
My mom’s younger brother said, “Do they need a Village Idiot? I might be available.”
Mom said, “Funny, I was thinking of offering myself as the Village Wise Woman!”
I said, “I now really want to write a story in which a brother and sister...
February 23, 2015
Redeemer ho!
I got REDEEMER into Scrivener today, did some edits (there’s a thing I’m trying to do with it which will almost certainly take seven thousand edit passes and I will still not entirely succeed), and actually wrote a thousand words, which is pretty remarkable, because I am no Alexandre Dumas; I do not finish one book, reach for a fresh sheet of paper, and begin writing the next.
Except I truly do have an extraordinary amount to do by the middle of the year to reach the (far too ambitious) goals...
February 22, 2015
i finished it!
I went off this afternoon to write and meet up with a friend, and accomplished some 3750 words before our meeting. I was pretty sure I’d broken through the Novelist’s Event Horizon, and thought maybe if I went back to write a little more, I could finish MAGIC & MANNERS sometime tomorrow. So I went back and blew through 2000 words in an hour (that’s about my top speed), said on Twitter that I thought I might keep going, wrote another two sentences, and was like “no wait i’m done!”
I stared at a...
February 20, 2015
long day on the home front
Poor Indy has a cold and last night ran very long for all of us. Ted and I switched out sleeping with him a couple times, thus ensuring nobody got enough sleep, which was possibly not all that smart. :) Anyway, the end result has been being essentially awake since about 4:30am, which makes it Very Impressive Indeed that I got my 2K in today. I did the first 1200 or so between about 6-8am, at which point my brain just turned to goo, but around noon I shut off the internets and got the other 80...
February 19, 2015
event horizon
I have crossed 120K–the approximate length of the original PRIDE & PREJUDICE–and I am firmly within the Novelist’s Event Horizon. I have 3-5 chapters left. I will continue to have 3-5 chapters left until I am suddenly done. This is how it always goes at the end of a book. I’m not quite at the stage of being ready to scream because it’s not yet done, although I’m going to have to wrap it up pretty quick to not get to that stage.
This morning on Twitter someone was bemoaning the fact that she w...
February 17, 2015
almost there
I don’t know what’s going to come first on this book, 120K or the end. I suspect 120K, as I’m at 113.4 or something now and I have at least two chapters before I can get to the wrap-up, so yeah.
Still, I’ve cracked 60K for the year and have had pancakes for dinner, so things can’t be all bad. Also I just got a lovely email from one of the MAGIC & MANNERS patrons saying it had gone far enough off the PRIDE & PREJUDICE rails that she really doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and I’m really ver...
February 14, 2015
Happy Valentine’s Day
Because nothing says “I love you” like bulbous homemade doughnut monstrosities that look like they’ve risen from the depths of the ocean.
I used a buttermilk cake doughnut recipe from my never-fail Meta Given’s cookbook. It said “chill the dough for 2-3 hours.” At the end of 2.5 hours it was clear that the dough was never going to reach any more substantial firmness than it had. “Roll out to 1/4″ inches,” it said. I tried. It stuck to the rolling pin. I grimly added flour, and more flour, and...
February 12, 2015
o lord we are tired
Young Indiana awakened at 5:12 today, having gotten up yesterday at 5:24 after going to sleep at 9pm. We are all tired. And the poor pumpkin developed a fever suddenly this afternoon, so he’s genuinely not well, poor wee fella. We have had a Very Quiet Afternoon of watching movies (How to Train Your Dragon really is *awfully* good, isn’t it?) and cuddling.
Before that, though, we went to see my Mom in a dance performance, which was really very entertaining. The dance reminded me of a Busby Ber...
February 11, 2015
Stone’s Throe now available!
My pulp fiction novel, STONE’S THROE, is now available for general purchase direct from the publisher! It’ll be up on Amazon and other locations soon, I expect, and I’ll let people know when it is, but if you want it hot off the presses, you know where to go!
Oh! Oh! Oh! My former editor at Harlequin, Mary-Theresa Hussey, has launched a freelance editorial service, so if you’re in a position of looking for an editor, I can recommend her highly!
AND on that note, I have engaged her services for...
tbr shelf: that’s one way to do it
One way to get through the TBR shelf is to bounce off what I’m trying to read. I’ve had a couple of thuds in a row, one mystery novel (which my mom couldn’t finish either) and an epic fantasy that I…probably could have made it through…if I’d really wanted to try…but it felt very over-written to me and I was just kind of tired of it before I got to page ten. Throw in a couple graphic novels and my little debacle with the MC Beaton books last month, and hey, that’s five or six books knocked off...
