C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 78
February 10, 2015
What I wanted from Jupiter Ascending
As I said on Twitter, I was going to write a blog post about what I wanted/expected from Jupiter Ascending, and then I thought “shit, maybe I should write a book!” But a blog post is a lot faster. :)
This will make more sense if you’ve seen JA, obviously, and will be rife with spoilers if you haven’t.
First off, I saw absolutely no reason for a physical-only Recurrence to mean anything to anybody unless the only way to revive a stored/backed up memory/person was to a perfect genetic match, beca...
Picoreview: Step Up
Picoreview: Step Up: Better than your average Wrong Side Of The Tracks Dance Movie.
I have an unashamed love for Wrong Side Of The Tracks dance movies while being perfectly capable of recognising that their usual range of quality falls somewhere between “not good” and “excrutiating”. Most feature at least one lead who cannot. act. at. all. Some feature two. In the real humdingers, not only can neither of the leads act but neither can any of the supporting cast, either.
However, they can all dan...
February 9, 2015
Recent Reads: Mansfield Park
I’ve finally finished reading Austen’s MANSFIELD PARK, which I found remarkably hard going. This was not helped by reading the first half over the course of several months in dribs and drabs; the second half, which I read over the past several days, went more easily. But I struggled with remembering who the characters were in relation to one another, and it was made worse by some of the longest sentences I’ve ever been dragged down by. I had a hell of a time remembering what had happened at t...
February 7, 2015
Picoreview: Jupiter Rising
Picoreview: Jupiter Rising: I’m putting my money down now: Channing Tatum is not going to be the problem with the Gambit movie.
This is not to say there will not be innumerable problems with it, because it would take a miracle of untold proportions for it to be any good, but what Jupiter Ascending did was convince me that Tatum could actually do a damn fine job playing the Ragin’ Cajun. My current expectation is that it’s going to be the equivalent of Catwoman, in which I maintain poor Halle B...
February 6, 2015
Ten years!
My authors’ copies of STONE’S THROE have arrived! As is now traditional, they are being displayed by a particularly handsome model.
The particularly handsome model then wished to take pictures of ME with the book. :)
And the end result of all of this is the Ten Year Shelf: the complete (full-length) works, 2005-2015: 24 books representing in the area of 2.5 million words!
Holy beans. :)
ytd wordcount: 46,100
The post Ten years! appeared first on The Essential Kit.
February 5, 2015
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...
February 2, 2015
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...
February 1, 2015
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...
January 31, 2015
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...
January 30, 2015
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...
