C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 8

Release Day: DEMON HUNTS

Today the re-release of DEMON HUNTS, book six of the Walker Papers, is in the wild!

Available here in e-book or print at Amazon

Available in print at Barnes & Noble

It’s been the weirdest year of Joanne Walker’s life, and the last thing she wants is for it to go out with a bang, magically speaking.

Then again, she can’t remember the last time she got what she wanted, either. She’s lost Coyote, her shamanic mentor. The burgeoning relationship with her boss, Captain Morrison, has been put on the b...

the state of the cate

how annoyed am i that that rhymes and ‘state of the catie’ doesn’t

I had a dream of knocking out 50K a month several times this year. So far I’ve not yet cracked 100K for the year. I realize it is only the 2nd of April and there’s plenty of time to do the former despite the latter. I’m still depressed about it. :p

And, like, yes, I had revisions the first working week of the year, and then I went afk for several working days, and then I had the Great Dropbox Disaster of 2025, which actually I’d ...

emotional compromise & the novelist’s event horizon

I stayed up too late last night to watch Cory Booker smash that old racist bastard’s filibuster record into dust, and it was fully worth it.

As soon as I woke up this morning, I picked up my phone to see how long he’d held the floor in the end, and the first thing I saw was “Pour one out for Madmartigan, lads.”

So between Cory Booker, Val Kilmer, & a lack of sleep, I’m pretty emotionally compromised this morning (which, phrased like that, sounds like it’s much more scandalous than it is, doesn’t...

admin, and yet, writing?

On the admin front, I’m doing something that my EXTREMELY GOOD AT MARKETING friend Elva Birch (author of a number of paranormal romances far exceeding mine, a bunch of which I’ve edited) has been telling me to do for…a very long time…and which I am finally, for reasons I cannot explain, actually managing to get done now.

Actually, the reasons are probably “because I finally broke down and got that Bookfunnel account, and now I have the tools to do all the things she told me to.”

Anyway, she’s be...

admin to the point of efficiency

I have spent way too much time this year doing admin. Like probably a full month, possibly six weeks, of work time has been spent on admin, not including the Great Dropbox Disaster of 2025 or the week+ I did of it in late 2024. SO MUCH admin.

A lot of it has been “once this is done, Future Catie’s life will be MUCH EASIER,” and at this point, all of that admin is in fact done. That stuff was stuff I could not hand off to my husband, but, well, it’s done.

In theory a lot of the rest of it IS stuf...

Release Day: Timber Wolf on audio!

It’s the Virtue Shifters as you’ve never heard (or seen!) them before!

I’m absolutely chuffed to announce the relaunch of my Virtue Shifter romcoms with all-new covers, the first audio book, & more stories on the way!

To celebrate, the TIMBER WOLF e-book is free this week, and the audio book is now available pretty much wherever you like to listen to audio books at!

Wolf shifter and carpenter Jake Rowly left his home town of Virtue straight out of high school and never planned to return. But a ...

beaten & bruised, but better

Holy mother of frogs am I tired.

I got up at about 5am to do an arguably insane thing I do every once in a while, which is travel half the length of the country (literally: it’s 250km to drive there, and from the northern tip of the Republic to the southern tip, it’s about a 550km drive, BUT because the train is not direct, it’s probably more like 300km of travel one way) to visit my very excellent PT. It’s expensive and time consuming and it’s possible that each of the two or maybe three times ...

Kitsnacks: Chocolate Meringue Cookies

I have a lot of left over egg whites after making lemon curd last week and in my kind of never-ending quest to find things to do with them, I made these actually quite intensely chocolately meringue cookies. I tried one, thought it was pretty good, offered one to Dad, he thought it was good, so I went to Indy and said, “My son, the moment has come when I must call upon you to perform one of the sacred duties of childhood.”

Indy: ::groans loudly::

Me, handing him a cookie: Taste test this cookie....

Call of Cthulhu: The Forces of Darkness

The game started this evening with my dad walking by the room and saying, “Good luck to Teddy as he faces the forces of darkness,” which was overheard in the chat, causing everyone to laugh and ask if that was our son.

“No!” we said. “It’s my dad/father in law!”

“Oh!” they said. “Would he like to play?” ::laughs::

One of our players has had to drop out, so we’ve got a new character, Caliope Baxter, a disgraced socialite who now studies parapsychology and whose presence Lord Summerset, the classi...

Call of Cthulhu: Teddy, Irritating Moral Compass

This week’s CoC session began with us still in Derby, where we spent a while trying to figure out how to break into the walk-in safe on the factory floor (a factory which, if you will recall, two of our party broke into “because we hoped there might be monsters,” only to be told straight-up by the GM that there were no monsters here, lads, you’re just criminals. :laughs:), a conversation that eventually went:

GM: You do have dynamite.

Dylan, sharpshooter: That’s right, I do!

Teddy, horrified: We...