C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 99

Reader Questions: Process & Pagecount

Lots of process questions, so I’m going to tuck them together into one and answer different aspects of questions people have asked!

Lola & Anne just want straight-up process discussion, which you’d think I’d have covered with the posts for the last couple of weeks, but you’d be wrooooong. :)

Then Kat Bonson follows up with How does your writing process work (e.g. do you write specific # of pages a day or is it a hit & miss kind of thing)? How does your agent/editor fit into your process?

I have...

come along, my darling

Yesterday on Moore Street I noticed a man who looked kind of like a blunt-cut, knock-off Michael Fassbender. Good looking, if not as good looking as Fassbender.

A minute later Young Indiana wandered several steps away from me and stopped to look at something. I said, “Come along, my darling,” and the Fassbender knock-off turned toward me in slow surprise.

I laughed and said, “Wrong darling, sorry,” and off we all went our separate ways. :)

I keep trying to make posts and I can’t think of anythin...

Everything is awesome!

I haven’t liked a “hit song within the context of a movieverse” so much since “Backdoor Lover” in Josie & the Pussycats. I thought the movie was at best moderately amusing, but the song, I find hysterical. Also it’s better than almost anything for clearing earworms, and I’d far rather be singing “Everything is awesome!” than the theme song to Sheriff Callie. @.@

(I asked on Twitter what special level of hell was reserved for people who put “Everything is Awesome” as their ring tone, and a frie...

10%, 10%, 10% onward…

I’m working on a short book (the one mentioned in the process post a couple days ago) and have just edged my way past 10%, which is one of those milestone numbers. It’s starting to take shape structurally, too, which is great, because it’s a blueprint for the structure of the rest of the books. And it’s still amusing me, so hopefully it’ll amuse readers too.

I’ve also gone off-synopsis already, although the off-ness isn’t relevant to the overall structure; it’s just a nicer/smoother opening th...

First SFF?

My friend Kari Sperring (who is one of those writers whose prose just makes me want to weep with envy) has been putting up terrific questions and commentary over on Twitter. Today’s question (which can be followed at the tag #1stSFFReads) is “What was the 1st sff book you read? The 1st by a woman? By a writer of colour?”

As it happens, the first SFF novel I read was *by* a woman: THE CITY UNDER GROUND, by Suzanne Martel. It was published when I was two; I read it when I was six. It made, obvi...

evolving process

Following up somewhat on last week’s process post…

Recently on Twitter Tobias Buckell mentioned he was 6K into a 10K synopsis for a 55K book. Kate Elliott chimed in to say that in December, she’d managed 4K a day for 2 weeks straight–far above her usual writing average–due to having a supremely clear idea of what had to happen in the book at that point.

I myself have become increasingly aware that the more I outline, the more smoothly the book goes. Particular cases in point were THE PRETENDER’...

GGK Book Club: The Darkest Road, ch 1-4

I was just sitting here frowning at my website wondering why a post hadn’t automatically posted and I realized it was because I hadn’t written it yet. @.@ And indeed, because I’m supposed to be working, and because I read the whole book at once this time, and don’t have it in my office right now, I’m going to make this a super short post primarily for the purposes of getting it out there rather than having anything insightful to say right now. I’ll try to get insights into the comments. :) Bu...

worth the price of admission

I had the sudden suspicion that Scrivener might let me put both my synopsis and the chapter I was working on up in a split screen, and lo, within a few seconds I’d figured out how to do so. That feature alone is worth the price of admission. I’ve also got an obviously-increasingly-useful sidebar going on with research materials filling up, and find a sort of unholy glee in the idea that it’s all just right there to flip through instead of digging through browser bookmarks or random text files...

Kitsnaps: Sunshine Yellow

Sunshine Yellow

Sunshine Yellow

More unidentified but cheerful flowers. Now I need to get myself out into the world to take more pictures, so the Kitsnaps don’t lag again…

The post Kitsnaps: Sunshine Yellow appeared first on The Essential Kit.

Picoreview: A New York Winter’s Tale

Picoreview: A New York Winter’s Tale: That was really pretty awful.

Ted had read me a bit of a review which had pretty well panned the film, saying, among other things, that there was too much magic. We went “wtf, it’s a fairy tale, how can there be too much magic?”

There was too much magic.

I can see where it might have worked in the book (which I may now have to read, just out of curiosity), but on screen it was just Too Much. Too twee, too corny, too whatever, but too much. Which is really to...