C.E. Murphy's Blog, page 99

Magic & Manners: Chapter Five

My gift to you this Valentine’s Day is chapter five of MAGIC & MANNERS!

(Start here if you haven’t been reading along!)

And, okay, folks, I’m doin’ it! I’m crowdfunding this baby! If you’ve enjoyed MAGIC & MANNERS thus far, visit my Patreon page to support its continuation!

Patreon’s not like Kickstarter: it’s for small projects rather than big ones, and relies on small, regular donations instead of one larger one. So you might decide to donate $1 per chapter, and if 250 people decide to donate...

dorktastic fangirl squee!

Yesterday for some reason Scalzi was listing his 5 favourite John Cusack teen movies and I volunteered that mine was The Journey of Natty Gann.

Meredith Salenger, the actress who played Natty, responded with an “Awesome!” and I am now totally full of dorktastic fangirl squee. OMG. #dorktastic

Seriously, that movie could be the place my great love of unrequited/impossible love stories comes from. Even now I think Natty and Harry’s story was utterly heartbreaking in the best angstful way possible...

Character Development

A while back, I put forth a general call for questions about writing that people might want to ask me, and, er, I just remembered that I had the list stored, so I thought I’d answer one! :)

Heather asks: Character inspirations – from whom did you draw the personality traits of Joanne, Gary, Morrison, Margrit, Alban, Janx, Daisani, etc.

This one’s particularly entertaining because Heather’s a high school friend of mine who has never been able to see herself or anybody she knows in any of my char...

the next big thing

I imported the Scrivener files for my next project this morning. I still don’t really have my brain wrapped entirely around Scrivener, but this is going to be a big project and it’s clear that Scrivener’s project management system is going to be extremely useful once I understand what I can really do with it. Even just having the character names/bio available at a click is obviously helpful.

I knew I’d written some little bit on the project last year, or possibly even the year before that (ai)...

GGK Book Club: The Wandering Fire, ch 5-8

Here we begin the proper crying bits.

I’m pretty sure, in retrospect, that I’ve been reading aspects of Jennifer’s story wrong for years. I’d always read her as actually being a victim of child abuse, through mis-interpretation of the events at the end of THE SUMMER TREE, but I don’t think that’s actually the case. Which is good, because she’s got a hard enough road as it is.

There’s also the fact that she’s literally drawing on mythical strength, but that doesn’t make me any less admiring of h...

switcharoo

Due to the sounds of traffic outside being slightly overwhelming to Young Indiana, we spent Saturday switching all the rooms around. Or their contents, anyway (pedants). Young Indiana’s room moved into what had been our bedroom, our bedroom moved into what had been the office/guest room, and the office moved into what had been Indy’s room. He’s happy because he can’t hear the cars now. I’m happy because I have a dedicated office.

I had, of course, just finished tidying the *old* office, and n...

GGK Book Club redirect

Due to *handwave* Reasons, the post for the WANDERING FIRE’s first 4 chapters didn’t properly cross-post. My main site page for it is here, and I actually managed my commentary this time! O.O :)

The post GGK Book Club redirect appeared first on The Essential Kit.

BatB rewatch: Eps 1-4

Arright, to start with you should actually go read Steve Aryan’s commentary, because it’s much more thoughtful and insightful than my own, and he’s my co-pilot on this BatB re-watch. :)

Here is my relationship with Beauty and the Beast in a nutshell: I had never read GREAT EXPECTATIONS when the first episode aired, and did so just to find out what the last chapter was, because in the hospital at the end Catherine wonders if someone might read the last chapter to her, because Vincent has been r...

Walker Papers: thud

Remember how two weeks ago I posted and said OMG there’s this bit in SHAMAN RISES I’d forgotten and it was like reading it for the first time?

Last night doing the final edits, I hit that bit again and the same thing happened. I think I can safely say nobody’s going to see that bit coming. :)

(No, it’s not that I’m losing my mind, it’s that I’d revised that section heavily and the changes haven’t settled in my mind yet, apparently. But then, there was a scene in URBAN SHAMAN that shocked me the...

Miss Panti Goes to the Theatre

Irish drag queen Miss Panti gives an impassioned, intelligent speech about opression and homophobia at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.

I don’t normally post videos, much less ten minute videos, but this is really, really worth watching all the way through.

The post Miss Panti Goes to the Theatre appeared first on The Essential Kit.