I have one complete set of the Walker Papers (URBAN SHAMAN, THUNDERBIRD FALLS, COYOTE DREAMS, WALKING DEAD) in trade paperback left to sell. If you’re interested in it, it’s $75, which includes S&H from Ireland, and I will of course sign them to whomever you like. Leave a comment to arrange the particulars!

I made a perfectly lovely applesauce cake for dessert last night. It’s a nice rich spicy cake with a lovely dense texture, and I was asked for the recipe, so I shall put it behind the cut. I will also put the applesauce recipe behind the cut, as well as the double-chocolate chip cookie recipe, which Ted has renamed Triple Chocolate Evil Cookies (they gave him a migraine, or at least, they and the glass of red wine combined gave him a migraine, so it’s not an inappropriate name for them), because I think it’s the best chocolate-chocolate chip cookie I’ve come across.

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This is a post of such inconsequentiality, mostly about NCIS and The Princess and the Frog, and a little about food, that I shall put it behind a cut tag.

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currently: peaceful

A post of mostly metrics, as I haven’t updated in a few days.

SPIRIT DANCES is, by way of wordcount, 25% done. Pretty close to that by pagecount, too, at 103 pages of an anticipated 440. (oh god, that number looks big. *ignores it*) I had an unusually good writing day at 4700 words today. If I could do that every weekday I’d be nearly finished with it by Easter. That would be good, but it’s asking a lot. We’ll see.

Four Five Six complete sets of the Walker Papers have been bought & paid for, by the way. Details on purchasing one of the remaining four three two sets are here, if you’re interested.

Off to feed the cats & be outraged by the news, now. Other weekend plans include seeing The Princess & the Frog and watching tonight’s hopefully new NCIS. :)

The Road Home: miles to Isengard: 165.2
ytd wordcount: 87,000

currently: working

All right. I was going to put this off until June when the Walker Papers mass markets will have been out a year, but I’ve just gotten 3 boxes of mass market Negotiator books and am really badly out of room for books, so I’m going to go ahead and throw this out to see if anybody’s interested.

I have 8 complete sets of the Walker Papers (URBAN SHAMAN, THUNDERBIRD FALLS, COYOTE DREAMS, WALKING DEAD) in trade paperback. If anybody would like a complete signed set, I’ll sell them for $75, which includes S&H from Ireland. Leave a comment and it’s first come, first served.

…yeah, ok, for ease’s sake I’m going to leave it at the complete sets for a few days to see if people want them, rather than saying ‘if you want URBAN SHAMAN alone speak up’. I do have boatloads of COYOTE DREAMS and WALKING DEAD, so if you just want one or both of those signed, they’re $12/book + $7 S&H for one or $13 S&H for two, but for the moment I won’t break up the 8 complete sets until a bit later.

(Bear in mind that with DEMON HUNTS coming out in June, clearly a signed set of the first four books would be an excellent gift for the not-yet-a-CE-Murphy-fan in your life. :))

We are back from P-Con and I have reached a degree of semi-functionality, so it is time to summarize the weekend.

It was fun. :)

There we go, then!

More, though not exhaustive, detail behind the cut. :)

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currently: chipper

This coming weekend (March 5-7) is Phoenix Con 7, more affectionately known as P-Con. My panel schedule is as follows:

Saturday
11am: Writing Methods of the Experts
C.E. Murphy; George Green; Steve Westcott; Juliet E. McKenna

12:15pm: Superheroes – limited to the graphic arena?
Cheryl Morgan; C.E. Murphy; Bob Neilson; Derek Gunn; Colin Harvey

4pm: Will water become more important in genre fiction?
C.E. Murphy; John Kenny; Ian McDonald; A.J. Healy

5pm: Pictionary

Sunday

10am Panel topics for P-Con VIII
C.E. Murphy; Brian J. Showers; Colin Smythe; Derek Gunn; John Vaughan
(I suspect this may be one of those “we’ll talk about all sorts of random things and next year some of them might make it onto official panels” kinds of panels)

1pm Urban Fantasy: A flash in the pan or here to stay?
C.E. Murphy; Mike Shevdon; Steve Westcott

Everybody else’s panel schedule is here. :) Looking forward to seeing everyone this weekend! Yay!

There’s a top ten writing rules meme going around. I’m pretty sure I could come up with ten, but the one my mother most often reminds me of is “A famous writer once told me you can’t fix what’s not on the page, so you better get writing.” I suspect that’s pretty much the most important one, for me.

Facebook’s latest new improved interface is so clogged up I’ve largely stopped using it for anything besides updating my own status, which is really boring. Not sure how much longer I can convince myself it’s worth the bother. Twitter’s interface is less irritating, but the status update problem remains the same. It’d be much easier (for me, you understand) if people would just read my blog….

Um. It’s been a really very quiet few days. I haven’t left the house since Saturday, which can’t be good. Yesterday I went back and re-read what I’d written for SPIRIT DANCES (Walker Papers #6) and decided it started in the wrong place. I had, however, very cleverly also previously written a couple other chapters which I’d thought were starting in the wrong place, and now I think they maybe started in the right place after all. So after a bit of jiggery-pokery to get things settled together tidily and today’s word wars, the manuscript is already suddenly 75 pages long. This is an unusually nice way to start writing a book, and if I can figure out how to do it again in the future without much effort on my part I shall repeat the experience. (It’s the “not much effort” bit that’s tricky…)

ytd wordcount: 77,000

The “Hot Time” novella went dark last night around 5pm Eastern (with one person getting their purchase in quite literally at the last minute: I was taking the Paypal links down as the payment came in!).

This whole project has been an experiment in selling to a direct market. I pretty much think of this as patronage: the people who bought this story made it possible for me to write something that would not otherwise exist–and believe me, this story was one I have known for years *happened* and have wanted to tell, and yet also one which I very possibly never would have made time to write, had I not been paid to do so. So now I’ve got thoughts and commentary about the whole project, which I shall stick behind the cut.

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currently: contemplative

Ted and I got it into our heads while in Alaska that maybe we should make doughnuts sometime, since the doughnuts here aren’t very good. We got a recipe from Ted’s mom, and last week online a discussion of doughnuts came up, so I wanted to make some. I had only ever done so once before, and my impression was that it was a real pain in the ass.

Today’s experiment in making doughnuts confirms that.

We were making cake doughnuts, which have a very, very soft dough. Sticky soft, and difficult to work*. The recipe suggested using a well floured cloth-covered cutting board as the item upon which to roll out the dough. This was a very, very good idea, as it reduced the stickiness by a considerable margin, although still not enough to make it easy to handle. By the end of the process, the dough had absorbed enough more flour to be relatively handle-able, and neither Ted nor I fully grasp why the goddamned recipe doesn’t start with another half cup of flour to begin with. Next time I make doughnuts (which, judging from the time lapse between the first time I tried and today, will be in about 7 years) I’ll use more flour in the first place.

I also didn’t roll the first set thinly enough (note to self: rolling only half the dough is probably how to avoid that problem next time, seven years from now), so the first several doughnuts became Monstrosities From Beyond The Bakery, and absorbed too much grease. The latter was partly a matter of their size and partly a matter of the oil being the wrong temperature. Ted and I have discussed getting a candy thermometer for years, and concluded that if we were going to try doughnuts again we would need one. (I’ve never needed one for *candy*, but I find gauging oil temperatures to be much more difficult.)

Eventually we managed to get the dough to a handle-able consistency and thinness of rolled-outed-ness, and the oil to the right temperature, and the last dozen or so turned out pretty well.

*My mom used to make doughnuts once in a while, but I’m afraid my only childhood recollection of doughnuts is Almanzo’s mother being disdainful of the new-fangled doughnuts with holes in them which required the cook to roll them over, instead of them rolling themselves over when they were ready, like her twisted doughnuts did. Both this and the first time I made doughnuts left me wondering how the holy bloody hell you create a doughnut dough which is solid enough to be twisted so it’ll roll over on its own, because it’s just so goddamned gooey. Mom says raised doughnut dough is less gooey, so perhaps Mrs. Wilder was making raised doughnuts. I’ll have to try them next time.

February is rapidly coming to an end, and with it approaches the end of the Old Races novella “Hot Time”’s availability. Somewhere around 5pm Eastern time on Sunday the 28th I’ll be taking it down, and it will not be seen again until I sell it to a traditional publisher. That’s likely to mean it won’t be available again for years, rather than months, so get it while you can!

And if you’ve read it–or just adore me on general principles–you can go to the Crowdfunded Creativity site and vote for “Hot Time” as the best crowdfunded fiction of 2009… :)

And heck, if you want to, you can link back to this post (or more ideally this one, since that’s the one with the teaser & Paypal button) to let people know this is their last chance for the novella! :)