I’m suffering from a bad case of compulsive hair disorder. I can point directly to all the causes, which are as follows:

1. I’ve regained the entire 20 pounds I lost after Young Indiana’s birth, and I traditionally take weight gain out on my hair.

2. My Rogue streak needs re-bleaching.

3. I generally only get one shower during the work week, so my hair looks pretty limp a lot of the time.

4. I have not had my hair even trimmed in 18 months, so it is no doubt in actual need of some maintenance.

2 & 4 are comparatively easily rectified, except I’m avoiding them for two reasons: I won’t re-bleach the stripe more often than every 3 months and P-Con is coming up at the start of March, so I don’t want to do it until then, and while I have vague intentions of getting my hair styled at some point, the thing I’m thinking of does generally come in long layers (thank you random person on flickr who has the haircut I want), and I have traditionally hated layers on myself, so I’m trying to get it long enough in the first place that if I get it cut that way and hate it, I can cut it straight across again and still have it past my shoulders. So that’s several months out yet.

During which time I could of course in theory lose weight, but Christ, I’m not doing well on that front. :p

The shower thing is probably doomed for some time yet.

Mutter.

A couple nights ago I said to Ted, “I have a Skype date tonight!” He said “Oh you do! With WHOM?!”

“With Gabra Zackman,” said I, “the reader of my Walker Papers audio books.”

Ted paused, bemused, then said, “Your life is not normal. I mean, really. That’s just not normal.”

I had a *wonderful* chat with Gabra, who is charming and funny and clever, and sometime soon (maybe not until Audio Book Release Day, but maybe before then) I’ll be posting a guest blog she’s done for me about being an audio book reader! Yay! :)

The mizkit.com winners of the RAVEN CALLS giveway are Anne Pascale Quinty, Poppy, and Larisa LaBent!

The mizkit.livejournal.com winners of the RAVEN CALLS giveaway are jasondrake, tattermuffin, and for_rainy_days!

All of you please email me at cemurphyauthor AT gmail DOT com with your snail mail addresses, your LJ names if that’s what you’ve won under so I know who you are, and whatever name I should sign the books to. :)

Apparently Facebook is going to roll out their Timeline change as a non-negotiable upgrade (if this link is correct). That may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for me, because its entire purpose is to make your history of everything clearer to advertisers and corporations.

And Google is apparently rolling out a non-negotiable one-username-shall-rule-them-all policy across everything they own. While in theory I like the idea of not having to log in and out everywhere, in practice it’s the same thing as the Timeline.

I cannot decide if I should just suck it up and accept that this is the way of the future, or if I should try to walk away from these networks. I hate that it’s not *easy* to walk away, but as I said on Twitter yesterday, can I not have some kind of social network that doesn’t keep “improving” itself into aggravation for its users? One which more or less everyone uses, so we can still communicate? In my heart I still want/expect Livejournal to be that source, but I don’t think people are going to come flooding back to it. I don’t know. It’s really frustrating to me, though. Arghglhg.

I’m reactivating my vanity domain email addresses, though. I will mine G+ in turn and try to get all the 700+ people who’ve circled me there onto a vanity domain mailing list of some sort, so that I still have contact with people who at least in theory want to be in contact with me. And I may even have the nerve to walk away from those two social networks. *sigh*

My 21 month old son just danced into the kitchen singing “We Will Rock You” with sufficient clarity that I could understand him. Totally independently. I don’t even remember it coming up on the playlist today. I mean, he was dancing and singing and I went “…wait, I know that song, that’s not one he’s sung before, that’s…holy CRAP, THAT’S WE WILL ROCK YOU!!!!” Coolest. Kid. EVER!

Excuse me, I have to go TOTALLY ROCK OUT with my kid now.

17 books in (and several anthologies & a comic), and this part never gets old. :)

A particularly handsome model displays the new book. :)

I’ll pick 3 random commenters to send a copy of RAVEN CALLS to. That’s 3 on mizkit.com & 3 on mizkit.livejournal.com, just so that’s clear. :) And hell, I’ll be doing this on cemurphy.net, Twitter, Facebook and G+, too, so if you’re very thorough you can have up to 6 chances to win a book, I suppose. :)

And oh, the spot varnish on this one is AWESOME. AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME!

In what could quickly become a recursive loop, Harry Connolly mentions a post by Nick Mamatas, and–look, the point is Harry’s post, not Nick’s, or even actually just a comment Harry made on his own entry, which was “I write with one or two actual readers in mind (as well as myself).” So of course I immediately started thinking about who I write for. And the answer (if not made obvious by my nerves over the book I wrote for my nephew) is “Me!”

I mean, yes, I *clearly* hope lots and lots and lots of other people are going to enjoy what I’m writing. But like many of us, I write the stories I want to read*. Take the Walker Papers, for example. When I started that series, the urban fantasy that was out there was really just LKH and Jim (remember, I wrote URBAN SHAMAN in Y2K, even if it didn’t get published until 2005), both of whom featured protagonists who already knew what they were doing. Well, I wanted to read about one who didn’t. So I had to write it. With the Negotiator Trilogy, besides wanting a Beauty and the Beast story where the Beast would never be human, I also wanted urban fantasy with a protagonist who was just human, no powers of her own. So I wrote one. The project I’ve got out on proposal is definitely one I’d love to read, and the one I need to write a proposal up for is also something I’d like to read. That’s largely how it works for me. And there’s enough that I’d enjoy writing that at times it’s a bit of an agony deciding what I might end up working on.

Of course, when you get down to it, I can generate enthusiasm for writing just about anything someone wants to pay me for, so I’m not writing for an audience of one in that regard. I inevitably will write a book I would want to read, but I don’t think it’s really possible not to. I mean, I have to live with the thing for the writing of around 100,000 words, and that’s a lot more living with it than reading 100K is. I’d probably paralyze myself if I started thinking in terms of writing for others, even though I obviously *know* that’s exactly what I’m doing.

I suspect that was all obvious, but I was moved to write it anyway. :)

*The fact that I do not then read them is largely nonwithstanding. I observed to a friend a couple of days ago (after she posted, charmingly, on Twitter that “The Cardinal Rule is that CE Murphy’s books are awesome.”) that the Cate Dermody** books are the only ones of mine I’ve ever re-read for pleasure. This is largely because I wrote them each so quickly that they *almost* feel to me like someone else wrote them. I do tend to want to edit them a bit, but it’s easier to just read them than it is anything else I’ve written.

**Speaking of the Dermody books, I mean, you want to talk about ideas that are an agony to decide whether or not to work on them? Not only were there 13 books planned for the Strongbox Chronicles, but I have two, no, three, other series ideas for action-adventure romancey things that I’d love to write under the Dermody byline. The Rainbow Room Romances, the Queen City series and the Angel Archives. It’s like forty books that Cate Dermody alone could write, and I’ve no idea if she’ll ever get the chance to.

Funny that the “Is LJ dead?” post got lots of traffic. :)

LJ and mizkit.com (which are pretty much interchangeable) are really still the heart of online communication for me. I use Twitter more than I like, but a great deal of it is announcing word wars and the like. Facebook has two aspects for me, one of which is the personal side, where I do almost nothing but share links and photos from other people. The other side is work, where I try to make an actual effort to be, y’know, like, interactive. I almost never remember to use G+ and when I do it’s simply reiterating something I’ve posted on FB/Twitter, or the very occasional blog posting. I never, ever read the stream there.

CEMurphy.net gets virtually no interactive traffic, perhaps because I do such a lousy job of posting there regularly, but also possibly because the spam’s been so bad I’ve had to instigate too many measures that shut down potential conversations. And also probably because it needs a redesign to make it more user-friendly, but see “in my copious free time”. Whatever the reason, it’s unfortunate.

I gather that for somebody in my position (ie, a writer), I should probably be hanging out on GoodReads. I don’t even have an account there, apparently. Oi. Another place to promote. :}

In totally other news (she said, in what we call “burying the lead”), I’m thinking of doing a Nano in February. 50K in 29 days. Anybody up for it?

Is Livejournal dead? Are we all using Tumblr and Twitter (and for me, to an increasingly lesser degree, Facebook) these days? I don’t ask because of this article (touting LJ’s return; hat-tip to Charlie for the link), but because man, it’s *really* seemed quiet the past few months, and only seems to be growing increasingly so. And of course it’s not any skin off my nose to keep cross-posting, but boy, there’s a lot of whistling in the wind going on.

Of course, a Saturday afternoon/evening is probably not the best time to post and ask this, but once upon a time it wouldn’t have been a *bad* time. Or maybe it’s just everybody’s moved on to a new phase in their lives where they don’t have time to blog as much, much like there was a slow visible drop-off in MUSHing among my friends lo these many years ago now as people moved on and out of college and perhaps out of jobs that let them be online 24/7, and started having children and doing other things which quite reasonably had greater demand on their time.

I dunno. I miss the community. I know I’m not doing a great job keeping up my end, either, with sporadic postings, but I miss it anyway.

- make applesauce
- make biscuits
- make bread
- make a birthday cake om nom nom
- pack up comics. srsly.
- send comics. srsly.
- books too.
- perhaps go, y’know, get send Ted to buy his own small birthday presents to go with his big one
- write. ahahahahah. ahahahahha. hahahahaha. *wipes eyes*