Category: CEMurphy

the essential kit

Laydeez Do Comics

May 23, 2013

Last night Maura McHugh and Lynda Rucker launched the inaugural Laydeez Do* Comics event in Dublin. It was an enormously successful launch, with 3 excellent speakers (Sarah McIntyre, Alan Nolan and Maeve Clancy) and around 15-20 attendees. I saw people I knew, met new people, and met some people who knew me. :) As always, going and talking to people about comics makes me desperately want to do them. In my copious free time. *agonize* I have this ever-growing pile of script ideas, and just aaguuuugh! I know people who…

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the essential kit

a momentary reality check

May 22, 2013

We’re looking for somewhere new to rent, and I mumbled about a lovely place that costs an impractical, um, *checks conversion rate*, $2350 a month. This caused someone (that I have known since childhood, so while it was cheeky, well, actually, total strangers ask these questions too, so) to ask the following question, and since I wrote out the answer anyway, I thought I might as well post it. “I thought successful authors like yourself made a lot of money? Am I way off base?” Yes. :) Here. I’ll talk…

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Recent Reads: TOUCH OF POWER

May 20, 2013

Maria’s one of the other Luna alumni who got picked up at the same time I did. She’s done a kind of splendid shooting star rise, reaching the NYT with first book, and going on to take the YA world by storm since then. This book might work better for that audience. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it (except a language thing Maria’s chosen to do in all her books which I understand but find jarring), but I was underwhelmed, which leaves me feeling like probably I just wasn’t a…

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More on genderflipping

May 14, 2013

After last week’s post on genderflipped covers, my friend Flit dug up an article she remembered reading about a a bias study regarding female playwrights. The article is well worth reading, but for the TL;DR folk among us (sorry, I only just learned that TL;DR meant “too long; didn’t read”, so now I have to use it at least once), the take-away is “in an as-controlled study as is possible, it turns out women discriminate against female playwrights more strongly than men do, even though plays written by women make…

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Genderflipping covers

May 8, 2013

So Maureen Johnson, YA author, threw down a gauntlet a couple of days ago regarding the way books are marketed and asked her jillions of Twitter readers to gender-flip some of their favorite book covers. To make a cover that might have been offered up if the book was by a person of the other gender, or was gender neutral (initials instead of full names. She’s written a terrific article about the whole problem of gendered covers here, and it is truly worth a read. Really truly honest to God.…

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