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new! shiny! website!
Thanks to the efforts of the magnificent Thirzah Brown, I have a beautiful new website! Equally excitingly, I have, through the good graces of a reader, acquired a comments moderator, which means the comments have been turned back on for the site! COME ONE! COME ALL! SPEAK TO ME! :)
This has all been in the works for quite a long time now, and I’m really delighted to see it go live. My needs for a website have changed over the years, with me gradually wanting a greater focus on the CE Murphy side of things on the main page of the site, without losing the more personal aspect that mizkit.com, specifically, means to me as an individual. There is, as there was previously, a CE Murphy-specific landing page, but the broad delivery of the main page is more business-oriented too. Basically: plenty of book information for the blog to snuggle up in. :)
A brief tour of the new page:
To your upper left, behind the “CE Murphy” (and frankly, I’m still debating whether that’s going to remain CE Murphy or return to The Essential Kit, with a tag line of “The Official CE Murphy Website” or something to that effect), we have the Miz Kit Productions logo that will be gracing the spine of my self-published books (thank you, Eleri Hamilton!). I’ve wanted to bring my Sassy Lady, as I call her, element back onto my webpage for a long long time, and I’m ridicuously chuffed that Thirzah found such a lovely way to bring her in organically.Beyond her we have (clickable!) book covers that will be primarily featuring The Backlist, because sweeping down to the right hand nav bar we have a gorgeous new Featured area, where (mostly) the newest books will be featured. I *love* the emphasis there, I’m just really, really happy with it. I think Thirzah did a beautiful job (and you can click the title bar for more Features!). It makes me feel like it’s delivering the book content in a big important way while also not totally dominating the page, which is just perfect.
Swooping back toward the left we obviously have the (COMMENTS ENABLED, WOOT!) blog, which we’re changing the landing-page structure of after I had a look at the site on a mobile device and had to scroll for fifteen years to find the secondary nav bar. There will be extended excerpts (around 250 words, rather than the oft-seen 100ish) on the main blog page, then a read-more link, so that the page continues to deliver content but doesn’t overwhelm. I’m also going to limit the number of posts on the main page to five, which will reduce the wordcount to about 1250 words instead of thousands, making it a much more friendly experience for mobile users. This makes me feel good about the site. :)
Then to bring it around full circle we’ve got my twitter feed (only one post from there at a time, is that enough? do i need 2 or 3? it may, i know, turn out i don’t need it at all, but right now it’s the Done Thing, so i’m Doing It :)) and then above it the much-neglected, all-important mailing list link. Honestly, with Facebook’s crappy reach and Twitter’s ephemeralism, the website and the mailing list are the best way to know what I’m doing professionally and I live in the eternal hope that I can make a community out of it all. Yay!
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On da business
Novelist Kameron Hurley talks about some of the hurdles of the publishing industry.
Tansy Ranyer Roberts responds thoughtfully to Kameron’s post.
Sarah Rees Brennan & Holly Black talk about characters of color in their YA novels. You can check out my own post on the topic, too.
Laura Anne GilmanL.A. Kornetsky announces two more books in her Gin & Tonic mystery series! Yay! :)I dropped by Chapters Bookstore yesterday to pick up the two Carol Berg books I didn’t own, and I don’t have, and said to yer man there, “Two more books I won’t have time to read!”
“Ah, we’ve all got shelves like that,” he said, and I said, “The truth is, we realized we could spend the rest of our lives exclusively reading books written by friends, and we would never run out of reading material.”
“You obviously have too many friends!” he said, which was not at all my original interpretation, but was pretty darned funny. :)
And actually I came home and started reading THE SOUL MIRROR immediately, because Carol is an incredible, incredible writer. If you don’t know her books, go get the first one she wrote, TRANSFORMATION, and just keep going from there. Epic fantasy of the best sort. I absolutely love them.
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Wish I’d thought of that.
New Novel Re-tells ‘Pride and Prejudice’ From Servants’ Perspective. Wish I’d thought of that.
Also, a romance novelist with a 20 year career turns out to be an 89 year old man. Awesome. :)
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pulling. teeth.
There are a variety of reasons why the opening chapters of SHAMAN RISES have been difficult to write.
One is that I knew when I sent them off to my editor as part of the proposal that I hadn’t really gotten them right yet. I had to fix them (which was made more difficult by the 3rd reason cited below) Another is that due to Life, I have gotten almost no writing done at all in this calendar year, when in my dream world I wrote 50K in January and was halfway done with the book. It’s hard to get traction when you’re starting out half a book behind. :/
Another is that a while back, an enterprising young artist took a silver Sharpie to my netbook screen, and I have not been able to get it off. It’s hard to write when you can’t see the whole screen. (Don’t bother giving me suggestions on how to get it off–I’ve tried a bunch of things unsuccessfully, and will buy a new computer as soon as the tablet/laptop hybrid I want comes out in Marchish. I don’t like this netbook anyway. :))
The biggest reason, though, was that the book starts off with a kind of fight scene, and I really wanted/needed to get it right before launching into what I am *hoping* will be a headlong rush of inevitability ending in a triumphant climax followed by everybody going out for shawarma. Or something to that effect.
I have finally gotten the opening chapters done, and since I know how the next one ends, I hope I’m now about to fling myself into that headlong rush. I certainly hope so, because if the rest of the book goes like the first chapters did, the whole thing is going to be like pulling teeth, and I’ll never make my deadline. o.O
This is going to be, I think, a big book: there are a lot of characters making reappearances, and a lot of repercussions and arcs to tie up from the PREVIOUS TEN BOOKS. Holy shit, guys. TEN BOOKS. How did I end up with TEN Walker Papers novels? (This counts “Banshee Cries”, which is, okay, technically a novella, and NO DOMINION, which is definitely a novel!) So there’s a lot of ground to cover, and I think it’s going to be a wild, exciting, heartbreaking ride.
I can’t believe it’s the last one.
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Year of Miracles
Four hundred years ago, master vampire Eliseo Daisani and dragonlord Janx both fell in love with a mortal woman. This is her story.
