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Thinks To Done: 2019
It’s coming up hard on the end of the year & naturally I’m freaking out about everything I haven’t gotten done, WHICH IS WHY I’VE BEEN KEEPING A LIST OF WHAT I *HAVE* GOTTEN DONE
I wrote most of DEATH ON THE GREEN and all of DEATH OF AN IRISH MUMMY, the second two books of the Dublin Driver series (launching in January)!
DEAD IN DUBLIN
Book One of The Dublin Driver Mysteries
American-in-Ireland Megan Malone has always enjoyed her job driving limousines…until one of her clients ends up DEAD IN DUBLIN.A friend who fears she’s culpable for the death begs Megan to look into it, and between her irate boss and a handsome Garda who’s both amused and annoyed by her persistence, Megan has her hands full. But if cockles and mussels aren’t to blame, can Megan find the real culprit . . .before another fishy death occurs?
Preorder Now!
Amazon || Barnes & Noble || GooglePlay || KoboI also wrote a chunk of SUNMASTER, the fourth (and hopefully final) book of my YA epic fantasy Guildmaster Saga (here is a link to book two, released this year!):
STONEMASTER
Book Two of the Guildmaster Saga
It’s good luck to earn the king’s regard…isn’t it?Seamaster journeyman Rasim’s quick wits have helped to save his beloved home city and earned him the dubious honor of studying with the diplomatic Sunmasters. But not everyone is happy that magical knowledge is being shared, and when the king orders the guilds back to the Northlands on a sensitive political mission, it may well cost Rasim his life.Seamaster-born, Sunmaster-trained, Rasim now faces a fight that can only be won by a Stonemaster…
Available now!
Amazon || Barnes & Noble || Apple || Kobo…and wrote a NEW UPCOMING PARANORMAL ROMANCE which will be out early next year!
So that’s about the equivalent of 3 books written in 2019.
But wait! There’s more! I wrote a novella set in the Heartstrike world. That, too, will be out relatively early next year, and wrote 10+ words of fic for my Patreon.
I wrote two short stories, one in the afore-mentioned Guildmaster Saga world & the other, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale, set in, um, the future.
“Siryn”
a fairy tale of The Rising
Cities have drowned and the future has changed beyond recognition. But something new has been born–or perhaps something impossibly old has been released.She does not know how she came to be, only that the oceans are her favored home…until a man from the world above nearly dies in her domain, and she is drawn toward the soft and easy life he seems to possess. But there is a price to pay for love, and in the end…
…you will never be part of her world…
Available Now!
Amazon || Apple || Barnes & Noble (Nook) || KoboI ALSO *majorly* revised the first book of the Strongbox Chronicles and minorly revised the second one.
THE CARDINAL RULE
Book One of The Strongbox Chronicles
When CIA Agent Alisha MacAleer’s cover is blown by ex-lover Frank Reichart, she’s forced into a spy game that draws a curtain back on a world she never even suspected existed. No matter which way Alisha turns, she faces new dangers and heartbreaking betrayals. In the end, she has no choice but to adhere to the cardinal rule…Trust no one but yourself.
Now Available
Amazon || Barnes & Noble || Apple || Kobo
THE FIREBIRD DECEPTION
Book Two of The Strongbox Chronicles
Agent Alisha MacAleer has put the past behind her as best she can, but when a mission goes sideways, she is left with an impossible choice. She can follow orders, or she can strike out on her own to discover the hidden mastermind behind the game she’s been drawn into—a mastermind whose identity she suspects, but could never guess.With no support, no resources, and no safety net, Alisha must believe that honor can survive a trial by fire….
Available now!
Amazon || Barnes & Noble || Apple || Koboand revised the paranormal romance due out next year. I revised about a third of a science fiction novel. I ran a crowdfunding campaign & wrote 4 more pages of comic script for it due to its success!
I *released* 5 books and 2 short stories; here are the ones I didn’t link to above. :)
“From Coffin to Grave”
a Heartstrike Short
Saoirse O’Cathain should have died on the coffin ship that took her from famine-torn Ireland to the dubious safety of the Canadian coast, but an ancient immortal–a man who claims he doesn’t care–saved her by Awakening the Timeless immortality she harbored within. Perhaps it was a gift: Saoirse might have all of eternity to watch the world change, now……unless she has been Awakened only to travel from coffin to grave…
Available Now!
Amazon || Apple || Barnes & Noble (Nook) || Kobo
THE QUEEN’S BASTARD
Book One of The Inheritors’ Cycle
Belinda Primrose is the unacknowledged daughter the unwed queen of Aulun. She is a spy, an assassin…and a danger to her mother, should she ever be discovered. As she infiltrates the glamorous royal palaces where her mother’s rivals scheme, a new power awakens in Belinda. The witchlight she commands could bring down everything she’s worked for when she finds a teacher in Javier, whose claim to the Aulunian throne ranks him highly among Belinda’s enemies.Belinda has never wavered in her mission, but love and loyalty will collide as her secrets are revealed…
Available Now!
Amazon || Apple || Barnes & Noble (Nook) || Kobo
THE PRETENDER’S CROWN
Book Two of The Inheritors’ Cycle
Belinda Primrose has lied, murdered, and seduced her way through the deadly courts of Echon, and now she has come into the strength of her witchpower, a magic she shares with Prince Javier, pretender to her mother’s throne. Their craft has been used to manipulate, shape, and evolve the future of Echon…but even a power from beyond the stars cannot break the will of a daughter betrayed by everything she has ever known.After a lifetime of service, Belinda will finally shape a future of her own…and change the destiny of a world with her choices.
Available Now!
Amazon || Apple || Barnes & Noble (Nook) || Koboand also wrote an actually ridiculous number of book proposals, like, five or six of them. One is the paranormal romance coming out next year, the rest didn’t stick. But I did write ’em, and that’s a lot of proposals to do. And I did about 20 pages of a screenplay, too.
I also read 35 books, went to Disneyland, to Dublin Worldcon, was sick for 3 months, and have made a truly prodigious amount of fudge. :)
It’s been a really busy year. I WANTED to get at least one other book finished, and two more revisions finished. But I’m trying to look at everything I HAVE done, and be impressed with that, instead of dismayed that I didn’t get Literally All The Things done.
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Worldcon 77: The Thursday
After years of preparation, Worldcon was held in Dublin this week, for the first time ever. A month ago I was, I confess, pretty exhausted by the very idea of it, even knowing that I tend to dread, rather than anticipate, big events. By a couple of weeks ago, though, my friends feeds were starting to fill up with variations on “Ireland, I am in you!” and I was starting to get pretty excited about the whole shebang.
I’d been claiming it was CatieCon, and while I *guess* there was maybe an AWFUL LOT going on that didn’t revolve around me, I honestly had an utterly terrific convention. The entire week seemed to revolve around shrieking gleefully at seeing someone, exchanging hugs, managing somewhere between 1/3rd of a sentence and 1/3rd of a conversation, and then seeing someone else and the whole cycle starting over again. I saw–oh, I don’t even remember. Anna and Rowan and Gideon and Peter and Michael and Leony and MY FRIEND ROBIN WHOM I HADN’T SEEN IN LIKE IDK 15 YEARS!??!?! and Mikaela and Lithera and Kris and just everybody and that was just day one and it was amazing!
I had LISTS of things I wanted to go to, and…well, I made it to Diane Duane’s GOH interview, which was more than I’ve done at a convention in years, so I’ll take it. :)
I was on eight different programme items, which, actually, over 5 days, isn’t at all bad. The Thursday I had a morning panel about anti-heroes in comics, which my dear friend Michael Carroll was also on, so we were bound to have a good time. And we did, with the panel going very well and the audience, I hope, as entertained as we were. :)
Most of the afternoon revolved around–in fact of most of *the* afternoons revolved around–squealing happily at seeing people and handing out fudge. I believe I ate. *nods solemnly* (Not fudge, though. :))
That evening I had a reading, and the truth is that you really sort of never know how many people are going to show up to those kinds of things and you basically just hope the audience outnumbers the panelists (or the reader, in this case). But to my surprise and delight I had, IDK, 25-30 people? IDK. One two three many people. :) I read from REDEEMER, and my friend Kate, who has both read the book *and* heard me do that reading before, said she got chills at the end of the chapter, so I think I have to call that a proper success. ♥
I left comparatively early almost every night of the con, although I still managed to not get to bed before 11:30 any given night. But it was good and smart of me to head home anyway, even if people made Disappointed Faces at me. :)
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Take A Chance thoughts / Patreon signal boost
I’ve been having a think, and here’s what I’ve been thinking.
I’ve got an artist for the next TAKE A CHANCE story arc. I need to be able to pay him, tho.
If I can get my Patreon up to 250 patrons, at the average of $5/m that people are paying, I could afford to pay him for 4 pages a month. 300 patrons? 8 pages a month.
(I can’t afford to pay him very WELL, but I could at least pay him. :))
It’d be a sneak peek/early, probably B&W, one-to-2-page-a-week release of what would PRRRRRRRROBABLY be a graphic novel eventually published by Markosia, as the first GN was.
I mean, if the Patreon really went all-out, and Alek had the time to work around the rest of his schedule, there *could* be a graphic novel ready in time for Worldcon in Dublin 2019. But for 22 pages a month(ish) I’d need literally hundreds of more patrons to support that. (like, about 250. it’s not…*impossible*. I’ve got about…well, 3500 followers on Twitter, 2500 on Facebook, 2K on my mailing list, 400 on Tumblr & Goodreads, and an assumption that there’s a lot of overlap on the first three, so call it, IDK, a total of 3K or so people I can reach easily? And say 5-7% of them are Patreon supporters? Another 10% would pretty well do the trick.)
(I mean, the plus side of that would be that we could in theory just, like, KEEP GOING with Chance, at that point. I have a 60 issue story arc planned out! Wouldn’t that be AMAZING? Plus…well. I mean. I have a whole world’s worth of stories there, lads.)
Anyway, so it’s a thought and I’m noodling with it, and heck, if you want to see more Chance and also the other fic & bits I do for my patrons, you can do that at Patreon!
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Very Exciting Developments!
One might imagine, from six weeks of radio silence, that I have been busy.
One would be correct.
But there have been some Very Exciting Developments in that time!
First off, I’ve gotten a studio to work in! It’s part of an artist’s collective, extremely convenient to my son’s school, and, as my husband said, “Bohemian enough to suit your sensibilities.” (I pointed out that I’m really not very bohemian, and he said, “No, but you want to be,” which is perfectly true. :)
The collective has a Studio Cat. Her name is Ophelia (or Elektra, or Lady Tara, depending on who you ask), and she is extremely pretty. She also decided I’d brought my cute Itty Bitty Wonder Woman and Supergirl in for her, a topic upon which she was mistaken, and now I have to put them in a Safety Cup when I leave in the evening (well, afternoon) so she doesn’t make off with them. :)
A friend, looking at the studio pictures, said, “I get the impression you’re expecting it to be cold a lot,” and the truth is I probably don’t have enough blankets, fingerless gloves, and shawls on hand yet. I’ve lived in 8 houses in Ireland, and none of them have kept heat worth a damn, but they were all at least nominally sealed. The studio is in a 150 year old textile factory with 22 foot ceilings and “windows” at either end that are merely wooden shutters with no glass behind them. So, yes, in fact, I expect it to be cold a lot. I have ambitions to get a rug for my space, and I need slippers, and probably other things to stay warm. On the positive side, I’m right below a heater (which is a giant space heater style thing), and have no compunctions against using it. :)
The next Very Exciting Development is that when I got the studio, one of my friends began a “Business Shower” fund as a surprise so I could get things for the new space, and it just happened that I found a spare keyboard like my own on eBay just as they were planning to send it.
Now, my keyboard (as evidenced in the pictures) is a fully split, chair-mounted keyboard, and I’ve had it for something like 17 years. Last summer I had a bad run where it had been messed up and I thought it was a goner, although it turned out the keys had just gotten remapped and someone who is a keyboard enthusiast happened to hear about it and could tell me how to fix it. But that was a very bad moment, because although there’s no reason to believe my keyboard will go kaput, I live in terror of the day that happens. I’ve looked for replacements idly on and off for at least a decade, possibly longer, Just In Case, but I’d literally never seen one on eBay before, and it showed up there just as my astonishingly good-hearted friends put exactly enough money in the paypal account for me to get it.
Readers, I bought it.
Honestly, I actually feel a little guilty about buying it, because, I mean, someone else might need and not HAVE one at all. I feel like I should lend it to somebody, or something, until the day comes that I do need it. Except that could lead to it ending up non-functional, too, of course, which would defeat the purpose of buying it in the first place…
ANYWAY VERY EXCITED TO HAVE A BACKUP KEYBOARD and also there may have been some crying when i found out about the gift fund because just omg. what wonderful people i know.
And the final Very Exciting Development is (not to bury the lede) I’ve just turned in my first COZY MYSTERY, which will be out in January 2020 and I am so looking forward to sharing with you all! Eeeeeee!
Tell me about YOUR summertime adventures?
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a reversion of rights
I got some of the best news of my writing career last week and I’m still OVER THE MOON about it.
Lo These Many Years Ago, I wrote a trilogy for Harlequin’s quick-to-fail Bombshell line, which were meant to be action-adventure romances, James Bond type stories where the heroine was the Bond character.
The line flopped badly for a lot of reasons, and the books I wrote never made any money, but I had a WONDERFUL time writing them and always wanted to do more. In fact, despite the books not doing well, despite it having been the better part of 12 years since they were published, despite everything, I’ve had readers ask regularly over the years if I ever *would* do more.
Well, there was a problem with doing more. It’s stupid and complicated but basically it goes like this:
I didn’t have the rights to publish the books myself. Those rights resided with Harlequin, because right-to-publish is basically what they’re buying when they give you advance money. And there’s always a clause in the contract that says under what circumstances those rights can revert to the writer, and what the publisher has to do in order to retain the rights. In these contracts, I wasn’t even supposed to ask for rights reversions for 5 years after publication, and the publisher had the right to reprint them within 18 months of me asking, if they so chose.
And those contracts were signed before the E-Book Revolution. So there was *no* language in them defining out-of-print in a world where e-books could be produced for almost nothing*…which meant that when the 5 year window *I* had to wait was up, they turned around and released e-books of the trilogy…which then sold basically No Copies At All, because they were under a different name, there was no demand for them, etc etc etc.
That happened two more times over the next EIGHT YEARS.
Now, there was no actual reason for the publisher to keep the rights. They were making no money off the books. They wouldn’t even re-release them under the CE Murphy name, where they almost certainly WOULD have made money. But every time I asked, they found another market to release them in as e-books, and thus re-started their 5 year window.
SO! The problem with writing more books in the series was that I could either:
1. write more books and NOT MENTION the first three, hoping that the lack of sales would someday allow me to get the rights back, or
2. write more books, talk up the first ones, try to get them selling, and therefore be certain I would *never* get the rights back, or
3. spend years gnashing my teeth and trying to get the rights back without talking about them very much, much less writing more.I chose option #3 and my friends and family will attest to the SHEER FRUSTRATION I have vented over the past decade about the whole situation.
Eventually there were digital amendments added to the contracts, which gave me some of the language I needed to argue my case, and I put in Yet Another Reversion Request.
AND THIS TIME I GOT THEM BACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mes amis, there was actual screaming involved. Like, fist-pumping foot-kicking incoherent bellows of joy. I kicked my feet so hard MY SOCK LITERALLY CAME OFF. I may have cried. I’m nearly crying right now, writing this blog post, in fact. I am SO HAPPY to have these books back and I am SO EXCITED to FINALLY GET TO DO WHAT I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO DO WITH THEM!!!!!!!!!!
I’m working on revising the original trilogy. Not LOTS of work, but some: updating the dated stuff (to my huge amusement, my heroine was carrying data around on a mini-CD, which was like the Height Of Awesome when I wrote the books *laughs and laughs and laughs*), trying to future-proof it a little, fixing some continuity errors, etc.
Once the revisions are done I’m going to run a Kickstarter for new cover art and book layouts. Kickstarter backers will get the revised books right away, and they’ll be re-released to the general public probably around the middle of next year.
Then over the next several years, I’m going to write the sequels on the side and run little Kickstarters for editing, cover art, layouts, etc. Backers will get the books more or less as they’re written (I’ll be doing the Kickstarters AFTER the books are written @.@) and eventually, when the entire series is finished, I’m going to do a year-long book-a-month release to put the whole story out almost in one big chunk.
I am SO EXCITED OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG I CANNOT WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIT I AM SO HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!! *KICKS SOCKS OFF AGAIN*!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
*E-books cannot be produced for almost nothing up front. All of the heavy costs–paying the author, editing, cover art, book design, copy edits–still have to be done, and that costs money. However, in this case, because books had already gone through all of that, producing e-books was cheap and quick.
