Picoreview: Too long by at least half an hour, but to my astonishment, Kristen Stewart was quite good in it. She emoted! And Chris Hemsworth is dreamy. And Charlize Theron is…well, you know. Charlize Theron. Raar.

Some of the effects were very pretty, some of the uses of magic were nicely done to explain a couple of things that otherwise made me go o.O, but man, I really wish they’d cut half an hour from it. My advice: don’t see it when you’re already sleepy.

(x-posted from the essential kit)

Happy BIRTHDAY to US!
Happy BIRTHDAY to US!
Happy BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRTHDAY dear Esmerel, Silkblade, Fahri, Novella, Morgan Freeman, Marilyn Monroe, Superman and MEEEEEEEEEE!
Happy BIRTHDAY TO US!

For my birthday, I offer you the opportunity to go buy THE OLD RACES: ORIGINS short story collection! (I know, I’m so thoughtful. :))

at Amazon
at Barnes & Noble
At Smashwords
at cemurphy.net (PDF only)

Why PDF only at cemurphy.net, you ask? After all, don’t I get basically ALL the money if you buy it direct? Well, yes, I do. But if you buy it through any of the other retailers, it raises the collection’s profile, making it more likely for *other* people to find it and buy it. I think probably in the long run that’s worth more than the extra dollar I get through a direct sale.

So: if you have an e-reader and really want to give me a birthday present, go ahead and go buy the collection. Write a review of it and give it four or five stars if you like it.

ORSSP patrons: this is a GREAT TIME for you to go write a review and star it heavily! You’ve already read all these stories! Go make it look good! *big hopeful eyes* :)

(Seriously, though, Amazon and B&N need to adjust their system so that a user can upload the book, go through the whole “publishing” process, and set a time/date for it to actually go live for sale, because all week I’ve been like YAY FRIDAY and instead of books going up on time I get “Your book will be available for sale in 12-72 hours.” Argh.)

(x-posted from the essential kit)

I am considering dying my hair. I know, I know, the excitement! The trouble is to do it properly today would take two go-rounds, and I don’t know if I feel like being that thorough. :)

Things that must get done today:
- email the writers’ centre
- rattle with impatience for Amazon & BN to get ORIGINS online
- notify BYD ARC winners that they won:

The winners of the BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER ARC give-away are as follows:

Mylia Scribe-Jones
Elise Julene Tuck
B. Ross
mela_lyn/Mela_Lyn

If all of you will contact me with your snail mail addresses, I will get those books in the mail to you. Remember, your part of this bargain is to write a review of the collected stories and either post it on your own blog and give me the link to it, or provide me with a review to post here! :)

- email padraig
- do dishes
- take out the upstairs rubbish
- make a massage appt
- attempt to make a hair appt
- whatever else comes to mind that seems important :)
- like the BYD page proofs

(x-posted from the essential kit)

Having now re-read the book and re-watched both the BBC miniseries and the Kiera Knightley film, I must say…

…both productions really did a stupendous job of adapting the novel. Differently, obviously, because the BBC had 6 hours and the film 2, but really, I think they both did really, really well. Huge amounts of side-story were cut for the film, but the basic story came through intact, and I liked Knightley’s Elizabeth as much as I liked Ehle’s. And I’m *awfully* fond of Matthew Macfayden (if Panzer & Davis were suddenly to pick up the Highlander spinoff story that shadowhwk/Sarah and I wrote, I would cast Macfayden as Methos, as Peter Wingfield, much as I adore him, has really gotten too old to play the Immortal he was introduced as nearly 20 years ago), but I fear I may like Colin Firth’s Darcy better. It’s a hard call, though, because Firth has six hours to fall hopelessly in love and Macfayden has only two, so it’s not entirely fair to compare them. Macfayden’s Darcy is also a little less…polished, which is pretty appealing. Anyway, the point is, having a P&P-fest was a *lot* of fun. And it does make me kinda want to write a bit more on MAGIC & MANNERS. ;)

(x-posted from the essential kit)

One of several billion work projects down: I have written & turned in the proposal for the final Walker Papers book. Working on the synopsis gave me some heart palpitations as I considered who I was going to have to kill. #gulp

Now to pare down the very long list of things to do and choose one that seems Most Important Now, to accomplish over the next 3 days.

(x-posted from the essential kit)

Apparently my life is sufficently boring that I can’t think of anything to blog about. I have to draw winners for the BYD contest, but since I already blew my first deadline on that and there’s a long weekend coming up in America, I think I’ll wait until next week.

In the meantime, random things:

I believe this is very much the sort of thing the phrase “Oh, snap!” was invented for: Back to back questions presented to Robert Downey Jr and Scarlett Johansson.

*laughs* My wallet died, so I found an old one I knew I had lying around. It has Sarah/shadowhwk‘s work phone # ca 2001, a 1999 bank receipt, a photo of me & Ted from 1997, a 1994 pic of my sister, & the crowning glory, the thing that made me actually laugh out loud because it was so unexpected, an early 90s photo of the unrequited high school Love Of My Life. *laughs & laughs*

Speaking of pictures, this is probably the most awesome one I’ve seen this week. MIB-Avengers mashup FTW!

I believe I have got all the ducks in a row for launching ORIGINS next Friday. Having re-read the stories, I feel that the ORSSP patrons got their money’s worth, and that so too will the people buying it as an e-book. *waits impatiently for Friday next*

(x-posted from the essential kit)

THE OLD RACES: ORIGINS

Before the Negotiator, there were the long-held covenants of the Old Races: Do not mate with humans. Never tell them of our existence. And never kill one of our own. For time immemorial, these laws were adhered to…

…except when they were not. Delve into the secret history of the Old Races and discover the truth behind Saint George and the dragons, the origins of the mysterious selkie race, and the djinn betrayals that shape the world of the Negotiator Trilogy.

These stories and more are revealed in this collection of five Old Races short stories, coming June 1 to an e-store near you!

(This collection contains 5 of the 6 Old Races Short Story Project stories, so if you were a patron of that crowdfunded project, you don’t need to buy this one. I mean, IF YOU WANT TO it’s fine with me, y’know? But there’s no new content. Except the cover. :))

Cover art by Tara O’Shea. My head is just going to explode of excitement when I get to see ALL THREE short story collection covers together. :)

(x-posted from the essential kit)

One of my favorite authors, Ann (AC) Crispin, has announced she’s been fighting cancer. The chemo appears to be working, which is fantastic, but the chemo has been going on for months already and is expected to continue through the summer. This means her Starbridge book sales are basically her only income this year.

I’ve mentioned STARBRIDGE before on this blog. I vividly remember reading the first book, mostly because I’d seen it several times in the bookstore and never bought it, because I didn’t like the cover very much (it was a Boris Vallejo, so it’s probably some kind of sin for me to say I didn’t like it, but meh, never really got behind the Vallejo work). Anyway, but Dad checked it out from the library for me and since I now *had* it, of course I read it.

And I loved it. I adored it. It’s about a young woman who is part of humanity’s first contact with new alien species, and who eventually helps to establish the Starbridge Academy, where young people of all species can go to school and learn to work together and be ambassadors to new cultures and worlds. For a 15 year old SF/F reader it was complete wish fulfillment stuff. I *loved* it. Love love love love loved it.

I don’t remember if other books were out by then or if they came out and I snatched them up with gleeful abandon every time they did, but she wrote more and more books in the series, all with collaborators. I liked them all. I loved some of them, loved them as much as the original StarBridge novel: most particularly SILENT DANCES and SILENT SONGS, with Kathleen O’Malley. The SILENT Starbridge books are about a deaf Native American girl whose ambassadorship is to a world where the natives are avians, and honestly, those two books are on my Desert Island list.

I already had great plans to be a writer by that age, of course, and I sent Ann a letter asking for advice. She wrote back a 4 page yellow pad letter with red pen and big fat loopy handwriting, full of stories and enthusiasm and advice and encouragement. I’ve still got it somewhere, but even if I didn’t I would never, ever forget that she took the time to do that for a teenage kid. Fifteen or seventeen years or so later I had URBAN SHAMAN published, and although I knew there was no chance at all she would remember having written to me way back when, I sent her a copy, and a letter explaining how she’d been so kind and generous to me so many years earlier, and thanking her for it all.

The incredibly bizarre and wonderful thing is that we’ve been in communication on and off ever since. Last year, when she announced that the Starbridge books were going to be e-released, I warned her that if they did well enough I was going to pitch a Starbridge idea to her myself, which prospect she met with enthusiasm (she also mentioned there was a third SILENT book planned, and wisted a moment over some of the unexplored potential of the Starbridge universe, so I don’t think she was *just* being polite :)).

So on a completely selfish note, of course, I’d like the books to do well enough to justify getting to write one with her someday, but on a much more important note, Ann is a terrific woman, a wonderful writer, and this is basically the best possible time for you to buy the books. The first 5 have been released and Ann is working on the last two between her chemo and PT and everything, so…yeah.

*goes to buy some books*

(x-posted from the essential kit)

I’ve certainly been following the Mandy De Geit Saga, though I don’t know if you have been. Short version: a sorry excuse for a publishing house rewrote the story they’d accepted for an anthology, without telling her about it, then got snitty when she objected. But that doesn’t really do the horrors of it justice, so you should go read the link.

It caused a friend to email me and ask what I thought of the substantive part of the issue, which I take to mean “what do I think of editors rewriting stories,” and my answer got so long I thought I’d make a blog post of it:

I’ve never met anybody published with a major publisher who’s claimed this has happened to them. Editors don’t do that.

Editors say “I think there’s a problem with this book in that it falls too perfectly between romance and fantasy. Would you consider removing the 30,000 words that are the hero’s point of view and revising it to keep the same story only without his POV?”, causing you to cut 30K and rewrite the other 70K and substantially improving the book by doing so. They will also say “If you don’t want to do that, I will give this book to our romance department and see if they think it would work for them instead of in our fantasy line.” (TRUTHSEEKER)

Or they say “I think X Y and Z need some looking at,” causing you to finally grimly accept that the book actually has no plot (which, frankly, you suspected all along and were hoping your editor would not notice) and that XY&Z can be fixed by ripping out 2/3rds of the book and rewriting what’s left (HOUSE OF CARDS).

Or they say “This book is wonderful except I don’t understand why the main character is doing anything. Can you add motivation?” (URBAN SHAMAN. THE CARDINAL RULE. THUNDERBIRD FALLS. HEART OF STONE. I’d started to get the hang of it by COYOTE DREAMS.)

Or they say “I’m concerned that the cruelty of this scene will lose readers for good. Can you make it more clear that it’s the magic pushing this?” (THE QUEEN’S BASTARD, and if you’ve read it you can guess the scene, and it’s the one change I’ve ever made in a book that I understood and agreed with the editor’s reasons, but don’t necessarily feel it was the right thing to do for the story.)

Once in a great, great while, they say “You know what, I think this one hits all the notes we need, no revision letter this time!”, causing you to be paranoid and suspect that really in fact time got too short and the book probably desperately does need revising but it’s going to print anyway and you’ve never been quite brave enough to reread it to see whether it stands up (THE FIREBIRD DECEPTION).

A legitimate editor/publisher would not do what was done to Mandy DeGeit. Vast numbers of people who are unpublished seem to have a hardcore belief that this kind of thing happens all the time. That sex scenes are added to books, that storylines are revised, rewritten, removed, all without the author’s permission or notification.

This does not happen. Not in real publishing. Editors don’t have time to rewrite your book for you. Indeed, if editors wanted to write your book for you, they would be writers, not editors.

The most ungodly rewrites I’ve gotten from editors have been from copyeditors who apparently dislike my style and feel they should improve it. And believe me, if I ever have that happen again I will send the manuscript back as it was originally, with a big fat note on it that says “Don’t waste my time.” (I was too new to the game to do that when it did happen, which is a goddamned shame, because there are paragraphs in HANDS OF FLAME which are nearly incomprehensible because not everything I fixed back got transferred smoothly to the print files. And yes, I’m still pissed.) That is not a CE’s job any more than it’s an editor’s job, and although almost everyone in traditional, legitimate publishing does seem to have a CE horror story, nobody I’ve ever talked to has said an editor rewrote their book.

As for Ms. DeGreit, I hope she’s a terrific writer and is able to parlay this entire fiasco into a relevant and useful career launch.

(x-posted from the essential kit)

I have just gotten four* advanced reader’s copies for BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER to give away. They’re softcover, uncorrected proofs, and actually if the book itself looked like this I would be quite delighted, but it’s going to be even more gorgeous and splendid, so don’t forget to pre-order your copy. :)

But at $40, it’s also going to be expensive. So here’s how this give-away is going to go:

Everybody reading this post, at whatever site you’re coming from (Facebook, Goodreads, Livejournal, mizkit.com, cemurphy.net, G+, Twitter) can put in their name once for a random draw. I’ll give two of the books away that way.

The other two I want to give to people who can genuinely not afford the $40 price tag on the book. Obviously this is on the honor system, but generally I find my readers to be extremely good people, so I’m going to trust you on this. Leave a comment or, if you prefer to keep the request private, send an email to cemurphyauthor@gmail.com, saying you’d like to be in for the Budget Giveaway. You don’t have to offer up details; it’s not going to be a Saddest Story Wins scenario, but rather another random draw from the second pool of names.

All I request–and this is of all four winners–is that you write a review of the book and either post it on your own blog & give me a link for it, or provide it to me so I can post it for you. I’ve never had a short story collection before, so I’d like to see it get some traction, and this is how you guys can help give it some.

So. That’s how this works. The contest ends sometime Monday, May 21st, so comment before then. Ready set go!

*technically five but I’M KEEPING ONE because i almost never ever ever get ARCs! also so i can do proofs on it. :)

(x-posted from the essential kit)