Murphy skillfully transports spaghetti western tropes to a lawless space station in this action-packed debut. Publisher’s Weekly The ebook and audiobook versions of my debut science fiction novel Red Noise are out and available to download and start reading or listening right now! Red Noise is the story of an asteroid miner who just wants […]
Good news, everyone! My short story, “The Body and the Bomb” has been published over at Crossed Genres for this month’s issue on Mystery, linked from the front page. If you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you enjoy it! (And don’t just read mine! There’s some great stuff there)
Just for fun, I thought I’d post a scene that I’ve been working on. This is from early in the novel, so while it contains important plot points, it’s not much of a spoiler. It takes place aboard the Colonial Union Ship William S. Halliday, which is currently docked with the Deep Space Telescopic Array […]
Looking back on my last few weeks of blog posts, one could be forgiven for thinking that I’ve spent more time writing about writing than actually writing! So, maybe a little update is in order. I have three primary projects right now, and have made some progress on all of them. First, I’m rewriting a […]
A month and a half after VP, and my submission piece is about ready to go. I got a lot of good feedback and advice on this one, and (after giving it a month to sink in so the text would be fresh to me) I have finally gone through it all, listened again to […]
The post title is a direct quote of a friend’s 3-year old, who asked her mother the above question when told she was having chicken for dinner. (I like this kid) But it turns out to not just be funny but I think good advice for me when I’m writing science fiction. See, one of […]
No, I don’t want bad SF. I want good SF — but about economics, the “dismal science.” As part of my side hobby of world-building, I’ve been collecting SF-oriented papers by economics like Paul Krugman and Robin Hanson. Hanson’s page (linked left) is a great starting point. There are some fantastic ideas there. But what […]
I haven’t actually forgotten this site! Things have just been a little busy around here (who knew it would be that hard to put in an extra outlet for the A/C, even with someone else doing most of the work?) but I’ve been working hard on planning this novel. (Discussion of plot follows, but no […]
I finished up the most recent short story yesterday afternoon. I trimmed a few scenes, but made up for it by adding a whole other one (I’ll be curious if anyone coming back to this post can figure out which scene was added). It’s a good piece, one of the better mysteries-per-se that I’ve written. […]
I finished up a rough draft of my work-in-progress. I wound up wrapping it up at around 6300 words, though I may expand it a bit on the next draft. I added a scene looking for a particular piece of evidence, and discovered that the character addition from earlier shortened that scene considerably. Now comes […]
John P. Murphy 