Author: Eamonn Murphy - Writer

Eamonn Murphy has published over seventy stories in small press magazines and collected them into small, cheap volumes for posterity. They are available at all good eBook retailers and libraries. In his spare time, he writes reviews for sfcrowsnest. Retired now after years of hard labour (building sites and call centres), he lives near Bristol, England, with a nice lady, a nasty Jack Russell, an untrainable loony Labrador and some ducks. He has a BA (Hons) from the Open University but very little common sense. Find out more at eamonnmurphywriter.com.

Lord Ringo would be better

In a quaint British custom – The New Year’s Honours List – Her Majesty has made Ringo a knight of the realm for services to drumming.

Lord Ringo would have been better. It sounds like a character in a fantasy film. ‘The dragons are at the gates, Lord Ringo!’

‘For services to’ is a euphemism for doing your job and getting rich and famous. Generous donors to the Tory party (or New Labour; or Old Labour for that matter) get honoured for ‘services to business’. Since the Beatles got the MBE there’s been a crowd-pleasing tendency to give meaningless titles to entertainers as well for ‘services to dance’ and so forth.

Workers at Tesco are not made Dames for doing their job – or ‘services to checkouts.’ I am still waiting to be made Lord Murphy for services to call handling.

New book: Choices and Other Stories

Woo-hoo! as that big yellow man says on the telly. My latest book Choices and Other Stories has finally passed through all the digital hurdles and is available at all good ebook stores for just $0.99 Here’s the cover of the book along with a description.

Choices and Other Stories by Eamonn Murphy is a mixed bag of fantasy tales, many with a touch of romance. Inside you will find a builder who meets his match when he picks up a witch in a bar; A girl haunted in the Mountains of Mourne; another who discovers that the villagers in her new home have a strange secret. There’s also a wayward sexist who gets his comeuppance, a duck that won’t lay eggs, brick eating worms from outer space and an 18th-century love triangle. This is a light-hearted collection for the gentle reader.

I was tempted to advertise it as romance but while there’s an element of boy meets girl in most of the stories it’s not enough to satisfy a regular reader of romance, I feel. All the stories have been paid for previously by editors and featured in some magazine or website so they achieve that minimal standard. The cover is by my favourite cover maestro Laura Givens.

Anyway, I hope someone likes it.

 

 

 

Free books

If Santa brought you an e-reader for Christmas then you might like to try it out with free books. These multi-author giveaways are currently running on Instafreebie but only until the 31st December.

Gothic Horror: Madness and the Macabre.

Best of British Science-Fiction

Horror and Thriller