About
Though C.E. Murphy was born and raised in Alaska, she has never watched a single episode of Northern Exposure or helped a film crew simulate terrorist attacks on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. She has, though, been forced to convince people that she neither lives in an igloo, rides a polar bear, nor has a penguin for a pet. Those who are surprised by the last detail should consider perusing a National Geographic after they have finished reading her book.
C.E., who goes by Catie in real life, has held the usual grab-bag of jobs usually seen in an authorial biography, including public library volunteer (at ages 9 and 10; it’s clear she was doomed to a career involving books), cannery worker, and web designer, the last of which her employers saw fit to dismiss her from just as she sold a new series of books and promised to turn them in every four months. She is grateful for the karmic justice done there.
According to one source, Catie began her writing career when she ran away from home at age five to write copy for the circus that’d come to town. You would think she’d remember this, but her own earliest memory regarding writing is from age six, when she submitted three poems to a school publication. The teacher producing the magazine selected (inevitably) the one she thought was by far the worst, but also told her–a six year old kid–to keep writing.
It’s likely she would have anyway, but she took the advice to heart, and a good thing, too: far more people after that (some of them famous authors!) told her to do anything other than write, if she possibly could.
She firmly believes those people are nuts. If she believed otherwise, she might have felt obliged to get a more useful university degree than one in English and History. As it happens, that’s an excellent degree for people who intend to live their lives in other worlds. In fact, one might go so far as to say that anybody who thinks she’ll get a paying job in one of those fields is probably living in another world already.
Catie’s family is made up of the sorts of people who, upon being asked what a person should put in her bio, will all independently say things like, “You could write about the time you ran into the burning building to save the child,” with wholesale disregard to the fact that no one in the family has ever run into a burning building to save a child.
Even her husband the chef has succumbed to this sort of blithe fictional attitude toward the world, and has been known to fling his apron over his shoulders, cape-like, and dash off to work as if he were a superhero.
Speaking of superheroes, Catie’s preference is to wear her hair like a certain skunk-striped X-Man’s. She is somewhat impatient for her hair to go white so she can accomplish this without having to bleach her bangs regularly, because that’s bad for them. When they’re not bleached, though, she tends to think her coloring is rather Snow-Whiteish, except for the freckles.
She also writes as action-adventure romance author Cate Dermody.
Her hobbies include swimming, walking, travelling, drawing, and moose-wrestling.
About the names:
C.E. Murphy is my real name. Not the one I go by in day to day life (that’s Catie), but they’re my real initials. A friend of mine suggested I use the initials when I was dithering (well before publication) about what name I would write under (”Catie” never sounded grown-up enough to me to put on a book cover), and I decided he’d hit on something. So C.E. Murphy is the first name I’ve published under, and it’ll be the one that stays in the sf/f genre.
Cate Dermody was my grandmother’s maiden name. I wanted to use a different name for publishing my Bombshells, which are action-adventure romance, for a variety of reasons: partly because I was lucky enough to sell to different lines early in my career, so there was no kind of financial hit in writing under different names; partly because I’d seen other authors who’d been pigeonholed into placements in bookstores because their names were associated specifically with one genre or another, and partly to honor a woman I never met: from what I can gather, my grandmother was just the kind of kick-ass, name-taking woman that the Bombshell line is meant to be about.
You’ll have gathered by now that I’m not all that concerned with keeping my various identities secret (I’m Batman!). The final reason I’ve decided to write under more than one name is that the idea of a reader being able to look at a Cate Dermody title and think, “Ah, that’ll be action-adventure romance,” or a C.E. Murphy title and think, “Fantasy novel!” appeals to me. I think the different names allows a kind of branding that can be useful for readers, and I like that. :)
-Catie