People Who Inspire Me: Mur Lafferty

Mur with me at Balticon in 2007

Time for another one of those bits of history. When we first started Variant Frequencies in January of 2006, I didn’t know all that many podcasts. Most of the podcasts that I listened to at the time were tech podcasts. On various podcast directories I kept seeing references to Geek Fu Action Grip and I Should be Writing. Both were podcasts by this house wife, who was trying to get published, named Mur Lafferty.

At first, I didn’t listen to her podcasts, because, frankly, I’m not a writer. Yeah, I know if you are one of the few people that have read this blog, that is obvious. Then I got curious. I checked out Mur’s podcasts. There was something very unique about listening to Mur. She has a slight southern drawl, and her way of talking in the podcast makes you feel like she is talking directly to you, not the whole world.

At Dragon*Con 2006 I finally got to meet Mur. This small unassuming person was a delight to meet. It is interesting, there is something about Mur that just makes people like to hang around her. She is shy, but you can tell, that quick mind is always thinking.

Even the bio from her web site is fun to read:

Mur Lafferty was born under utterly mundane astrological signs. She prefers this to mean that she was definitely the most exciting thing going on in the universe at that time.She started her first book at age 13. It involved her best friends—all 12 of them—and unicorns. Thankfully it was never completed.

Mur graduated with a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went into the exciting and promising career of a barista. It was 1996 and the Internet was just about to explode when she got a job as an administrative assistant to a technology guru.

One year and one layoff later, she was the webmaster at a computer games company. Four years and another layoff later, she began her career as a freelance writer.

Mur has written for over 15 role-playing games, one textbook, one book on podcasting, and several magazines. Her column, Geek Fu Action Grip, appears regularly in the magazine Knights of the Dinner Table, and her column Dice Totin’ Mama appeared regularly in Games Quarterly Magazine until the magazine shut down in 2007. She has published fiction with the podcast Escape Pod, Scrybe Press, Murky Depths and Hub Magazine.

In 2004 Mur picked up a microphone and decided to try podcasting, a hobby that has eaten more time than she’d like to admit. Her first podcast, Geek Fu Action Grip, contains ramblings about the geek lifestyle as well as original essays. Put on indefinite hiatus in June 2007, it was reborn with her friend Jason Adams as co-host later that summer as The Geek Fu Morning Show (still at the same URL). She has been serializing an original story on her podcast, “Heaven.” She started a writing podcast in August, 2005, targeted at people who strive to be writers but are held back by doubts and self-constructed barriers. I Should Be Writing has proved to be quite popular as well and won a Parsec award in 2007 and a Podcast Peer Award in 2008. In fall 2007 she podcasted her first full length novel: Playing for Keeps, which won the 2008 Parsec Award for Best Novel.

In 2007 she began working full time again at Lulu Enterprises, first at Lulu.com as a community administrator, then in June moved to Lulu.TV to work on creating content to build a community on the site. For six months she did blogging, podcasting and vidcasting for Lulu.TV, earning the job title Dark Mistress of Open Media, until the company shut down in December 2007.

In 2008 her novel Playing For Keeps was published by Swarm Press. It reached #1 in Science Fiction on Amazon.com.

So, how has Mur inspired me? She has shown me how even someone who is naturally shy can achieve big goals. She has produced so many great things in the time since I’ve known her. Her followers just keep growing in numbers. Mur is not done rocking the world. You are going to hear and read more by Mur Lafferty in the future. And it will be “mighty.”

A short chat with Mur

Rick: You have been podcasting longer than most. When did your first podcast start, and why did you start it?

Mur: December ’04 – and firstly I wanted just to do it. I thought it sounded awesome, I enjoyed the couple of podcasts I was listening to, and thought it seemed like a fun way to connect with people. I then realized it was a good way to release my essays I was writing and not getting published. No one else was doing it, so why not?

Rick: How has podcasting helped or hurt your writing?

Mur: I’ve been more prolific in the past 5 years than ever before, both in fiction and nonfiction. Having an audience encourages me to write more, and it was my podcast that allowed me to get my first regular column job in Knights of the Dinner Table, which also led on to other work. Podcasting my novel Playing for Keeps was what put it on the radar of Jacob, my publisher at Swarm, who published it a couple of months after the podcast ended.

All of the agent and editor blogs I read now are talking about a platform writer’s need. Essentially they want you to be “someone” on the web, they want you to have an audience before you publish anything. They want to know you can leverage this new “Internet thing” to capture readers. Podcasting has done just that for me. Lastly, my podcasting has brought me in contact with many people I know and admire in publishing, which is networking gold (not to mention finding some excellent and supportive friends in the world of science fiction).

The downside is of course that recording and editing takes an awful lot of time, time that could be spent writing. It’s a careful balance to strike.

Rick: Is there one thing about Mur Lafferty that you can tell us that has not been posted out there on the web already?

Mur: My middle name, which is Larkin, used to be Taylor. I had it changed in… 83? 84?

Also, I love food and I love good food, but I “slum it” in two ways: I prefer milk chocolate over dark, and the only mexican food I like is Taco Bell.

Rick: Who inspires Mur Lafferty?

Mur: Neil Gaiman for his storytelling, Connie Willis for her character creation, China Mieville for his fucked up imagination, Barbara Blackburn for her strength and humor, JC Hutchins for his innovation, Matt Wallace for his dedication to my eventual defeat – oh, and he’s a good storyteller, too, and my husband, Jim, for being a solid, logical person when I’m ready to panic. Oh- and my daughter, the Pink Tornado, for her fearlessness.

Mur Lafferty
Blog: http://www.murverse.com
Podcast: http://www.ishouldbewriting.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mightymur
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mightymur
Superhero Novel: http://www.playingforkeepsnovel.com
Afterlife Novella Series: http://www.heavennovel.com
Zombie Audio Drama: http://www.zombinc.net