Mur Lafferty

Writer, podcast producer, gamer, geek, and even martial artist, Mur Lafferty is a multi-faceted talent and a force to be reckoned with. Hailing from Durham, NC where she lives with her husband and eight year old daughter, Mur churns out fiction and editorials at a breakneck pace. Her fiction works include the Parsec winning Playing For Keeps, Nanovor: Hacked!, Marco and the Red Granny, and my personal favorite The Afterlife Series. 

Mur's podcasts are many, Escape Pod magazine and Angry Robot Books Podcast premiere among them, the seminal author is probably best known as host of  the long running podcast I Should Be Writing " the podcast for wanna-be fiction writers by a wanna-be fiction writer." The award winning podcast follows Mur's trials and tribulations in the publishing world, offers advice to new and beginning authors, and boasts a series of interviews with some of the top names in scifi publishing. 

Mur is also an avid gamer and has written for several RPG's. She currently writes a column for the gaming magazine Knights of the Dinner Table, and in the past she has been a contributor to Games Quarterly, Suicide Girls, and Anime Insider.

Mur also studies Kung fu. No, I'm not making that up. Kung fu. Northern Shaolin five animals style to be exact. And she plays World of Warcraft. And Dragon Age. And Button Men.

Now, when you can move across this rice paper, and leave no trace...

6 Questions with Mur Lafferty:


1. What are your favorite and your least favorite words?

  "Favorite words: Pie, defenestrate, limerent. Least favorite words: It's misuse of words that bug me, and anyone using "nom" as anything but onomatopoeia. (for example, as a noun, "It's time for noms" or verb "I'm going to nom that" or adjective "It was nommy." I just cringed writing that.)"


2. What turns you on creatively, spiritually, emotionally?

  "Reading excellent writing makes me want to write, it moves me in ways that I can't describe. Any story well told can inspire me in a number of ways."


3. What is the closest you have ever come to giving up writing?

  "When I gave up on writing. :) I quit in college because I figured I'd never get better than I was - and others were better than me - and then spent a decade thinking to myself "I want to be a writer" without actually doing anything about it."


4. What is your favorite profanity?

  "Cunt-blossom."


5. What is the strangest thing you have ever done while writing?

  "Uh, nothing leaps to mind. I think one time I laid out Reese's Pieces on my desk and ate one for every hundred words I wrote, to push me along."


6. If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God (or Allah or Yahweh or Odin. Generally the Supreme Being of your choice.) say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

  "Probably what Douglas Adams said the last known message from God: "We apologize for the inconvenience."

Reece's Pieces. I rather love Reese's Pieces.

Thank you to Mur for taking the time to share this. And thanks to you for taking the time to read! If you'd like to know more about Mur Lafferty simply go to the Murverse.

On the menu for tomorrow is comic book master Ben Templesmith! See you then!