Mur Lafferty

By: David Perry

Friday June 20, 2008

Mur Lafferty has super powers. And she made them herself.
Mur Lafferty is a familiar voice in the podcasting community, best known for her work on I Should Be Writing, a show that features interviews with published authors and advice for novice writers. Over the past few years, Lafferty has used the platform and audience her podcasts gave her to create her very own crash course in fiction writing.

Lafferty’s bold experiment pays off this August with the release of her novel Playing for Keeps.

In addition to advice and interviews, I Should Be Writing includes a segment in which Lafferty updates her listeners on her writing progress since the last episode.  They say, however, that it’s better to show than tell, and in 2006 she altered the format of her popular Geek Fu Action Grip podcast, which had primarily featured her essays, to serialize a fiction project called Heaven.  Unlike most podcast novels, however, this one didn’t have an ending – at least, not when it started.  According to Lafferty, “people who write episodically for television don’t have the ending in mind and write all seven season [of a television series] before they release it, they build the story as they go.” 

Working from a similar premise, Lafferty began the story of two travelers, Kate and Daniel, who grow bored with the perfection of the traditional Christian heaven and are allowed to explore the afterlife.  From there, it was wide open.  “I did not know where it was going until episode four of Heaven. About a fourth of the way through Heaven, I knew I wasn’t done and there would be more,” Lafferty said.  Three sequels followed – Hell, Earth, and Wasteland. 

In a departure from the serialized format of most podcast novels, Lafferty released Wasteland all at once.  She explained, “I left Earth on a big cliffhanger for about seven months, and I felt bad about that, so it was kind of a reward for people’s patience.  I had just finished a novella, I’m working on a novel, and the next season isn’t really on my radar now.”  The fourth sequel to Heaven, called War, can’t get here soon enough for Lafferty’s growing audience.   “What I didn’t expect was that people would download Wasteland, listen to all of it, then say, ‘OK, where’s more?’  I’ve barely caught my breath.  It’s gratifying, it’s wonderful, but it’s not a pressure I expected to feel for a while.”

Lafferty’s next podcasting project was a novel that had been in the works for quite some time.  Listeners to I Should Be Writing knew about her agent hunt, and had heard the novel’s name dropped here and there, but it wasn’t until October 2007 that audiences were able to hear the story.  Playing for Keeps  is the story of Keepsie Branson, who lives in a city beset by super villains and protected by super heroes, neither of which are fond of her and her fellow Third Wavers – people with powers, but ones that can hardly be called super.  In fact, they seem downright useless.  Since the Third Wavers are forbidden by law to use their powers, they aren’t encouraged to learn how they work, but as crisis after crisis unfolds in the novel, they learn to stretch themselves in new and amazing ways, and discover hidden layers to their abilities. 

Along with the serialized audio, Lafferty released text versions of the chapters of Playing for Keeps as it went along, a decision that allowed her to reach an unexpected audience. “I was interviewed on the Disability 411 Podcast  partly because I had made my podcast available to deaf consumers of content.  By putting out the text files, I suddenly could reach the deaf, which I couldn’t before.”  Some authors might worry about compromising future sales by giving away not only the audio but the text as well, but Lafferty is not.  “People are realizing that even if content is available for free,” she said, “that doesn’t mean people won’t buy it.  I’m not so afraid of giving my stuff away anymore because it’s building me an audience, and not a lot of authors go to publishers with a built-in audience.”

That audience will get to follow Playing for Keeps to bookshelves soon, as Swarm Press, an imprint of Permuted Press, will be releasing Mur Lafferty’s first novel in August 2008.  And while the dream of being a published novelist is one that she has chased for years, Lafferty says she will not forget the path she took.  “I don’t see myself ever leaving podcasting,” she said.  “While it’s not an end in itself, it’s not a destination, I want to keep podcasting my fiction.”

You can learn more about Mur Lafferty’s fiction and podcasts at her website.