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.

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 picked up to be published in August by Swarm Press.

Mur likes sci fi, board gaming, growing and killing orchids, running, and gardening.

Mur Lafferty FAQ

Mur gets a handful of questions via email somewhat frequently, so she decided to make a FAQ to help people out.

Q) How did you get into RPG writing?
A) My answer may not please you, because it was clearly a case of “right place, right time.” I was working at Red Storm Entertainment around the time they hired Richard Dansky from his stint at White Wolf. We became friends and when he read some of my stuff, he said he’d recommend me to a friend of his at WW, and that’s where it started. I will say that a friendly nudge can help you in the beginning, but hitting deadlines and writing what your developer wants is the thing that keeps you getting work after the first test run.

Q) What kind of equipment do you use for podcasting (home)?
A) I have a Studio Projects B-1 microphone, a Eurorack UB802 mixer, and I record on a Macintosh PowerBook G4 using Audacity. I highly recommend zzounds.com for audio needs.

Q) What kind of equipment do you use for podcasting (mobile)?
A) I have an iRiver 840, 256 MB recorder with a Sony ECMMS907 digital recording mic plugged in. The current iRivers do NOT have the microphone jack, and can only record using the internal mic. I highly recommend getting an older iRiver refurbished off of eBay. More questions answered as needed.