{"id":37611,"date":"2025-08-22T09:49:20","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T13:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/?p=37611"},"modified":"2025-08-22T09:49:20","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T13:49:20","slug":"mur-lafferty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2025\/08\/22\/mur-lafferty\/","title":{"rendered":"Slurp ramen with Mur Lafferty on Episode 261 of Eating the Fantastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the real world, I’m still haven’t fully recovered from last weekend’s Seattle Worldcon<\/a>, but in Eating the Fantastic’s timeline, we’ve just arrived at the beginning of last month’s Readercon<\/a>. And my first guest from the first night of that con is the multi-talented Mur Lafferty<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mur Lafferty is an author and podcaster from Durham, NC. She\u2019s been a podcaster since December 2004, working on such shows as I Should Be Writing, Ditch Diggers, Pseudopod,\u00a0Mothership Zeta, Escape Pod, and others. Ditch Diggers\u00a0(with Matt Wallace) won the\u00a02018\u00a0Hugo Award for Best Fancast. Her longest running show is\u00a0I Should Be Writing, which she\u2019s been hosting and producing since 2005. All of those activities have also resulted in her winning the\u00a0Podcast Peer Award,\u00a0three\u00a0Parsec Awards, and being\u00a0inducted in 2015 into the\u00a0Podcaster Hall of Fame.\u2028\u2028<\/p>\n

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And the awards have come for her writing as well, starting with her being the 2013 winner of the\u00a0Astounding Award \u2014 then called the John W. Campbell \u00a0Award \u2014 for Best New Writer. She was the 2014 and 2015 winner of the Manly Wade Wellman Award for her novels The Shambling Guide to New York City<\/em> and Ghost Train to New Orleans<\/em>. Her 2018\u00a0clone murder mystery in space,\u00a0Six Wakes<\/em>, was a nominee for a Hugo, Nebula, Philip K. Dick, and Manly Wade Wellman Award in their novel categories.<\/p>\n

\u2028\u2028Infinite Archive<\/em>, the third book in The Midsolar Murders series \u2014 following\u00a0Station Eternity<\/em> (2022) and Chaos Terminal<\/em> (2023) \u2014 was released in July. She\u2019s also written\u00a0Solo: A Star Wars Story<\/em>, the writing workshop in a can I Should Be Writing<\/em>, and so much more.<\/p>\n

We discussed the problems which come from being a discovery writer who sells a novel via a pitch, how to play fair with readers of science fiction mysteries, the reason everyone’s worried she wants to kill her agent, one major difference between Hollywood and publishing, why the character she often thinks will end up being the murderer doesn’t end up being the murderer, how to deftly recap previous books in a series, whether going too weird might alienate a writer’s audience, what keeps her continuing to podcast after 21 years, the importance of shrugging off rejections, and much more.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how you can join us for ramen at Gyu-Kaku Japanese BBQ<\/a> — <\/p>\n

1) Subscribe at Apple Podcasts<\/a> — or wherever<\/a> you choose to consume your podcasts — where I hope you’ll be tempted to sample a few of the 260 previous episodes.<\/p>\n

2) Listen via the RSS feed of http:\/\/eatingthefantastic.libsyn.com\/rss<\/a> on the device of your choice.<\/p>\n

3) Or simply use the embed below.<\/p>\n