The Hot Mic - Mur Lafferty's Weekly Newsletter - Issue #7

Wishin, and hopin, and thinkin, and schedulin, and teachin, and preppin…

TODAY in Murland:

NaNoWriMo is coming. I always struggle with this. I want to offer special things to my very awesome Patreon supporters, but I want to do a bigger thing on the podcast too, which often ends up running me ragged and not getting MY NaNoWriMo done. So here’s what we’re gonna do:

Patreon supporters will receive several (I need to schedule this out) live write-in events on our Discord. This will be joining an audio or video (if you’re comfortable) room in Discord and just writing together.

All audience members will get a daily short podcast. I’m going to attempt recording early so that I can just schedule them. I will do some write-ins on Twitch, and I may do some live talks on Wisdom, a new app that I’m checking out. (It’s similar to Clubhouse, as I understand it. I see it as audio Twitch with no chat, but with the ability to invite folks to come on and talk or ask Qs.)

OH and all audience members will get access to our NaNo Discord!

Description- Sticker of the NO emote from Twitch. Orange haired moderator with glasses, holding a mallet that says NO.

I’ll be teaching a live class on the Speakeasy platform about NaNoWriMo prep this month!

I did one prep class last week, but I have one upcoming. If you’re a last minute kind of person, then on October 30 we will be looking at how to prep when you have almost no time left in the Last Minute Decision to Join NaNoWriMo! You can still do it!

About eight years ago, we had two dogs and they both checked out a neat thing in the grass. The neat thing was a copperhead snake, and they both got bit on the snout. That was a super fun emergency vet visit.

Now the young dog from that story is the old dog, and we have another young dog. By now it’s a tradition, a rite of passage if you will. Yes, our younger dog Rosa went head to head with a snake, and the snake won.

I don’t know what it is about dogs, but apparently a snakebite to the nose isn’t nearly as terrifying as it is to humans. I mean, yeah, her snout swelled up something awful and I took her straight to the vet, but after deciding she wasn’t dehydrated and reacting (too) poorly to the venom, we left with some painkillers. Rosa is fine now, even if she spent the weekend with a big schnozz.

Still. Watch out for snakes, yall. I would like this to be my last dog to get a snake in the face.

Description: photo of a black and white dog sleeping, face mashed into the floor.

I just finished Apples Never Fall by Lianne Moriarty, and it brings up a lot of questions I’ve been wondering about point of view. The book flips back and forth from present to past: a woman is missing and we see her four children talking about it, and then we move to several months ago when the woman was home with her husband, taking in a young woman who needed help.

The present-day story is told about half by her children and half by satellite people: the woman giving a pedicure, a waitress, a hairdresser, a young man in love with her daughter, her son’s ex-wife. This was a definite choice she made, only giving us what these folks overhear, and how they view the family dynamic, not showing us what each sibling is thinking.

She throws about two twists in, the last one being very satisfying. She weaves in little nuggets about the family’s day to day life, makes it feel like set dressing, but then later you realize almost everything has a point in solving this woman’s disappearance, if you’d just paid attention. There’s a throwaway comment about the dog that was brought back. Pretty tight plotting!

Now I’m reading The Supervillain’s Guide to Being a Fat Kid by my buddy Matt Wallace. It’s a middle grade book about a bullied fat kid writing to a supervillain in jail for advice. Matt has such a strong and sympathetic voice. I’m so happy he got a chance to write this, AND that I get to blurb it.

I’m really trying to figure out why I fizzle out on newsletters. I did this with blogging too. I can write fiction, no prob. I can talk about pretty much anything into a mic. But sitting down and writing my thoughts and I hit a huge wall. “Who the hell cares about this?”

Logically I know that if you followed, you care. But sometimes I’ll get halfway through something and then run out of steam. It does have to do with ADHD and my problems with prioritizing, but I think part of it is just confidence. I’m having it in some areas of my life, but not all. I’ll keep working on it.

You can support me on Patreon, Jemi, or just buy me a Ko-fi. That helps support my many creative projects.

If you can’t support via financial ways, I totally understand, it’s been a painful few years. You can still help by telling a friend about my work, or leaving a review of my podcasts or books, or forwarding this newsletter!

Just want to catch the podcasts? For I Should Be Writing, you can subscribe on iTune or take this RSS feed and plug it into your preferred player. Ditch Diggers is on hiatus but you can find back episodes here: iTunes, RSS, and Spreaker.

Or just search I Should Be Writing, Ditch Diggers, or Mur Lafferty on any podcast site.

Podcast credits: ISBW production by Summer Brooks, ISBW theme song by John Anealio, DD theme song by Devo Spice, art by Numbers Ninja, site design by Clockpunk Studio and hosted by Libsyn.

This newsletter is BY-NC-ND 3.5 Creative Commons licensed.

See you next week!