1. What the heck is this obsession with Rogue?
Good grief. Good question. Um. It’s the hair, I think. Or I think that’s where it started. I just really, really liked Rogue’s hair. And plus she’s got this whole *host* of incredibly cool powers, even if her own power is awful because she can’t control it. She can *fly*. I’d do just about anything to be able to fly.
2. Why a livejournal AND the Kit blog AND the C. E. Murphy blog AND…?
Oh, gawd.
The CE Murphy blog is … a constant source of irritation to me. :) It was partly so that the site woudn’t be 100% static while I was waiting for, you know, ANYTHING, to happen with my writing career. I wanted a professional site that’s separate from my personal site because, eh, different look and feel, you know? Easier to navigate, specifically for finding out what’s up with me-the-writer. I keep wibbling about going back to putting a link to the mizkit.com journal on the cemurphy site and calling it good. ‘course, then I don’t know exactly what I’d do with the front page of cemurphy, since information about the ol’ writing career doesn’t come fast and furious at this time. :)
The LJ was originally so I could read the friends list stuff. Then I started putting quizzes and stuff on it, and then posting stuff that seemed important ’cause I know there are people who don’t read my main blog. OTOH, there *is* mizkit_feed, which there hadn’t been, er, at some point, and so the idea of just letting people use that has been growing in appeal.
3. What finally killed those X-Men MUSHes you ran, anyway?
Politics. Hosting issues. A too-small player base. The funny thing is, it still hurts.
4. What’s the plan, as a writer? Where are you going with it?
To conquer the world.
No, really, that’s pretty much it. Ideally, I’ll be able to quit the day job at the end of 2005; this is more or less contingent on selling enough books over the next two years to pay off our non-house debt load. I have one series (The Walker Papers) sold already, and have the first book in two more (The Old Races, first book is HEART OF STONE, and Broken Faery, first book is RIGHT ANGLES TO FAERYLAND) written, so if I get those sold this year, I’ll be in good shape to quit the day job.
What I’m after, as a writer, is to be a commercial success. Man, people don’t say that very often, do they? I tell good stories. I may not be the most elegant writer around, but I tell good stories, and it makes me happier than anything to tell them. So I want to make enough money telling them that it’s all I have to do. My take on how to do this is diversify, diversify, diversify. I write fast and well, and it’s my goal to have two or three (or, y’know, five) series going with different publishers at a time.
Some of this plan includes YA stuff, some of it includes writing non-fantasy mystery series, the latter of which I’d like to pursue once I’m not at the day job anymore. My plan is to publish under different names for different genres (Catie Murphy for YA, probably Cate Malone for mysteries), less to hide my identity than as a marker for what kind of book it is I’m writing. And, y’know, less of a glut on the CE Murphy name (I can *hope* there might be danger of a glut!).
On one hand, that sounds insane. On the other hand, from a writing POV, the publishing industry is literally years ahead of me. URBAN SHAMAN will be coming out in 2005. I expect to have the third book done by the end of this year, or early next year. I’m planning on writing the sequel to HEART OF STONE starting next month sometime, when I finish THUNDERBIRD FALLS, which is the sequel to US. What I feel that I need to do as a writer is stay ahead of the publishing machine. Unless I move into the Robert Jordan realm (which would be nice), where it’s 6 weeks from delivery of the final manuscript to the book hitting the shelves, it seems reasonably likely that I can stay ahead of the machine.
Did you expect an answer this long? But wait, there’s more. Other goals, for example.
I’d like to write comics. I’d like to write screenplays. I’d like to write television shows. I’d also like to get some breakfast, so I’m going to stop answering this question, answer the next, and eat. :)
5. What the devil are Kitlings?
*laugh* A long long time ago on Too I started typing my name as ‘Kitlings’ for some silly reason or other. Then Trip figured out that Kitlings, which ranged from 3 to 18 inches in height were something like a 1d6 hit dice creature, and went on to deduce that there were approximately 2323 of them. Then they got doubled. Then they got tripled. Then they got halved, so there are approximately 7000 of them. They are highly destructive, terminally curious, appallingly cute, nearly invulnerable little creatures with the attention span of gnats, unless there’s chocolate involved, in which case they’re frighteningly focused. :)
Bonus question: Bloody writers! Don’t I know anyone else?
Apparently not. :)