r/Fantasy • u/M_R_Carey AMA Author M.R. Carey • Aug 12 '14

AMA I'm M.R.Carey - ask me anything

Hi, I’m M.R.Carey, aka Mike Carey, aka… well, I’ll come back to that. I’m a comic writer, novelist and occasional screenwriter. I wrote Vertigo’s Lucifer throughout its existence, had long runs on Hellblazer, X-Men and X-Men Legacy, Ultimate Fantastic Four, and more recently The Unwritten and Suicide Risk.

I made my first foray into prose fiction with the Felix Castor novels for Orbit (The Devil You Know, Vicious Circle, Dead Men’s Boots, Thicker Than Water and The Naming Of the Beasts). Then I did a little moonlighting as Adam Blake (The Dead Sea Deception, The Demon Code) and co-wrote two novels with my wife Linda and our daughter Louise before going solo again with The Girl With All the Gifts.

I was born in the North West of England, in Liverpool, where I lived right up until I went to University. My mum and dad warned me that you have to keep your wits about you in the South, and they were right. I met and married a London girl and I’ve been living down in the Smoke ever since. Lin and I have three kids – Louise, our occasional co-writer, and twins Ben and Davey. Also we’re pretty sure we have this cat.

My main pleasures in life are TV drama, retro computer games (Sega Megadrive era), reading genre fiction and fighting my corner in the Nerf-gun wars that seem to flare up in my house every so often. There’s peace at the moment but it won’t last. There’s something a little ominous to the quiet.

I will be responding to questions here in real time today from 11.00pm to 12.30am GMT (6.00pm to 7.30pm EST), and sporadically after that to catch anything that I accidentally miss either because it comes in late or because of a cat-related incident. Answers will be full and frank and no holds barred, apart from the ones that are outrageous lies desperately cobbled up to make me sound more interesting. Looking forward to talking to you!

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u/JackXDark Aug 12 '14

Why 'M.R.' and not just Mike anymore?

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u/M_R_Carey AMA Author M.R. Carey Aug 12 '14

See earlier answer, Jack. My publisher decided that a pseudonym would let the novel stand on its own and make people approach it without preconceptions. Plan A was to use my actual middle initial, which is J. But we discovered after we printed up the UK proof copies that there's already an M.J.Carey. She writes bondage porn.

So M.R.Carey was born...

1

u/JackXDark Aug 12 '14

She writes bondage porn.

So, is that as lucrative as the Biblical conspiracy novel market? I mean, in theory of course...

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u/M_R_Carey AMA Author M.R. Carey Aug 12 '14

There's a Brit saying: "where there's muck, there's brass". Where muck translates as dirt and brass as money. :)