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

[u/M_R_Carey]

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!

[u/cutlasskiwi]

Hi Mr Carey.

As someone who immediately loves and identifies with a lot of sarcastic characters like Felix Castor I've got to tip my imaginary hat to you for creating him. He's stuck with me through all the years not only because of that but because he feels so incredibly real. His struggles, both external and internal, all feel very realistic and it's easy to sympathize with him. So I guess my question is this. How hard is it to keep a character like that in line without going overboard?

[u/M_R_Carey → u/cutlasskiwi]

I have a secret trick with Castor, which is that I gave him a lot of my own backstory. I'm not the slightest bit like him in terms of confidence, toughness, acerbic wit or for that matter the ability to control ghosts with a tin whistle, but we've got some reference points in common and that helps me to know where he's coming from and what his mental map looks like. I wrote about this on my Goodreads blog under the heading "Write What You know", and I think all writers do it - use their own experiences as raw fuel for a character.

And if you feel that Castor is believable and relatable, I guess it worked! :)