Special note: I am proud to host a guest post from author Angelia Sparrow, an author whose work I think a lot of. This post is part of the Literary Underworld Blog Tour Week, to raise awareness of a great site supporting quality small press and self-published authors by carrying their titles both in an online store as well as setting up at conventions. You've heard me brag about them before! :) Enjoy Angelia's post and then visit the Literary Underworld!
Miking the Frog
The story is told that in the early days of the Muppets, Jim
Henson was being interviewed and had taken Kermit with him. As the cameras
rolled, the crew realized they couldn't hear Henson at all. They called for a
commercial and checked the situation. The sound man had attached the microphone
to the Frog.
Interviewing authors is a little like miking the frog. Most
of us don't have a lot to say, about ourselves at any rate. We'd rather tell
you about all our imaginary friends, about the weird places we vacation
and what our next book is about. If you
get two or more of us in a room, there is likely to be comparison shopping of
publishers.
I had one of those “imaginary friend” moments. I'd
taken a writer friend to see JOHN CARTER. I had waited for this movie since I
was 10 years old. I'd read all 11 books, owned some of the very short-lived
comic book and all the usual fannish things. In fairness, I had already seen it
and was eager to share something I loved so very much. My friend immediately
translated this into terms of her imaginary friends and talked for an hour and
a half about them, instead of sharing the movie experience we had just seen.
You ask this friend about herself and she won't have much to say.
The trick is getting the imaginary friends to work for you,
instead of hurting your material friends' feelings. Most of the time, this is
accomplishable. Sometimes the friends go to Aruba, without so much as a picture
post-card, and sometimes they stop talking altogether. But we soldier on.
So what do you do, when¡ยชas
frequently happens in this day of constant social networking-- someone has
miked the frog and started asking the writer questions?
We tapdance as fast as we can, trying to make ourselves as
interesting as possible. We share memes and cat pictures and quiz results. We
do photo-dumps of everyone else's cat pictures. We interview our characters. We
irritate everyone with our politics or religion. We keep to-do lists. We post
recipes and excerpts.
But our readers expect good stuff from our blogs, from our
facebook, from our twitter. They want more than “State of the Sooky (that's Succubus for
the uninitiated): Angel wrote 2000 words, edited a chapter, failed her workout
and cleaning, fed the family frozen pizza again and went to bed.”
They want more than endless twitter reposts, even the funny ones: I love how
bottles of baby powder say "mild," as if "extra spicy”
was an option.--Della Buckland
They want more than endless self-promotion. “Fifteen
days until my book comes out, here's the cover! Fourteen and a half days,
here's a picture that looks like the main character. Fourteen days, here's an
excerpt. The book came out, who wants to win a copy?” You get the idea.
There are endless websites with ideas and creative writing
prompts to fill your blog with interesting posts. This is what google is for.
On the other hand, I never have to worry about that with my
friends at the Literary Underworld. Most of them have blogs that are
interesting and far more entertaining than my endless failure at my daily task
roster. So I put them on my blog roll and read them, instead of working out.
Yep, you miked the frog.
If you want to let the interesting folks speak, you can find
them at http://www.literaryunderworld.com
Vampiric sex workers, half-angel steampunk lesbian demon hunters, gay Christmas
werewolves, dragons and inventors. Dwarves and Nephilim, and Zombies, oh my.
And just for reading, there is a 15% coupon for use at
checkout: LUBLOGTOUR
Angelia Sparrow is the author of 9 novels and over 60 short stories. Her tenth
book, HARD REBOOT releases Sept 30, the 11th, SPELLBOUND DESIRE is
coming Oct 26. Her work can be found at http://brooksandsparrow.com and of course at http://www.literaryunderworld.com
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