Miking the Frog (Literary Underworld Blog Tour Post)

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¡ªas 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 11^th, SPELLBOUND DESIRE is coming Oct 26. Her work can be found at http://brooksandsparrow.com and of course at http://www.literaryunderworld.com