Friday, July 25, 2008

"Hype" is such an ugly word, Mr. Bond.

My amazing publicist Janice Kaplan has marshalled her unholy myriad of Uruk-Hai publicity flacks and scored me all this press, like

• The Washington Jewish Week has a profile discussing my indubitable Yiddishkeit
• The Arlington Sun-Gazette interviewed me for this profile
• Tomorrow this profile of me (registration required for that link) will run in the "Sunday Source" section of The Washington Post.

I boggle.

The interviews were a lot of fun to do. The Gazette reporter was a high school intern who was very diligent and infectiously excited. The Jewish Week reporter seemed, over the phone, like an old pro who was amused by my freakish surreal ideas ("I've never said this to an interviewee before," he said, "but you're really weird." It was clearly meant as a compliment).

The Post guy, Dan Zak, was very hip and a really great interviewer, seizing on things I would say and asking intelligent followup after followup, drilling down until I was saying things that surprised me. He also did not ask any of the questions that I'm used to hearing (like "why genre?"). It was a two hour conversation, and he did a fantastic job synthesizing a coherent Q&A out of those two hours of intense ramble -- stitching together comments taken from wildly disparate parts of the conversation and managing to preserve the sense of it. (Though I do look, in the photo, like I am indeed single-parenting on a jet-lag-filled international trip, and there are the usual little content quibbles (like I would never say "Sam", as opposed to "Samuel R." or "Chip", Delany... :-) ))

Note also the reference to the blogospherical greatness discussion (I want y'all to know I did namecheck Nick, but that got cut).