Big Blend Champagne Sundays Interview
Check out the interview on Big Blend Champagne Sundays with co-hosts Lisa Smith, Nancy Reid, and Amy Friese. Go to 52.47 minutes to listen to my 20 minute segment.
Big Blend Champagne Sundays
Here’s the truth. I’m a bit nervous about tomorrow’s interview. 800,000 is a large number of listeners. I’ve never faced a crowd like that before, even if I won’t have to face them, just talk on the phone/radio. I’ve had two preparatory events, the ReachOut.com interview last week and the MAGPI workshop the week before. I did a practice interview with my publicist (nothing like a run-through – as hard as they can be to do) too. I’ve faced 500 in an audience a number of times before at conferences in my day job for an hour and a quarter a shot, leading workshops. I’ve presented workshops hundreds of times.
But this is about me and my book, something personal, scary to talk about. The butterflies are fluttering.
I’m used to it from my day job but you never really get used to it. Let me say that differently. The anxiety and nervousness never goes away but it does become more manageable.
Manage-able.
I teach public speaking in my day job and I talk about managing nervousness and anxiety. I have to use my own advice.
Breathe – alternate nostril breath works wonders (a yogic pranayama technique).
Yoga practice, with movement, with the breath. Slow sun salutations. Warrior poses held for 3-5 breaths. Throat opening poses like Ustrasana/Camel to open the throat chakra (home of voice and creativity).
Self-talk (a favorite). I tell myself I can do it. I’ll do well. I will succeed. It sounds silly but it’s a powerful tool. I have enough negative self-talk running through my mind so I counter it with my own positive self-talk.
Meditation to give me practice focusing. To still the waters of my mind before it all begins. Twenty-minutes. To center. To ground. To calm.
This is my preparation.
Believe it or not I’m really looking forward to it. It kicks off my week of publicity and Book Expo.
Breathe.
Two Interviews, A Sneak Peak, and a partridge in a pear tree…
Two big ones.
Sunday, May 22nd, 2:45pm EST – 3:15pm EST Big Blend Radio’s Champagne Sunday’s show with Lisa Smith, Nancy ?, and guest co-host Amy Friese. Here’s the link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/big-blend-radio/2011/05/22/champagne-sundays. I’ll be talking about Open Wounds. Anyone can tune in.
Wednesday, May 25th, 1pm EST Tami Snow’s Lyrical Lip Service Radio Show. Here’s the url: http://lyricallipservice.com. Check in on the website to hear me talk about Open Wounds with Tami.
If you listen in, let me know what you think.
Hunger Mountain, an online magazine about writing and kids/YA/Children literature, is sneak peeking the first chapter of Open Wounds this month and my essay on writing, In the Half Light will be out by the end of the month. Check out what editor Bethany Hegedus has to say about the sneak peek. This is a great magazine for readers and writers so take a look at the other offerings too.
Pub-date
… has been pushed to May 31, six days forward. But I think they’ll hit it. I know I keep saying that but… I’m getting copies for BEA next week for the 26th and 27th book bloggers convention so the rest will be close behind. My publisher is pulling out the stops, making the publishing creatures of the night work overtime on their presses and binding machines. I can see the steam from the engines hovering in clouds near the ceiling and sneaking out the cracks in the windows.
Books are coming.
Books are coming.
Hardcover copies of my first book in my hand.
Very soon.
Very cool.
Reset the clock. 13 days and counting…
Philli MAGPI Redux
So here’s what happened at University of Penn, at ten in the morning on Wednesday last week. Well… I have to back up. After putting together my Powerpoint for the workshop, going over it with my actor/choreographer friend Dave, reading lines of my book, and getting everything ready to be able to leave at 4:15 am – I got into the car and… the battery was dead. So… after wracking my tired brain for ten minutes and trying everything I could think of (turn the key on and off, open the hood and shut the hood, try turning the lights on again and again and again) I gave up and went back upstairs to tell my wife I would have to take the other car. Of course that meant, 1) I woke up the dogs (Spike and Gracie) and 2) I woke up my wife (I didn’t know where the other car was parked and this is Queens so it could be anywhere so… I had to wake her up) – neither of which were happy. Okay the dogs were happy because they thought they were going out but that’s another story.
Fifteen minutes later and I was off to the Verrazano Bridge and Staten Island where Dave was now checking his watch and waiting for me. Behind me were an unhappy, awake wife and two smiling dogs.
We spent an hour on the Jersey Turnpike heading south and west.
We made it to the MAGPI studio, after breakfast at COSI (not bad – didn’t know they had breakfast) by 9am, as required, to check in and go over the distance learning machinery. Michael Knight, the technician arrived and showed us around, then set us up. It was a small TV studio with four cameras and two big plasma screens on the wall that we could see the remote sites on. The cover of my book which I’d embedded on four slides, had disappeared. They needed the originals to show up. I didn’t understand what happened to the images but they were gone. Michael found the pics on my website and after twenty minutes of transfer attempts and switching laptops, and statements like, “you used a mac didn’t you?” and “Sometimes this happens,” he made the presentation whole. with fifteen minutes to spare we were ready to go.
Three schools checked in from Ohio, all high school English classes. One large picture and two small pictures appeared of the classes on the plasma screen. A picture of me and Dave appeared on the other screen. My Powerpoint appeared behind us and our picture got smaller. I taught a writing workshop on “How to Write Action Scenes,” presumably because Open Wounds has a lot of action scenes in it and I therefore had some expertise in this area. Dave (a real actor as opposed to me who is an amateur) was terrific as all the characters, especially Lefty (my crippled, English, WWI vet) and I played Cid and narrated. Dave’s a good director so he dragged some semblance of character and pace out of me while providing four different voices for the various other characters. We demonstrated some physicalization of fencing moves – ie: here’s how I worked out the fight we just read before I wrote it. The kids did a writing exercise and one student from each school read their piece out loud. They asked questions like, “Why do you like to write fight scenes? How do you write realistic dialog?” and “Why do you write?” Sixty minutes came and went.
What I learned about distance learning systems:
- It’s very hard to call on kids when they raise their hands. “The boy in the black shirt (they’re all wearing black shirts) in the top screen (they don’t know which screen they’re on), yes that one over there (I point ridiculously at one screen or the other). I finally figured out to say things like, “The boy next to the teacher wearing a yellow shirt (so glad the teachers were wearing something other than black).” What I’ll need to do next time (will there be a next time?) is write down which school is in which frame and call out the school and a description of location (boy in the middle at Ohio High). It will be better than my automatic response of pointing which, of course they could not figure out at all because of the perspective they had of me … well… pointing.
- Michael Knight, the technician, used to be a stage, sound, lighting, expert on the road for all kinds of entertainers and bands and easily gets points for telling the best stories about the stars he’s worked with. He’s tops in Dave and my book.
- I’ve got a shiny forehead. Yes, I do.
- Powerpoint is good and always helps. It creates structure for any presentation and is a nice counterpoint to my shiny forehead.
- There’s no instant feedback on jokes because of the distance and lack of mikes being on at each site. They are all mute and have to un-mute to speak. So it was like talking to a silent audience – always a tough performance and difficult to get a read on how you’re doing.
Lunievicz 