Fifteen Minutes of Fame

...more like twenty minutes. I'm breathlessly reeling from the fact that I was just a phone guest on the NPR program Insight, which is local to the Sacramento/Central Valley area (some of you who know me well will know why the particular choice of program is funny). They did a segment on NaNoWriMo. I just happened to see a post in the NaNo forum last night that they were looking for guests for the show today, and so this morning I e-mailed them. (I was undecided about contacting them, because I need to spend most of today slaving at the keyboard so I can attempt to finish my last 5,000 words; hence the not e-mailing them until this morning.)

At about 1:15, they called me to ask if I'd like to be a guest on the program, and that they'd call me at 2:35 right before the segment started. I said yes, and they asked me to read about a minute's worth of what I'd written today. I proceeded, for the next hour, to freak out about what was worth reading and what was brief enough yet "stand-alone" enough to read on the air.

Chris Baty, the founder of NaNo, was featured, as well as another participant in NaNo from Dixon. Both of us participants got to read an excerpt, Chris talked about the origins and purpose of NaNo, and Jeffrey Callison (the host) asked us some fairly standard questions about why we were involved, how we fit it into our schedules, and what we were going to do now that the month was over. Eventually you'll be able to get a podcast here, but as of 3:30 pm, it's not up quite yet.

I have to tell you, that was the longest 20 minutes of my life. I was so nervous. Rob said I sounded very calm, but I think that's because I made many notes beforehand of what I might say to introduce the excerpt and that sort of thing. I do that for important phone calls, too. I just know I get nervous on the phone and can sound much more tongue-tied or air-headed than normal, so notes are good for me. Ironically, I can read things aloud or speak in front of a crowd without too much nervousness.

Being a phone guest was probably a less stressful than it would have been actually being in the studio, though. It was just like having a four-way conference call...that you know is simultaneously being broadcast to thousands of listeners over the airwaves. Yeah.

Okay. Back to word-slaving.