Indie Author Tips #2 - Establish Routines by practicing interviews

Or The Ignorance of Being Me

When I whisper to people and my dogs that I'm a writer, I like to pretend they are interviewing me so when that time does come I can distinguish myself from the real writers out there with my well thought-out answers that appear completely spontaneous.

Invariably, one of the questions my future interviewers will ask me is what is my process? They then might barge into my psyche with all the delicacy of a whale in a tuna factory by asking me where my ideas come from.

I imagine I'd lean back all reflectively in my chair and really give this a good mental mulling. I might say something slightly condescending like 'That's a good question'. Then I'd be like BAM! THERE'S YOUR ANSWER! and that answer becomes VIRAL and next summer I am receiving an Nobel Prize for an award they made up especially for that answer which of course is given to me.

...

Anyways, I like to really get my write-on with a good and loud adrenaline song. I crack open TNT by AC/DC, a song which needs some re-introductions in hockey rinks across the nation. I don't know which song it could replace... maybe this one which admittedly is a good song for when the home team gets scored on and is indicative of our kinder, gentler emotionally fragile NHL.

 So once I've got the TNT, oi, oi, oi in my veins, I look around for something else to do - usually I start in the bathroom and list off my unfinished projects that are 95% finished, which coincidentally feels about the same for a lot of the stories. I should look into that correlation.

Then, with an unneeded coffee in hand, I wander back down to my desk and consider what to attack at that moment. For this, a little Queen/David Bowie Under Pressure helps. Often it is a purge of the the Daddy Longleg spiders (fun fact; actually aren't spiders) trying to exist in every corner of my room. Next, I might wonder what it would be like to have some type of debilitating disease. Yesterday, I learned of something called xylophagia which is obsessive eating of paper. So then I might google that or an in-depth analysis of Birdman, a subtle nod to the heading of this post. It's really anyone's guess at that point.

Thankfully, I have Wake-Up Call by Maroon 5 next on my playlist which again reminds me to focus on my original intention, which was doing some productive writing. I refocus and open up some word documents, look into my heart and wonder why I'm not getting any younger. Follow that up with When I Grow Up by Garbage. I regress a little, think Garbage is an awful title for an indie book writer but a ironically great one for a book of poetry. Because art likes that type of irony...

Follow up that song with You're So Vain, the original by Carly Simon. It grounds me once again, reminding me I'm not nearly as good as I think I am so don't get too far ahead of myself by doing fake press interviews for my dogs. This would've been fun to play as the first dance at my wedding. But I'm not that brave and my wife, god (and I) love her, sometimes gets me and sometimes doesn't. With the betting odds of being only 50-50 I think I did the wise thing by not suggesting it. But.

Finally, right before I end this blog post and get back to my true intentions, my fingers nicely warmed up, I plug into Ahead By A Century by the Tragically Hip. This is a reminder, self-consciously deprecating, that while many people might not get the concepts or story lines of a world undone by legalizing marijuana, maybe in a century people will look back and say 'Wow, that jay royston guy, he sure nailed it. The world was actually destroyed because some guy in the Rocky Mountains invented a marijuana that could hypnotize us into mindless drones through the airwaves."

Then some literary critic or crazed super fan will spend too much money on a replica of the Nobel Prize I won a century earlier for the inaugural 'Saw It Coming' award and find this post hidden away in the Internet and all this reading would have been worth it.

not life size.

My dogs have now wandered off and fallen asleep. Time to get my Karma on...

PS - Thanks for reading. I'm also now a Twitter virgin looking for someone to teach me what to do  - @metjayroyston