The Radio Interview

Well, the radio interview wasn’t too bad. In fact, it was kind of fun to meet Dennis Green in person. He was shorter than I pictured (grayer, too). But his voice was just as big in real life as it is on the radio. When I lived in Cedar Rapids, he was with a different radio station…and that station used to have a trivia contest every morning (maybe they still do? I don’t know…)…I was a frequent caller.

Anyway…I got there a little early because I’m the kind of person who would rather be 10 minutes early than 30 seconds late. And when I got there, there was nobody around. I waited for a little while, and when it was clear nobody coming, I slowly made my way back toward the studio rooms. There was a guy in one of the rooms, hidden behind a wall of alphabetized CDs. The door was open, and the huge ON AIR light next to the door wasn’t lit, so…I went ahead and knocked on the door. Unfortunately, that guy wasn’t Dennis Green. And I think he was a little nervous I was going to mess with the CD collection. He invited me back to the lobby to wait for Dennis.

Dennis arrived a few minutes later and took me to another studio. He led me to a little table with a huge, honking microphone. I’ve never seen such a huge microphone! Then he went around to the computer and control panel (at least I think that’s what the thing with all the buttons was). I would’ve loved to have seen what all those buttons do and how everything works. Maybe I should write a book that’s set in a radio studio? Then maybe Dennis would let me come back and job-shadow him for a while?

Anyway…the interview was pretty painless (much better than the video interview they sprang on me in Missouri a couple weeks ago…and much better than the phone interview I did for a radio station in Minnesota a few years ago — that one seemed to go on forever!). Dennis asked me to talk about my book, tell how I first got published, talk about the challenges of writing for boys, and plug my Barnes & Noble event next week (except this was a taped interview, so I had to pretend the event was “tomorrow” rather than next week). The Barnes and Noble event was the only thing I screwed up. Dennis dared to ask me WHAT TIME my event was….I didn’t know! I’m not sure whether it starts at 12:00, 12:30 or 1:00. He must think I’m a complete airhead! But he just edited that part out (he edited right then, while I was sitting there) and had me say “it’ll be right after lunch tomorrow.” When Dennis finished, I said, “that was seven minutes?” It was 6 minutes and 54 seconds. Wow! Piece of cake! (And since my husband works in Cedar Rapids, we don’t get to have lunch together very often anymore, so since I was so close, I picked him up and we went out for sushi! Yum!)