Interviews, Creative Mojo, and Procrastination

I just got off the phone, doing a live interview with Mark Lipinski on his toginet.com radio show Creative Mojo about my 2006 book Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures. Lots of fun! Yes, my palms were sweaty and I probably sounded more than a little hyper: I’ll see once they post the podcast, which will be available through that Creative Mojo link above down the road (I’ll post when it comes up). But I enjoyed the show, and was able to calm down a little and focus beforehand by the trick of imagining myself as one of the very experienced interviewees one sees on talk shows-famous actors and directors and so forth. This is similar to the trick of imagining what it’s like to be a college professor before taking a standardized test, which in one experiment helped people remember more facts more confidently.