Fiction author Robin Brande talks about writing, reading, and other vital matters

Here’s how it was:

The car picked me up yesterday at 6:30 AM to take me to the studio where they staged the TV satellite tour. Small studio on the second floor of a building you wouldn’t know had tons of recording and mixing equipment and four or five television screens lined up along the wall.

Small snack to settle my stomach, then into the chair for Elizabeth–a true makeup artist–to blow out and style my hair and shellac my face.

“How do you normally fix your hair?” she wanted to know.

“Um, by going out with it wet and rolling the car windows down until it’s dry?”

“Huh.”

Needless to say she had a better method: blow dryer, rollers, mousse, spray, and all while I sort of napped in the chair because what could be better than someone playing with your hair when you’re both tired and wired?

Then we moved on to the part where she erased all the old acne scars from college, those pinched lines between my eyebrows that started forming just from being a little sister and then grew deeper once I had stepchildren, the little spots here and there from where my sunscreen failed–all those imperfections you just get used to, but that someone viewing your face as a canvass has to correct before she can move on to the painting stage.

The makeup felt about an inch thick, but Elizabeth was right: on camera it looked perfectly natural, because the lights shining in my face were so bright and hot they would have made me look washed out if not for all the color she added back in.

How cool is it to have someone pop in after every interview to put more gloss on your lips? That was a level of pampering I have never, ever imagined for myself, and I had to be careful not to giggle.

I was wrong about the smiley face. It wasn’t painted on a wall, it was sketched on a camera lens. Which obviously makes more sense. There was a huge camera right in front of the chair where I sat for all the interviews, and what was weird (actually, trust me–it was all weird) was that the camera always stayed dark. So even though it never looked like it was on, once the tech guy cued me I knew my face was actually beaming across the country somewhere, and I was being recorded for all time (or all time in TV terms), and I’d better remember that and not slack or slump.

So I had this earpiece in my ear that allowed me to hear the reporters from Ohio or Connecticut or Florida, California–all those other places–and people could see me but I couldn’t see them. I just had to look at Mr. Smiley Face and pretend I was really seeing Dan or Mary Ann or Josh or the other reporters I was chatting with for those 4-10 minutes.

The longer interviews were actually easier, because they felt more like conversations than just quick soundbites. The less time I had to talk, the more nervous I got because it seemed like I had to fit in all the important stuff and not fumble my words at all. Whereas if I had 10 minutes I could ramble a little and not feel bad.

I didn’t feel particularly nervous while it was going on, but I noticed that every time I finished an interview my body sank back into itself, which made me realize I’d been sitting there all tense and alert. Because even though I knew generally what kinds of questions the reporters were going to ask me, there was still always that wild card of each interviewer being a new person to me, and so I never knew what the tone would be or whether anyone was going to ask me a question that might throw me off. But every one of the reporters was incredibly kind, and there were only a few questions I had to pause and think about before answering, and all in all it was a fun, exhilarating, truly exhausting experience that I would happily do again.

While waiting for one of the interviews, there was a problem with the audio connection, and I could hear the woman reporter in her studio, but she couldn’t hear me. So while she waited for the connection to be fixed, she chatted with her cameraman or producer or whoever was in the room with her about how her husband never cooks, and how the only thing he can make is spaghetti, and how she really needs to get him to pick up the slack, etc.

So I thought it would be funny once they fixed the connection for me to chime in about her husband and the spaghetti and all that. And the woman laughed and all was fine and fun, but then we got the signal that we were going on the air, and she began her interview: “We’re here with so-and-so, who’s written a book on getting your man to cook . . .”

Wait! Yikes! “That’s not me–”

Next thing I heard was her talking to her producer again. “What evolution book? Nobody’s given me anything about an evolution book. What are you talking about?”

Turns out she had four TV satellite interviews that day, and the producer had given her cheat sheets for only three. So the people on my end quickly rescheduled the interview for about ten minutes later, and I moved on to another interview in the meantime.

Then we came back to spaghetti reporter, and just to show you how easy it is for these guys and how experienced they are, we got the cue and she launched right into her intro and her questions as if she’d already read the book and knew all about it and me. If not for that earlier flub I never would have guessed she’d just been prepped mere moments before. That was a cool little look behind the curtain.

From what I understand, all these interviews will start appearing today and over the next week in the various cities. Two of the interviews were for Internet sites, so as soon as they go up I’ll let you know so you can check out the weirdness that was my day yesterday.

By the way, it is really hard–at least for me–to see yourself on camera. You don’t remember doing that with your mouth, or making that gesture, or cocking your head so often like a dog hearing a strange sound. Obviously there’s an art to it, and you can improve over time. And I think I worked out some of the quirks during the course of doing 12 back-to-back interviews, but I’m sure there are still parts of every single one of those that would make me cringe. But overall it was such a fun and fascinating experience I’d be happy to do it again.

Especially if someone like Elizabeth got to play with my hair and makeup first.

Off to the airport soon, back to my normal life where the next big excitement will be taking the dogs to a snake-breaking class this weekend to teach them that they don’t want to sniff rattlesnakes. That sounds normal, right?

Technorati Tags: TV Satellite Tour, Author Tours, Book Tours, Facial Shellac

Posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 5:59 am under Writing . Subscribe to responses: RSS 2.0 Comment Feed. . Comment, or trackback.