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Randy Cassingham's BlogHistorical Details and Author's Notes from This is True®
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Hoops of Murphy
Last night I was up until 2:00 because I spent an hour and a half doing an interview with a magazine. The interviewer was pretty good: it was more than the usual questions like "Gee, why do you think it's so popular?" He even went into what I thought of the Napster debacle, and the Microsoft anti-trust action.
But about True, he asked, "How do you put the thing together, what do you deal with in the process, what hoops does Murphy's Law make you jump through to make it all come together?" Good question -- no one has ever asked it before.
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My answer: It happens because I work every day. Every day, at least eight hours, and often 14. It translates to 70-80 hours per week to get everything done. I write on Sundays, since my contractual deadline for the various newspapers that run True is that they get it first thing Monday mornings, and the last thing I would ever want to is get up early in the morning. But I need that deadline pressure to make me go through the agony of writing the 7-9 stories I need.
It takes anywhere from four to ten hours to do it, finding just the right mix, turning 300- to 900-word stories into a tight 75ish words to get the point across in a meaningful, understandable way, and wrap it up between a punchy headline and a smart-ass tagline. But when it's done, I get a feeling like Picasso must have when he put in his last brush stroke and stood back to look.
But work isn't all. I do love it, but that's not enough. Because I set my own schedule, I can take time off whenever I want. A working friend wants to get together for lunch? Easy! Except for me, it's breakfast. And when they rush back to work, I stay for dessert with my girlfriend, and then do an errand or two, and amble back to my office two or three hours after I left. I settle into my chair and look at the Rocky Mountains out my window ...while I download the morning's 100-200 e-mails.
Need to jet out to Southern California to speak at a Mensa conference? No problemo: I did that last week, after loading up my laptop and jumping on a plane. It doesn't matter where I connect to the Internet, and the column still went out. And while I was there, I took my girlfriend to Disneyland, since she had never been there....
The interview is probably still the best I've ever done -- it's amazing what can happen when you give an intelligent journalist the freedom to ask probing questions, and space to print the answers. Interviewer David M. Fitzpatrick has allowed me to reprint the interview in its entirety.
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