Tuesday, October 20, 2009

October 20, 2009 Links and Plugs

Will be working 'til midnight due to the company's concert so I might not be up tomorrow...

In the meantime, Jonathan Strahan tweeted the formula (thanks!) to estimating word count when you don't have a computer: "Count 1 page. 6 chars (inc spaces) = word. No of words per line X lines per page." (I was inquiring how to determine if a story was a novelette.)

Here are some valid criticisms against email interviews (and I'll accept responsibility for the second one):
"I HATE doing email "interviews" (I ask 10 1-sentence q's, you do 10 essays, I get to put my name on it, OK?) That's a (bad) questionnaire" - Cory Doctorow

"If you are going to conduct an email interview, do the questions one at a time to allow for follow-ups, as the 'silent interview' technique when accompanied by some level of ignorance of the subject simply makes the interviewer seem like an amateur." - Nick Mamatas
Zen photo (and pun) for the day courtesy of Librarian.net (who in turn got it from the Howe Library):


Interviews
Advice/Articles
News
And from Tachyon:
The Secret History of Science Fiction edited by James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

3 comments:

Lincoln Crisler said...

I do my interviews in somewhat the same manner as prescribed by Mr. Mamatas. While I don't send my questions one at a time, I will often email followup questions in a second email... it simply comes closer to approaching the give and take of a real interview. Plain ol' common sense, really.

David Steffen said...

I agree that follow-up questions are a good thing, and make an email interview more interactive.

I've had a phone interview that went awry also. a 1 sentence question became a 20 minute answer, no joke. Also, my audio recording program on my phone is sub-par, so transcribing anything of significant length is a huge pain.

If it weren't for these things, I'd rather do a phone interview anyway--I like to hear the other person's voice.

Charles said...

1) The follow-up question wouldn't have helped in the interview in question.

2) I do send follow-up questions when the need arises but rarely.

3) It depends on the response time of the interviewee. When I get a 6-month response time, maybe waiting for the answers to the follow-up question will take as long.

4) Yeah, phone interviews are better as you can sense how it's going based on the tone. But I live in the Philippines so that's usually out of the question, and home Internet is erratic which rules out Skype.