Interview Jitters

I've been doing some email interviews left and right for the past few months and I'm genuinely surprised when the people I ask say yes. (Of course some friends have asked how I get to interview all these cool men and women and as much as I want to say that I blackmail, bribe, cajole, or intimidate them, the truth of the matter is I use one universal technique: I send them an email asking if I could interview them.)

I'm still new at this (four months isn't really long) and figuring things out (my own technique and maximizing the email medium because quite frankly it's not as dynamic as doing a face-to-face or even a phone interview). What you don't see is how nervous I am before hitting the send button as I spend almost half an hour deliberating on what to include in my email (even if I'm working with a template that I just copy/paste) and my general pessimistic attitude (oh my God, I just sent an email to -insert author/editor/publisher's name here-).

That is, of course, a stark contrast to my day job where I do contact some personalities which people will squeal to get in touch with but my personal paradox is that I work in a rock magazine even if I don't really listen to rock (or any music in the English language for that matter). Of course it might be because my official day job has a huge backing (my company) but I'd like to think that it's because I'm passionate about the topics of my blog interviews as opposed to my work interviews where it's usually professional (that's not to say those interviews don't turn out to be interesting... they are in fact quite amazing).

Anyway, I just sent some new emails this week asking various people if I could interview them and I experienced the pre-interview jitters as I started typing their email addresses. At this point, I have no interviews ready for next week so unless a miracle happens, don't expect an interview this coming Tuesday. (Luckily, I have a bunch of feature articles that I haven't gotten around to publishing.) There's actually a bunch of authors/editors/publishers I want to interview but schedules and lack of research on my part (well, I placed an order of The Secret History of Moscow three weeks ago but it hasn't arrived yet...) stand in the way so we'll see.