Steve Knopper | Appetite for Self-Destruction

September 19, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Steve Knopper [21:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Steve Knopper covers the music business for Rolling Stone magazine. His next book, on the record industry in the digital age, is due from Free Press/Simon & Schuster in January 2009. He is a Denver-based journalist who has written for Spin, Details, Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, National Geographic Traveler, Wired, New York, Chicago, Backpacker, as well as the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, The Washington Post, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Denver Rocky Mountain News, the Miami Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and many books and websites.

He is the former on-air technology correspondent for Fox News Chicago and has appeared as an expert source on CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, WNYC-FM in New York, WXRT-FM in Chicago, and G4: Attack of the Show as well as in print publications such as Reuters. He has written or edited several books, most recently Moon Colorado, a travel guide. He also co-wrote, with rock-band manager extraordinaire and northwest Denver neighbor Mark Bliesener, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Starting a Band; it contains a foreword by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips. For three years, he wrote the Daily Net Buzz column for Yahoo! Internet Life until that magazine folded in 2002. Steve’s specialty is pop music, but he writes about a range of other topics as well.

Born in Livonia, Mich., he moved to Boulder, Colo., at age 13 and wrote his first-ever story for the high school newspaper about students’ tastes in music. (Dig the extremely strange Patament reference.) After attending the University of Michigan and working for The Michigan Daily, he spent a year on the 5 a.m. obituary desk at the now-defunct Richmond News Leader in Virginia. After that, he became pop music critic and feature writer for the Daily Camera in Boulder; within four years he’d moved up in the Knight-Ridder Newspapers chain to the (Gary, Ind.) Post-Tribune, where he wrote about truck-stop prostitution, mob-style triple homicides and wigs. He quit the paper in January 1996 to become a full-time freelance writer, and has been happy that way ever since.

Steve lives in northwest Denver, with his wife, Melissa, and daughter, Rose. He has occasionally been known to rock.

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Mark David Gerson |

September 12, 2009 | Comments Off

Interview with Mark David Gerson [11:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

From his website:

Mark David Gerson is an internationally recognized author, speaker, mentor and coach whose inspirational writings are read in more than two dozen countries.

Through more than 15 years of classes, workshops, coaching and consulting, Mark David has guided groups and individuals to connect with their innate wisdom, open to their creative power and express themselves with ease.

Poets and playwrights, novelists and educators, amateurs and professionals, people who don’t believe they can write and people with a compelling call to write — all have benefited from working with him, as have nonwriters seeking to move through life’s challenges and awaken to their highest potential.

Mark David is author of the award-winning novel, The MoonQuest: A True Fantasy, and of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, a book and companion 2-CD set of writing inspiration, instruction and practice.

He recently completed a screenplay adaptation of The MoonQuest and is at work on the first of two projected sequels to the book.

Posted by admin | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Inspiration, PODCAST, Publishing

Mark David Gerson, Author of The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write

June 4, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It’s my pleasure on this show to have my next guest, Mark David Gerson, and he is a Twitter friend of mine, and we’ve tweeted back and forth a good bit. If you know me well, I’m a big twitterer, or tweeter, as it will, and Mark David Gerson has written a book called The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write. Welcome to the show, Mark.

Mark David Gerson: Thank you so much, Kent, it’s great to be here.

Dr. Kent: I want to start out with Twitter, because you’re into Twitter, I’m into Twitter, what’s your take on this crazy engine of thought?

Mark David Gerson: I think it’s fabulous. I had a friend about a year ago who I’d actually met on MySpace, which was my first introduction to social networking, who tried to get me to go onto Twitter, and go on the website and I’d kind of shrug my shoulders and say, “I don’t get it.” That happened frequently, and then one day, probably when I was trying to avoid writing, I got on, (inaudible), nosed around, and before I knew it I was having wonderful conversations with lots of brilliant people.

Dr. Kent: So how does it help someone like you, and author of The Moonquest and The Voice of the Muse?

Mark David Gerson: Probably if it weren’t for Twitter, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation, just to start. It’s been a great way to connect with other writers. It’s been a great way to market myself as an author. And it’s been a great way to just meet interesting people all over, and some of the people I’ve actually met on Twitter I’ve met in person, and they’ve been just as personable in (inaudible).

Dr. Kent: Absolutely. And what I find fascinating is that in 140 characters you can be so much more to the point than you would be in an email or an interview or a conversation or this and that.

Mark David Gerson: Well that’s true, it’s a great training for being concise, and also for being creative in your abbreviations.

Dr. Kent: So let’s talk about your book, especially the Voice of the Muse where it’s talking about something that I’m very familiar with, which is authors starting out, authors getting published, and what you were just talking about, which is getting into places like Twitter and saying, “Hey, here I am,” as an author.

Mark David Gerson: Sure. Well, the book, both my books, the other book is a novel called the Moonquest, both books (inaudible) to me, I didn’t sit down one morning and say I’m going to write a book on writing, or I’m going to a fantasy novel. They both just kind of snuck up on me, hit me over the head and dragged me to the computer, or the blank page, because part it was in longhand. I’ve been teaching writing, giving writing workshops, coaching writers for 15 years now, and out of all the wisdom I guess I had accumulated, which was mostly wisdom from me, because you know we do teach what we need to learn, and I think that is certainly true for me. It found itself onto the page, and before I knew it I had a book that I’m very grateful to say (inaudible).

Dr. Kent: And you are also a sound author in two ways, and I find it interesting on your website you have a title on the left side that says sound healing. And that’s very similar to sound authors, I like that punk. You’ve put out a lot of audio CD’s as well. Talk about your work, and what you do every day.

Mark David Gerson: Sure. Well, just briefly, the sound healing is something I have not, I don’t do a whole lot anymore, but I did regularly for a couple of years. It’s a form of energy healing, like reiki is, where I use the sound of my voice instead of my hands. I used to do a lot of teleconferences and live events and recordables, and those are a combination of kind of sound healing and guided meditation, and I do have a lot of CD’s, and they’re on my website. But my kind of daily routine right now is working on a sequel to my novel, The Moonquest, and my daily routine really is a writing routine. I write almost every day. My goal is to write every day, but I cut myself some slack, so as long as I’m writing 4 or 5 or 6 days a week, I’m satisfied. I tend to write in the mornings for a number of reasons. One is, it’s nice to have it done. Not that it’s a horrible thing to do, but writers tend to be very distractible, writers can be really amazing procrastinators, writers can find really all kinds of awful things to do that somehow seem much more interesting in the moment than writing. I find that if I get the writing done early in the day I don’t waste my time looking for things to do to avoid writing. That’s part of it. The other reason is that I find that writing does something to me, does something for me, it really shifts my mood and my energy in the morning, and I generally have a better day because I had written, not because I’ve done, I’ve gotten it over with, but because I’ve had the experience of writing, of connecting with that deep part of myself to let the story out. So I always start my day writing if I can. And the rest of the day is whatever it is.

Dr. Kent: It’s such an interesting thing, because different writers have different processes, and I’ve heard from many writers that they like to get up at dawn and do their few minutes of writing. What’s your process?

Mark David Gerson: I’m sorry, what was the question?

Dr. Kent: What’s your process? Do you get up at dawn and write a few minutes? Do you sometimes write all day long? What’s your process for writing?

Mark David Gerson: Right, well, I don’t like getting up, period. So getting up at dawn is never fun, but I do do it sometimes. I try to get up, and I have the advantage, most of the time I’m living on my own, I mean, it’s bad in some respects, but not in others, so that I can get up when I want and write when I want. I have a 9 year old daughter who’s with me sometimes, and that changes the routine when she’s here, but for the most part I get up about 6 or 7 in the morning, and sometimes I will actually write in bed. I have a laptop in the bedroom and I’ll just plop it on my lap and just get going. But the days that I’m going to write all morning, I usually get up and do my stuff, and have my breakfast, and then sit down and just go at it for 1, 2, 3 or 4 hours. I don’t usually write all day. I think that would be really awesome to be able to, I’ve got other things going on in my life that sometimes makes it difficult to do. But (inaudible). I don’t write at night for the most part. I know a lot of writers do. I’m just too fried at the end of the day to really be in a place where I can write, although I have. It’s just not my preference.

Dr. Kent: And we’re having just a little bit of technical difficulty, I think we lost you there for one second, but we got you back, so that makes me happy.

Mark David Gerson: Good.

Dr. Kent: Now, you’ve also written The Moonquest, and you won an “IPPY”, which is an Independent Publisher Book Award, a great honor, and a number of other awards. Tell us about that book, and are you doing a follow up to that, tell us about what you’re working on.

Mark David Gerson: Sure. Well, I’m very pleased and proud to (inaudible) award, won an “IPPY” gold medal last year, and it also won a New Mexico book award. (inaudible) …really gratifying. When I wrote the book I didn’t know I even had it in me. The story is a fantasy, obviously, that takes place in a time and a place in a land where stories have been banned. Storytellers have been banished or put to death, and the land, you may have no visions, songs, creativity, anything like that. The legend in this land is that the moon was so saddened by the silence that she cried tears that extinguished her life, so the moon has not been seen for many generations. So The Moonquest is a quest story to restore the light of the moon and bring stories back to land. It’s (inaudible) because I don’t think I could have done it that way, I think it really is a wonderful metaphor for a creative block and breaking through our creative blocks, it truly was for me in writing this story was a breakthrough of a creative block for me. And right now I’m working on a sequel, which is tentatively titled The Star Quest. It seems to me as though it’s going to be a trilogy. Not a conventional trilogy because the second book is really about the daughter of the main character of the first book, who is already dead by the time the second book begins, so it’s more of a generational thing than a trilogy. But that’s what I’m working on right now, and that’s what I’m working on every morning when I’m writing, for the most part, if I’m not working on a couple blogs. Some mornings I’m actually working on those.

Dr. Kent: Tell us where we can find your books and CD’s.

Mark David Gerson: Absolutely. The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, and there’s also a companion 2-CD set, a recorded guided meditation called The Voice of the Muse Companion, and The Moonquest, all available through Amazon. They’re also available through the publisher at www.lightlinesmedia.com, and the two books, not the CD, are available through other online retailers, and in some bookstores across the US (inaudible). And people can find me on the website at markdavidgerson.com.

Dr. Kent: So at markdavidgerson.com we can find out everything, including all the stuff he just said, and information about The Voice of the Muse, and The Moonquest. Thank you so much for chatting with me, and for always tweeting with me online.

Mark David Gerson: A pleasure Kent, thank you.

Dr. Kent: Now my next guest on the show is a author and a musician. We’re going to talk to her in just a minute. Her name is Janet Paschal. Come on back.

Posted by admin | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, PODCAST, Publishing, TRANSCRIPTS

Interview with Lesa Trapp (AngelLesa) | Sound Authors Radio

January 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, October 3rd and I have the pleasure of speaking with Lesa Trapp whose handle is AngelLesa online and she hosts the Odd Mind, a radio show and she has 3.2 million listeners each month – that’s pretty amazing. She has the Odd Mind Magazine as well. She’s a writer, she interviews authors. Welcome to the show.

Lesa Trapp: Thank you, thank you so much, I’m glad to be here.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little about your show.

Lesa Trapp: All right. Basically I let the voice of the authors, musicians, comedians, artists have a voice. For a long time the independent authors and Indie type people never really had a voice and so I gave them an outlet and from there each artist brought in a listening base and they stayed. And it grew and grew and so it turned into a magazine as well.

Dr. Kent: What is the magazine?

Lesa Trapp: The magazine, the first part of the magazine shows all of the shows I do for four months. I put it out quarterly and it tells like their product, if it’s a book it gives a synopsis and it gives the bio of the person and it lists all of their websites. And anybody can get it and they can read that or go listen to their show and listen to them live. That part of the magazine has short stories, poetry, articles on writing and photography and then we have a bunch of fun space.

Dr. Kent: Tell me a little bit about now on your show, interviewing the authors kind of like this show; what’s the key for you to getting to the heart of an authors story, of their biography? Do you take it to them?

Lesa Trapp: You mean like in asking the questions?

Dr. Kent: Exactly.

Lesa Trapp: Okay, I like to find out the human side of them and I find that the listeners when they relate to the authors, they seem to like them and they find that they’re human. So I like to ask them what they wanted to be when they grew up and how they got into writing and where the stories came from. Its unbelievable how many people write in and say gosh, I really liked this guy. I’ve done that too so it kind of brings the authors to the people.

Dr. Kent: How many of your authors have really shocked you on the show? How many of them make you say, oh my goodness what did they just say?

Lesa Trapp: Well I’ve had one author who he went to a friend’s house when he had his interview and there were too many people there so he did it in their closet and so it was Scott Nickleson and the whole interview he was in a child’s closet looking at clowns and talking to me.

Dr. Kent: What do you read? Do you enjoy certain kinds of books or do you like them all?

Lesa Trapp: I really like more the murder mysteries and sometimes romance if there’s a storyline to it. I don’t like just love affairs. I want a storyline. So I really like I could try everything but I always go back to the detective novelist or the murder mystery or something.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about how you got into this. You’ve published yourself, you’ve self published and the Odd Mind Magazine is out there for the world to read, you’ve got this radio show; how did you get into this business?

Lesa Trapp: I started in March and I ran across a guy that had a radio show and I asked him how he did it and he told me. And he showed me how to do it and I told him I had a bunch of author friends. So I called a few of them and they came on and interviewed with me and other authors found out and all of a sudden I went from doing one show a week to I’m doing five a week.

Dr. Kent: And you love it.

Lesa Trapp: I am, I do love it and I’m booked all the way to December with five shows a week.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, what kind of authors do you choose? Are you discriminatory? Do you like certain ones or all of them?

Lesa Trapp: I take everybody who calls me and I tell them to pick out a day because as I look at it, I don’t know what the listeners like because they come from everywhere. I just had one on yesterday about knitting and you wont believe how many people called in!

Dr. Kent: About knitting?

Lesa Trapp: Yeah, and I don’t knit.

Dr. Kent: So are you thinking of starting to knit?

Lesa Trapp: Oh no, I’m too busy, I’m raising four kids plus the writing and the magazine.

Dr. Kent: Four kids! My goodness.

Lesa Trapp: I call myself a breeder.

Dr. Kent: I don’t know how you have any time to do this radio show.

Lesa Trapp: I just do it one hour at night and then I deal with the kids, luckily they’re in school.

Dr. Kent: Can anybody interview with you? How do people get a hold of you?

Lesa Trapp: Well from the site, all they have to do is email me and then I’ll tell them to go pick out a day. I keep like the month at a glance date up on my site and so I tell them to pick out a date and that’s the date they get. I tell them to send me their information but everybody’s welcome. I get musicians, comedians, authors, artists, all of them.

Dr. Kent: Well it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you. We’re both on the blog talk radio network. I’ve been chatting with AngelLesa, she has a show called the Odd Mind and clearly I’m sure you’ve had some odd minds on the show.

Lesa Trapp: Oh I think we’re all odd minds aren’t we?

Dr. Kent: I think so and I love the graphic you have of the odd mind with words coming out of the mind like suspense, drama, and provocative. Well it’s been a real honor chatting with Lesa Trapp and we should all tune in!

Lesa Trapp: Thank you so much!

Dr. Kent: We’ll keep in touch. My next guest on the show will be Judy Collins. It’s going to be my honor chatting with this legend of music. We’re going to listen to some of her songs and talk with her about many, many years in the business; for decades. Here’s a song from Judy Collins to start us off and then we’ll speak with her after that song is done. This is a song that made her famous in some ways, way back when called Send In The Clowns. It’s a stunning song.

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Warren Whitlock | Twitter Guru

December 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Interview with Warren Whitlock [14:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It was a great pleasure to speak with book publicity legend Warren Whitlock about his newest book and project “Twitter Revolution.” The world is all a’twitter about it… More about Warren Whitlock from his website:

Warren Whitlock is the Marketing Results Coach. His mission is to help authors and businesses improve the results of their marketing programs.

Warren is a #1 best selling author, publisher, and editor of dailywarren.com, an online web log (blog) focused on book marketing.

Warren is an entrepreneur in the computer and imaging industries, several offline businesses and Internet properties. He started his career in broadcast advertising, developing cross promotions between two or more businesses, and has used the same strategies in direct mail and other media.

Over the past decade, Warren has taught thousands of small businesses, authors and individuals how to use proven direct marketing principles to promote product or service, started a trade association for manufacturers in the imaging products industry and served on several executive boards.

Posted by admin | Filed Under AUTHOR INTERVIEW, Business, Entertainment, History, PODCAST, Publishing