Sandy here. Both WJR-AM radio and The Detroit Free Press have requested interviews with us concerning our latest book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fun FAQs. Because interviews require focusing on a subject for an extended period of time, we’re understandably hesitant to do them. While developing our trivia chops since the early 1990s, Kara and I have become masters at taking a narrow subject and finding ways to expand it using tie-ins from pop culture, history, literature, whatever.
And, quite frankly, we do so darned much of it that it’s difficult to distinguish one job from another. When interviewers ask about a particular article done six months ago, we find it very tricky, since we’ve filled our minds with thousands of new bits of information since then. It’s like asking a baseball player about a particular pitch from earlier in the season. There have been so many since then that all you can really say is something generic like, “Yes, well, that was challenging, but I did my best.”
I’m happy to talk about our “craft,” but I even draw a blank when someone asks me for a random interesting fact. There are so many swimming through my head at all hours of the day and night that it becomes more and more difficult to pull out one from the batch. We try to FIND things, and we try to PROVE things, and while we’re at it, we do our best to LEARN things. But they don’t all stick.
A few months back, I calculated our output in 2007, and here’s what I came up with:
- Multiple-choice trivia questions: around 2,500
- Paragraph-length facts: nearly 3,000
- FAQ questions: around 1,200
- Puzzles of varying descriptions: over 500
Combine these with additional things we’ve written (in print, online, and tied to merchandise) and I figure that we ran well over 500,000 words last year alone. Yow. It’s no wonder that the letters keep rubbing off our keyboards. And that doesn’t include the research and fact-checking work that we do for mental_floss, where we have to check every article in each issue for accuracy. That’s a full-time job in itself, with all the checking, reading, calling and digging it takes.
It’s a job that’s usually interesting, sometimes maddening, and often exhausting. But one thing Kara and I both agree on – without hesitation – is that there’s nothing else we’d rather do.
UPDATE: Our interview with Julie Hinds is schedule to run in The Detroit Free Press on Tuesday, August 5. There will be a photo as well, so consider yourselves warned.