Book launch: Mission accomplished!

OK, we're off!

Today is my book's one week birthday, and it's been a really wild and wonderful launch week.

As a first-timer, I wasn't really sure what to expect on a book's official publication date, especially now that thanks to Amazon pre-order a ton of folks had already gotten their copies a week before, and my students were routinely spotting it in bookshops by Thanksgiving weekend. Would confetti drop from the sky? Maybe there would be the sound of trumpets? Or maybe I could just sort of ... lie down for a while?

What actually happened was that a ton of lovely radio interviewers wanted to know more about my book, so I did my very first interviews ... on the other side of the mic. As a reporter, I've long been the person sticking mics into people's faces and asking them to speak slowly and in complete sentences. (And to tell me what they had for breakfast, which is the reporter's sound check staple.) But it turns out that it's really fun to be on the other side of the process, too.

Here are a few of my favorites so far:

"Extending Human Experience" with Krys Boyd on the "Think" show at KERA (Dallas, TX) -- a whole hour of great questions from Krys!

"Sense and Virtuality" on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC (New York City) -- in which a caller wants to tell us about grafting human skin onto trees. (You can listen here.)

I even got to weigh in on Voice of America's international edition with Susan Yackee!

Note to self for future interviews: Talk slow, don't cough into the mic, nobody can hear you waving at the phone.

Thanks to everyone on Goodreads who has added my book to your to-read list or given it a rating so far! It's been amazing to see it go out into the world, and I hope people are enjoying it.

And if any of you know about grafting skin onto trees ... please tell me!