My name is Ben Rehder. I write for a living, and I find it painful at times, which means I'm always looking for things to keep me from doing it. Hence this blog.

What will I discuss here? No idea, really. Writing, probably. Reading. Whatever pops into my head.

And here's the first such item:

I have four books out from St. Martin's Press, and in that time I have done a lot of publicity-related events. Booksignings, festivals, interviews, etc. They're a lot of fun, and I get to meet a bunch of interesting people.

However, these events don't always go as planned. When my second book, Bone Dry, came out, a friend of mine knew a woman who co-hosted a radio program in New York. He told her about me, and I was invited onto the show. The other host (he was the headliner and main host) had been a pioneering DJ from way back. Now he was broadcast on the AM band to 100 stations around the nation. It was in the middle of the night, but I'd be reaching something like a million listeners, so I was all for it.

Anyway, I get to the studio, and I'm nervous, but that's okay. I get to listen to part of the program as I wait, and it seems interesting. They are discussing a broad range of topics, including current events in NYC.

Finally, about an hour later, I go on. The hosts welcome me, very congenial, but within seconds it becomes obvious that they haven't read my books, nor do they know much about me at all. They know I'm from Texas, so they ask about George Bush. They make a remark about the awful heat down here. They finally ask a few cursory questions about my novels, but since they aren't familiar with them, the questions are very broad and vague. I do my best, giving them a quick overview of the series. Total time: about thirty seconds.

Now, I should say that I don't hold it against the hosts that they haven't read the books. They’re busy people, and I received sort of a backhanded invitation onto the show, so it didn’t surprise me. But the problem was, I hadn’t done many radio interviews, and I really wasn’t prepared to speak about anything EXCEPT my books. What’s more, I wasn’t familiar with recent events in NYC. The host has sort of a train-of-thought style, so he was quickly jumping from topic to topic, and I wasn’t contributing much at all. Truth is, I felt like a loser. The worst guest ever.

As the minutes went by, I was waiting for the host to say, “Okay, well thanks for joining us,” or something to that effect. Most interviews, after all, don’t last longer than five or ten minutes. But he didn’t say anything, and I kept sitting in that chair, speaking up occasionally, but not much, and before I knew it, an hour had gone by.

After a while, another guest joined us, apparently a regular, and he and the hosts were discussing all kinds of stuff that I knew nothing about. Now I really felt odd, sitting there, wondering why they hadn’t booted me yet. In hindsight, I should’ve had more fun with it and just jumped into the conversation with all sorts of goofy comments. Which is what I finally did. One comment, anyway.

The subject of the Dalai Lama came up because he had visited NYC the day before. If you put a gun to my head (please don’t) I couldn’t tell you anything about the Dalai Lama except that he wears some sort of funny robe. However, I am very familiar with Bill Murray’s rambling narrative in Caddyshack about having once caddied for the Dalai Lama. It’s one of the funniest scenes in movie history. And a line popped into my head.

So the two hosts and the guest were having a spirited conversation about the Dalai Lama, and I was completely mute until there was a small break in the patter and I said...

“Big hitter, the Lama.”

Keep in mind that the other three people on the show were all about twenty to thirty years older than I am--not the Caddyshack demographic--and I had a pretty good feeling they wouldn’t recognize the line. And they didn’t. After I made the remark, there was this slight pause--dead air--as they were all wondering what the hell this kid from Texas was babbling about. Then they continued as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.