Visiting Kat Zhang

Let's start the week off with something fun and simple, then! I had the wonderful pleasure of visiting Kat Zhang in Nashville, Tennessee over the weekend, and hot damn but it was a good time. Every night was a booze-filled techno-fest and every morning began at 1pm. We burned cash at indian casinos in california and other places, and sang Patsy Cline karaoke. We tripped down streets in early hours and watched the sunrise. We talked all about the other lies we could come up with to make my trip seem glamorous. (...In other words, none of that actually happened.) Yeah, it was mostly just hanging out in her dorm perpetuating writer stereotypes and chatting about books. Exactly my kind of trip, to be honest. She had a successful launch party on Saturday for her debut book What's Left of Me, and the rest of the weekend was taken up by eating, sleeping, and doing homework. And then yesterday I sat her down and begged her to do a video interview. Man, sometimes you just don't realize how silly the things you say are until you watch a video of all your jokes falling flat. We really should've known better. We're writers. We don't do improv. Ideally we should've written a script and memorized the crap out of it. Instead we were left with twenty minutes of footage of self-conscious giggles, awkward pauses, ummm's, like's, yeah's, terrible jokes, bad sarcasm, continuity failures, cramped framing so no one would be able to tell that we were still wearing pajama bottoms, and roommates making bread in the background. For the sake of all that is good in this world, we pared it down to three minutes of jump cuts, forgetting to introduce the book, and somewhat streamlined dialogue. Hopefully, you'll enjoy it. It's mostly two silly girls laughing at their own stupidity. But there's some authorial insight from Kat thrown in as well.