Stephenie Meyer and her alma mater's newspaper

The November 24, 2008, edition of the Brigham Young student newspaper contains an article entitled Stephenie Meyer: Too Cool for This School?, which says in part:

Meyer graduated from BYU in 1995 with a bachelor's in English. Because of this inside angle, The Daily Universe requested an interview with the 34-year-old author last week. However, we were snubbed. After a few hours of searching, our reporter finally tracked down Meyer's publicist's e-mail address. But the publicist sent us an e-mail telling us Meyer was on much deserved time off. That's publicist-speak for "She's not going to grant you an interview, so don't bother us."

I'm willing to give Meyer the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure her publicist didn't even pass the message along that her alma mater's newspaper requested an interview. If Meyer has time for a self-indulgent cameo appearance, she has time for a 15-minute phone call.

That's such crap. I'm nowhere near as popular an author as Stephenie Meyer, and my next book doesn't come out for over four months, but we've already been lining up media related to its release (and a book release is much smaller news than is a movie coming out).

I posted the following comment over at WritersWrite.com's Writer's Blog, where I first read this news story; my friend Virginia O'Dine of Canadian SF&F publisher Bundoran Press introduced me to that blog.

"Because of this inside angle, The Daily Universe requested an interview with the 34-year-old author last week."

LAST WEEK? Come on, guys. The fault is not Stephenie Meyer's. It's the paper's for not getting its act together.

Darn tootin' the publicist probably didn't even pass on the request to the author; why should he or she when the students at the paper couldn't be bothered to do their homework and request an interview well in advance of the release date of the film?

You can bet that all the major news outlets that had Meyer stories recently were lined up well in advance. They didn't try to play an "inside angle" at the last minute.

Oh, well. At least the editor didn't say "My dog ate it" to explain his failure to have an interview in his paper.

I have an author friend (someone everyone in Canada knows) who refuses to do any student media. I'm very sympathetic to student efforts -- I founded my high school newspaper, The Northview Post -- but this kind of crap (we didn't do our job properly, so we'll cover for that by being snarky) just vindicates my friend's position.

The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site