Tomorrow I am having the first (hopefully of many...) big press event for Generation Blend. My colleague Dan Rasmus and I are meeting with foreign reporters at Microsoft as part of their big Information Worker Vision event, and Dan will be interviewing me on stage for a while until we open it up to Q&A.

I've been somewhat nervous about this for a while. I have never had a problem speaking in public, and I certainly have plenty to say on the themes of Generation Blend, but for the last week or so, I have been very tongue-tied when trying to describe it to people. It seems reasonable to me that if you are an author, you should have a pretty good answer if someone asks, "so what is your book about?" Yet more often than not, I have managed to babble on as though my brain were a bowl of cold spaghetti. This is not recommended at a press event, especially when many of the reporters are not native English-speakers.

Today we had our run-through in front of the Microsoft PR team. About two questions in, I suddenly felt the fog clear. I had an answer for everything, my stories had points (some were even funny), I was doing all that eye-contact stuff they tell you to do. It was weird. No amount of preparation could have got me to that point. It just had to happen. It's like all the information was floating around in my head in a super-saturated suspention, and suddenly a seed crystal appeared to gather it all into a coherent whole. I'm not sure this is replicable on command (though I hope it is), but it was certainly a good feeling!