Even though this is out of sequence — that is, Laura should first be writing about her first event, a reading and signing at Newtonville Books — she’s going to start with her trip downtown to do a Comcast Cable TV entertainment-news show mainly because she has photographs and wants to try out all the cool brant-improving features now available to her.

Some might consider “Backstage with Barry Nolan” the poor man’s “Entertainment Tonight” but it’s produced by Comcast for Comcast (she thinks people “in the business” call that “original programming”) and it’s national and it gets real live celebrity guests — but Laura’s getting ahead of herself once again.

Anyway, on Thursday night Laura and her media escort, Benji, left the suburb of Newton, Mass., and drove their Volvo station wagon down Commonwealth Ave. past B.C. and toward B.U. where the Comcast Studio is located. (Laura assumed an actual driver was going to chauffeur her in a plush black sedan so she could sit in the back seat and read a magazine or talk on her cellphone with the little high-intensity lamp on the way she always sees businessmen doing on the highway when they’re being driven to and from the airport, but obviously her publicist screwed up.) It was dark, and since her escort couldn’t drive — much less read, since he’s only 6! — matching the streets up with the Mapquest directions she’d printed out earlier was pretty stressful for Laura since she’s one of those people who can get lost coming out of her own bedroom. Her lack of a decent sense of direction (especially in an area she grew up in) notwithstanding, Laura was able to find the Comcast building and get there on time. Which, for the former publicist that Laura is, means an hour and ten minutes early.

Once Laura and Benji entered the building (it was kind of annoying because Laura The Author About To Be Televised had to open the door for Benji The Child-Escort, but she remained professional and courteous and did not pitch a hissy-fit the way she could have under the horrendous and humiliating circumstances and which would have been entirely justifiable), they were brought to the Green Room to wait.

Having thought ahead, Laura had suggested to Benji that he bring something with him to do while they waited, so he brought a shopping bag filled with train tracks and trains which he then proceeded to spread out all over the floor of the tiny Green Room. Laura was afraid someone was going to complain, but the only other person in the Green Room was a woman who did Reiki (alternative healing) and she didn’t seem to mind one bit.

Waiting in the Green Room was super exciting for Benji! Good thing they’d gotten there so early and had so much extra time to kill! Clearly Benji couldn’t wait to tell everyone the next day how exciting waiting in the Green Room was and how cool he felt hanging out at the local cable tv studio even though he looked really really bored and tired. In fact, the only time Benji seemed to perk up was when they watched on the Green Room’s large flat-screen TV John Stamos being interviewed from the set of “ER” (actually, that was the only time Laura perked up, too.)

Anyway, after about 40 minutes Laura went to the make-up lady’s room, and the shortly after she returned a young man from the show came and gave her a mic to thread up her sweater and clip onto the neck of her sweater. (Laura always gets uncomfortable doing this since most of the time the young men who are helping to thread the mics up people’s shirts or sweaters are about half her age and she doesn’t want to scare them.)

As it turned out, Barry Nolan was not there (he allegedly “had the night off” and “was out on assignment” which made it obvious to Laura The Nobody’s Fool Author that someone was lying), so instead Laura was interviewed by veteran entertainment reporter Sara Edwards. Sara is blond, brassy, sassy, and a true professional. Sara was also just a little bit older than Laura which made Laura feel better about how old she felt around the young mic-person. Benji was even allowed into the studio and got to sit on a high swivel chair while Laura endured the grueling interview. Three or four minutes later, the interview was over, and Laura led Benji out of the Comcast studio.

Unfortunately, Benji was hungry, and so at almost 9:30 p.m., Laura took him next door to a small pizza parlor that was still open and got him a slice. While she watched Ben eat (and while she wiped cheese off his chin, and opened his bottle of water, and got him more napkins, and offered him the shaker jar of grated cheese, and ate his crusts, and threw away his greasy paper plate), Laura couldn’t help but feel proud of herself. Despite their roles being ridiculously reversed — Ben was supposed to wait on Laura hand and foot but Laura was the one who’d ended up waiting on Ben hand and foot! How unfair was that?! — she’d remained professional and polite even under extreme duress. Being a guest on cable tv wasn’t easy but Laura refused to be one of those impossibly difficult celebrity-divas who complained about everything – just like the hasbeen, Mary Ford, in the book she was promoting!

Laura would like to send out a big thank you to all five people who wrote favorable reviews for Piece of Work on Amazon. Now, whenever she goes to the Piece of Work page, that first bad and annoying customer review isn’t the first thing she sees!

Laura can’t believe that it took her this long — and this many brant entries — to figure out how to pimp her text entries. But she just discovered that only when using Firefox can she access bold and italics and insert links and images, all of which she feels are enormously important to use when branting.

Despite all her previous protestations, Laura is starting to enjoy branting. Her first impulse after seeing this really cool New York Times email blast promoting “Piece of Work” that her publisher was generous enough to arrange was to post the link on her brant — i.e., to brag — so everyone could see it. So here it is, despite the usual technical difficulties of not being able to get the link to light up…

http://www.nytimes.com/todaysheadlines

This just occurred to Laura: if you, too, are nervous because today is the OPD of POW, Laura has an idea of what you could do to distract yourself: You could leave a POSITIVE comment on the Amazon page for POW. There is only one customer comment on her POW page, and it SUCKS, and Laura would really appreciate it if people could leave enough POSITIVE comments to make that one go as far down on the list as possible. That way, whenever people (Laura) would go to the POW page and look at the customer comments, they (Laura) wouldn’t even know it was there because who has time to scroll down that far.

Laura just posted a message on her Discussion page because it’s the Official Publication Date (OPD) of “Piece of Work” (POW) and she doesn’t know what to do with herself. An OPD doesn’t really mean anything anyway: it’s just an arbitrary date a publisher picks within the month of a book’s publication. The problem is, everyone thinks the OPD is like a birthday, which means they think something special is supposed to happen, which means you start to think something special is supposed to happen even though nothing special ever really happens on OPD (at least, not to Laura). And so, because of all of this expectation (from others, and from herself), she’s kind of at a loss for what to do today. Which is why she posted a message on her Discussion page asking people to help her figure out what to do today and how to distract herself from the oppressive weight of expectation (OWE) — or, the Weight of Oppressive Expectation (WOE) — of OPD.

Which brings her to the issue of “confusion” — Laura actually wasn’t sure whether she should post that message on her Discussion page or on her Brant. Laura really isn’t clear on any of this website stuff, and this is a perfect example. Since it seemed to her to be more of a “discussion” type of issue — it was, in fact, was a direct solicitation — a plea, even — for a dialogue, Laura naturally thought instantly of posting it on her Discussion page. But what about the Brant? Doesn’t the Brant have a discussion-like feature — the “comment” — to make it conversational and dialogue-ian as well? Since she thinks the Brant, too, can be used as a forum to discuss her personal and professional issues, she decided to post the same message — a paraphrased version, anyway — here as well.

And so, for anyone who didn’t visit her Discussion page, please try to think of a topic of conversation or something Laura could do today. Thank you.

For those of you (besides Laura) who are counting the days before “Piece of Work” is published, there are only ten more days between now, September 15, and the official publication date of September 25. Laura thinks she’s done the math right (25 minus 15 = 10), but just in case she hasn’t she’s showing her work (maybe if she hadn’t gotten an 11 on her math final in her junior year of high school she would have more faith in her ability to do math, if you can even call simple addition, or subtraction, math). If she’s made a mistake in her calculation, please bring the error to her attention by leaving a comment here on her brant (just make sure you sign it “Smarty-Pants”).

Not to get bogged down in more figures and numbers (this is the most math Laura has done in years), but in the 15 days since her first brant entries Laura got pretty busy. She meant to keep her brant current with interesting and entertaining entries to satisfy her rabid readers (although from what she can tell about them so far, she’s not sure satisfying her readers is possible because they are SO incredibly rabid), but she was kind of swamped (inundated, actually) with enthusiastic responses to her website. Yes, okay, so a lot of the praise was for the site designer’s (Jefferson Rabb’s) actual design of the site (”cool”, “hip”, and “modern” are three words Laura got really sick of hearing this week), but she, too, received her share of comments regarding the content. While most people (allegedly) enjoyed the faux-narcissistic voice of the third-person narrator (also known as “Laura The Branter”), one or two people (buzz-killers) doubted the fact that Laura is really as insecure as she makes herself out to be. In other words, they wonder if her self-deprecation is an act. This struck Laura as incredibly funny (in fact, she would have started laughing hysterically if she wasn’t already crying hysterically because of how wounded she felt having her credibility called into question like that). All Laura can say is that these doubters (buzz-killers) must not know her very well. In fact, Laura wants to reassure everyone that she is even more insecure in real life than she makes herself out to be on her website!

(OK, well obviously that’s a lie, but you know what she means.)

Laura also wants to call attention to the fact that her theories about celebrity narcissism (featured in “Piece of Work”) are actually based in sound scientific research. To prove that she does her homework before shooting her mouth off (even though, technically, she shot her mouth off long before this bit of supporting research was released), she’d like you to read this September 13th article from the Los Angeles Times — “Celebrities Are Their Own Biggest Fans.” (Again, she’s providing the link even though she doesn’t know how to get the link to light up and do it’s linking-thing.)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/cl-et-narcissism12sep12,1,5835330.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-entnews&ctrack=1&cset=true

It’s pretty amazing that Laura already has an actual reason to brant right now, but she does: a Q & A with her has just been posted on MediaBistro Toolbox. She’s going to post the link (whatever that means) despite the fact that she can’t figure out how to make the link light up and turn blue so that it does its linking-job. Which means you’ll have to copy the link into your browser: more work, certainly, but that’s not Laura’s problem.

www.mediabistro.com/mbtoolbox/pop_quiz/pop_quiz_laura_zigman_43082.asp?#email

For those of you who have just arrived at Laura’s Website, you might want to read her Homepage and her Bio to see what she’s all about these days (self-promotion).

Up until now, Laura considered such public displays of self-absorption — PDSAs — completely unseemly and she refused to engage in anything which could, even remotely, be considered self-promotional. Of course, when invited to do a reading, or attend a book group, or give a lecture, Laura would always gratefully accept. Why? Because she hadn’t generated the attention; the attention had come to her.

But when it would come time to generate attention to herself for herself by herself — the way all authors are supposed to — she refused. Which is why, at this late date, 2006, years and years after every single Tom Dick and Harry has their own website and blog and newsletter and podcast, she is finally joining the pack.

Yet even though she is indeed joining the pack, Laura refuses to follow the herd. This has always been both a positive and a negative in her life. Because instead of just blogging away on a blog, she felt the need to create her own specialized forum of communcation — one she has renamed BRANT. Brant, she feels, better sums up exactly what this sort of activity is really all about — bragging and ranting — and now that she has her own brant she will be branting away as much as possible.

And so, Laura welcomes you to the introductory post for her brand new brant. She hopes you like it! (But if you don’t, please don’t tell her. The last thing she needs right now 24 days away from publication is a whole bunch of “honesty” from people she doesn’t even know. That would be a huge buzz-killer.)