It's coming, it's coming!!
Yes, folks, we're less than a week away from the season 3 premiere of Lost, and could the poster for it be any more amazing? Charlie looks evil, Hurley looks stoned, Henry is peeking out from the shadows, Sayid looks confident, Desmond is ALIVE, Sawyer/Kate/Jack look possessed, Eko's half hidden, and Locke's eye is peering out at us. Claire and Jin are off to the side; I wonder if that means their characters will be, too?

In case you haven't heard, they've announced who the first 5 flashbacks will be, and I'll put it at the end of this post with a spoiler warning, so you can keep reading if you don't want to know, and stop when I warn you to.

My book, Finding Lost, came out in stores last week and my publicist has been getting me interviews everywhere. I've done nooner and drive-home radio shows; print interviews in Canada and the U.S.; and next week I'm doing TV, which should be fun.

David Kronke from the L.A. Daily News did an interview with me that was a lot of fun, and he had some inside scoop on stuff that was upcoming on the show. I told him at the outset that I didn't like spoilers, and when he started to tell me some of them, I'll admit I held the phone away from my ear for some of it. But the stuff he told that I did listen to was pretty cool stuff, and he was definitely a knowledgeable fan of the show.

I did a radio show in Kentucky run by a husband and wife team who bickered through part of it, and I loved them to death. They were HILARIOUS ("Tom's been keeping this book all to himself and won't let me look at it" "That's not true!"). They pushed the book a lot, talked about the show (they both watch it pretty faithfully but had missed a couple of episodes, so I filled them in on what they missed) and allowed me to go a lot more indepth on some answers than just, "Who is your favourite character"-type stuff.

Yesterday I did CFRB Radio in Toronto and it was a call-in show, and it was a lot of fun to answer the pretty tough questions some of the fans had (a lot wanted to know about the numbers, and one asked an interesting question about the Eastern philosophical influence on the show through things like Dharma).

I was interviewed by a guy in New Jersey who was very funny and a HUGE fan of the show. Bill Ervelino writes for The Record, and he also blogs specifically on Lost, and his interview with me ran in today's blog. I'm looking forward to checking in with his blog on a regular basis, especially when the show begins.

One of my favourite interviews was with a woman at the Connecticut Post, because she'd spent the summer reading all of the books related to Lost, so she was a woman after my own heart, since I'd spent months doing exactly the same thing. (Unfortunately, the article was taken down so I can't link to it.)

The LOW point of the interviewing has no doubt been doing the Mancow show. Think Howard Stern, minus the brain cells and sense of humour. Then you've pretty much got Mancow. His producer told my publicist they were all huge fans of the show, and that Mancow had specifically requested me because he wanted to talk about it. My publicist knew he was a shock jock sort of thing and told me to be prepared. I'd dealt with obnoxious morning hosts before, and I knew what this guy was like, so I was prepared for the rudeness. What I wasn't prepared for was the downright idiocy. He was ranting about how some gov't official had called his show stupid and anyone who listened to it stupid (well, duh), and then proved how WRONG that person was by... being... stupid. Turns out the producer wasn't being very truthful -- Mancow doesn't watch Lost, has very little interest in Lost, and frankly, I think the show's concepts would be too far over his head, so it's a good thing. He kept me on hold for 15 minutes ranting about one thing after another, then jumped me on the air, asked me if he could watch the S3 premiere if I'd never seen the show before, I said no, you should watch the first two seasons, and he said, "So I gotta watch 2 seasons of a show AND read a book? No thanks. What's in the hatch?" I said, "I'm sorry?" "What's in the hatch?" "That was a season 2 mystery, and it was an experimental station that's being researched by another station, and..." "All right, enough of that" and boom, I was gone.

If you want to watch a great sneak preview that lasts about 3 minutes, from the show's season 3 premiere, check it out at YouTube. It's very exciting, not only to see something new, but it looks like they've put Sawyer in a cage VERY akin to a B.F. Skinner experiment that I talked about at length in the book (see page 187). So that was awesome for me to see.

And finally, the Spoiler about who the first five flashbacks will be (stop reading here if you don't want to know):
Ep 1 -- Jack; Ep 2 -- Sun/Jin; Ep 3 -- Locke; Ep 4 -- Desmond; Ep 5 -- Eko
I don't know about you, but I am super excited about all five of those! I've heard some speculation that the 4th ep is actually Sawyer, not Des, but I think it'll be more fun if it's Des.

That's it for me. For now. Watch next week when I'll be on eTalk Daily in Canada and G4TV in the U.S.!