Because I'm in the holiday (read: lazy) mode, I'm stealing today's interviewee's bio from his website. Yes, by the way, it's only Wednesday, not the day I usually do interviews, but it's Friday in spirit. Daniel is a contributing editor at The Week and at Radar. From 2000 to 2001 he was a senior editor at Modern Humorist. Less recently, he was a staff writer and editor at Spy, and a weekly columnist at The New York Press. He has contributed to several books of humor, including 101 Damnations, Mirth of a Nation, and Rough Draft. He also freelances for more publications than you have probably read.

You're a busy guy: do you schedule when you work on each project, or do you grab time wherever you can?
Hang on a sec, I just need to finish reading Romenesko for the fourth time today. Then my blog stats. Then Whedonesque. Then Fleshbot. OK, what were you saying? Oh yeah, busy. Terribly.

Anyway, I'm definitely more of a time-grabber than a scheduler. When at all possible, I prefer to work on one project until its finished before moving on to the next, but that's not possible very often. A lot of what I do is sitting by the phone, so I generally work on one story while I'm waiting for an editor or a source to call back about another. Currently I do have something of an imposed schedule in that I spend all day Monday and Tuesday at the office of The Week, so everything else gets crammed into Wednesday through Friday. Or sometimes through Sunday.

If there is one piece of advice to give to people trying to publish something, anything in the New Yorker, what would it be?

Back off. It's mine, I tell you! Mine, mine, mine!

Other than the obvious - persistence, being Steve Martin — I can pass on something that my editor told me: too many people who set about writing for The New Yorker, particularly for Talk of the Town, get this idea in their head that their style has to be all literary and shit (I'm paraphrasing). What the magazine is really looking for is not precious, hyper-polished prose but clarity of thought and language. Of course, as I've found many times, that's easier said than done.

And if you really mean "anything" you could always enter the cartoon contest.

What was the hardest part about writing your book proposal?
Having never done this before, I initally approached it as if I were pitching an article, just kind of sketching out ideas without trying to give them much form - the idea being that I'd get started and see where the material took me. I think my first version was 7 pages long. My agent, David Kuhn, persuaded me to spend a few months doing enough research to get a real understanding of what the finished product would look like. Then he pushed me to identify narrative lines, characters, and arguments that would propel the book from one chapter to the next. Then he helped me figure out how to put all this together in a way that would be persuasive to people coming to it cold. The final proposal is about 60 pages. So in other words, the whole f*cking thing was hard. But David was right. The proposal ended up being much stronger, and frankly, the book will too.

What have encountered in the research for your book, and how
did you deal with it?
When the idea for a book about Christian pop culture first dropped into my head I thought it was going to be a humor book. I thought I'd read a bunch of crazy novels and listen to a bunch of bad music and make jokes about it. Very quickly, though, I realized that Christian pop isn't just these discrete funny items, but a rich and complex parallel universe that is genuinely fascinating to a curious outsider who happens to fall into it. There was still plenty that I found amusing (I mean, even evangelicals are embarrassed about Test-a-mint breath mints) but there was also a disturbing political dimension that I found quite serious and largely unexamined, as well as a human dimension that I was surprised to find myself quite sympathetic to. With some initial reluctance, I decided to drop my agenda of looking for punchlines and allowed myself to become more a bemused observer. I still have my point of view, of course, and, I hope, my sense of humor, but the book I'm writing now is respectful, substantial and informative as well as entertaining.

When and how did you make the transition from beginning freelancer to working for Esquire, the New Yorker, Radar, etc?
The difference between "beginning freelancer" and "successful freelancer" is not actually as great as the difference between "any type of freelancer" and "real job." I'm still doing basically the same thing I've been doing for years, with a little more freedom and a fraction more money, so to the extent there was a transition, it happened slowly and imperceptively. I was fortunate that my first steady freelancing gig after leaving Spy was a weekly column in the New York Press, which at the time was a paper that everybody in the media world still read. But what really worked to my advantage is that nobody stays in one job for very long in this business, so if you start out knowing three editors at one magazine, pretty soon you know three editors at three different magazines, plus a new one at the first magazine. And with each move, they get more power to assign stories. My career has been helped immensely by sitting around waiting for people I know to land better jobs.