I'm gripped by fierce mixed emotions this afternoon.

Tuesday, the New Yorker asked me to do a Q&A for their book blog, about my book Columbine.  The interview is up right now--both on the book page, and featured near the top of their home page.

Making the New Yorker was a lifelong dream. I expected a glorious  day--and I am happy about. I was pleased by the questions from Lila Byock, and she was really generous with her intro.

But it's been a gloomy day and a half, too. Events intervened.

Lila first wrote asking me to do it on Tuesday, and her editor wanted a quick turnaround--posting the next day. It was the New Yorker, so of course I said yes. 

I got the questions just as I was heading to the gym that night, where I did one hell of a workout to make up for two weeks off during my trip to Harvard and NYC. 

So I got home, had dinner and looked at the questions at 10 p.m. I got to bed at three.

Two years ago, I got the Virginia Tech news a similar way. A BBC colleague I'd met through the wonderful Dart Center called as I was literally getting out of bed. He asked me to appear on air to discuss "the events in Virginia this morning." I groaned, involuntarily, and I remember exactly what came out of my mouth. "Oh God. What happened in Virginia?" 

I was asking for the particulars, because I knew the gist. Someone had opened fire on a school there. That's when I get the call. I had not pictured something that awful, though.

Yesterday, I was a little more used to it. That doesn't make it much better. So sad.

For now, I guess this is who I am. The school shooter expert.  Hopefully I had something useful to say, but I am looking forward to writing second, third and fouth books on more pleasant topics, and getting the phone calls when something wonderful happens.

(But will I actually write books about happiness? Hmmmmm. I might not take that bet.)

I am happy about the New Yorker piece, though, and I like talking about this topic, grisly as it might be. Since I dove in to learn about spree killers several years ago, I have come to find them fascinating.

So I try to do my job, sometimes keeping a safe emotional distance from other tragedies. It's the survivors that do me in--and the victims. I talked to my shrink after one particularly bad round in 2006, and we agreed to some limits. I made a rule when Virginia Tech happened that I had to change the station or FF when any victim profiles came on. I get too emotionally involved that way, and it's just too much. I expect to follow the Columbine people in some way for the rest of my life, but I can't take more into my life that personally.

Anyway, if you want a listen,  I was on BBC-2's noontime "Jeremy Vine Show" today, and you can hear the whole thing here. (There's a scroll bar which will take you right to me at mintue/second 11:08, but the journalist right before me was excellent, reporting from the school in Germany.)

I'll try to get links to other shows I did later, as podcasts go up.

We delayed the NYer posting by a day to add in a question on the German situation. The rest of that interview was conducted before we knew it happened.

---

I'll try to get back here with more thoughts on the German shooting.

So far, the reporting seems very responsible. I found this opening of a Yahoo News story this morning really enlighening:

WINNENDEN, Germany – "You will hear from me tomorrow, remember the name of a place called Winnenden."

Authorities say a 17-year-old left that message in an Internet chat room six hours before he went on a rampage in his former high school and killed 15 people in this southwest German town.

Tim Kretschmer wrote that he was "sick of this life" and planned to storm the school the next day "and really toast them," Baden Wuerttemburg state Interior Minister Heribert Rech told reporters Thursday.

The transcript released by authorities gave the first indication of what might have driven Kretschmer, described by his peers as withdrawn and shy, to carry out a bloodbath on Wednesday before turning a 9 mm Beretta pistol on himself after a shootout with police.

"Everyone laughs at me, nobody recognizes my potential," Kretschmer wrote in the German-language chat with a teen in the neighboring state of Bavaria. The Bavarian teen told his father and then police about the chat when he realized the threat had been real.

Since then, it has been reported that Kretschmer was treated repeatedly for depression.

Two huge cautions: 

1.Be very careful about early reports. A pattern does seem to be emerging here, but the early reports tend to be tiny bits of the puzzle, which can be very misleading about the full picture.

2. As I told the NYer, "There is no accurate profile of the school shooter, but there are several useful categories." I laid out three of the common categories in a piece for Slate in the wake of Virginia Tech.They are 1) psychopath (Eric), 2) angry depressive (Dylan), 3) severely mentally ill, with a complete break from reality (Cho, apparently).

Within each category, comparisons are extremely useful.

So far, early signs are looking a whole lot like another Dylan Klebold, but without the partner to spur him on. The fact that we have an actual medical diagnosis of depression is powerful evidence, although sometimes other conditions can present as depression.

So the diagnosis can change as we get more data. Don't allow him to get boxed in too soon. But keep an eye on depression. In the Slate piece, I laid out a thumbnail of how depressives tend to go interalized self-hatred to externalized. 

In the book, I have the luxury of showing that slow evolution by Dylan  over the course of several chapters. I think he's probably the most interesting, and tragic character in the book--which is not at all what I expected when I started writing. But the Slate piece hopefully gives you an overview of how the process usually unfolds in an angry depressive.

---

FYI, The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has wonderful resources for understanding tragedies and reporting on them, including case studies, tipsheets and this PTSD 101 guide.

---

I want to use this moment to thank all you OSers for the tremendous support you guys have shown me over the long, slow process of this book launch. It's like nothing I've ever been through before, and I've enjoyed sharing it. I always feeling maybe I'm sharing a little too much, but I've really been encouraged by the responses here. It helps.

We got the first edit of my book trailer last night, and I'm thrilled. I love everything about it except my face (seriously, unfortunately--but that's between me and my shrink, right?)

I think the filmmaker, Andrew Kemler, is brilliant. (He worked on South Park for years, and both Matt and Trey's movies, and those guys don't work with no slouches.) We hope to have it posted soon. I'll definitely let you know here.