Ever heard of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers? It’s an organization of authors who put sweat, blood and tears into crafting literary advertisements for pop-culture franchises. In other words they produce books with titles like, um, Warhammer: Elfslayer. Anyhow, IAMTW just announced this year’s nominees for the 2009 Scribe Awards, “which honor excellence in licensed tie-in writing – novels based on TV shows, movies, and games.” And guess what? CityLife contributor Tod Goldberg is a nominee! Apparently, when he’s not providing Las Vegas’ most established weekly paper with insightful book reviews, he also chronicles the further adventures of covert-operations agent Michael Westen from the USA Network thriller series Burn Notice. Fellow CityLife freelancer Jarret Keene e-mailed Goldberg to discuss the great news.

Jarret Keene: Hey, Tod, let’s do a CityBlog interview regarding your nomination!

Tod Goldberg: Um, OK.

JK:  So how does it feel to be nominated for a Scribe (in the Best General Fiction category)? Feel somehow less literary?

TG: Well, I’ve lost a lot of literary awards in the past, so I suspect that I’ll feel no less literary when I lose this award, too.

JK: Does this mean you’ve found real success as a tie-in writer?

TG: I don’t know what that is, precisely — maybe my real success as a tie-in writer is that I don’t have angry fans of Burn Notice parked around my house shouting obscenities at me. Actually, now that I think about it, the hate mail I’ve gotten from fans of the show who’ve read the book and been somehow angered by it normally focuses on how I put swear words into the book, which is odd since they don’t mind the fact that people get fucking murdered every week on the show or in the books. But say “fuck” and, well, a tree in Israel dies.

JK: Man, how in the world are you going to beat out Max Allan Collins and Greg Cox? If you do, will they kill you? No offense, but they’re great writers, too.

TG: I don’t expect to, so that’s the best part of the deal. As noted poets the Gin Blossoms once said, if you don’t expect too much from me, you might not be let down. So I expect to lose and to lose poorly. I will probably hit someone. I feel like, if need be, I could probably take out a Star Trek or Buffy writer without a problem. Worst-case scenario, my brother Lee will be there, too, and I know I can take him.

JK: Burn Notice is a great property, but what other TV shows, films and games are you itching to tackle?

TG: None. I wasn’t itching to tackle Burn Notice, but the show runner, Matt Nix, have known each other for a long time, I love the show and when it was offered to me it sounded like a ton of fun, which it has been. So I don’t see me writing any others, candidly, so don’t go running to the bookstore to read my take on, you know, My Two Dads: The Novel.

JK: I would run for that! God, since the Scribes will be awarded at Comic-Con in San Diego (July 23-29), does this mean you’ll be forced to attend Comic-Con?

TG: It seems like it. I’ve never been to Comic-Con before and it actually seems pretty cool, even though I’m not a huge comic book guy. I did once attend a Starlog convention about 25 years ago and what I recall about that is that a lot of people dressed in costumes asked me weird questions about Lovecraft, perhaps because at 13 I looked like a horror show. The upside is that if I do lose and have to fight my way out of the convention, I could always focus my attention away from the other writers and instead fight some guy dressed like Boba Fett, so there’s that.

For more information about the IAMTW, visit www.iamtw.org.