Derek’s Comments (group member since Sep 21, 2010)

Derek’s comments from the Q&A with Derek Gentry group.

Kokanut wrote: "i just finished reading The Lost Symbol By Dan Brown it was great"

I've never tried any Dan Brown myself. Watching chunks of the movie on cable has pretty much ruined The DaVinci Code for me, so maybe Angels & Demons or The Lost Symbol?

I like your suggestion about Infinite Jest. I'm guessing that I'll enjoy the book, and the idea of committing to just 50 pages makes starting it much less intimidating. Thanks!

How strange & disappointing that Chabon's books aren't available electronically. Given how quickly things are changing on that front, I have to think they'll be out soon. Otherwise, his publishers are just losing potential sales.

I haven't had a chance to read any Chabon yet, but I've wanted to try something. Sounds like The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay might be a good place to start?

For DFW, I've only read A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, but I loved it. Just looking at Infinite Jest scares the crap out of me...but you think it's worth a shot?

Well, I'm a Red Sox fan, which I think is pretty close! The Cubs are definitely my favorite National League team.

I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp when I was twelve, and as you might expect, all of the book’s absurdity, sex, and violence had a corrupting effect on my young mind: it made me want to write fiction.

So I read all of the Irving that I could get my hands on, even as I was plowing through the works of my other favorite novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.. It wasn’t until years later that I learned Vonnegut had been Irving’s teacher in Iowa, a thought that still makes me smile.

Over the years since, I’ve found many new favorites. I’m going to link a bunch of them below, and maybe others can share theirs as well?

I started writing Here Comes Your Man on a plane. I was flying to Seattle to visit a friend, and I starting to imagine this guy named Garrett who travels constantly for work, keeps telling himself that he’s okay with it, but who is really just barely holding it together. I started with one line, which is still in the book: “Landing is always a near-death experience.”

I carried this new character around in my head the whole time I was in Seattle. It was my second visit to the city in just a few months, and setting the story there seemed like a fun and challenging way to put some distance between me, a lifelong Massachusetts resident, and this guy Garrett, a fellow New Englander who had relocated to Seattle for college and never left.

So, with lots of help from my friend in the area, I started doing research—figuring out where Garrett would live, work, and spend his free time. Once I’d developed ideas about all of this, I went back and visited all of the places I’d imagined using, just hanging out and taking notes, sometimes getting new ideas or changing my mind completely.

The action of Here Comes Your Man is set in a number of real places that you can still visit—like Macrina Bakery and Mama’s Mexican Kitchen—and a few other places that existed during the story’s 1999-2000 timeframe, but are no longer around, like The Sit & Spin.

In the end, my hope is that Seattleites will enjoy my depiction of their beautiful city, and that I've given others a feeling for the place. I for one can't wait to go back!

I've been writing for a long time, which is just another way of saying that I've been getting rejected, over and over again, for a long time.

To date, I've received more than 200 rejections for my work, but for some reason, I keep writing anyway. I wrote a blog post about this phenomenon called Testing the Invisible Fence, which included a scan of my all-time favorite rejection letter.

As you might guess from my Pixies-inspired title, music fueled the writing of Here Comes Your Man . If I had my way, every copy of the book would come with a soundtrack CD including not only the songs referenced directly in the text, but also the unmentioned tracks that inspired or encouraged my work on it.

Over the years that I worked on the book, I began to associate certain songs with each character. This wound up being very helpful during the revision process—I could put myself immediately back in touch with a given character or scene by listening to what I'd come to think of as his or her "theme music." In the case of Garrett, my protagonist, this was usually something by The Pixies, or Radiohead's "Let Down."

Thanks for visiting my Q&A!

I'll start by introducing myself, and you can do the same if you feel so inclined...

I'm a fiction writer from Auburndale, Massachusetts, where I live with my wife and our daughter. Here Comes Your Man is my first novel (but hopefully not my last). I grew up in Marshfield, MA and studied creative writing at UMass/Boston. I've worked in Information Technology for the last 17 years, squeezing in writing time wherever I can.