D. C. Pierson: Touring a Book & a Movie? No Problem!

When I met D.C. Pierson back in December, he was in the middle of visiting New York to promote a short run of his debut motion picture, Mystery Team, at an indie theater; he and other members of the Derrick Comedy troupe were sitting in on screenings and fielding questions from the audience. (They’re going wherever they can get enough people to go online and say they’d come to see it if it were in their town; it just opened in Chicago last week and will be in Minneapolis next month.) We’d gotten together to talk about his debut novel, The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, but, he admitted cheerfully, he was currently “putting the book tour on top of the movie tour.”

Pierson told me how he came up with the idea for the novel back when he was still living here. “I got on the N train and my friend Eliza was on there,” he recalled; she was the one who suggested he write the book, then agreed to be his “novel sponsor” when he told her he thought he could do it if he had somebody giving him motivational pushes along the way. He kept booking small acting jobs to support himself while working on the manuscript—you might recognize him as the “No problem!” waiter from a Golden Corral spot—and then put the finishing touches on it after shooting Mystery Team in the spring of 2008. The book landed with Gerry Howard at Doubleday, and Pierson said it was his editor’s idea to add the illustrations (meant to reflect the teenage protagonist’s creative ambitions) after reading it. “I didn’t do any art for it as I was writing it,” he said; though he “doodled” as a kid, “I don’t really do it as its own thing.” (Still, his skills are good enough, he conceded, that he was the one who storyboarded Mystery Team before filming began.)

Back before all this, though, he once spent two days temping for Barnes & Noble’s accounting department—now he’s become one of their featured “Discovery” authors. Not a bad progression.

8 February 2010 | interviews |