Ridley Pearson was at the local Barnes & Noble last night promoting his latest YA novel, The Academy. A significant fraction of attendees were young’uns, some of them very enthusiastic about his books. He arrived about fifteen minutes early and immediately sat with those already present and talked, answered questions, made jokes, recounted anecdotes. He has cowritten several Peter Pan novels with Dave Barry and is writing a series of YA thrillers set in Disney theme parks. He’s self depracating (“this series has 12 fans, as opposed to that one, which has nine,” he said at one point) and enthusiastic. His deal with Disney gives him full access to all of their theme parks at any time — he’d just gotten back from a trip to Florida where he was on some of the rides at 5 a.m. Creepy place when there’s no one else around, he said.
The idea for doing the Peter Pan books came from his young daughter who, according to his legend, stopped him in the middle of reading to her to ask where Peter had first met the pirates and other questions not answered in the Barrie novel. Turns out that Peter Pan is in the public domain most places, except in England where an act of Parliament preserved the copyright. The recipient of proceeds is the Great Ormand Street Hospital in London, as stipulated in Barrie’s will. Pearson said that about 90% of the money from the European editions of their books goes to this hospital.
Pearson is doing a lot of multimedia tie-ins with his work, including ARGs (which he called Augmented Reality instead of the more traditional Alternate Realigy), websites with interactive videos, etc. I think it’s the Peter Pan novels that have been adapted as a stage production that was workshopped in hopes of landing it on Broadway at some point.
He talked a little about the Rock Bottom Remainders. He said that during their first tour, for which they rented Aretha Franklin’s tour bus, they stopped somewhere in Alabama at about 4 a.m. to refuel. Before they were able to leave, he said, about five people showed up with copies of The Stand for King to sign. Imagine the logistics, he said. Someone had to recognize King, make some phone calls, these people had to stagger out of bed, find their copies of the book and drive to the gas station all in the length of time it took to refuel a bus! This was the same tour with the infamous incident where he and Dave Barry saw someone in the audience in front of King with all ten fingernails on fire. “I never want to be that famous,” Pearson said to Barry at the time–after Barry picked himself up off the floor having fallen there in astonishment. The Remainders are preparing to do another tour shortly, he said.
I bought a copy of his most recent adult thriller, Killer Summer, and read about 30 pages or so. I’ve only read one other of his thrillers, Parallel Lies, which I thought was decent enough if lacking a bit in characterization. He also signed my copy of The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer, signing both as himself and as Joyce Reardon, the putative editor of the diary.
This week’s NCIS was really good. I guessed that the husband had something to do with the contract on their whistleblower early on, but that didn’t detract from the overall fun storyline. The Shatner reference was funny, as were the references to snakes on a plane. I wonder what the deal was with Gibbs getting whapped by the car at the end. Maybe he had some real-life injury they need to work into filming the way they did with Reid on Criminal Minds, who had to get shot to cover the fact that the actor had bunged up his knee.
