GARY BENCHLEY, ROCK STAR

a novel by PAUL FORD

This is the cover of the book. They did a nice job at Plume.

News

Did you know that you can win a copy of Gary Benchley, Rock Star through the end of October? You can, simply by visiting The Morning News and answering a single trivia question about the book.

10/13 — I will be on Soundcheck on WNYC today at 2:00PM (Update--I was on Soundcheck; listen! [MP3]) to talk about Gary Benchley, Rock Star. I'll go on after Don McLean. They may take phone calls. I'll be talking with the host about the book and about indie rock in general. It should be fun. If it's not fun then I will have failed. 212-264-7483 is the number to call in live, if you're so inclined.

10/10 — The Gary Benchley, Rock Star book party was a success. This is due to to the careful planning of The Morning News editors, who are the best friends a book could have. My knees shook slightly before reading but the crowd was large, cheerful, drunk, and looking to be amused.

Steve Burns and I performed Squirrel and Rat, a tiny musical that we wrote together, and then I read a section of the book in which Gary is on tour with his band Schizopolis and meets a girl in Austin, and things go terribly wrong from there. At first I competed with crowd noise from the rest of the bar but everything quieted down as I read (I am loud), and all ended well and for once I felt good about my performance. I signed many books. Things like that happen only a few times in life, where it all works and everyone has an okay time but no one goes to the hospital. Hot damn.

For posterity, or until this domain name expires, this was the invitation:

10/3 — I published an explanation of the Gary Benchley hoax on The Morning News. Some people are quite upset, but most are just amused. I also outed myself on Ftrain.com, which feels peculiar as I've never carried an advertisement on the site. Still, if you can't push your own novel on your website then what's the point?

I've also been rehearsing for the reading. It's hard to pick out exactly which sections to read because so much of the book is dialogue-driven and I'm not an actor. I don't want to put on a one-man show, or I'll lose the audience. A few sections stick out, though, particularly a scene with Gary in Texas. I've also rehearsed Squirrel and Rat with my friend Steve Burns, which I'll be performing as an opening act. This is a musical we wrote about a squirrel and rat who live in Brooklyn, and which we performed around New York City and in Portland, Oregon, about a year ago. It's been fun to resurrect it in all of its fifteen-minute-long glory and return to my role as a large singing squirrel.

9/28 — Release day has arrived. Last night Mo and I walked up Court Street to look at the five fresh copies of Gary Benchley, Rock Star at the local Barnes & Noble and the single copy at local, independent Book Court. God, was it satisfying to see five copies of my novel with their green-blue spines sitting next to Richard Ford's Independence Day.

My friend Steve, who has been a great help through the entire process of writing and a fine friend in general, met us at the bookstore and spent twenty minutes in Barnes & Noble holding the book in the air, yelling to anyone who shuffled by that I wrote it. Typical New Yorkers, no one looked at the yelling man, but I was very pleased and embarrassed even so.

We took two of the copies and put them down on the "new fiction" table on the first floor, where more people will see them. Then I watched Steve purchase a copy—$15.17 with tax—and we went out for Thai food. It was a huge release to see the book on shelves, and I had a couple beers and genuinely felt good about the world.

Afterwards we snuck down to 3rd St., a mostly-empty street of empty factories near the Gowanus Canal (empty except for the dodgy black Mercedes parked on one corner where the light of a cigarette bobbed up and down from behind the darkened window), and set off fireworks. The best were two Chinese "Naughty Elephants" which rolled a foot or two on plastic wheels while shooting off sparks. No cops drove by. When it was over we cleaned up and threw the spent fireworks in a dumpster.

Mo and I came home, and I sat in my chair and said, "Goddamn, I'm actually a novelist." And regardless of what anyone thinks of the book, they can't disagree—there's evidence of my novel-writing status at Barnes and Noble, hard physical proof in the form of a 291-page novel complete with a blurb on the cover ("High Fidelity for the New York Scenester"—Robert Lanham, author of the Hipster Handbook). And now it's the next morning and I've got to get back to my regular life, but God was that fun.

9/27 — Amazon has elevated me in the rankings from 517,466 to 35,498. Auspicious. And I received a solid review from Entertainment Weekly, with a letter grade—B+. Ever a nervous schoolboy, I wonder how I missed the A, but mine is not to question reviewers, especially when they give up such great pull quotes, in this case describing the book as “warm, human, and surprisingly sweet.” I also turned in a piece to The Morning News, where about half of the novel was originally serialized, exposing myself and my role in the hoax, and giving some back-story regarding the novel's creation. It's strange to be writing about that sort of thing—who am I, I wonder, to narrate my own processes as an author? It seems gauche, so I tried to be as honest and clear as I could about the hoax aspects of the serialization, and tell a few interesting stories about what happened as I wrote the book.

The book party is shaping up; it will be on October 6 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I'll post more details tomorrow.

9/26 — One day from G-day. Tomorrow my first novel goes on sale online (although it's been on sale at Amazon.com for months); it appears in bookstores the next week. My editor at Plume promised me a cuban cigar if I didn't look at my sales rankings too often, but I suppose I'm safe if I take a peek now. 517,466 with a bullet. Hell yes.

9/25 — My mother in Mt. Savage, Maryland, has gone on a rampage of maternal pride. She went to the bookstore and pre-ordered the book. “I just blurted out, ‘My son wrote it!’” she told me. Then she called the bookstore that I used to visit constantly when I was very young, Chester County Book Company, in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and told them my life story. My father, in Florida, is a man with a more direct approach, and simply ordered ten copies of the book from Amazon.com.

9/20 — There are 37,200 results for “Gary Benchley” from Google. It will take a while for this site to percolate to the first page of results, I suppose.

9/19 — I am launching this site in an unfinished form so that Google might catch on that it is the official site for the book. I am this waving my digital arms, yelling “Look over here! Google! Hey!”