Improv and sketch comedian DC Pierson brings us Crap Kingdom, a novel so hilarious he’d like each of us to read it, laugh, and then email him a recording of our laughter (please see response to question #3).

YA: What made you decide to start writing?
DC Pierson: When I was in elementary school, we had to do that project where you trace your hand and then decorate the resulting traced hand like a festive Thanksgiving turkey. I mentioned to my mom that I would maybe like to write a Thanksgiving-themed parody of “‘Twas The Night Before Christmas” to go along with the turkey. Then I immediately backed off because it sounded like a lot of work and would take away precious cartoon-watching time. She insisted I do it, extra work be damned, and when I brought it into school, the teacher was so impressed that I got to read it over the loudspeaker to the whole school. 
The other kids were probably indifferent, at best, but hey: I got my words projected through the whole school, and they didn’t. Attention is attention. I was hooked.

YA: Tell us a little bit about your latest work. What is different about Crap Kingdom, aside of course from the title?
DCP: Crap Kingdom is a comedic fantasy-adventure about a high school boy who loves stories like Harry Potter, so he’s really excited when he’s taken to a magical fantasy realm where it turns out he’s The Chosen One. But the magical fantasy realm is also really crappy.
So our main character rejects the Chosen-One-hood in this crappy realm, then returns a few weeks later and discovers that the kingdom now has a new Chosen One: his best friend from back on Earth. Suddenly, he wants the kingdom back at any cost.
I think Crap Kingdom is different from other YA titles because it’s not about a post-apocalyptic world in which children have to do battle against sexy teenage mummies. Not that there’s anything wrong with books like that. I love sexy teenage mummies! But that’s not my book, and I think that’ll be refreshing to some readers.

YA: Talk to us a little about the comedy element in your writing. 
DCP: I’m an improv and sketch comedian so I bring a lot of that training and experience to prose writing. I learned improv and sketch at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York, where everything they teach is focused on exploring what’s fun about a single comedic idea. 
Writing is kind of like crystallized improv. You’re making it up as you go along, and decisions that you make early on will effect everything you do as you move forward, but when you’re finished, what you’ve created can be enjoyed by anyone, at any time, forever. (Hopefully.)
Writing is obviously different than live comedy in that, if you laugh at my book, I’m not there when it happens. So what I’m saying is, if you could e-mail me a recording of you laughing while reading my book, I’d really appreciate it.

YA: This book seems to be very tongue in cheek. How did the idea arise?
DCP: This exact thing happened to me, except instead of becoming the Chosen One in a crappy fantasy universe, I dated a girl and then decide I didn’t want to date her anymore and then when someone else was dating her I went “Hey! All of the sudden I want to be dating you again!”
I think the experience of having something, taking it for granted, then seeing somebody else with it and going “Wait! I want back in!” is a pretty universal one. Add a lot of dragon-dogs and evil inter-world warlords who live in crystal towers and you pretty much have my book.

YA: Take us through a typical writing day for you. 
DCP: 
10 AM – 1 PM – lay in bed looking at Twitter on my phone thinking about how I am SO going to get up any minute now
1 PM – get up and get coffee around the corner
1:15 PM – eat a greek yogurt, which takes longer than it should because I haven’t done dishes in a week so I have to wash, like, a single spoon
1:30 PM – Open my laptop. End up on Twitter.
3:00 PM – I’m hungry for lunch already so I get in a spiral of “do just a little writing before you eat lunch” and “just eat and then you’ll be more focused”
3:30 PM – Get some lunch
4 PM – 6 PM – Write. 
I would like to be a more disciplined writer. The only thing that keeps me sane is the belief that doing SOMETHING is one million percent better than doing nothing.

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YA: Besides the classic ‘never give up’, what advice would you give to aspiring young writers today?
DCP: The biggest hurdle in writing is writing. You actually have to write. It is every bit as difficult for me, a “professional writer” if you wanna call me that, to actually sit down and write as it is for you. If you are actually sitting down, actually putting one word in front of the other, congratulations: you are winning.
The other biggest hurdle is having really high standards for your own work, but not such high standards that you never actually do any work because every sentence you write you look back at and go “UGH! That is so not what [your favorite author who’s been doing it for 40 years longer than you] would write!” Don’t go so easy on yourself just because you’re the one who wrote it. But also don’t be so hard on yourself that you quit entirely and go lay down in a ditch.

YA: If you hadn’t become an author, what path would your career have perhaps taken?
DCP: There are dudes on the street in New York, on Venice Beach in LA, and I’m presuming in other places, that are trying to sell their rap mixtapes, and they come up to you and say “Excuse me, do you like hip hop?” I would like to be one of those guys for a living. Not the selling-a-CD part, though. I’d just like to ask people if they like hip hop for a living. A sort of hip-hop census taker, if you will.
That or a vocal coach who teaches airline pilots to have just a little teeny tiny bit of a Southern accent.

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