Matthew Jarpe: Radio Freefall

 

Title: Radio Freefall
Author: Matthew Jarpe (http://www.matthewjarpe.com/)
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Tor Books
ISBN: 978-0765317841

1. First off, congratulations on the big novel sale! Give us the elevator pitch.  What’s your book about?

Thanks, congratulations on your book, too! RADIO FREEFALL is about a rock musician and a computer geek who team up to take on the world government. That’s what I call the back of the business card pitch. If we have a whole elevator ride I can tell you more.

Aqualung is a mysterious blues guitarist who walks out of the Nevada desert to lead a group of talented but unmotivated musicians onto the world stage. Quin Taber is a disgruntled former employee of Walter Cheeseman’s transnational corporation WebCense. Cheeseman wants to use the power of WebCense to unify the world under one government, which he will control from behind the scenes. Quin wants to harness the power of a feral artificial intelligence called the Digital Carnivore to bring Cheeseman down. But the Carniove has its own obsessions and it seems strangely attracted to a twenty year old rock music revolution. The resulting story is a little bit cyberpunk, a little bit hard SF, and a little bit near future rockumentary.

2. Most new novelists have an interesting story to tell about their journey to publication. What’s yours? Did you use an agent? Make sure to tell us about the day you found out you’d sold a book.

I have a disheartening story to tell, but it comes with a happy ending. I met Tor editor David Hartwell at Readercon and pitched him my book. He asked to see it in 2001. Every time I met him thereafter I’d ask about the book, and he admitted he hadn’t read it yet. After about four years of this I had given up. Then David sent me an e-mail to say he was buying one of my stories for his Year’s Best anthology.  After we negotiated that sale I told him I was going to take another shot at selling my book. Did he want to read it before I started shopping it around? He did.

When he called to say he wanted to buy he first left a message on my voice mail to call him back. I imagined all the possible reasons for the call and ranked them in my mind as best case scenario, worst case, and so forth. I couldn’t call back for a couple of hours and the scenarios began multiplying in my mind. When I finally did call back and got the news, I don’t remember any more about that conversation.

I had tried a couple of times over the years to land an agent to help me sell the book. The response I got never varied: six weeks later a small slip of paper, not interested. When I had the sale from Tor I tried one more time. I looked up the agent I thought was the best fit for me, Russ Galen, and wrote him an e-mail telling him I had a sale, and I got a phone call 15 minutes later. Big difference. Russ has been a big help walking me through the contract and all the subsequent steps towards publication and beyond.

3. Do you have another book in the pipeline? What are you working on now?

I just turned in another novel called MACHINE INTELLIGENCE. I hope David will take less than 5 years to read this one. It’s “The Lord of the Flies” in space. Right now I’m flying through a first draft of a new novel, but I don’t like to say much about work in progress. I’ve written too many novel stumps to belive that this one is as good as done.

4. What’s your writing process like? Morning writer, night writer, or something in between?

I write in between my son’s bedtime and mine, which is about 8:30 to 10:00. I try to get a thousand words a night when I’m in draft mode, but most of those words are just to push the plot along. They’re not very pretty. I go back later and fancy it up, if the story calls for it. I do a lot of my writing while I’m walking to and from the train station. I think up dialog, work out plot problems, come up with new characters. I’ve walked that way ten times a week for the last 10 years, so I don’t have to pay too much attention to my surroundings. I’m lucky that my memory is still good enough that I can wait until 8:30 to write down whatever I come up with.

5. There seems to be an unusually high percentage of writers who own cats. Here at the The First Book, we’re doing a study to find out if there’s a direct relationship between writing success and cat ownership. Do you own a cat? If so, tell us about him or her. If not, tell us what you have against cats.

I don’t have a cat. The only thing I have against them is if you try to roughhouse with them they can really hurt you. Dogs have much blunter claws and teeth. My English Setter rarely draws blood when he swipes me with his paw, and if he accidentally bumps my hand with his teeth he seems genuinely contrite and embarassed.