Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
I have a friend who was a member of an all-male book club. Once, during discussion of the novel of the month, he said that he’d found it “derivative,” to which another member of the book club countered with a sneer and challenged my friend: “I’d like to see you write a f**king novel.”
My friend’s first inclination was to punch his detractor in the face, but then he remembered the third rule of Book Club: “Never punch a fellow member in the face, even if he’s a fan of Water for Elephants.” As everyone knows, the first and second rules of Book Club are “You do not talk about Book Club.”
After learning of the derision unpublished authors can face, I realized that if I ever wanted to join a book club, I should probably publish a book to blunt the criticism of my fellow bookworms. So I did.
That book is Funny for Nothing––available on Amazon or at these local purveyors of fine goods: The Card Cellar, Liberty Town, Wren and Sparrow, Novel, Laudenbach Brewing, and at Tails and Tales. (I recognize that both my editors and my readers may get a little tired of me going on about my book, but just wait until the holiday season when I intend to promote it through the Sunday column AND on affordable signage near the town of Bumpass.)
Though I found the publication of my book to be extremely gratifying, I soon realized that I did not have to take such drastic steps to enjoy a book club. That realization came the first time I plugged my name into the Amazon search engine and found that I was not the only Drew Gallagher to ever publish a book, and I could have simply lied to my new book club friends. Of course, book clubs being what they are, I’m sure there is some kind of entrance exam and a polygraph that would have uncovered both my ruse and my humiliation.
Based on the Amazon summary of the other book by the other Drew Gallagher, though, I might have been able to fake it. But what kind of bedrock would that have laid for a relationship of mutual respect? The other Drew Gallagher’s book is titled In the Eye of The Hawk and is the first “Pontic” in the The Hawk and The Handmaiden Pontic Chronicles. Here’s that summary:
It is 493 BC. A fragile peace between regional rivals is strained as Persia moves to war with the Greeks. Can the ‘Oracle’, jewel of the Greek espionage network thwart the designs of the adverserial Hawk? Queen Illir’ya sends a loyal Handmaiden on a dangerous mission, where she must foil the ploys of enemies and traitors, and avenge her honour, with the fury of an Amazon...
I’m not sure it would have endeared me to my new book club friends. The misspelling of “adversarial” would have been the literary equivalent of farting loudly in the theatre during Schindler’s List. Plus, it’s always best to be able to pronounce the names of your Queens, and one thing I learned over two required semesters of Linguistics at Mary Washington College is that glottal stops are not your friends during public readings. Thank you, Dr. Judith Parker.
The book appears to have been published in 2022 and is available for $62.57, which is a sum that would also afford you the opportunity to purchase four copies of a book published by a different Drew Gallagher at the low, low price of $14.99. As Herbert Hoover once said, “A chicken in every pot, a car in every garage, and a copy of Funny for Nothing in every bathroom!”
In further researching The Eye of the Hawk, I found a couple of other titles by my doppelganger, but no second Pontic instalment in the Hawk and Handmaiden Chronicles. Still, even George R.R. Martin took six years between books five and six in his Game of Thrones series. I don’t know how many Pontics were planned in the other Drew Gallagher’s magnum opus, so it is possible that he remains hard at work on the second.
Always leave your audience wanting more.
Please understand that I am not slagging on the other Drew Gallagher, nor any of my fellow authors—Drews or otherwise. Writing a book is hard, and I hope that its publication has opened the doors of numerous book clubs to the other Drew and his family.
This is not the first time I have felt the sting of my shared name. Do an internet search for “Drew Gallagher” and an actor of the same name pops up with a list of very modest acting credits and a string of shirtless photos. I am 15 years older than Actor Drew, so it stands to reason that I was going shirtless years before he was even born. In short, when I eventually join a book club and someone inevitably brings up Actor Drew Gallagher’s performance in “Getting that Girl” —alas, no official Tomatometer score—I’ll dismiss his shirtless look as derivative of a much younger me circa 1982 at Antietam Pool.
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FXBG Advance columnist Drew Gallagher’s book Funny For Nothing was released on July 28 by Long River Press. It’s available for sale in the Fredericksburg area at Novel Bookstore (212 William Street), Liberty Town Arts (916 Liberty Street), The Card Cellar (915 Caroline Street), Wren & Sparrow (807 Caroline Street), and Laudenbach Brewing in Stafford (45 Centreport Parkway, Unit 101). You can also buy it on Amazon.
