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If you’re reading this website, you probably live in Philadelphia, and if you live in Philadelphia we’ve probably gotten
drunk together, and if we’ve gotten drunk together in the past two years you’ve probably already heard about this book I’ve been
writing: True Jersey. But if we haven’t met, well, hi there. I’m Erik. True Jersey, Volume One is the first of a projected five
volumes of books that take place in a fictional town that I made up. The completed project will probably wind up being well over
a thousand pages and I will be an old man by the time it’s all said and done - because I have other books I would like to write
besides this one so I’ll probably only write True Jersey books every, say, two books? Maybe three books. Who knows: it’s creepy
trying to predict the future, isn’t it? Back to this fictional town: the town is called Milton, PJ, the PJ standing for PennJersey.
Milton is a roughly Manhattan-sized island somewhere north of here in the middle of the Delaware River, governed by both New Jersey
and Pennsylvania but making its own final decisions as an independent citystate. It was pretty fun to design. It has a lot more
parks, for example, than most towns. That was my idea, the parks.
In 2003 I started writing the current version of True Jersey. There was a previous version that I felt was too clever (the omniscient plural narrator, for example. Is that what you call it? You know, like “We feel you would like this character.” Ick. America invaded Iraq and that was the day I canned the manuscript. I was like - wake up it ain’t the Nineties any more, dude!). I was talking to Alex about the new book and some of my ideas about how it was going to look. I had never paid Alex for his work on Pilot - the idea was we’d all make money when we found a way to sell it. So I proposed this: hey Alex, how about you design this new book I’m working on. The idea at the time was that we’d do it in these small volumes, like a comic book. Say, twenty-two page booklets. That way we could save money, print one volume, and then hopefully make the money back to print the next volume. A serial novel! But also like a comic book! We went crazy discussing the graphic ideas - maps, photographs, illustrations, comics. Alex would have total control over how the design stuff went, and we’d split the profits right down the middle.
The endless serial novel idea was something I had learned from comic books. Comic books had the potential to comment
on current events. Comics were written two months before their release date, and usually came out on a monthly basis. Comics
were like fictional magazines, in this sense. My first book took place in the Nineties and already it had seemed like a dated
artifact - no cell phones, no Internet, Northern Liberties was scary, the Bean was called the Supreme Bean! If all had gone well
I would have finished that first book in late September, 2001. Suffice it to say I finished it in November. Yes sir, the times
they were a’changin’. So I wanted to write something that could change along with them. That’s how the current idea for True
Jersey began to shape. Things have mutated since the initial idea. We thought that it would be cheaper to publish volumes longer
than twenty-two pages. Then we canned the idea of publishing altogether. Again: where would we get the money? Then we bucked up
our pride and said, in unison, “This is an important project! We can sell it to a publisher! We won’t spend money to get it
published - we will be PAID money!” Then we fell into a despair once again. Maybe you know the feeling. Either way, we both
silently pushed on with the project, and now at somewhere around two hundred pages, True Jersey, Volume One is just about complete.
Neither of us knew what to do with it, still don’t really. It’s one crazy motherfucker of a book. Maybe you’ll read today’s
excerpt and think, “Okay besides the pictures this isn’t so different. This is your average straightforward narrative.” Oh yeah?
Wait until the next excerpt, where your narrator becomes a frickin’ CAT. Basically we thought: why keep this to ourselves?
It’s not doing any good on our hard drives. Philebrity had asked me over a year ago for an excerpt from my new book, and here
we are a year later. We have
changed some stuff. It’s now color, for example. This is the magic of the Internet. Do you know how expensive it would be to print
this book in full-color? Big bucks, mister. Alright, enough from me, about me. This thing went on long enough. But hey, wow, this
is really exciting. You’re going to read a chapter from True Jersey. Nice! Pretty rainy day right now, chilly too - better get yourself
a nice hot beverage, a coffee maybe, or hot chocolate. I’m actually very happy that the drizzly first chapter is debuting on a drizzly
day. That’s magic stuff. Oh wait - how about some kind of pumpkin drink? Like that pumpkin spiceaccinno or whatever its called. Wawa
has one, I think. Did you know the pumpkins came early this year? (I’m in the produce business, you know). No, it’s true, like some
came as early as late August. Dry season - brings out the pumpkins and - shit. Okay, I’ll stop. I’ll stop. I’m just really excited,
is all. This is like my big day. I hope today is your big day too.
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