The creators of True Jersey have started a new
online magazine / newspaper / blog in the spirit of the broader Fort
Saint Davids family project — a regularly updated, all-encompassing
source of information and entertainment called the Daily
Miltonian. This is not to be confused with the actual "Daily Miltonian" section of True Jersey, we just used the name to tie it all together
So far, we have a wide range of contributors, many of whom will be familiar faces to fans of True Jersey.
Notable items we've published thus far:
A serialized story, "Lily",
by the actress who plays Emily
Sellers in True Jersey, Martha Curren-Preis
"Ask Crooks" by Jason Krapf (the actor who plays Mike
Ennis in True Jersey), an advice column, forever immortalized
(well not quite forever) by our friend Alison in his "About Me" section
on Myspace
An interview with Big Dead Voodoo Raccoon, a bunch of nihilistic, scary
punk drifters from California
Father Gibbs' (our friend who was the influence for a character named Father Gibbs, who is an actual priest in Volume One and a dream
character who hangs out at a dream mall in Volume Two) Seafood Series
It was a chilly October night - morning, really,
probably somewhere around four AM - and my boots crunched across dry
leaves, indistinct in the darkness, my hand clutching a flashlight.
I was a security guard, out in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and my shift
wouldn’t be over until after sunrise. Twenty-two years old in the final
years of the 20th century, a heart-broken college dropout with a love
for indie rock and a desire to do something important with his life
- like write a novel, for example. At twenty-two everything is life
or death. It’s the first officially adult feeling year - meaning
the first year where there’s nothing to celebrate. 17 you can drive,
18 you can vote, 19 is your final teen year, 20 is your first non-teen
year, 21 you can drink, but 22? The first non-celebratory year in a
lifetime of them. What do you have to look forward to? 30, then 40,
then 50. And that’s it.
As I said, life or death. If this girl dumps me, I’m finished. And if
I don’t write a novel, I’ll be no one. So I started writing a novel.
Right there, in the dead silent moment between night and morning, holding
a flashlight, passing the closed-for-summer swimming pool, mere blocks
from where Ezra Pound grew up. I came up with the first few sentences
to The Pilot and the Panda, in my head, and when I returned
to relieve the other guard I sat down at the desk and wrote them down
so I wouldn’t forget them.
I wrote the last line to the book shortly after. Maybe that’s how I
pulled it off - all I had to do was connect the dots from the first
line to the last. Seemed simple enough. Three years later, the arrow
I was drawing from point A met point B.
It’s been almost ten years since I began writing the book that I now
look back upon as a failure. So why, then, am I going to share this
failure with you? Because it exists. From 1998 to 2001 I sat at the
same desk making something that in the end I deemed worthless. That
many of my peers have deemed worthless. That the meager contacts I have
made in the publishing industry have deemed worthless. This isn’t a
sob story, it’s just a fact: I was a young man and my first book wasn’t
that good. So be it. The first baseball you swing at won’t make it out
of the park - you probably won’t even hit it in the first place. After
a long period of indecision, soul-searching, heavy drinking and self
pity I did what I felt was the right thing to do: I sat down once again
at the desk and I started to work again. I wrote a better novel (True
Jersey, Volume One) in less time (two years). Having been unable
to sell True Jersey, Volume One I decided to skip the soul-searching
and self-pity and instead built this website with Alex Zahradnik. Then
I got drunk. Then I woke up, showered and made coffee, and started a
new novel.
Back to this first novel. As I said, it exists. Whether you enjoy it
or despise it, there are hundreds of pages of it and only a fire or
a hard-drive failure will erase them from this earth. Failure or not,
three years of anyone’s life is nothing to sneeze at. At the time, it
consumed me. I wrote the chapters on Post-It notes on the sly at shitty
temp jobs, I wrote them on placemats while waiting for food at diners,
on damp bar napkins hoping my date would show up but knowing she wouldn’t.
Do you have to read it? Please, this is the Internet; we both know the
answer to that. But if you would like to read it, I’m giving it to you.
One chapter per week, for the entire summer of 2006, Alex and I will
be serializing the first book (there are three) of The Pilot and
the Panda in its entirety, in printable PDFs, here at our website.
Do I feel shy or embarrassed, sharing such juvenilia? Yeah,
of course. But although I now feel, at 29, that it’s a terrible novel,
I still believe - in my heart of hearts - that it is a beautiful story.
