Where the Camopede Roam

Though The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti’s not offi­cially released until early Sep­tem­ber, it looks to be slip­ping through Ama­zon already. And that seems to me to be a good time to explain it a bit. Or, not explain it, but explain around it. And not like this, but with this run­ning journal-thing (my first ever) I kept for the seventy-two hours it took me to write it. That Three-Day Novel Con­test, yep. Which, if I could find a way to make a liv­ing doing one of those every week­end, then I guess I’d do pretty well for about a year, at which point I’d of course have to die. Any­way, the week after that con­test, I read this journal-thing, and my knee-jerk reac­tion — pre­tend­ing, say, I was read­ing a journal-thing some­body else had been keep­ing — was that some­thing wasn’t right. At some very fun­da­men­tal level. And also I kind of knew that I shouldn’t show to this to anybody.

Nev­er­the­less.

Here it is. All I’ve done’s cor­rect a cou­ple of typos, pretty much, and erase one name, so as to pro­tect the innocent:

My 3-Day Novel Journal

Days –6 through 0:
â–  read no fic­tion, write no fic­tion, know­ingly lis­ten to no fiction.

Day –1:
â–  3pm: hand-deliver con­test reg­is­tra­tion to post office, then make sure the postage is right for Canada, then mail it and become absolutely cer­tain I’ve again for­got­ten to sign the check.
â–  9pm: finally, while read­ing HORTON HEARS A WHO, fig­ure out all at once what the novel’s going to be about, front to back, but resist writ­ing it on the end­pa­pers, as they’re illus­trated, and I some­how don’t have my pen on me any­way.
â–  9:30pm: write as much of that as I can remem­ber into an email draft.

Day 0:
â–  10am: gym
â–  2pm: work meet­ing
â–  4pm: Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN
â–  6pm: din­ner (chicken breast, rolls)
â–  7pm: two hours bas­ket­ball with good music
â–  9pm: make first pitcher of sweet tea
â–  10pm: watch AMERICAN ANTHEM, love it even more than ever. Meant to watch FOOTLOOSE, but my DVD of it’s some­how gone, I can’t even begin to imag­ine where.
â–  11:45pm: watch last twenty-eight min­utes of a LAW & ORDER episode I’d already watched the first half of ear­lier (last two min­utes: unrecorded), and eat sec­ond din­ner, of spaghetti & meat­balls & ketchup and then two bowls of hon­ey­combs with real milk.

Day 1:
â–  12:02: check con­test rules, to make sure I don’t need to be doing any spe­cial doc­u­ment­ing.
â–  12:03: open new blank doc­u­ment, title it, won­der why my new com­puter already sucks so much, then save the file to its own folder, so hope­fully all the temp files will be there as well, in case doc­u­men­ta­tion becomes any kind of issue.
â–  12:04: try to fig­ure out what music’s good. Try Jerry Reed, but, when that doesn’t work, just turn up George Strait real loud, over and over. Sav­ing all the hair metal for day three, I’m think­ing.
â–  3:33am: call it a night, twenty-three pages in.
â–  4am: set alarm for 8:00, then turn the lights back on, reset it for 8:59.
â–  8:59: wake up, eat some break­fast bur­rito while watch­ing a recorded SEINFELD and a lot more of VH-1’s top 20 count­down than I mean to.
â–  10am: back at it, ner­vous I’ve lost the thread. Have to eat a lot of Whop­pers and drink a ridicu­lous amount of sweet tea and lis­ten to Jour­ney at a stu­pid, painful vol­ume. First pitcher: gone.
â–  11:43am: call it a morn­ing, thirty-eight pages in now. Am very glad that first line kind of seeded a struc­ture, as I think that’s what went wrong with my novel the last time I tried this con­test: it spooled out of con­trol.
â–  11:45am: wrote all this, so far, while I still remem­bered it. Only try­ing to ring that fifty-page bell today (going for one hun­dred pages total this time, instead of one-fifty, like last time), so, only twelve pages to go. May have to sneak into town, catch SUNSHINE, maybe STARDUST, or what­ever that Gaiman movie is. Though too BALLS OF FURY is call­ing my name.
â–  11:48am: check mail, which usu­ally doesn’t make it here until noon, but Sat­ur­days are kind of spe­cial, mail-wise. Today’s espe­cially good: a Russ­ian post­card from a friend I’d been want­ing to hear from, a roy­alty check, Eric Shapiro’s THE STRAWBERRY MAN, a Net­flix DVD (THE LOOKOUT), and a watch band, for the nev­erend­ing saga of my favorite watch that I hate more than any of my other watches.
â–  11:51am: do what I’d promised not to do—turn on the inter­net. Noth­ing good, though; only bills
â–  11:53am: fig­ure out how this next chap­ter, chap­ter five, should start. Not the word­ing, but the nec­es­sary devel­op­ment. Very happy.
â–  12:20am: too jit­tery, have to work-out. Watch an old STAR TREK, “the world is hol­low and I have touched the sky,â€? I think, where McCoy gets the girl, and the girl either has this just gor­geous hair, or else she’s wear­ing one very cool wig.
â–  1:36pm: make more sweet tea.
â–  1:40pm: lunch (chicken breast, can of shoepeg corn, which I spill most of, so end up hav­ing to pick up one ker­nel at a time from the car­pet). Ques­tion for lunch: why does the clas­sic coun­try music sta­tion play Okie from Musko­gee so much? Hate that song. Always have.
â–  1:47pm: check front door for tenth time, sure my ninja UPS guy has left the pack­age I’m expect­ing, but now prob­a­bly won’t get until after Labor Day.
â–  1:48pm: do all dishes, drop a knife on my foot but it doesn’t cut me, promise to eat no more Whop­pers because I hate them now, espe­cially because they’re not Sixlets, which were per­fect, but scarce now, and back here again, wish­ing I either had a Jimmy Buf­fet album on CD or mp3, or that I had a cas­sette player at my desk, to play some of my old Jimmy Buf­fet. Though Eddie Raven would do too, I think
â–  2:34pm: fin­ished chap­ter five. More hap­pened in it than I planned. But you have to esca­late, nev­er­mind plans. Forty-four pages in. Could eas­ily hit fifty right now, but SUNSHINE starts at 4:40, it looks like, and I should have all night, and I’m very excited about that, as I get to eat a lot more of spaghetti and meat­balls and also because, now, I can watch THE LOOKOUT if I want. Too, though, I really want to find my FOOTLOOSE. Wash­ing dishes ear­lier, I kept feel­ing like a big bug was crawl­ing on me very lightly. And some­how there still aren’t any clean forks, I don’t think.
â–  3:04pm: acci­den­tally wrote two or three more pages. So, at forty-seven now. And, going by chap­ter count (start­ing six [year-later edit: no clue what this part of the par­en­thet­i­cal means], and count­ing epis­to­lary inter­ludes), I’m exactly halfway through. Which is about right.
â–  8:59pm: bam, fifty-five pages. SUNSHINE rocked. What didn’t was jack­ing my sep­a­rated rib up play­ing bas­ket­ball. Resulted in a lot more mus­cle relaxer than can be good. It’s nice to walk around an unfa­mil­iar gro­cery store on a very high dose of pretty old mus­cle relax­ers, though. And I can’t find any Sixlets any­where in town. Or the pow­der Nes­tle Quick. Was really want­ing some spoon­fuls of that.
â–  9:02pm: have no idea how to keep a jour­nal like this. No clue what tense to use, what the point of nar­ra­tion is sup­posed to be, any of that good kind of stuff. Sucks
â–  9:04pm: THE LOOKOUT, I hope. May yet push through another chap­ter or two tonight. Just not hav­ing so much luck sit­ting up in a chair. Ribs suck. If I were Klin­gon, none of this would mat­ter.
â–  9:05pm: I get it. Incom­plete sen­tences. What you use in a jour­nal. Just notes to your­self. Almost a to-do list, just slightly after the doing. Not that I’m going back and fix­ing any­thing, this sen­tence included. Melissa Etheridge’s “No Sou­venirsâ€? has been one of my favorite songs for so many years now. Still sit­ting here just because it, the song, hasn’t gone over yet, quite. It might be day two by the time I get back to my key­board too.

Day 2:
â–  5am: wake, totally lost, in my clothes. Evi­dently the amount of hydrocodone and mus­cle relaxer I took equalled about three bot­tles of Nyquil.
â–  6am-ish: grab some energy bars, back to writ­ing. Jam through ten pages.
â–  9am: eat break­fast (-bur­ri­tos), acci­den­tally pour far too much hot sauce on. Watch another SEINFELD, the dog­nap­ping one, which I love. Resist music videos some­how. Another mus­cle relaxer.
â–  12:26pm, if that’s noon: wake up again, wholly con­fused. I may be using those mus­cle relax­ers wrong. Any­way, lunch (chicken + corn, which I spill again, like grav­ity has a dif­fer­ent pull on it than every­thing else, I don’t know), another piece of THE LOOKOUT (about five-sixths through it by now), then back here, for some-odd amount of pages.
â–  3:21pm: get email pop-up, which reminds me I for­get to kill the net. But this one I want: it’s a story rejec­tion (story: rodeo bulls pos­sessed by death row inmates). I reply to it with another story, about a were­wolf.
â–  3:23pm: acci­den­tally write two more pages, even though I’ve just, last stop, hit the seventy-five I had planned. Not sure how I’m sup­posed to wrap this story with less than twenty-five pages left. Always the dilemma. Lis­ten­ing to, over and over, that Pink “Who Knew.â€? Trick is, too, now there’s this girl with pink hair in the novel. Also, thanks to shuf­fle, Tina Turner and Thun­der­dome are now sup­ply­ing the epi­graph. But she can do any­thing. Now to decide whether to hit the gym with a busted rib, to play some hurt­ing ball, or to catch BALLS OF FURY or STARDUST or try to hold out for a sneak peek of 3:10 TO YUMA. Or none of the above. I hate flies, see no rea­son for them to exist. So tired of spaghetti and meat­balls. Had no idea that was even pos­si­ble. Want only to watch music videos for hours. They always save me.
â–  8:04pm: back from gym. Got lost get­ting there. Not at all sure how that hap­pened. Ridicu­lous. But I think I sweated all the mus­cle relaxer and hydrocodone out. Good until the next round. Just now wrote, I don’t know, five pages. At eighty-one now. This may go a touch longer than a hun­dred. Hope that doesn’t work against me. Each time I go back and read the page I’ve just writ­ten, there’s all these miss­ing words. THE LOOKOUT seri­ously rocked. Enough that I watched all the extra fea­tures, and even about half the movie over again, with com­men­tary. Still never eat­ing Whop­pers again. Hate them.
â–  10:06pm: eighty-eight pages in. And my ears seri­ously hurt. Some of these songs are so loud, and some idiot’s got every vol­ume con­trol twisted around twice. Four candy bars gone for the day (100 Grands & Nes­tle Crunches—poor sub­sti­tutes for Sixlets), no clue how much sweet tea. More than enough, though. All jit­tery again. Want to go back to the gym, or maybe watch TALLADEGA NIGHTS. BORAT’s in the player, though. Can’t drink any­thing either. Try­ing some dif­fer­ent meds I just found. Could be a bad mix wait­ing to hap­pen, and I’m all alone in the house. Really lik­ing Cher. I think I like every­thing she’s ever done. Sat out­side for a while ear­lier, and it was very nice. No flies.
â–  10:17pm: have decided that what makes or breaks a jour­nal isn’t the dic­tion, like I thought, but the point of nar­ra­tion. And the intended audi­ence. There’s some­thing tying those two together, I’m pretty sure. Some­thing it’s pos­si­ble to luck onto, but not really do on pur­pose. My ears really hurt.
â–  11:58pm: BORAT was good, but I really could have done with­out the naked fight. Should have watched TALLADEGA NIGHTS again.

Day 3:
â–  12:00pm, or am, whichever one’s mid­night: only two chap­ters to go, but I’m going to save them for tomor­row. Also, it’s scary to write the end. No clue what I’ll do instead now, with the rest of these hours
â–  12:45pm/am, I don’t know: acci­den­tally did five more pages. Still very jit­tery. This def­i­nitely isn’t fit­ting into a hun­dred pages.
â–  8:19am: too much hot sauce again. Been up for a while, but had to wait for chap­ter nine to gel. Waited and waited for the music video I wanted, but it never came on. Onward. Faster Pussy­cat at high vol­ume now. I think “House of Painâ€? is this novel thing I’m writ­ing. ‘Five years old and talk­ing to myself.’
â–  10:02am: fin­ished. One hun­dred three pages, looks like. Love it. AMAZING STORIES. Not going to read it all through again now for a few hours. Still four­teen left. Thir­teen and change. Put too much of myself in it, but that’s always.
â–  10:18am: recon­sid­er­ing the epigraph-thing. It might have to be “House of Pain.â€? Been lis­ten­ing to that song so much. Now I know where the mime came from, any­way. Never real­ized that was the lyric until now.
â–  10:40am: just had to look ‘mis­sile’ up in the dic­tio­nary. And Faster Pussy­cat won’t work for the epi, nope. Because of the first line. Sucks. Spellcheck­ing way too early now, but need to get it printed, pol­ished. Lots of tense-problems as the thing started speed­ing up, wrap­ping around itself.
â–  10:45am: this Word07 spellchecker is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent beast. One I love. It learns, and checks for the right-spelled word in the wrong place, which I have pretty seri­ous, stu­pid issues with.
â–  10:02pm: recap of last twelve hours:
â–  11:30: buf­fet.
â–  12:25: STARDUST, which rocked.
â–  3:00: print the novel up.
â–  3:40: gym, & read novel very closely.
â–  9:00: fin­ish novel. Still like it, which is rare.
â–  Now: about to enter all the cor­rec­tions. Actu­ally going to be a clean mss this time. Last time was sloppy as can be, I think.
â–  11:14pm: still cor­rect­ing. Keep writ­ing more than I mean to. Half-nervous. Forty-four mins. No, forty-six. Now forty-four prob­a­bly. Being care­ful not to make any addi­tions that up the page-count, though. Happy to be keep­ing it low.
â–  11:42: done deal. Now just to save it on the flash drive, truck it to the office in the morn­ing, get it printed and mailed. Eigh­teen min­utes to spare.
Stephen Gra­ham Jones

And, as for the year since, it’s been a lot like this:

ME: It’s got this, like, this big, um, I guess you’d call it a cater­pil­lar, only it’s sen­tient, and in the future, and the ‘camo’ part, that’s where –
CHIASMUS: We already said yes, didn’t we? Is this con­nec­tion good?
ME: I’m just. Um. Did I men­tion how fic­tional this was? I just made it up, I mean. What I was say­ing ear­lier about three days not being enough time to lie, that’s what I was lying about.
CHIASMUS: You keep say­ing that.
ME: I just don’t want any­thing bad to hap­pen.
CHIASMUS: To … ?
ME: I don’t know. Every­body. This, the planet.
CHIASMUS: And don’t say ‘just’ in rela­tion to ‘fic­tion,’ please. You do know who we are, don’t you?
ME: It’s just a story’s what I mean. It doesn’t involve me at all. Hardly. Except for where it has to.
CHIASMUS: …
ME: Okay, okay. Is it pos­si­ble, can y’all, like, con­trol who does and doesn’t read it, maybe? There’s cer­tain peo­ple, I mean.
CHIASMUS: Indi­vid­u­als?
ME: Classes. Types. Uni­forms. Rela­tions. For­get it. It will say ‘novel’ on it some­where, won’t it? Have that dis­claimer?
CHIASMUS: It’s assumed.
ME: Good, good. Thank you. I just — I wouldn’t want –
CHIASMUS: So let [us] get this straight. You want your novel about a ‘camo­pede’ to be itself some­way camoflouged, so as to keep you out of some trou­ble you rather dis­tinctly per­ceive?
ME: [sub­ject may have averted his eyes here, and cov­ered his mouth, nev­er­mind that this isn’t even a phonecall, but the dra­ma­tized dis­til­la­tion of a series of email com­mu­ni­ca­tions]
CHIASMUS: Hello?
ME: Maybe we should start over, like. Did I tell you about that bun­ny­headed zom­bie novel I have? or the one with the wrestlers?
CHIASMUS: They’re made-up as well, right? With lots of quo­ta­tion marks around the ‘made-up’ part?
ME: Well, yeah. But they’re really made-up, like, from noth­ing.
CHIASMUS: What are you say­ing?
ME: …
CHIASMUS: [here floated author’s first name through the phone in a way at once tol­er­ant and impa­tient — per­haps in the same way you would cod­dle a hyena, had it just ‘acci­den­tally’ eaten some item you val­ued, and you were now hav­ing to wait around for said item, and make nice in the mean­while, the sun beat­ing down on you the whole time, and some­body back in the grass honk­ing the horn at you, and this hyena just grin­ning and grin­ning, its nasty­mat­ted tail sweep­ing a clean lit­tle arc out of the savanna, these long lines of saliva trail­ing from its black lips]
ME: Noth­ing. [eyes averted again: is there some­thing against that wall? Shit, no, no — ]
CHIASMUS: Hello? Hello?

Or some­thing like that.

And then, about two sec­onds after that to col­lect blurbs (we had four sec­onds total, I think, as the book wasn’t picked up until — May, maybe? Right around then, and we still had to dream up a cover, and fig­ure out how to do the text, and, luck­ily, my edi­tor Trevor Dodge was able to get all this done, don’t ask me how). Blurbs for which I’m so so grate­ful. Means so much to get sup­port from writ­ers I really respect:

Two unre­li­able nar­ra­tors, a bunch of sui­cide let­ters, and a plot that col­lapses on itself just like the char­ac­ters do — Stephen Gra­ham Jones is our con­tem­po­rary Jorge Luis Borges.
— Michael Kim­ball, author of Dear Every­body

---

Stephen Gra­ham Jones’s novel The Bird is Gone was the most bril­liantly orig­i­nal book I’d read in years, but Nolan Dugatti may top it. Like Lethem and Murukami before him, Jones mines his genre fic­tion past to bring us a work of star­tling lit­er­ary merit. Mys­tery, hor­ror, sci-fi: the ingre­di­ents are all in there, and the chef — as con­fi­dent and cre­ative as ever — knows exactly what he’s doing.“
— David Good­willie, author of Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

---

Sui­cide notes from a father who can’t quite man­age to kill him­self, the nine final hours of cus­tomer sup­port at a help desk for a video game no one has played in almost a decade, train-length, time-traveling, hyper-adaptive super-centipedes, lethal shrimp cock­tails, nin­jas (blind and oth­er­wise), and a posthu­mous Pong match all cryp­ti­cally con­nect in this stark explo­ration of guilt, grief, and fear by the pro­lific Stephen Gra­ham Jones. And did I men­tion that it’s funny? Unplug your con­soles, kids, and play this book.
— Zack Wentz, author of The Garbage­man and the Prostitute

---

Stephen Gra­ham Jones has one of the most rest­less and indi­vid­ual imag­i­na­tions in Amer­i­can writ­ing today. This strange, sub­tle story of father-son dis­af­fec­tion and dis­jointed love is told with his sig­na­ture nar­ra­tive inven­tive­ness and dark humor. It moves for­ward with a gen­tly preda­tory Kafkaesque logic that will draw you in and leave you remem­ber­ing other lives, while won­der­ing more about the one you call your own.
— Kris Saknussemm, author of Zanesville

---

Stephen Gra­ham Jones con­tin­ues to deftly demon­strate that there’s some­thing warped and even a lit­tle scary behind the cur­tain of our cul­ture. At once funny, poignant, and unset­tling, The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti pulls it back to reveal the guilt and exis­ten­tial drift result­ing from our attempts to escape.
– Patrick Sch­abe, Pop­Mat­ters

So, yeah. Nolan Dugatti. Like Jim Doe and Pid­gin and LP Deal, like Hale and Doby Saxon, I’m him, he’s me, we’re nei­ther together and twice some­thing the far­ther apart we get from each other. It’s why I keep send­ing them out to the shelves, I suppose.

Hope you like it.

be famous,
Stephen

Posted: 08|3|08 at 11:18 pm. Filed under: Main.

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