Serial Killer

The good people at the Los Angeles Times asked me if I'd bat cleanup in the first round of their serialized novel project Money Walks and so of course I said yes. Normally, with my speed and eye I'm more of a lead-off hitter or #2, but I felt like my fast twitch muscles would suit the purpose at #4, particularly since there were will be 17 installments between this past Monday and April 24th, when the serial concludes, so, really, mathematically, I'm essentially Rickey Henderson. The results are now online (and in print Thursday morning if you happen to get the paper at home) for you to read. Here's snippet:

Angie believed nothing good ever happened in the Valley. She'd done her time there, like everyone else, working the day shift at Odd-Balls back in the '90s, stripping for CSUN frat boys who couldn't make it past Van Nuys, not even to see naked women. Even then, the cities of the Valley sounded like they wanted to get out: Northridge, West Hills, North Hills. . . . each one creeping on the fringe back toward the real Los Angeles.

The way the serial has worked from a writing point of view is pretty simple. About 24 hours before my 600 words were due, the first 3 sections were emailed to me. I spent the next 18 hours trying to figure out how the hell I was going to go from Diana Wagman's section, which I suspect started with Diana trying to figure out where to go from Seth Greenland's submission, which certainly had Seth trying to figure out just what to do with the initial section, penned by LAT's writer Mary McNamara. I was also thinking, while writing, how I might be able to set up the next section for my friend Aimee Bender, who was originally supposed to go after me, but who ended up moving further down the line, but who, originally, I was going to see the very night she'd have to write her section. See, I'm all about helping others. But, yeah, that didn't work out. So I took a more mercenary approach and decided that the story needed to have a caper and needed one right now, or else the entire project was going to go down in a burning heap. Whether or not anyone else thought this -- ie, the fine folks at the LA Times -- was not made clear to me. So. Yeah. That's what I did. 

It was actually quite fun to do this bit of experiemental storytelling. You can feel each writer attempting to inject their brand of storytelling into the work and also expressing a will about where they'd like it to go. I don't think people reading it can expect a uniformity in style or even for the writers to try to mimic each other's tone as part of the fun is watching what each of these talented folks choose to do, how their own aesthetic shines through. I fully expect that in Aimee's section, for instance, that everyone will turn into pumpkins. And when Mark Haskell Smith is up, I expect a prolonged scene of scatalogical excess. And then Susan Straight will make it all serious and beautiful. Personally, I'm hoping for scatalogical and downtrodden, but that's just me.   

Comments

[linda woods]

I am pretty sure I know what Mark Haskell Smith will write about.

[Josh Maday]

This is great, Tod. Nice work.