What Now or Whatever?

The first novel I wrote was titled What Now for Whatever. It was my first stab at a hard-boiled detective novel set in Los Angeles. I’d moved to L.A. seven years previously, before undertaking the notion that maybe I should be a novelist. Los Angeles crime fiction has been an obsession for me over the years. If you’ve read any of these posts, you’ve seen the influence. But what kind of influence has it been?

I’ve written here previously about the old axiom of ‘write what you know.’ What do I know of crime? Besides a few petty crimes I’ve committed or seen others commit, not much. However, I have read a great deal of crime fiction and true crime, and I presume I have an imagination. And isn’t that the fun part about writing? You get to make things up. But making things up and readers believing what you’ve made up don’t always go hand and hand.

I believe I’m like most readers. No matter how absurd and outlandish a piece of writing is, there has to be a level of grounded believability. The writer doesn’t necessarily need to know all the x’s and o’s, but must sound like they do, at least. Fake it until you make it. A phrase I’ve heard ad nauseam since my fledgling days in Los Angeles, a city that knows a thing or two about surface-level awareness. Nothing against that city or its denizens.

And not to say that every writer is just throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks. Many writers do real research. Most crime writers go on ride-alongs and make real contacts with real cops and criminals. How many crime writers covered crime as journalists before they started making it up? Quite a few. Not me. I’ve done none of this research and held no jobs on a crime beat. I was just making it from what influenced me, from what I’d read over the years. Probably why no one has read it.

What Now for Whatever was published here once upon a time. I tried to get a literary agent for a long time, because I thought my crime novel was good enough to be published. However, literary agents were not looking for anything but cozy mysteries, not hard-boiled crime thrillers. Or so I told myself and decided to self-publish on this website. I thought it was good enough, but it wasn’t. I took it down after about a year.