The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

[Originally published at 8763 Wonderland, 12/22/05] It was three days before Christmas and Trace felt a black depression coming on. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “There wasn’t enough left of her to put in a shoe box.” “Providing it’s a child’s-size shoe box,” Wellbeck confirmed. The Public Information Officer for the L.A. County Coroner’s Office offered [...]

“The game is afoot, Watson …”

I’m very pleased that the contentious New Homeless series for the Las Vegas Sun is finally complete and out of the way – at least the substantive bulk of it; there has been talk of a fourth and final segment when we are ready to pull up stakes and leave Las Vegas for Los Angeles but I [...]

The Myth of the Starving Artist

  If you are a frequent reader of this blog and my work elsewhere, chances are pretty good that you are personally acquainted with someone who makes their living in the creative sector: writers, painters, commercial and graphic artists, actors, dancers, musicians of all stripe, architects, sculptors; in short, anyone who earns a living from [...]

Flashback: “Darwin For Pigeons”

(Originally published five years ago, June 14, 2005, at Giselle Fernandez’s L.A. Stories web site) “Did you make that pigeon blow up?” the little boy called up to Trace. Trace was standing on the balcony of his fifth floor residential hotel room. Moments before he was smoking a cigarette and observing the pigeons on the lawn [...]

Mailander in the L.A. Weekly

Our friend Joseph Mailander has another by-line in the L.A. Weekly. Read “A Nervous Rec” about the L.A. City Council’s plans to help resolve the budget crisis in the metropolis by the sea by slashing funding for the Department of Recreation and Parks, which is the most ridiculous proposal I’ve heard in a long time, [...]