Moorpark Palms - Prologue. A Quick Introduction

A Quick Introduction

From 1993 to 2001, I informally chronicled some of the activities in the small Los Angeles apartment building where I lived. I sent letters annually to a group of my friends, and they seemed to enjoy them. In fact, no matter what I’ve written since, most of my friends say, “You know what I always liked best of yours? Those apartment letters. They were really funny.”

Buoyed by that, when I started to write full-time, I wrote a novel based on the letters. I did this for a couple of reasons, but the biggest was to protect me from libel. The goings-on in my building were often semi-public, or I wouldn’t have known about them, but they were still filtered through my perceptions. Other people, especially those diving high, drunk, and naked at 2 AM off the carport roof into the pool, might not see it that way. And they might sue. So I needed to disguise the setting and change the people’s names.

Also, I’d written another rambling book, long on characters and short on plot, and I learned that most people read novels for plot. The apartment letters don’t have a plot. It’s just a lot of people doing a lot of stuff over ten years. So I picked the characters I thought might string together best and condensed the time to four years. I also decided I needed to build up the narrator and give him a life with its own plot.

Sounds like a great plan, but it didn’t work. No one cared about the 28-year-old narrator and his writer boyfriend. Some people couldn’t get around the fact that I wasn’t 28 when I wrote the letters. “These are your stories, Rich,” one of my friends said. “Who’s this guy Jake?” Also, Jake’s story at work fought what was going on in the building instead of providing continuity. And even with the number of people reduced by three-quarters from the letters, people still couldn’t keep track of them.

But the biggest problem was the book wasn’t as funny. Maybe people liked the enormous dysfunctionality of people in the letters. Or maybe my often glib rudeness. The smoother novel didn’t capture that.

So I set the project aside and wrote some other books. But the more that people read them, the more they asked about the letters. So I figured I’d go back, change all the names, send the edited collection letters out as a present to friends, and then post the collection online. But there’s something else: these are people’s lives, no matter how twisted my perceptions of them. And if someone wrote a funny series of stories about you, you’d probably want to be mentioned by name. It’s a memory of that time in your life.

Also, this is LA: people move on quickly – or die – so maybe I won’t get sued. Last I checked, fifteen years after I left the building, there were still two people living there who figure in the letters, and the last owner has held on. That, alone, is amazing, since I think we had five owners, including two banks, from 1991 to 1998. But I only have a small group of readers, and I’m not worried that these three people might join it.

Finally, I decided to publish the letters and the novel together as one book. And I’ve already separated the novel into the longer story about the building and a short one about Jake. I figure people can read one part or all three, depending on their tastes.

Some of you have already read about Jake in Jake and Conor. The apartment novel will be serialized for the next several months, and the letters will follow. Hope you enjoy yourselves.