Hell-A

I haven’t written anything for a week.

Because I’m an idiot.

I was laying a new floor in the kitchen. There was only a little left to do. It had been a bit of a slog because we had decided on a herringbone effect and it was more fiddly than anticipated. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I chopped off the end of my finger and it hurt like hell. So I haven’t been able to strum the guitar, play the piano, shuffle cards or, more importantly, type very well on my laptop.

Speaking of Hell, I went to LA for both work and fun. I’ve written a new novel set in LA and I have started a new private investigator series that is based in Hollywood through the decades.

Now, I know that it is easy to jump into Google Maps, whack it on to street view and have the ability to scour Sunset Boulevard from my home in Reading, but there is so much more that you can get by actually visiting the place you are writing about. (We talk about research in the latest episode of the Let’s Get Lit podcast. Give it a listen HERE.)

Hollywood Boulevard feels dangerous. It’s grubby. You don’t get that from Google Maps. The amount of homeless people I passed (or avoided) who were lying in their own piss on the sidewalk or howling at the moon or hung their head in some opiate-induced haze was remarkable. I know it’s also an issue in London but I probably passed a hundred homeless people - including an entire family camping under a sheet of tarpaulin - on one street where I might have seen five on a similarly busy road in my capital.

But the people I met were friendly and generous. I stumbled on a Sunday-morning market on Cahuenga Boulevard. I was offered samples of everything. I got talking to a couple who had been to see Joni Mitchell the night before - I was going that evening. I chatted with some guy about vegan macaroni cheese as we queued for a fake tuna sandwich that was being made by a woman who had cooked on Good Morning America the month before.

Only in LA, right?

I watched people as I ate breakfast alone on Sunset and I made notes in a hotel on Selma. I also found myself in a Cleveland Browns bar during a game and spent a few hours with a guy who works for NBC news and another who is a cinematographer and works a lot on music videos and adverts. And they think Kamala Harris will win the election. From my sofa in the UK, it looks like Trump will get in again but they seem pretty confident in Harris on the West coast. Again, I urge any writer to talk to real people for research.

I saw Joni Mitchel on the Sunday night. A bit of a dream come true, for me. She sang some songs I needed to hear and some songs that I didn’t. I learned the phrase DEEP CUTS. Everyone was saying it. ‘She’s playing a lot of deep cuts’. I had no idea what this meant but I looked it up and apparently it just means songs that are not as well known. Seems like an odd thing to do, to me, but I took it all in and I wept at Case of You, and I was shocked when she came back for the second half with Elton John, Annie Lennox, Meryl Streep and Marcus Mumford.

I walked back to my hotel, talking to strangers who had travelled from all over to be there and the mood was light and appreciative and positive. And I love how music can bring people together like that.

I enjoyed LA and I will go back to pick up more detail and colour for these novels. There’s more to explore, for sure. It doesn’t come close to New York, I have to say. That place is special. But there is something about Hollywood that defies the view of the glitz and glamour that most of us probably have.

It’s kinda gross. It’s dirty. Seedy. In many ways it is outdated. Old-fashioned. There is a darkness hidden beneath the celebrity culture. There’s desperation. Waitresses who look like more of a star than Scarlett Johansson, crossing their fingers for tips and auditions. It is what it is but it’s not what it seems.

In short, it’s the perfect place for a new Will Carver series.