The Accidental Author

book + prompt

I wrote another book without knowing I was writing a book. To be clear, I was hired to write a longform piece on this 90s-era graffiti writer in LA who had a long cat-and-mouse story with a certain detective, who followed him up to Seattle and [spoiler alert] ultimately brought him home in handcuffs.

There is a good chase story in-between, though, full of injuries, close calls and camaraderie.This is no redemption story, as the subject remains unrepentant and became a hero in his scene. Just the kind of story I like, where protagonists are complex, chaos ensues and surprising things happen along the way.

It happened in writing it, too. What I thought might be a 6,000-word introduction to a zine or text for an art exhibit turned into the main text of the book, woven through color photos. The publisher surprised me with a nice up-front credit, too (Sometimes I don’t know with these things, unless we discuss ahead of time, as there are some works I don’t want my name on, and others I do…) This is a limited edition book, only 500 copies printed by the publisher, so nice to have this hardcover land in my hands this week.

For today’s Friday Focus & Flow writing prompt…