It's great when you write a story and all of a sudden the phone starts ringing, producers call, fans call, women send you notes about how clever you are. But there are other times when you writing a story and you get no response whatsoever. Zilch. Nada. Not even fan letters. A month ago (spring of 2005) I wrote Beheading on Mount Baldy for the LA Weekly. The editors liked it so much that they ran all 11,000 words without protest, not cutting a bit. (And at the end of the year they subitted to the LA Press Club contest for the best feature story of the year.)

But what was their (and my) reward when the story came out? The magazine got a couple of fan letters and after that, nothing at all. No phone calls (other than a few friends). No letters. No producers calling to ask about the rights. The story didn't even make anyone mad enough to complain to me. The story fell into the pond without a ripple.

I have no idea what went wrong. But a couple of possibilities suggest themselves. First of all, maybe I just deluded myself. Maybe the story was a lot of strutting and fretting about nothing. I know that one of my old friends thought so. Also, maybe I just made a bad choice. Maybe the characters (two gay women who were involved in the death of an old man and the stealing of his money) were too unattractive. Maybe the film industry (after "Monsters") just didn't like the idea of doing another film about lesbian murders. Maybe the whole subject was just unappealing. I do know that I wasn't able to interview the three most important people I was writing about. One was in jail for murder, one told me never to call her again, and the third (a psychologist) was told by her attorney that she couldn't talk to me.

One lesson I draw from all this (something I've always known but tend to forget when I get on the trail of what I think is a hot story)--never do a story about people who won't talk to you (though to be fair, I didn't know this at the start). I was sure, at the very least, the killer and her psychologist would talk. Without them, I don't know, maybe the story, well-written though it might have been, simply lacked heart.