When Kokomo, Indiana resident Dianna Brown first submitted an entry to this project a few months ago, she introduced herself by email, saying she’d only visited Los Angeles a couple of times, so her writing would focus mainly on character.
Her pages weren’t selected that time, or the next time she entered, or the next nine times after that. But this week, she finally nailed the tone of “Right of Way” with three pages (61-63) centering around our hero’s attempt to regroup personally and politically after yet another hellacious night.
It wasn’t easy.
“Mayor Russell Napolitano was like no other person, real or imaginary, that I have ever encountered,” Dianna said. “Each time I would think I had him figured out, he would do a flustering turnaround. I knew if I just hung in there he would turn my way eventually.”
The turning point came this week when Dianna, writing through severe thunderstorms that created havoc around Kokomo, chose to give Napolitano a breather from the breakneck pace he’s kept for the past 48 hours since learning of his friend Larry’s murder.
Back in his City Hall office at last, Napolitano deals with a flurry of official visitors but also grabs the chance to shower, shave, eat and sit for a cosmetician who tends to his banged up face.
Sure, carving out time for a makeup session will help the mayor avoid talking about being on the receiving end of two (count ’em) late-night assaults. But visually, the scene also spotlights the vanity and narcissism partially behind Napolitano’s quest to solve a rash of murders and free a kidnapped friend on his own.
Dianna kept our story on track by having Napolitano next grab 10 minutes of alone-time, during which he retrieves and studies a hidden copy of the stolen methane map. Here he starts to realize the map’s significance lies not in its marking of underground methane deposits, but in its title block, which names the parcel number and the city inspectors who surveyed that stretch of Wilshire back in 1926.
As hard as things have been for Napolitano, they weren’t much easier last week for Dianna. As 27 tornado cells bounced around her region, she wrote her entry in fits and starts, constantly scrambling to turn off her computer to avoid lightning strikes.
“I hurried through, because I was afraid we’d lose power and I would miss the deadline. The last thing I wanted to do,” she said, “was to lose Mayor Napolitano to cyberspace.”
The mayor survived due to tenacity and perseverance. Not his, this time, but Dianna’s, on her twelfth weekly submission.
“This has been the most fun, aggravating project I have ever done,” she said.
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