Just Right for Me
Four People. Four Stories. One Murder.
Just over a year ago, I finished writing Just Right, “a tragic tale of lust and betrayal.”
I finished uploading the whole thing to my website SJStoneAuthor today, and wow, was it ever an emotional rollercoaster again, all the feels from a year ago when I finally finished this epic noir serialized tale — 30+ episodes totalling maybe 90k words. That’s a whole novel.
The End — those are big words, and sometimes they’re a relief — you did it! Sometimes they’re a burden — is there more to the story that you didn’t tell or want to tell? Sometimes, well, they’re just right — the story ended exactly how it was supposed to end. Just Right ended exactly how it was supposed to end — it ended at the beginning and tied up nicely with a little bow.
And so many emotions. When I wrote that last episode last January, I felt it, which is exactly what I want out of my writing. I want to feel it. I want that emotional impact. I fucking love a good tragedy. I love writing broken people. I love seeing all the shards of a character’s heart or soul, or both, littering the street around them. And so it was with Wolfe, our hero, our protagonist, our opening salvo.
I started writing this story with three other friends some 10+ years ago, and just about two years ago I decided to finish it myself.
Where to Start?
I would play Wolfe, aka the Big Bad Wolfe, a broken-down, no good, New York City detective who had only one thing in his life that mattered — a singer, stripper, and kind-hearted girl who’d come to the big city to make her way in the world. Red, aka Little Red Riding Hood, who loved her man as hard as anyone could, and who walked away because there was no other choice.
And right in the very first moment, when the story opens, there she is, lying in the alley behind her place of employment, Smiley’s Cabaret, stabbed to death with a kitchen knife.
My friend from Tennessee was next. She played Goldi, aka Goldilocks, a struggling singer who, like Red, had come to the big city looking for a life, but unlike Red, she wanted fame and fortune. She wanted more — bright lights, a stage, diamonds and pearls. Only, it turns out, she was in love with Red, too, and in Episode 2, we found out what that love, when spurned, did to a person.
To create some distance, character number three was Gretel, from Hansel and Gretel, an FBI agent who’d been undercover so long with a human trafficking ring that she’d lost her way and her moral compass. My friend from Florida, who works with battered women, took on that role, and the idea of having a shelter in the city for women and children was born. How did Gretel connect to the shelter? Through the fourth and final character.
Our friend from Ireland played Ivan and his Giant, from Jack and the Beanstalk, a black-hearted old man from Russia who had no place in his heart for compassion or love, who cared nothing for the future of a human being, only what a person was worth in cold hard cash. He owned the shelter, and everyone there was a potential victim of his scheming.
We sustained things for about twenty episodes back in the day, and then things went a little sideways, and the story sat on my old Blogger account and in my Google Drive unfinished. Not everything works out, but all good things come to an end. I decided in August 2023 it was time to end it, to finish the story.
Over six months’ time, with some episodes done and others needing some editing, I started reposting the story to Medium. I created title graphics and videos using AI, Canva, and other tools that didn’t exist ten years ago and added that to the mix, giving our characters new life. Then, around episode 15, when I had a good feel for the story again, I dumped a few episodes to pull the story together faster than the original script suggested. Having some completed episodes was nice, but it didn’t make delivering the story in whole that much easier. There was still a lot of ground to cover, and having to write four different characters and trying to match the original writing styles from earlier episodes took a lot of work.
And it’s done now and on my website this week — a few introductions, a guide on how to read the story, thirty-four episodes, and now this bit of history. Here are some images to help whet your appetite. If you want to read the whole thing (for free), just click on Just Right at the top here and start reading.
