Just Right — The Path to Murder

A writing project from beginning to end

Some ten or so years ago — everything about time and memory is off since Covid, so let’s say ten years — some friends and I had just wrapped up a grueling, wonderful two-year journey writing a multi-author serial in which we took our readers back to Oz. It was a fucked up Oz, a broken Oz, a bizarre, twisted Oz, and we loved it for two years. 138 episodes, each of us playing one of four characters, although as things progressed, I ended up playing (er, writing) as many as six characters. Nevertheless, without a script, without a net, without fail, we delivered episode after episode, even after we went on a long, six-month break in the middle of it all for reasons I can’t even begin to remember.

It was glorious. It was fun as fuck. It was monumental. (And it’ll be reprised on my website this year because I think it’s worth another run.) It was called “Dorothy: Locked & Loaded.”

Ten years ago, there was no such thing as Midjourney or Canva or half the amazing things that help authors deliver spectacular visuals. But now, there are tools out there, and I love them. If you read me, you’ve seen them yourself.

When we were done, we needed another challenge — the four of us: a book lover from Dublin, a social worker from Florida, and a writer from Tennessee. So, I sat down and brainstormed a way that we could pull together a variety of classic fairy tale characters, modernize and subvert them, and throw them together in a much more condensed serial fiction series — a noir tale starring a detective and a cast of characters.

I wrote a tight script this time. In D:L&L, we had all the time in the world, and partly because we had no script, it sprawled — in fun ways, but it sprawled. This time, I wanted it to be tight and just right, an intricate tale that brought all the characters together in a very narrow space, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in close contact with each other as storylines crisscrossed.

And Just Right was born.

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 amazing 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 this week — a few introductions, a guide on how to read the story, thirty-four episodes, and now this bit of history. But there’s a little more to say yet.

Warning! Major spoilers ahead!

Eventually, the lines between the characters began to blur, which was fine. That was supposed to happen. Also, it’s hard to write with distinct voices to keep the feel and flavor of multiple characters separate. When all the characters tell their stories in first person POV, there’s much more than action and dialog to differentiate them. In normal fiction, you can separate characters by certain characteristics. In Just Right, it was easier when four people were writing; it was very difficult by myself, and I spent a lot of time reading back, catching nuances to how certain characters spoke, how the authors portrayed their actions, and how they saw the world around them.

But again, it was easier as I got closer to the end. Why? Because, as you must know by now, dear reader, all of the characters would eventually die off figuratively and literally. The last episode would deliver the final truth — that there was never anyone there but Wolfe. Everyone else, the entire story itself, was simply his own mind playing out its own explanation for the death of her beloved, Red.

Whodunnit? It can’t be me, can it?

I like to think this was obvious to the reader as we reached the end. And perhaps, like lots of breadcrumbs dropped on a forest path, you didn’t notice the hints until the curtain was pulled back, revealing just a man. The astute reader may have noticed the crossover word choices and references, the subtle ones that appear more frequently in the last fifteen to twenty episodes. And if not, no worries. It’s all there to reread and explore later.

Wolfe, Goldi, Gretel, Ivan — Made with Midjourney & Canva

Here’s where it all started — in a blurb written forever ago.

I wanted to post the blurb that explains the story so many times, but I held off repeatedly to let the story play out. Here’s the one you might have seen:

In the depths of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, four people coexist in a cesspool of lust and betrayal — Wolfe, a broken cop with a history of questionable behavior; Goldi — a young woman trying to survive her dreams and the death of her lover; Gretel — an undercover agent struggling to remain true to her oath; Ivan — a horror of a man who will do anything to get what he wants.

Here’s the one that tells the story, the one I sent out to my author friends:

In the gritty depths of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a man named Wolfe, haunted by his own demons, finds himself caught in a web of darkness and despair. Consumed by anger, he commits a horrifying act, killing his lover, Red, in a moment of uncontrolled rage. What follows is a descent into madness as Wolfe’s shattered psyche drives him to do whatever it takes to discover the murderer and make him or her pay.

Goldi, Ivan and Gretel are aspects of Wolf’s personality that come into being when he commits murder in the alley behind Smiley’s.

Goldi is his survival instinct, a willingness to do whatever it takes; Ivan is his angry, violent side, a monster who has done horrific things to get his way; Gretel is the betrayal of his oath, his comrades, and now even Red. Wolfe himself personifies regret for his failures but unwillingness to accept what he is.

In the end, just one lonely man sits under a naked bulb in an alley. He wishes he’d made different choices, and maybe now he’s ready to face the future he built for himself.

Hope you enjoyed it. I did. And, I’m sure there will be more of the like before long. For now, you can start reading all of Just Right on my website for free, and I plan to put it all together into a book on Amazon.

Thanks for reading. — SJ Stone