Golden State

Los Angeles had a way of making failure look temporary. At thirty-five, Nico Serrano had been “temporarily” figuring things out for most of his adult life. He bartended nights at The Crooked Nail, a Downtown dive surviving mostly on regulars, industry washouts, and people who still smoked despite having quit. He lived with his childhood friend Eric Tanaka, an insurance adjuster whose greatest ambition was apparently keeping the electricity bill reasonable. Nico’s real work happened at an old drawing desk shoved against his bedroom wall. For nearly a decade, he had been writing and illustrating Blood & Iron, an enormous alternate-history graphic novel that consumed most of his twenties and produced very little money in return. His ten-year-old daughter, Lucy, thought it was the coolest thing anyone had ever made. That was enough. Usually. Lucy lived with Nico’s ex, Maya, and her new boyfriend Skyler, a relentlessly pleasant Silver Lake improv teacher who wore linen shirts and believed most interpersonal conflicts could be solved through “radical presence.” Nico found him unbearable. Unfortunately, Skyler was also very good with Lucy. Nico and Maya had settled into something resembling peace. They could share a school function without fighting, coordinate weekends without lawyers, and occasionally remember why they had once loved each other. His other constants were Roxy Vale, his tough, brutally honest goth coworker at the Nail, and Malik Rhodes, a musician whose social circle seemed to encompass half of Los Angeles. None of them expected Blood & Iron to change Nico’s life. Then came the bookstore. His first official signing took place at a tiny independent shop in Los Feliz. Attendance was modest enough that Nico could identify nearly everyone personally. That was where Poppy Bell found him. Twenty-eight, eccentric, excitable, and seemingly incapable of experiencing anything at a normal intensity, Poppy worked as a junior producer for Aurelius Pictures, the struggling film division of a massive entertainment conglomerate. She picked up Blood & Iron expecting to skim it. She stayed for hours. Three days later, Nico received a call from Aurelius. Poppy had brought the book to her boss, Vivienne Mercer, the formidable sixty-one-year-old president of the division. Vivienne was elegant, severe, deeply Old Hollywood, and currently fighting to keep her studio from becoming another corporate casualty. Poppy believed Blood & Iron could be their next major franchise. Vivienne believed Poppy needed adult supervision. Their relationship existed somewhere between executive and protégé, mother and daughter, and exhausted school principal and gifted problem child. Nico knew nothing about filmmaking. He had never written a screenplay. He had never taken a studio meeting. Until recently, his closest connection to Hollywood was serving martinis to people complaining about Netflix. Now a major studio wanted to discuss turning the strange little book he spent nine years drawing in apartments, bars, and coffee shops into a movie. For once, Nico Serrano might actually be getting somewhere. Unfortunately, he would soon discover that success in Los Angeles could wreck your life just as efficiently as failure.