Diary of a Serial Killer Novelist

"You're not a serial killer?" he asked, and I wanted to laugh. Indeed, he was just kidding, but after the amount of paperwork I'd had to fill out so that the government bureaucracy might accept me into their subsidized housing program, it certainly felt like they were investigating me for murder. "No," I typed out. "Just protagonists."

"Oh, that's okay, then," he replied. "Not too many protagonists renting from them, so they probably won't care about that."

It made me smile, certainly, and that made the afternoon's hassle dissipate like smoke. Did he always know what to say to make me smile, or did he honestly just think like that? Sometimes it was hard to tell. If only I could do the same for him when he wasn't doing so well, it'd be fair. But I don't have that same sense of snide humor.

But the idea stuck with me. Protagonist killer? Serial killer who only stalks protagonists? There ought to be a better term for it. And then that made me laugh again. Of course there was. We call them "novelists". Should I feel dumb for not connecting that sooner? Perhaps. But thinking wasn't high on my list, not with the headache bureaucracy had given me.

"I'm going to write a satire about a serial killer novelist," I typed to my friend. "Is there anything I should include?"

"Write it like a cop show on TV. Not 'Cops'. Like 'Law & Order' or one of those where they have a killer to catch in one forty-two minute episode."

Hrmm. Screenplay, or not screenplay? Nah, that'd be taking it a bit too far, and besides, I can't write screenplays for shit. But how do those investigative shows on TV start? With the murder, usually, right? This was actually starting to intrigue me as more than just a random slew of words thrown into a word processor. It could actually be fun. How to... ah.

It was a dark and stormy night.

I found myself giggling aloud for a nice change of pace. My writing doesn't normally make me laugh, only the foolishness of my friends in the writing community. But this was too hard to not ham up at this point. I had to take it farther than just 'protagonist killer'. I'm hardly the first person to ever say that.