When writing about LA, people always assume you’re going to write about rich people at pools on the West Side. LA is not that. Los Angeles isn’t a stage set, and anyone who doesn’t know the difference hasn’t been in LA long enough or with enough hard-won intelligence. William Faulkner wrote, in Requiem for a Nun , that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Los Angeles feels like that if that was about a city—LA is not even LA. Everything is still here, as a city it remains, but nothing holds still even while it’s happening, even once it’s over.  That said, you can also start writing from inside the illusion. My novel, Kill Dick begins poolside in Brentwood, before dropping fast and dark into the stratified streets of chaos where the poor and addicted are being hunted by a serial killer who is a stand-in for the worst actors on the stage of capitalism-run-riot today.…