Writers taking a flier on ‘Birds’

To be perfectly honest, we at The Times had no idea what we were getting into three Sundays ago when we began a novel-writing contest and invited readers to show us their best work.

Would they ignore us? Would they be such good writers they’d take our jobs? Would their work be so horrible that we’d never live down this crazy idea?

I wrote Chapter 1 of “Birds of Paradise,” as you may recall, and stepped aside. We invited all of you to write subsequent chapters on a daily basis, with me stepping back in a month later, on April 27, to wrap things up.

In one of the smartest moves of my life, I was out of the country when the contest began. Roughly 700 readers entered the first day, saddling several judges (Times reporters and editors) with the task of reading a whole mountain of noir.

I’ve done my share of judging since then, but the most fun has been the nightly calls to winners and runners-up.

With just a little more than a week of competition left, our entrants have included grandmothers, grandfathers, cops, insurance agents, students, teachers, private investigators, a rocket scientist, a brain surgeon and two former FBI agents. Luckily, we’re not still getting 700 entries daily. The number dipped into the hundreds and then, as the plot became more complicated, leveled off in the dozens, many of them by regular contestants.

I found myself wondering what made them keep doing this, writing 600 words between 7 p.m. and noon the next day. It sure wasn’t the money: They don’t win any, just a bit of glory and a few perks at the L.A. Times Festival of Books the last weekend of this month.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve gone back and asked a sampling of our contestants why they entered the chase. Our first winner, the proud author of Chapter 2, was 21-year-old Joseph Fink, a recent graduate of UC Santa Barbara and an aspiring writer.

“Well, my parents are big L.A. Times readers,” says Fink, and they had clipped out news of the contest for him to see. “I wrote it kind of for fun.”

“To be honest,” says his father, Ron, a musician, “I wasn’t real impressed.”

Our judges were.

Joseph Fink had taken a setup that involved an underhanded TV producer, a hapless congressman and a stripper at Jumbo’s Clown Room and launched a wild caper involving guns, greed, lust and a mysterious flash drive that contained information worth dying for.

“Bonner loved driving with the top down in Malibu, where it felt like flying above the ocean,” wrote Fink in Chapter 2.

He went on to win Chapter 8, as well, which his dad thought was much better than Chapter 2.

“After years of criticism and rejection letters, I am deeply humbled by this experience,” Shaun Morey of Hermosa Beach wrote at the bottom of his submission for Chapter 17.

Morey, an unemployed title insurance man, stay-at-home dad and aspiring writer, has won three times -- one of three entrants who have won more than once.

Morey, who has a book out called “Great Fishing Stories,” has entered every single day of the contest. The first time he won, on Chapter 10, he was notified by his wife -- who teaches philosophy of law at Cal State Long Beach -- while surfing north of Santa Barbara. His son hugged him, and Morey quickly went to work on Chapter 11, rushing to Santa Barbara the next day to send in the entry at a coffee shop with Wi-Fi.

He won that one, too.

My calls to Karen Dale are not quite as enjoyable. Dale, a retired writing teacher living in Corona del Mar, is a four-time runner-up, which means she is consistently one of our best and most talented competitors. But each time she hears my voice, she gets nervous, hoping the news will be better than last time.

“I haven’t given up; I just haven’t won,” said Dale, the twice-widowed mother of two daughters, who promised to keep trying. I’m pulling for her, naturally, but we judges respect our writers too much to be swayed by emotion.

Stacy Weinstein has entered three times and hasn’t cracked the finals, but she says “Birds of Paradise” offers a nice break from her day job designing interplanetary space missions for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“If you launch a rocket and it breaks, you can’t bring it back and fix it,” Weinstein said, but the plot in a mystery can loop over and back, go off course and be redirected. “It’s neat to be able to participate in something like that.”

“The greatest joy in my life is to start the day with a cup of coffee and the morning paper,” says Newport Beach brain surgeon Deborah Henry, who likes to write, came upon the contest and decided, “Why not?”

In her work as a surgeon, the one-time “Birds of Paradise” runner-up said, she sees people whose lives have changed tragically and instantly, and she often wonders at the mysteries of human drama. What if they’d turned right instead of left? In fiction, she’s an omniscient creator who can take control of those moments.

“You’ve got to root for Carmen,” Henry said, referring to an underdog character who might, or might not, get the best of the miscreants who populate “Birds of Paradise.”

Nick Boone, a retired FBI agent who specialized in counter-terrorism, lives in Agoura Hills and works as a screenwriter. He was tracking our fictional crooks and sending in chapters when inspiration struck. Then he saw a familiar name on the list of winners.

“I thought, ‘There can’t be two guys named Jim Botting,’ ” said Boone, and sure enough, Jim Botting of Moorpark listed his occupation as ex-FBI.

Boone and Botting had worked together as G-men. Boone worked the 1984 Summer Olympics in counter-terrorism and later cracked the case of an IRS office bomber.

Botting was a negotiator on high-profile cases, including the standoff at Wounded Knee. Neither knew the other had been entering chapters in “Birds of Paradise.”

A few days after Botting won, Boone hit the jackpot, lending a second federal cop’s experience to a wild plot involving blackmail and extortion, and an ex-FBI agent running surveillance. He’s since won again.

“Solving all the bombings and crimes I did,” Boone said, speaking of his life as an agent rather than as writer, “it was a story you had to unravel. I’m very good at solving plot problems.”

For Chapter 17, Botting and Boone decided to co-author an entry, figuring that if two FBI agents put their heads together, the crooks -- and the other writers -- would be no match for them. They entered as Botti-Boone, a Soprano-sounding name, and came up with an Anthony Pellicano-inspired character named Johnny Seagullano.

Get it?

The entry was a runner-up.

Although it’s only fair to admit that at times our plot has wandered aimlessly, or stayed in one place a little too long, “Birds of Paradise” may well end up launching a legitimate writing career or two.

“Dear Lorin:” a literary agent wrote to our Chapter 4 winner, Lorin Michel, a freelance writer living in Oak Park. “We read your work in the L.A. Times and wanted to contact you to find out if you might be interested in writing a book.”

Definitely, Michel told me, saying she was eager to respond to Jill Marasal, who’s with the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency (home to Amy Tan, among other literary stars).

Marasal told me she’s been reading “Birds of Paradise” out of curiosity and in search of potential clients, and she found Michel’s work “dramatic without being melodramatic.” She said she wanted to get in touch with Joseph Fink, too, because that kid’s got promise.

There’s still time to get in on the action, folks, and no telling where “Birds of Paradise” might take you.

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steve.lopez@latimes.com