These are the steps to the Baldwin Hills Overlook in Culver City, California. I used to live nearby. Nervous about how a gym membership would stretch my Hollywood assistant salary, I often hiked the steps for a free workout. All 282 of them. Big, slabby stones of uneven heights, lengths, widths, and steepness. One year, I made it my New Year’s Resolution to run all the way up. Without stopping. Hey, it seemed like a fun challenge at the time. Bounding up the first 30 steps was glorious. Breath came easy. My legs were light and fluid. I wantonly flaunted my twentysomething youth, gazelle-like, certain that “I got this.” Around step number 50, my lungs started to tighten. It wasn’t too bad, though. I focused on breathing deeply, evenly. My legs started to burn. A good burn, though. I was past the biggest steps and nearly a fifth of the way to the top. All downhill from here, I thought, with a grin. I was still certain that “I got this.” By 70, everything felt a little worse. My lungs were tighter. I focused on deep, even breaths, but couldn’t get enough air. The burn in my legs was not a “good burn” anymore. My legs were heavy, as if my running shorts had morphed into water-logged jeans. But I was now a quarter of the way to the top, mentally repeating, the faster you run, the faster you’re done. I was no stranger to endurance exercise, having run cross-country in high school and the Chicago Marathon in college. If I could willpower my way upwards, one step at a time, soon, the next step would be the top step. I was still pretty certain that “I got this.” By 80 or 90 — the intensifying fatigue threw off the exact count — I’d downgraded my pretty certain to pretty uncertain, and as I hit 100, maybe?, my lungs felt straightjacketed, my gasps futile efforts to loosen the straps, my legs thousand-pound sequoia stumps doused in gasoline and set on fire. My body was screaming at me to stop. I kept going. “Going.” A generous term. By the low 100s, I’d slowed down. Instead of bounding up with one foot per step, I was putting two feet on each step. Then, I started sneaking in a cheaty little pause. Then, I started planting my hands on my legs to keep them from buckling. It didn’t matter. Slowing down wasn’t enough. Cheating wasn’t enough. I was certain that "I don't got this." I needed to stop. I kept going. Somewhere in the mid 100s, I started to play a mindgame. "If you stop, your script will never sell." That got me another few steps, at which point I was in so much pain the I didn’t care about a stupid script and raised the stakes. "If you stop, you will never get any, in any form, not even first base, ever again." That got me to 150, give or take, probably take, but soon I needed to raise the stakes again. "If you stop, aliens who very much do not come in peace will descend, raking lasers across the Santa Monica pier and Dodger Stadium and even"—this one hurt—"your local In-N-Out Burger." It didn’t matter. Unable to raise the motivational stakes anymore, I stopped, leaving Los Angeles to ruin. --- I went after this New Year’s Resolution several times. The farthest I ever got was to step number 190 or so before my body decided that 0 career success, 0 romantic success, and an apocalyptic Los Angeles void of double-doubles, animal style, were less painful than pushing to 200, never mind 282. These attempts left me sore-legged but not empty-handed. As I limp-hiked the rest of the way up to the overlook, I wondered, what if these mini-mindgames were real? What if, as I gazed out over Los Angeles, swarms of UFOs actually did darken the skies? An extreme, even comical, thought dreamed up by a mind woozy with exhaustion. But, I figured, you could lower the stakes, make it more believable, by playing with the criteria. I was reminded of Stephen King's "Quitters, Inc.", Roald Dahl's "The Man from the South", and that Twilight Zone episode, "The Bet." I also recalled the little throwaway bets from my own life that broke free from the confines of a casino or a racetrack. Hiking at Devil's Lake in Wisconsin as a kid and being dared by my brother to pick up a bright red centipede for a dollar. Waiting in line at Disneyland for the Haunted Mansion and overhearing a group talking about how much money you’d have to pay them to spend a night in an allegedly haunted house. Maybe gambling was more universal, more elemental, than I'd thought. Maybe, I thought, there's a story here. --- At first, I tried writing a one-hour drama TV pilot called PLACE YOUR BETS. It got encouragement, which didn’t mean much, because in LA, you can die of excessive encouragement. Being treated to a $15 mushroom swiss burger at the Grove, however, signaled that the story might be worth more than hot air. After reading the script, a low-budget horror director took me to lunch, and told me, “This thing’s crazy.” Which was a compliment, I think. Neither of us had the connections or clout to get it made, and the director was more interested in getting a cheap (e.g. free) writer to script his ideas, but I was elated. Something I’d written had earned me a meal. Now, I just had to figure out how to earn three meals a day, 365 days per year, for (knock on wood, salt over the shoulder, don't breathe while passing a graveyard) another five or six decades. As a TV pilot, PLACE YOUR BETS just wasn’t going to do that. Or be the first step to my goal of paying my way through life with the pen. No matter how much I rewrote it, the medium wasn't right. It wasn’t until I read BEAUTIFUL BOY by David Sheff and researched gambling addiction that the medium took shape. PLACE YOUR BETS should be a novel, I realized, so that I could more readily access the thought patterns of a gambling addict. BEAUTIFUL BOY, traveling to Vegas as a 12-year-old, running up the Culver City stairs. I’m sure there were many other inspirations, remembered and imagined, long untethered from their origin. Maybe that’s a good thing. I’m interested in authors' motivations, but I’m appreciative of a common refrain: in the end, many don’t know where their ideas come from. After all, what’s a story without a bit of mystery?