"Sherlock Alger"

Today marks the publication of Joe's Luck: The World's Longest Literary Remix, in which 150 writers (myself included) remixed/rewrote a single page of Horatio Alger's 1910 novel, Joe's Luck: Always Wide Awake, under the editorship of Jason Boog at GalleyCat. (Explanation here.) The abridged version can be read here, with my page starting on page 32 of the Scribd viewer (the text between the sentences in red is mine).

For my piece, I took what was originally a fairly uninteresting scene with truly terrible dialogue, and reimagined it as a lost passage from a Sherlock Holmes story. To refresh my memory before I began writing, I re-read some Holmes stories for the first time in years, and was surprised at how densely wordy Doyle's tales were - to create a truly faithful homage to Holmes, I would have needed four or five times the number of words that were allotted to me for this project. Because of this, my version of a Holmes story comes off as almost minimalist in style. But given the constraints I was working under, I'm pretty pleased with the result. And it was certainly fun to write.