DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — This afternoon we published the first chapter of "The Adventures of Downtown Oliver Brown," a semi-fictional tale of Downtown nightlife written by author Stan Lerner. It's very different than our typical content, but a series that I think will turn out to be a lot of fun.

I met Stan a few weeks back in the Starbucks at Elleven, somewhere he hangs out often. We got to talking and he expressed an interest in writing about Downtown, but taking more of a novella-style approach to the material.

The idea with Downtown Oliver Brown is to give a real take on Downtown's nightlife, but to use a fictional character to tell the story. Many of the experiences that work there way into the adventure will be based around real people and real events, but with a healthy dose of literary license taken to move the story along and make for an interesting tale.

Personally, I'm really looking froward to seeing what this turns into. I think this idea of painting a picture of the Downtown experience has a lot of potential to be both entertaining and informative, and I'm interested to see how it develops.