This story is part of Image’s November Kinship issue, celebrating L.A.’s generous spirit and the artistic collaborations that happen among family and friends. Writing a novel is a lonely endeavor, one that requires thousands of hours in quiet solitude. Or so I used to believe. In the years after the pandemic, I started meeting with four other writers — Jade Chang, Angela Flournoy, Aja Gabel and Xuan Juliana Wang — for regular work sessions at Little Dom’s, the cozy Italian American restaurant on Hillhurst Avenue in Los Feliz. We sat cloistered in a corner booth and adhered to the Pomodoro method, increasing the usual 25 minutes of work to 40, with breaks in between to talk, over giant meatballs in marinara sauce, fried potatoes with garlic and lemon, butter lettuce Italian tuna salad. What did we talk about in those breaks? Seldomly about our book projects — but everything else, from the serious to the frivolous. The point wasn’t to share pages or workshop chapters. All of us had published one book and were writing …