The art of writing is what you’re trying to say, that’s the art. Sometimes you’re being very direct, pointing to, well, the point, with a big arrow-shaped cut-out, but a lot of times, it’s subtle. It’s scene setting and characterization and world-building. Sometimes the street corner is the plot and character both. The art is maybe why you’re writing, whereas the craft is how you’re writing.
Starfish; Desert; The Fire; The Message; Cold Nights
I’ll hold up your firmament with you, for you, for you, & I’m not afraid now of my name becoming wind, or earth, or yours.
Doobuck’s Room
“How much is she going to pay me?” Susan finally asked through gritted teeth, still staring at her dimeless four dollars.
“Why nothing! My word.” Mrs. Peck’s face turned red. “Mrs. Oliver is a personal friend of mine; one I am proud to count. It would be an insult to ask her for money. She’s in need and I promised to help her. Selfish girl. I already pay you four dollars a week. Look in your hands.”
Going Through Imprints From Summer
I gave thanks to the summer gods, who put us together, and didn’t question the cause, and processed my flummoxed adolescent emotions in Meat Loaf songs.
Nowhere Man – Novel Excerpt from Sol & Serafina & the A.I.R.
“He might have some thoughts,” was all her mom, Luz, said, cancelling early Spanish classes at St. Cecilia’s. As long as Serafina wouldn’t get tricked by therapy into talking about stealing the mini-van at midnight to meet a boy who ghosted her at the winery—which got robbed after she forgot to rearm the alarm—before she lost the only key to aunt Julieta’s heirloom Armada chest from Mexico—she’d see the good doctor.
Writing in Crayon: Celebrating the “Disparate”
In my writing and reading life, I thank as "family": Cervantes, whose Don Quijote battled lies with the swords of the imagination; García Márquez, whose notes from life "helped themselves to coincidences forbidden to fiction"; Isabel Allende whose magical humor lends resilience in tragedy. And as I write these days in a vein of the "fantastic" in my novel, I include Julio Cortázar, with his alternating currents of glittering worlds.