I'm back

I reached a point this semester where I had to put myself on a blog-atical and a Facebook diet. It was worth it, though, because I was able to get a bunch of really significant academic stuff accomplished this semester (kinda what you’d expect of a PhD student and I won’t bore you with it) and was also able to complete a couple of personal writing projects. The first is the Spanish to English translation of a novel my friend Jose Palacios wrote in 2009. The second is my own novel I’ve been working on for a couple of years. Both projects are going to a publisher who has shown interest in publishing them (Jose’s novel in Spanish has already been published once in Colombia and another publisher, Alfaguara, is going to publish it again).

I’m cautiously optimistic about my book. It’s a first person narrative about a guy who does surveillance for narco-traffickers in Peru. I don’t normally write stories from the point of view of narco-traffickers, but I had a bunch of disparate narratives that I had worked on and liked but that didn’t really work together. This surveillance guy was an invention to tie all these other stories together and what happens to him is what keeps you reading to the end (I hope). I came to grips with a lot of this stuff via a graduate English class I had last spring on Creative Writing. The biggest part of the course is “workshopping” what you’ve written by handing it out to the other people in the class. They take it home and come back and give you verbal feedback in front of the prof and the other students. It’s somewhat traumatic when eight other people tell you your twenty pages of creative work is crappy, but, more often than not, they also have helpful suggestions that, in my case, shaped the book into something that may be publishable.

When you’ve put a lot of yourself into something and you’re very close to it you can’t have real accurate perspective about it, so I’ll have to see if the final book is really any good. I’ve been a pretty fair writer for a while, but this novel was a tough project. It's a lot like building a house. You may be a good decorator or a great cabinet maker or an electrician, but that don’t mean you can build no house. To build a house you have to know everything from the blue prints to the home site preparation all the way to the best roof to put on. And if you put it all together and build it and the bathroom’s in the wrong place, too bad. As for the writing, you may be a fine writer, but if you can’t hook all the characters together correctly and have a really solid, interesting premise and build in the right amount of conflict and construct a plot that works you won’t have a novel. And I struggled with all those things.

All the writing and studying have put a crimp in my workout program and that, combined with the great holiday food now have me swoll up like a tick on Dracula. Only my cycling shape is somewhat up to snuff for winter. So I need to get it in gear and get serious for bike racing season and the Holy Toledo Triathlon in late March. Monday will be the A&M Cycling Team MLK Day Century (100 mi.) Ride - some of the best fun you can have with your pants on. And the next day it’s back to the academic grind, too.