my life – Page 6 – Anthony Otero

Happy Book Birthday (to me).

I can go into this whole thing about what the book is about and how I spent hours upon hours of writing. I can tell stories about how I went through three drafts and had to re-write the ending. I can talk about isbns, self publishing, and the creation of the cover. The thing is, I just don’t want to. I feel that all these things are just to get people excited about a book that came out a year ago.

Instead, I will talk about what it means to be an author. I was having a discussion the other day with a friend a mine and she was telling me that she felt that blogging has become flooded. Everyone wants to blog and if that is the case, does that mean everyone is a writer? I’m not sure I can answer that. I don’t have an MFA. I don’t run writing workshops.

What I do know is that being a writer is something that has defined who I am. I’ve always done it. I’ve always written stories, I just never followed through. Hanging Upside Down is the first real literary work that I’ve followed through on. This does not include research papers, essays, old and new blogs, poems, or short stories that I’ve codified in a nice little folder. The act of following through for me is what changed my status from a writer to an author. It is that act of follow through that has gotten me to finish the second book. I never wanted to be an author of just ONE book.

I’ve enjoyed my rookie year as author. I’ve learned a lot about the industry, about how book sales and royalties work, and I’ve learned how to handle the various amounts of bullshit that comes across my way. I’ve come to respect those who have come before me and those who come out with books almost every year. I find myself enjoying other people’s work a lot more because I can see the little nuances in every chapter while questioning if I would have written some passages differently.

I’ve learned to soak in the successes and deal with the failures and to be honest, there enough on both sides to cancel things out. My measure of success is based on the goals I’ve set for myself. I have never, nor will I ever, base my success on money or fame. Consistency is the only way I can continue to make strides. If I’m constant in what I’m doing the rewards will be far more than I can imagine.

There are some rewards to this. I’ve never said no to anyone who needs advice about writing a book. I feel it is my duty as an author to help writers with their goals. I have a particular interest in writers of color so much so that I have really thought about doing some drastic things. The problem is that I have no time to do anything more than just be a guide.

Lastly, I feel that I need to address a perception that I think people have of authors from my limited point of view in this space. I think there is the perception that because I have a book out that I’m automatically a success in the field. I get the feeling that many people who have not read or bought the book think, I will get to it sometime, he is fine. I say this as a writer of color and not just some self published writer, you cannot simply bypass a product simply because you assume our work is doing well. At the same time, you cannot assume something is not good if we are not mainstream.

Being an author means I’ve joined a community of folks who followed through on their writing goals. I look forward to sharing this journey each step of the way. I still can’t believe it has been a year but pretty soon I will be saying, I can’t believe I wrote a second book.

my life, writing

Fall Free Write One

I need to pick this up. It’s hard to consider lack of post entries slacking when the majority of the time, I’m writing a second book. Yet, I feel that I’m a bit of slump now that the book has gone to edits. Almost like I don’t know what to right or say because parts of my mind is still left on those chapters I gave to someone else to look at.

So I free write so that I can get the engine started again. I free write so I can get my thoughts back together, so I can become familiar with this space again. While, you the reader (if you’re indeed still reading) see a black background with grey lettering, I see a white page being slowly filled with black lettering all because I need to get back into motion.

The thing is that I feel like I’m being too technical with my blogs. It almost started to feel like work which is not a good thing because I have enough work to as it is. I want to get back to those days when the words poured out of me, when I wrote because I wanted to say things that I felt. Now, things feel cold and technical. I’ve left all the passion on the page and not on the blog. I feel like have to explain what I mean and how the world works (because black lives matter, and no one is illegal, and stop mansplaining to women). I remember a time when I wasn’t worried about book sales and writing workshops. I remember a time when I could write more than fifty effing blogs post a year but those times seem to have past.

Those where the times when I just talked for the sake of talking and not the sake of doing. I would talk all the shit in the world about how I wanted to publish a book and never took two steps to do anything about it. Those were the times when I was in great pain with love and live. When work was a chore and sex was a dry desert. I don’t want to go back to those days long gone so I have to keep moving forward.

Moving forward means working hard and playing hard. Moving forward means saying good bye to friends that were once brothers. Moving forward is posting book quotes and booking information so I can speak about a book that no one has heard of… yet.

I free write because I want to be free. I want to move out of this box that I’ve been put in. I want to ~~escape~~, ~~break out~~, no… transcend whatever this thing I’m currently in. Is it a box of expectations? Is a box of false promises? I think it’s a box that writers of color automatically find themselves in. I think it’s a box that self published authors put themselves in. I want to get out of that and connect with the world through the words that I place on the page.

I free write because I refuse to go away.

cancer, diabetes, my life, running

How I Lost 20 effing Pounds

It’s crazy actually, but I don’t think I did anything amazing. I just did a few things that I said I was going to do and the results have been more than I could’ve hoped for. I lost 20 pounds in about 45 days and weight loss was not even my goal, it was a result of me just trying to be healthier.

I may have explained this before but there have been 5 people in my life that have gotten cancer. 4 of those are relatives. 2 of those 5 are my age. The thing that doctors tell cancer patients and survivors is that they need to change their diet. So I started thinking, why wait for that to happen? I should just start now.

I stated last month that I was going to stop eating meat. There were some jokes and some looks that I got. The comments were interesting both on Facebook and on Twitter. Most were supportive, of course, but I had to convince some family members that I was not going to force my beliefs on anyone. They can have all the meat they want but I will still continue to this lifestyle.

That is the key to this. This is not a diet, this is lifestyle. I run 2-3 times a week and I changed my eating habits. There is no special pill, no green ring that works on will power, and no formula to any of this, just motivation. However, I write about this because people do asking me what am I doing that has allowed me to be this way.

Well first, I eat Fish which technically means I’m a Pescatarian so that does help because, depending on the fish, it is generally healthier. I stay way from fast foods and, of course, I drink tons of water. However, the most important thing that I have changed in my life has been the decrease of sugar intake. I believe this is the number one reason for my weight loss. The reason I added this along with giving up meat is because outside the threat of cancer is diabetes, which is way too common in my family.

My daily intake of sugar is from 5g – 20gs a day. I do strive for the lower end of the spectrum and I know there are days when I don’t consume sugar at all. I’ve gotten very used to not putting sugar in my coffee. That is something that I did every day without fail. Now, I don’t even miss it and in fact, I don’t even put milk in my coffee anymore.

Here is some example of what I do for meals each day. I don’t do these all at once or even every day but these are my options:

Breakfast: Eggs. Cheerios (1g of sugar) with milk. Banana. Black Coffee. Croissant (6g of sugar). Pancakes and French Toast are a rarity because syrup is high in sugar.

Lunch: I have salad everyday for lunch. When I don’t, it is generally a veggie burrito. If I’m slumming it, peanut butter & banana sandwich (Multi-grain Bread)

Dinner: Fish (Salmon, Sushi, etc), veggies, pasta, rice, quinoa, beans,

Snacks: Fruits, walnuts, peanuts, cheese, crackers.

These are samples of what I do. Sometimes I will have tuna fish sandwich for lunch or a slice of cheese pizza. The most important thing is that I do not have too much of the guilty pleasures like ice cream, cookies, and chocolate. Trust me, I can kill those, but I do have them in moderation.

Speaking of moderation, I have eaten meat a small number of times in the past 45 days. I would say no more than 6 times. I’ve come to realize that I cannot go over board when it comes to the consumption of meat because it actually has been making me sick and that was just one hot dog. So, for me, if I’m going to eat meat or poultry (because, after all I am Latino) then it will be on my terms.

That is also the key everything. I’m doing all lifestyle change on my terms and it feels great.

history, my life

Sunset to Sunrise: We’re connected

I have a basic belief. This belief has come to shape me as a person, as a professional, and as a writer. I believe we are all connected. Despite our issues that revolve and evolve around social constructs such as race, gender, and sexuality, I believe we’re all connected at the basic levels of humanity. Perhaps we may not see it so profoundly but it’s there. History tells us that it’s there.

Maybe it was the close proximity to the water from the San Francisco Bay, or the sand from the beach looking out into the Pacific Ocean, or if it crisp air swirling around AT&T park, but I realized that I must travel more in order to become a better writer. The knowledge that instead of seeing the the sunrise from the Atlantic Ocean, I’m seeing it set from the Pacific just gave me the sense that we are not alone and they we experience and perceive the same things differently.

This sense of connectivity was brought home when I read The New Yorker Article about the Cascadia subduction zone. The richly dense article goes into horrifying detail about a earthquake that is likely to happen in the Pacific Northwest. The whole article goes into detail about how this will happen and how scientists were able to discover the history behind the subduction zone. It’s this history that makes this entire thing so very interesting.

The Cascadia fault line was discovered only 50 years ago, which was news to everyone there considering that no earthquakes were ever reported in that area. I wont go into specifics about the Ring of Fire, but I will say that massive research has been done to show that two plates (the Juan de Fuca oceanic plate and the North American tectonic plate) have been stuck together for far too long and it’s only a matter of time before it snaps like a rubber band. How is the connectivity? The history of how this was discovered.

It all starts with scientist trying to figure out what happened to the Ghost Forest in Washington. Here are a bunch of dead trees that look really creepy but how did they get they way? In short, they discovered a massive earthquake took place here before America was born. They figure roughly around 1700 this massive quake cause the land around the trees to drop thus killing all them at the same time, which is pretty spooky. But it gets even spookier when they figured out the this date coincides with something called the “orphan tsunami” in Japan.

The article beautifully explains that the Japanese have records of earthquakes and tsunamis for centuries. They understood the correlation between the two so when this random tsunami hit one year without an earthquake, it caused a bit of alarm. This orphan was one of a kind until scientists were able to connect where it came from:

At approximately nine o’ clock at night on January 26, 1700, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest, causing sudden land subsidence, drowning coastal forests, and, out in the ocean, lifting up a wave half the length of a continent. It took roughly fifteen minutes for the Eastern half of that wave to strike the Northwest coast. It took ten hours for the other half to cross the ocean. It reached Japan on January 27, 1700.

That’s some shit right? Well it gets stranger than that and before I get into how, I want to point out that we, as a society, seem to put so little faith into oral histories of other cultures. I think historians tend to be judgmental about people who don’t have a written account of their history. Welp, oral history has a place in this:

In 1964, Chief Louis Nookmis, of the Huu-ay-aht First Nation, in British Columbia, told a story, passed down through seven generations, about the eradication of Vancouver Island’s Pachena Bay people. “I think it was at nighttime that the land shook,” Nookmis recalled. According to another tribal history, “They sank at once, were all drowned; not one survived.” A hundred years earlier, Billy Balch, a leader of the Makah tribe, recounted a similar story. Before his own time, he said, all the water had receded from Washington State’s Neah Bay, then suddenly poured back in, inundating the entire region. Those who survived later found canoes hanging from the trees. In a 2005 study, Ruth Ludwin, then a seismologist at the University of Washington, together with nine colleagues, collected and analyzed Native American reports of earthquakes and saltwater floods. Some of those reports contained enough information to estimate a date range for the events they described. On average, the midpoint of that range was 1701.

Damn son, are we not connected? Does this not tell a global history about a cataclysmic event that literally spans the world? Two different types of recorded history from two different civilizations help piece together a modern mystery of the Cascadia subduction zone. A horrible event that shows the destructive force of our planet while at the same times showing that what happens on one side of the world effects the other.

When I was sitting the beach last week out in California, all I could think about is why are we so cruel to other people when the world is so beautiful? I don’t have all the answers but I do know that search for the meaning of everything that happens maybe beyond our horizon.

I think we should all take time to enjoy the beauty of this world and realize that our sunset is someone’s sunrise and that is a blessing.

my life

Fighting the Network of Distraction

Distractions play a big part in my life. They keep me from doing the things that I need to do which is why I avoid them the best way I can. This is the only way I’m ever going to finish book two.

The other night I was asked how I stay focused. I will admit, It takes practice. The thing is, I know exactly what can distract me enough to take away my focus. My goal is to write everyday so I can get into that zone. My zone is when everything clicks and it gets to the point where the only thing I’m doing is typing and words appear on the screen almost as if my mind has direct access to the page. This is when I become in touch with myself.

What’s really difficult is the events happening around me. The news, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, family, and friends all play a role in this network of distractions. This doesn’t mean that I don’t welcome it but some distractions are worse than others. I can still continue to write in all those cases. I’ve been known to write with the television on or with company over but the quality of focus goes down.

However, they’re are times when having that television on or texting that friend does help in the process. Just because I haven’t written a blog about the 9 people murdered in a church in South Carolina doesn’t mean I’m not feeling it. Things like this just serve as a reminder to me why I must continue to do what I do. Talking to friends and fellow writers has also helped me remember certain themes in the book that I’m trying to maintain.

I really feel that I need to be writing always and I’ve trained myself to continue the process by giving myself soft and hard deadlines. My first book, Hanging Upside Down, gave me the awareness I need to write a novel but it many ways I had no clue what I was doing. Writing book two has given me the ability to train myself to write when I want to. What that means is that, when I was younger, I would write when the mood hit me but now I’m dictating that mood and making those sudden spurts of inspiration last over a longer amount of time.

The thing about distractions is that they can feed into any type of writer’s block I may have.The best way I’ve counteracted this is by reading, which is not a distraction but a part of being a writer. I wont get into any of the new Netflix shows or play video games until I’m satisfied with my process with this first draft.

my life

41

I’ve been on a mission. I’ve been driven to prove to myself that my fourth decade of existence will be better the past three. I truly believe that life should get better the older we get. I also believe that every new goal that is set should mean more than the last.

Maybe its because I’m getting older and I view life just a little differently than I did when I was younger. In any case, I want to be able to see new sites and do things that I’ve never done before (within reason…I’m not jumping out of a plane). I would like to spend more time with people who matter to me.

I also feel that when you get to point in life, second chances to do things just seem to pop up. Dead relationships come back to life and (more often then not) old relationship come to an inevitable end. Second careers are born during this time and as I look further down the road, I truly do not know what to expect. The goal remains the same: continuous writing. From there, I will see what happens.

Right now, I’m just grateful for family and friends. I love the fact that when I go somewhere with people who know me, they tell me to keep writing. I love that.

Today, I received a great gift, a reminder to never stop what I’m doing. I ran into former colleagues from Syracuse University that I haven’t seen in a long time. We connected and bonded over current success. During the conversation it was pointed out to me that despite their busy work they found time to buy my book. These are people I haven’t seen in at least 5 years. I needed that…the universe knew I need to hear that. Despite any of my struggles, there are people out there rooting for me.

That was just as good as any gift I will get today.

cancer, food, my life

Vegetarian? What?

Here’s the thing, I know too many people that are battling cancer in their lives. I’ve seen, first hand, the affect on family and friends. In every case, the doctors have said one universal thing, “you need to change your diet.” Its has been scientifically proven that there are certain foods have cancer fighting agents. So my thought in all this is, why wait for something bad to happen in order for a doctor to tell me to change my diet? I should just change it now.

This also happens to coincide with a fitness challenge that I fell into (You know, the kind where family is like…come on, you know you wanna). I started a 21 day challenge on June 1st where I do some form of exercise for 45 minutes everyday. If I miss a day, I have to double my work out the next day. If you are into things like math then you realize that I’m currently on Day 5 and my body is sore as hell. My workouts consist of running and ab work…so my body basically hates me.

So that is 5 days without meat so far. What can I eat? Well for starters I can eat fish. I know, that would make me a pescatarian but It doesn’t sound sexy to me. I have virtually take sugar out of my diet too so the foods I’ve been eating have been salads, brown rice, broccoli, Quinoa, fruits, yams, pasta, potatoes, eggs, non white bread, and nuts. I started this with the idea that meat is no good for me with the chemicals that are added so the deletion of sugar from my diet was just an added bonus.

I’ve done some research and watched some documentaries (yay Netflix), like Forks over Knives and Fed Up, that have given me a clear understanding on what is happening to us when it comes to food. I wont get into major details but the reality is that we should only be consuming the max of 25g of sugar per day. If you look that up, we max that out just by having cereal and milk. Its the excess sugar intake that can lead to type 2 diabetes. I turn 41 in a week, I’m not trying to deal with that too.

Exercise is complete hell
More like exorcise
The demon must be Vanquished

— Tony Snark (@Latinegro) June 5, 2015

Some of you may know that I’m a coffee drinker so what does that mean? At the moment, I drink black iced coffee unsweetened. It’s not as bad as I thought. In fact, nothing about this is as bad as I thought it would be. I thought I would be hungrier. I thought that I would crave a hamburger or at least a pork chop. I crave none of those things. In fact when I snack, its on almonds and peanuts. This is not to say that I don’t have small amounts of chocolate here and there but craving things like cookies, so far, hasn’t happened.

For the most part this is about not having any meat to see how it feels. I started off being very curious to see how my workouts would be effected by the change in my diet. Not to be cliche but I do have more energy. You see these commercials about that 2:30 feeling during the middle of the day? I used to have that. Now, I don’t and I think that is a direct result of lack of meat.

For the record, I was at the point already where I limited my red meat intake, so the meats I was killing all the time were chicken and pork (turkey too). Those are the meats essential to any Latino diet. Which brings me to the next question, will I ever eat meat again? I’m not sure. Its quite possible that meat maybe become a delicacy, something to have on special occasions. If I were to go eat it on a semi regular basis again, then it might just chicken breast.

But hey, the only thing for sure is that nothing is for sure. I will continue down this path and see where it leads me.

my life, Novel

Its all about #booktwo

I always start out any of my life stories with “my life is never dull.” There’s nothing about this statement that a lie, which is why its hard to have time to sit down and hash out a blog post. Although, if you’ve been paying attention, I did drop my eleventh Huffington Post Article last week. All this to say that my free time, when I do have it, has been focused on my second novel.

At this point, I’m about 114 pages in and still working out all the minor details. Of course, I know how it ends so its just part of my literary journey to get there. I feel good about what I’ve written so far and I will be honest, I cannot wait to share it with people.

Just like the last time I went through this process, I’m starting to think about the next book. I’m thinking about ways to set myself up for book 3. Part of the reason for this is that it gives me the drive to keep going. I want to get to a point where all I do is just write books if I can continue to be inspired to do so. A large part of me feels that if I can continue to tell parts of stories, I will want to finish them or connect them in a later volume.

But for now, it is all about #booktwo. I’ve been really gearing myself up to do this with the right hashtag to let people know there are things that I’m doing which is related to this book. My inspiration comes from all around and there are times when an idea will hit me and I have to drop what I’m doing so I can write it down.

So what is #booktwo about? This novel is an extension of Hanging Upside Down with some of the major players from that book with in addition to some new characters. The main plot is centered around a book Louis wrote called, The Book Of Isabel that he shares with a very sick friend of his. I invite the reader to read the book along side his friend so they what she sees. However, before you think about how #booktwo is a prequel, there will be times when I will bring the reader to the present causing a shift between prequel to sequel.

I think it is a pretty bold move on my part to write a story this way but I intend on sticking with the main theme which is friendship. We all have friends that we we gain and lose. Sometimes we gain an unexpected friend and at times we lose a friend we never expected to. Life plays out in very strange ways and I plan on drawing our concepts of friendship (as well as relationships) that are difficult to handle for Louis.

Sure, I will be drawing a lot of this from personal experience but I think that the true fictional narrative will show. If you read the first book then you will see some of the same characters that you’ve come to expect and some new ones that will make you question the reason why Louis trusts anyone at all. I have some surprise that will lead into the third book.

Yes. There will be a third book in this “series.” Please understand, I never intended on this to be trilogy or even a series of books. I really was going to just drop this whole thing after #booktwo but I think that I have enough material to make a third book, which I think will be outrageous. But after that, I think I can move on to my other plans for other stories with in this “universe” that does not involve the exploits of Louis Ortiz.

I think by the time I even get to book four (which I kinda know what it will be about) I will have a myriad of characters to play with as I see fit. So with that being said, I’m back to the keyboard in hopes that #booktwo will be out sometime next year.

my life

I Don’t Trust Them Very Much. #Mets

I’m skeptical, that’s best way to put it. I’ve been a Mets fan all my life and in my lifetime I have been through the good, the bad, and the ugly. Unfortunately most of it has been bad and ugly so when they open the season red hot, I tend to not fall over myself because I’ve seen this before. Sure, I love the Mets but I don’t trust them very much.

This lack of trust has always been there but it is been deeply rooted since the second consecutive collapse of 2008. Once the restructuring began, I knew that it may be a very long time until this team would be in the conversation again. So now it is 2015 and they are 11-3 with a 9 game winning streak; undefeated at home. Time to get hype? No.

I know the numbers. Mets always have a decent April. But when they get into the grind of the season, they begin remember that they are the other team from New York. While people will point to stats that say this is the best start since 1986 and 2006, I will remind them that it is April and I refuse to buy into anything for the moment. There is still a ton of baseball left.

Before you come to the conclusion that I’m not a real Mets fan (to which I will laugh my ass off) understand that my feelings are that of caution. The real issue is that I hate to lose. Getting involved year after year with a team who’s owners don’t care is exhausting. Talking about this to people who think Mets fans have gotten use to losing is exhausting. There is not one person in the city of New York that is accustomed to losing. Ask any true Knicks fans how infuriating this is. The truth of the matter is that I want two basic things: the Mets to be in the playoffs every year and the MTA to stop raising its fairs. We all can’t get what we want can we?

So the absurdity to think that losing is something I’ve become accustomed to is crazy. But all this hype is too soon for me. I need to see this team during the tough times to really see what they are made of. I dont like the phrase, “This is our year” because it has been used too often by this organization. I just need them to just play and play as well as they’re playing right now.

I’ve been telling anyone who would listen that I will not buy into this yet. This teams is going make me care for them the same way I cared in 2006 and if my heart gets broken again, then it will be a long winter for me. So yes, I love the New York Mets. I love then they are battling to be relevant again. I love that, at the moment, they are a part of the conversation.

But, I just don’t trust them very much.

my life

The Mistake of Trust.

I’ve made so many mistakes in my life. The little mistakes are too many to count but the big ones…they scar. I have no problem admitting mistakes and while I seem to be a defensive person, I’m an open book of relative failures and successes. I’m also guilty of many things in the past such as, lying, stealing, and cheating but all of those pale in comparison to the biggest thing I am guilty of… trusting.

I’ve had this discussion before. I trust too easily, why? Maybe because I feel in some small way people are inherently good despite the fact that 9 times out of 10 I’m proven wrong. I have these talks with friends and loved ones that we, as humans, cannot all be as horrible as we think we are. There must be some amount of honor and credibility in strangers and especially in friends. Then something happens and you realize that honor is something you hear in a movie.

Want to know the honest truth? I very much enjoy being nice to people. I like meeting people but lately, I just find it hard to get close. I keep a safe distance and for the most part, I can be quiet. Why? I’m not sure I want to know what lays in the heart of strangers when I know what lays in the hearts of my “friends.”

That sounds harsh. I’m not that person that hates people. I’m speaking from a place that is raw because I trusted someone and now that trust is gone. When I was younger, broken friendship were a dime a dozen. Assholes come into our lives all the time in our twenties but as we get older we begin to filter out the bullshit. The plethora of friends we thought we had dwindles from two hands to one.

The term right hand man is probably meant as way to show that this person is only one of, maybe, five people in the world that can be truly trusted with secrets, money, contracts, and all matter close to the chest. This is the ride or die person that has fought the wars…together with us. Imagine what your hand looks like when you lose a finger.

I’ve been through horrible breakups, a divorce that changed me, thieving ex-friends, dishonest supervisors, untrustworthy co-workers, and family member drama. I survived all that and I’m still that person that may give a person $20 because they need it. I’m still that person that is willing to be nice to people. I’m still that person that wants to trust you, I just can’t.

I can only take so much. I can’t only extend that olive branch so far before I have to pull it back, but now I have to go a different route. I will be hurt but not angry because I know how to let things go. Thus I will let go of this friendship and never forget the good times nor the bad ones. I will never forget. For the minute I hit submit on this blog the deed is done.

We had our time together. I need to let you go.