Tag: Novel

my life, Novel, writing

40K

I reached a pretty significant goal yesterday. I reached the 40 thousand word mark in the novel that I’m writing. This has become something that I am fully committed to and in many cases I cannot believe I didn’t start writing like this sooner. I feel that I am finally doing the one thing that I always wanted to do and that is write a book.

When I look back at certain points of my life, I can see that just about every creative thing I have done has lead me here. In grammar school, I wrote a story that involved my classmates turning into werewolves. I enjoyed that people read it and liked it. That was my first stab at writing anything in the first person. The years leading into high school I created a whole universe filled with superhero characters. They were completely diverse in origin, ethnicity, and gender. I had the comics titled, numbered, and a synopsis written for each one. I wanted to be a comic book writer.

Of course growing up and having people tell me that writing comics was not a good way to earn a living led me to doubt myself, but at the very least I was able to graduate with a bachelors in English. Despite everything, writing was still came very easy to me. When people were stressing finals, I was writing papers and I enjoyed it. But I still remember the voices of people suggesting that writing should not be the way to go, so the only thing I could do was put it in the back burner and make it a hobby.

As most of you know, four years ago I started a blog and the rest is history. What I find interesting is that I have a clear goal to get this book done and I have written way too much to stop now, but I still think about that black and white composition notebook that has all my notes in them. I think about the journals that I kept in High School through all the pains of my parents divorce and all the frustrations of the bullies. I think about how I may have spent most of my life preparing myself for what I am doing right now.

I now laugh at the notion that comic book writers do not get paid much. Maybe they don’t but when you do something that you love, is it really work? I have worked at places that are unsatisfying and it can suck. I now look at the body of my work and I realized that I have done short stories, narratives, essays, poetry, blogs, articles, and screen plays. This need to be creative with words has always been inside of me. I just made the mistake of listening to the naysayers.

I still have those composition notebooks. I still have the those journals that I kept in high school that detailed the issues I went through in my younger days. I am not saying that I have led a tragic life, I just think that I have fuel to create stories in which I can draw from experience.

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Afro Latino, Barnard College, Columbia University, mother, my life, New York City, Novel, Syracuse University, writing

The Next Chapter

writingAs I literally write my the next chapter of my novel, I am thinking about the next chapters in my life. My first school year is coming to a close here at Barnard and I have set certain goals for myself that will be set in motion before school starts back up in the fall.

I have the prefect opportunity to start school again and I would like to take full advantage of taking course at Columbia University. The process may be slow since classes are not free and I do work full time but I owe it to myself to get my Master’s Degree. I frequently tell people that I ultimately didn’t want to get my Master ‘s at Syracuse because I was tired of the SU point of view of the world. The other reason is that I would still be there right now if I went all in on that program.

Now that I have an idea of what my work schedule is like, I can plan to take classes accordingly. This will effectively change my life to be able to attend an Ivy League Institution. I had already investigated the possibility of this happening last summer when I was getting ready to be interviewed for my current position so I know what CU has to offer. I think going down this road will allow me to turn the page to the next level of my career.

Speaking of turning the page, I feel the need to say that I have resigned from the Latinegr@’s Project. I know this will come to shock to some because everyone knows how passionate I am about Afro Latinos. I am not going to get into the how’s and the why’s. They are a great group of people that are doing some amazing things. As proof from when I left SU last year, there are times when you just need to move on. I did wish them luck with pushing their agenda and ideas forward into the future. When I think about it, they really don’t need luck, they will be successful with anything they do, I can feel it.

I have also been thinking about the Syracuse University Commencement that just happened last weekend. I truly had mixed emotions about this day. I felt bad that I could not see the students that I’ve been in the trenches with for years. They made it very hard for me to leave and I wanted to show my appreciation. However, this Mother’s Day was the first time I have been with family in a very long time. Graduation weekend has pretty much always fallen on Mother’s Day so I spent 11 years in Syracuse on that weekend.

So it was VERY hard for me to look at all the ceremonious pictures on Instagram and Twitter because there was a part of me that wanted to be a part of that celebration. It reminds me of the discussion and arguments with the knuckleheads. I do miss them. Of course, since most of them live in NYC, I am sure it is only a matter of time until I see them.

I wont even mention that I am turning 39 in less than a month. The big Four-Oh is right around the corner which means all types of cancer tests that I am so not ready for.

The reality of it all is that writing this novel had been a another journey for me. The funny thing about turning the page on an old chapter is that is hard to go back. The story that I am creating draws from so much experience from me as well as the vivid imagination that I was born with. It has opened up some old wounds but also spawned some great ideas for future text. Writing this has been a mixed bag of feelings that has allowed me to think about everything in my life.

One thing is for certain, all this writing has given be a new appreciation for people who do this for a living. I am not even sure what I am going to do about it when I am done, but I suppose I will figure all that out in the next chapter.

my life, writing

Fiction

stack-of-books

As I embark on my literary journey, I find it interesting how real life plays out on in fiction. The one lesson that I truly learned in all my English classes was that all writing is autobiographical. I didn’t really understand it at the time but as I truly begin to redefine what writing means to me, I see the meaning of that statement clearer than ever.

I have always thought about writing a book. Lord knows that I have talked about it for way too long. A few years ago I start writing short stories sporadically. Nothing fancy, straight to the point. Most were sexual in nature and all were based, in part, on the fragility of relationships. To date, I have written 11 stories. One of these stories, however, is missing. I have no idea where it went. It may have died in one of my failed hard drives.

Out of those stories, I converted one into a potential novel that I have not finished yet. Most of that story is in my head and every so often, I will add a chapter to it. However, there is a part of me that feels that I am simply not ready to finish that book yet. The other short stories are something I have been tinkering with. Maybe I will combine them into a larger book and called it a day.

Right now my main focus is to finish a story that I have been working for a little less than a month. It is the most I have ever written in one document. There was a point where I was thinking about a page number that I wanted to reach all the while knowing that a page in MS Word is not the same as a page in a book. For example, I know that roughly 30 pages in Word is close to about 60 pages in a novel. So my goal was about a 110 pages in total. But then I started thinking about it differently. Pages themselves may not matter because it all depends on the content and the words being used.

Sure, I can write “fuck” and copy it over and over for 120 pages on Word, but does that make it a novel? I read somewhere that Stephen King writes 5 thousand words per day. That seems like an insane amount that is necessary for him. That is a full time job to just come up with that number of words everyday. Then it really got me thinking that I need to focus on the amount of words that I feel I need to have. So I looked up the average amount of words that are in a novel and I came up with this:

  • Romance Novels ranges from 50,000 words to 100,000 words
  • Science fiction minimum is 80,000 words
  • Mystery minimum is around 70,000 words
  • Mainstream averages around 100,000 words.

The number of words don’t scare me. I see this as a goal. As of this blog post, I am at 28,440 words (52 MS Word pages). While this is a fictionalized story, there is a certain cathartic feeling that I get with every page that pours out of me. It gives me hope that I can finish this goal and yet tell a pretty decent story. I suppose that I was always meant to move past a blog to a book since I have written so much over the years. I just didn’t know when I was going to get to that point.

As crazy as it seems, I do have an alternative motive behind this. I feel like I need to leave something behind. I think that this blog and blogs of the past are great but what tangibility does it really leave? Who reads past words if they aren’t relevant anymore? It is not like there is a library that someone one can look up blogs a hundred years from now. I want to leave a piece of myself when I am gone. Something that perhaps my children and thier children can look back at say that they can find a book that I wrote in a Library (whether that be a physical one or a virtual one).

I want to be able to be an old man in either a rest home or a hospital and see actual book with my name on them. True immortality is based on the legacy that is left behind. I can only achieve that if I write.

Ficton or not.