new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Chicano writers, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 4 of 4
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Chicano writers in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
What you wanted wasn't under any tree this week. So, to give you some inspiration, here's things stuck in the bottom of your stocking. Hope they give you some ganasto begin the new year. Check all upcoming deadlines.
Nakum - a website for mestizo writers
For Chicanos y otros to connect their writing better to our indio roots.
Info from the website: "For centuries, the identities of the peoples native to the U.S. Southwest and Northern Mexico have been subject to legal, political, and social interpretations that serve colonial interests. The mission of Nakum, the Coahuiltecan word meaning “we speak” or “I speak to you,” is to offer a public forum through which scholars of Native and Chicana/o studies can do precisely what the title suggests: speak from their own perspectives.
"In keeping with the general mission of the Indigenous Cultures Institute, this journal offers a space for the continued exploration of Hispanics’ indigenous identities. The journal thus brings together many of the conversations that the Institute has cultivated and, through its online presence, makes them available to a vast and growing audience of scholars, journalists, creative writers, and students with an abiding interest in hearing the voices of those who contribute to those discussions."
Open call for Sci-Fi reprints
Deadline: 4 January 2015.Upper Rubber Boot Books issued an open call for reprintsubmissions for an upcoming anthology of fiction and poetry, The Museum of All Things Awesome And That Go Boom, to be published in 2016.
"Editor Joanne Merriam is interested in explosions, adventure, derring-do, swashbuckling, dinosaurs, ray guns, von Neumann machines, fanged monsters, flame-throwing killer robots, chainsaws, antimatter, and blunt force trauma. She is also interested in writing which explodes our perspective of science fiction itself—literary fiction employing SF tropes, cyberpunk, speculative fiction, magical realism, infernokrusher, etc., are all welcome."
Open call for First Contact submissions
Book Smugglers Publishing is looking for original short stories from all around the world, written in English. "Our goal is to publish at least three short stories, unified by a central theme. Each short story will be accompanied by one original piece of artwork from an artist commissioned by us separately.
"The theme is: FIRST CONTACT. While we are huge fans of aliens and would very much like to receive submissions featuring first contact with aliens, we would love to receive a broader pool of stories and traditions. We welcome authors to subvert this theme, to expand horizons and adapt the prompt to other possible connotations and genres within the Speculative Fiction umbrella.
"What We’re Looking For:
• Diversity. We want to read and publish short stories that reflect the diverse world we live in, about and from traditionally underrepresented perspectives.
• Middle Grade, Young Adult, and Adult audience submissions are welcome.
• Creativity & Subversion. We love subversive stories. We want you to challenge the status quo with your characters, story telling technique, and themes.
• We are looking for original speculative fiction, between 1,500 and 17,500 words long. These SFF offerings must be previously unpublished."
Hidden Youth: Submissions
"We welcome stories by authors from all walks of life. We especially encourage submissions from members of marginalized groups within the speculative fiction community, including (but not limited to) people of color; people who are not from or living in the U.S.A.; QUILTBAG and GSM people; people with disabilities, chronic illness, or mental illness; and atheists, agnostics, and members of religious minorities. The protagonists of your story do not have to mirror your own heritage, identities, beliefs, or experiences.
"We also especially encourage short story submissions from people who don’t usually write in this format, including poets, playwrights, essayists and authors of historical fiction and historical romance."
Before you sign a contract–things writers should know now
An article by Kristine Kathryn Rusch contains only her opinions about where U.S. publishing is headed. It's not all good, but seems to be worth knowing about. Read it after half a bottle of whiskey.
From: Business Musings: What Traditional Publishing Learned in 2014.
"Change has been happening for years, as mergers and acquisitions grew. Some of it has come from the fact that the large companies have finally understood the impact ebooks and online shopping have had on the industry.
"Much of the change is in response to 2013’s dismal fall sales, which happened courtesy of the Justice Department’s investigation of six major publishers and Apple for price-fixing. It didn’t matter how that case turned out; the case itself changed business as usual inside publishing."
Es todo, este año,
RudyG
Manuel Ramos’ post, “Golden Age for Writers?” got me thinking. Rudy Ch. Garcia’s “If not the Golden Age of latino writing, no importa” made me feel that I had to say a few things about the subject. After all, I’ve had such a long and glorious career . . .
Back in the Seventies, in the wake of the Chicano Movement no one encouraged me to become a writer. Teachers, and other people in authority tried to talk me out of it; they warned me that it could lead to a life of poverty -- they were right, but I did it anyway. The struggle has been epic.
These days I’m amazed at the subculture of support that has developed for wannabe writers. When I was starting out, it was me against the whole pinche world. Today’s aspiring writers lack that certain quixotic fighting sprit. They -- and their potential readers -- are the poorer for it.
When I started out, I didn’t make a big deal out of my ethnicity. Just getting published was hard enough. Also, I figured that it shouldn’t matter. It was the early Eighties by the time I started selling stories. Hadn’t the world advanced beyond that?
Apparently, it hadn’t.
Because of my name from my New Mexico Irish connection, folks in places like New York assumed I was a white guy.
“You’re really brave -- writing about blacks, and minorities, and stuff -- they get offended, you know!”
Not being one to try to “pass,” I let my Latinodad be known, and it turns out it was an issue. Nobody ever said it plainly, but once they realized they were dealing with a Chicano, the New Yorkers all started acting funny, uncomfortable . . . Then there was the guy who refused to shake my hand or even talk to me -- and the other one, who saw me and took off running.
Suddenly, “the audience” had a problem with me. I shouldn’t have been surprised when nobody in New York would buy my novels -- for years. They would politely flatter me, then tell me how their readers just don’t buy my stuff. Sure, there were some who thought I was some kind of genius, but they were a “noisy minority.”
I used to take it personally, but now I see that this was the time when the New York publishers went under corporate control. Working at Borders, I saw that modern fiction consumers were programmed to buy entertainment modules produced by multinational corporations that, as one woman informed me: “will keep your mind off things when you’re waiting at the airport, but if you lose it and can’t finish it -- it doesn’t matter.”
That is now changing, thank Tezcatlipoca.
I just kept on writing, and sending stuff out, and getting published now and then by small presses and various weird venues. I like to say that I keep one foot in the underground so I’ll have a place to stand.
So I didn’t get rich. I’d starve without a day job. But I’ve had a career. My novels and short fiction have earned me a reputation, so these days, I usually get published as the result of an editor getting in touch with me.
Things are better in the 21st century. And it’s not just my stubbornness and the fact that I'm not afraid of poverty -- the interconnected social and technological revolutions are a big factor.
Before I plugged into the social media, a lot of people thought I was dead. It was lonely in the old days. You could publish something, then nobody would notice, and you could disappear. Now you can hang in there, like a guerrilla in the interwebs.
So it ain’t as bad as it was. Though I often think that if my writing brought in more actual money, this age would seem a lot more golden. Then I remember that the Aztecs didn’t value gold the way Western Civilization does. They though it was pretty, but it was the excrement of the gods.
Ernest Hogan had been called a “precusor of modern Chicano spec lit,” “Vintage Gonzo Chicano SF,” and “a mad, Mexican Hunter S. Thompson,” among other things.
by Rudy Ch. Garcia
You're at a writers' conference and you finally get to ask your question--what was it like working with your first editor?--and the panelists give you some minutes and maybe a good story or joke and then they go on because there's lots of others like you and lots more questions. Below I relate more of the details you wish others had given.
I just finished four days on the first round of editor's mark-ups of my debut novel The Closet of Discarded Dreams. First came the dread, the dread of neophyte novelist anxious about what the editor will find! My description would be belied by Neil Gaiman, so I'll let him talk:
"The first problem of any kind of even limited success [RG-like first novels] is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It's Imposter Syndrome, something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.
 |
| Neil Gaiman |
Imposter Syndrome induced by the Fraud Police, in my case, my first editor, who maybe carries her own titanium clipboard, razor-edged. Would she bust me for mediocre prose, cardboard characters and MIA plot points? Would she run to the BIG editor and threaten to resign if I wasn't reassigned to someone younger who hadn't earned their clipboard, yet?
In the real world, you
can get busted by your story's editor. Earlier this year, one of my short stories came back ALL marked up, changed, critiqued, and probably had clipboard indentations that I didn't notice. At the end was a long note that described how many of the editor's hours and hours my weak writing had cost. I followed each of his notations and spent my hours and hours on rewrites, and to this date don't know if it will be published. So there.
Back to this editor-experience. I'm a fairly thick-skinned writer, given that it's gotten wrinkly, desiccated and flab-
uloso, so the editor's comments, suggestions and questions don't bother much. There's chingos of them, but, really, I expected more, and worse. Like something the Fraud Police might say, like "This book sucks." But not this time.
When I was less experienced, and thinner-skinned, so many ideas from someone else about MY writing would probably have raised the hairs on the back of my neck, gotten me to pull my feet up onto the chair in dread, or maybe made me rise off the chair to pace the whole patio, exclaiming, "That's not how I wrote it!" But I have more experience now--especially the experience of countless form-rejection letters that didn't provide opportunities to improve my prose.
That's exactly the point of editing, no? I didn't write it that way and somebody else who's providing a different perspective is telling me maybe I should have written it differently. They're also giving me one last chance to change, improve it.
So I spent hours in four days running my editor's gauntlet. Could I make it? I went thru and took care of the easy stuff, mostly punctuation and realizing things like, "Oh, that's not what that word means, exactly?"
In the next round I dealt with more significant edit remarks in the realm of, "Think about changing this word/phrase/sentence/paragraph because . . ." I've heard other authors talk about having a good editor, or their editor catching errors that the author didn't. I get to realize what that means and I go with the flow. Mostly.
Then I'm done, but only with my editor's eagle-eye catches. I have one saving round yet to tackle: what did the editor, and me before that, miss that somebody should have caught? To salvage my POWER, CONTROL, PERSONAL WORTH and prove to the world that this is MY stuff. This sounds somewhat like a passage from
The Closet of Discarded Dreams hero's suffering. It actually wasn't that melodramatic, but a bit of that sensation was there. And of course I do find stuff. And work into the late night, patio lights fixated on me, but my vision blurring from the moonlight, my wizard-brain and writer-soul in the flow 'cause this is what writers do, until it's . . . all . . . fixed. I gotta quit my day job! Oh, that's right--I don't have one!
Al final, I sent off the revisions yesterday. Await her final verdict. Hope it's close. Close to perfect is what some might wish for. I just want close to finished. Not because it's too boring or tiresome or demanding of a process. Because it's no different than raising a son or daughter, or a lot like putting the last layer of shellac on a carpentry project. I need to say
Finis and let the work stand on its own two or four legs, as the case may be. A writer's passion is to write--not linger and lounge and homestead a work--and then move on to new writing.
At this point, initial reaction from the editor is very positive. I'll get finals back from her tomorrow. Then, in some days, BIG editor will go over it. And the last round will begin. That's what I get for writing a novel, no? For wanting
el mundo to see it.
Qué no? Plus, at least so far, it was a much less agonizing experience than I would have imagined.
Then I'll be ready for: What new thing should I start writing? So I can get edited, again.
Esperamos. . .
Es todo, hoy,RudyG
Rudy Ch. Garcia's alternate-world epic recounts a Chicano's experience going through worse than his first editor, but maybe not as
bruto as your own as a
latino in
Gringolandia. The Closet of Discarded Dreams will be released Sept. 1 But
read this before you buy it.
rambling update on debut novel by Rudy Ch. Garcia
My head's spinning, there's not enough time, I don't know where to look next. Welcome to the wonderful world of first-time published novelist getting ready for the BIG day.
You can read about my debut novel
here and about some of my prep work
here.
Like I said, my head's spinning. I want everything to be perfect, timely, on time, and as much of a success as it can be. At the same time, not everything is in my control. Luckily, I have friends, acquaintances and contacts who know more than me.
Manuel Ramos, author of several novels, authors and poetesses Lisa Alvarado and Melinda Palacio are just some helping me navigate this episode in my lit life that comes only once. First novel. Debut. Book signings with audiences who will read the bared revelations of this writer. Scary? Nerve-wracking? No, I've got too much prep work that's muscling in on all my time and not allowing for that much true feelings.
Again, luckily, I've also got supporters and friends and family who're helping me with setting up a book tour, speaking, interviewing engagements. I couldn't do it alone, otherwise.
For those of you who anticipate your first book-length MS getting published, I can't tell you how it will affect you. For me, it's mostly a blur.
When I tell someone new about the book, they go, "I bet you're feeling great." It goes in una oreja and out the other. I know I should be feeling that, maybe I will be when I stand in front of my first audience to conduct a reading. Vamos a ver.
I've had to research the Internet, blogs, publications, and contacts and found surprising things. For instance, I'm going to attempt to focus people's buying the book. For the first month of Sept., I'm aiming for the Denver bestseller list. Why?
Because bookstores in other parts of the country, book reviewers of major publications and media gente look at such numbers. If The Closet of Discarded Dreams can make the Top 5 for one week in Denver, it will get noticed, possibly, nationally. It might get reviewed. I might be interviewed. Etc. You can help me accomplish this.
So, that's why I entitled this post the way I did. Don't buy, don't pre-order, don't go for it until you hear where and when. It's a small window, making a bestseller list. Even harder with a first novel.
Crossed Genres Publications will publish Hidden Youth: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (expected release Jan., 2016).
I had to smile at your mention that people start out not thinking you're Latino because of your name - me too. ;) I have started seeing more Mexican-American, Dominican-American, Cuban-American and Puerto Rican writers publishing in small presses and magazines, but it is no "oleada." Distinctive voices, distinctive ways of seeing - these are the ways we're told we aren't marketable or are too "difficult" for most readers. Since I'm just starting out (en mi vejez, yet) I'm glad to have the careers of seasoned Latino writers like you to look to for insight and inspiration. I know it continues to be a challenge - but I want to say siga haciendo la lucha because it really means something to those of us following in your trail. =)
Glad if I hear that the weird tales of my career can be inspiring, Sabrina. Guess I'm just the Old Sci-Fi Chicano, survivor of the Atomic Age. Maybe I really am a calavera in a spacesuit.
Una otra leprachano aqui, y tambien de Nuevo Mejico! Leprachana doesn't sound right, does it?
Leprahano -- me gusta! Also, anybody else ever notice the resemblance between The Banshee and La Llorona?
There is a resemblance between La Llorona and one of the banshees--Cliodhna.
There are resemblances between many mythical figures in Amerindia and Europe.
Some have pointed out a resemblance between La Llora and Medea, who weeps at the shore for her dead sons by Jason.