How to escape your writing woes: A garden book party on a golden day
When the path for getting your next book out in the world is a hamster wheel of rejection—one long, squeaky NO spinning like a broken record—go forth into the sunshine should there be any in your rainy Pacific Northwest city and revel among a genial band of other writers and readers as you all celebrate…
Read MoreHow much do I suck at selling my books?
When the invitation came in my email to participate in a community book festival in Long Beach this April, I thought, why not. My last book was published in September of 2020, over a year and a half ago. Okay, call it two years. My book came out during the pandemic so any events I…
Read MoreMy AWP 2022: All real, all true
AWP – that annual mega writing conference that some abhor and others adore, or at least like well enough to attend when they can and feel a pang of regret when they can’t. I last attended in 2019 in Portland, canceled my plans for 2020 in San Antonio as the pandemic loomed, and tuned in…
Read MoreMy Naked Face, My New Way of Seeing
When I was in kindergarten, sitting cross-legged with my classmates at the foot of our teacher’s chair, I dreaded being called upon to name the animal in the picture she pulled like a mean magician from the deck of flashcards. The lines were imprecise, the colors bleeding into each other. I squinted to make sense…
Read MoreMy Mother’s Dress
Five years ago this month, my sisters and I gathered in my mother’s bedroom. She had died the previous June and we were ready to sort through her clothes. As I wrote in my January 2017 post, she had lots of them. A bulging closetful. A crammed dresser full. A jam-packed trunkful at the foot…
Read MoreThere’s Gnome Place Like Home
Much of my fiction is set in a place that resembles my hometown of National City, California and some of my characters live in a house that resembles the National City house I grew up in. I’ll argue that these similarities are due not to writerly laziness or lack of imagination, but to an emotional…
Read MoreWhat I missed when I missed my 50-year high school reunion
I missed my 50-year high school reunion last month. I had purchased a ticket to the event months ahead of time and booked a hotel room in Old Town San Diego for three nights, planning to use it as a mini writing retreat. I was going to write while reuning. But as the date neared,…
Read MoreRejection and Acceptance
Rejection is part of a writer’s life. We all know this. Rejections will outnumber acceptances. It’s a statistical certainty. So we learn to respond to rejection with acceptance—at least intellectually. But our very human emotions insist otherwise. When I receive a rejection for my work, the first thing I feel is disappointment, and then a…
Read MoreLiving Color: Angie Rubio Stories one year later
This month marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories about a brown girl just wanting to be seen and heard. It’s been weird and fun, celebrating online. Each time after an event, watching faces disappear from my screen was an eerie and sad thing. At some events, the audience…
Read MoreLessons from a techno-bumbler’s video pitch
I don’t get out much because there’s this virus out there that could infect my vaccinated self and potentially sicken me, not to mention make me a vector of contagion. So to break up my apartment-bound life where, after a morning bike ride, much of my day is spent at my laptop, I recently signed…
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