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Angel Luis Colón

  • Deepest, Bluest

    October 17th, 2022

    I’ve got a book coming out!

    You can preorder it HERE!

    Why the hell am I not happier about it right now?

    When my uncle died, I remember the turn out. The guy had a ton of friends. Lots of great stories about him too. Out of all that, though, the only refrain throughout the wake and burial was, “Man, he was a hard worker.”

    A hard worker. That was his legacy. Not how much he loved music or how he could play almost anything by ear. Not how incredible of a conga player he was or how fucking gifted he was when he cooked a pork shoulder.

    Nope. He was a hard worker.

    My family drilled that into us. If you didn’t work, you weren’t worth shit. Working was the answer. Sick? Go work. Sad? Go work. Suffering from trauma due to your workaholic family dynamic and a malignant narcissist of a mother?

    Go.

    Work.

    So here I am with finished work. I have accomplished. Achievement unlocked and all that.

    I should go work, right?

    I’m 42 years old and slowly learning that, no, I don’t have to be like a goddamn shark. I don’t have to keep swimming. Is there an astoundingly loud voice in my head screaming at me to not believe that? Yes. Do I listen to it? Not necessarily, but it does manage to make me a little sad.

    And I should be proud. That hard work was fruitful. The only problem is that workaholic nonsense gets into the peanut butter of the very real issues I’ve had as Puerto Rican dude from the Bronx flitting around more “high scale” worlds, and I remember that in my chosen passion, folks like me rarely get shots. We have to make the ones we get count and we have to hustle to make sure we get them.

    So, that leaves me with an achievement and nearly incapable of appreciating it fully because I’m vapor locked by this existential terror that not working means I’m a bad person. That I’m not doing enough to prove myself to people, who for lack of a better term, are completely imaginary.

    The hardest part of writing, for me, is never the work. It’s letting go. It’s understanding that while done has many face, it still means the momentum is lost. Now, maybe that’s some kind of high for me. Maybe I’ve done way too much tying of my self worth to the process and not the outcome, I’m not sure.

    What I do know is that there’s no use in burning myself out. There’s no use in ruining the ideas I scribble down for the sake of working.

    And that’s sort of work in itself, right? Working to feel better. To do better for me. Easier said, but it’s possible. I’ve done a lot more with a lot more effort.

    It takes time for everything to happen in this business. For the first ‘yes’ to land in your inbox. For the first sale. The first editorial note. All the way to that last copy edit. It’s all hurry up and wait.

    That damn waiting, though. That’s the fucking mind killer.

    Guess I’ve got a lot to work on.

  • Crow

    June 23rd, 2022

    This:

    Oh, man. That’s pretty. You can read more about what I’m getting up to with MTV Books over here. It’s a privilege to get pubbed with this slate (all the books sound amazing, especially Daniel Kraus’).

    Anyway, I bragged. Got that out of my system.

    Thanks to my agent (aka the greatest hype man of all time, like Flava-Flav level hype man), my editor, and the folks who have been sounding boards for my frustrations and worries.

    That said, none of this is possible without the support of my partner. She’s the reason any of this happened. Nearly ten years ago, I found myself in a pretty dark place after some traumatizing shit went down. She convinced me to get back into writing for my mental well-being and I got the idea that maybe after all this time, I had something to say that people would want to hear.

    Never in a million fucking years did I think I’d achieve even a single publication credit let enough alone finally landing a deal with Simon & Schuster. I can’t explain how grateful I am to anyone who would take the time to read anything I write. Even this rambling nonsense.

    The weird thing about moments like this is that I’m happy, but never satisfied. I’m nowhere near done yet. Trust me. There’s so much left to do.

  • Shorts Break

    May 1st, 2022

    I’m not entirely sure where my desire to write short fiction fell off a cliff, but one day it simply did.

    I had a reading a week ago and I was all set to write something new for it…until I didn’t. It wasn’t for lack of an idea or energy. I just didn’t want to write a short story. The very idea was fucking repugnant. It made me grumpy, even slightly depressed. I mean, I was amped to do a reading and see peers I really missed over the past two and a half years, but I also didn’t want to write something short.

    And it’s not that I’m averse to short stories. Still love reading them. Still love fanboying over writers who do so much with so few words.

    I think I just don’t necessarily love writing shorts anymore.

    I often wonder if the main reason is money or hubris. There’s simply no path to being paid what I believe I’m worth as a short story writer. There are plenty of publications and projects, but I’ve found the idea of writing for free or exposure to be incredibly regressive for me? But I feel guilty about that. Like I’m turning up my nose at something I still enjoy. At the same time, I’m not as thirsty for immediate validation of my writing anymore. I care that people enjoy what I put out and have actually paid (maniacs) for it, but I’m also not worried that I need to necessarily chase that dragon either. Is that hubris? I’m not sure.

    The other reason might be better: I’m simply so much more comfortable with myself as a novelist. Hell, not just comfortable, I’m CONFIDENT. I don’t see the same obstacles I used to that once convinced me I didn’t have the chops to take a concept and carry it all the way to 80K+ words in a satisfying manner.

    Maybe it is hubris. Who the fuck knows? That I’m overthinking this and literally feeling bad about not wanting to do a thing nobody is asking me to do is fucking weird and I know I’ll obsess about this for the next few weeks, so yay.

    I used to get this really good envy whenever I read an excellent short story. This spark that made me say, “I can do that.” or “I think I can really enhance this aspect of the concept.” and while I still get inklings of that, I see myself thinking of the outline instead, of how to take these ideas and build them out to something sprawling. Sometimes it feels like my brain’s finally caught up with my mouth, to be honest.

    Just thoughts on where I’ve been lately with writing. And it should be said: these are my experiences. There are plenty of folks killing it on the short fic scene in incredible ways I couldn’t touch for all their own valid reasons.

    I just think I need a break.

  • The Unbearable Volume of Silence

    March 21st, 2022

    I published nothing last year and I have yet to publish anything this year.

    A few years back, this would have freaked me out. The sky would have been falling in chunks. That I wasn’t writing something, ANYTHING would have been a crime. A means of punishment because I couldn’t imagine not being published once I finally overcame the obstacles on my path to getting that very first credit.

    But a few things happened. I dropped my agent. Got picked up by a new one. I went on query right when a goddamn pandemic reared its head and sent us all into a fucking spiral of insanity that continues.

    I got a little more perspective.

    A lesson I learned from pandemic is to shed the fear of doing the things I want. That isn’t to say that I’m going to speed run life, in fact, it’s the opposite. I realized a lot of my short writing and need to publish were entirely rooted in the very real fear of focusing my efforts on long form – an obviously longer game. I was horrified of that wait. Of not filling the space with validation because if that validation disappeared, then I wasn’t worth anything as a writer.

    Which was bullshit.

    I’m a good writer. I’m trying to be a great writer. I’m doing the extra stupid thing to achieve that on my terms, without sacrificing my voice or my identity in order to get to where I want to be. The problem is that takes time. My speed doesn’t help (I’m sitting on four books as of right now and started outlining a fifth), but I’m learning to deal with the silence; to allow myself to disappear because I’m doing the work.

    At first, I was worried that lack of me would hurt me – especially when it came to networking. Thankfully, pandemic alleviated some of those concerns, but now we’re pretending things are over and here comes all the events that a person has to participate in to be taken seriously. While I miss the folks I’ve forged meaningful relationships with, I also don’t miss the infinite internal eye rolling that comes with a lot of these events. I’m not unique in this, especially among writers, but I ain’t a joiner.

    So, the silence has become a lot more attractive. I like putting my head down and putting in the work. I won’t lie, I do miss writing short fiction, but looking at the state of things, I don’t see a place for me in that world at the time. I’m proud of what’s come before, but all this time I know I’ve grown as a writer and I’m so very excited to show folks what’s coming.

  • Blancito

    July 16th, 2021

    I often think about my great grandmother, my bisabuela. Her name was Belén. It means Bethlehem. We called her Rafa – it was a thing on my mom’s side of the family, nobody went by their real name except my mother.

    And yeah, if you’re asking ‘What about you, Angel?’ Little secret? The right way to say my name is Ángel Luis, but I go by the English pronunciation Angel b/c I enjoy not rolling my eyes seventy-four times a day.

    I was lucky enough to have her in my life for 21 years, though, that’s the outcome of a family where your grandmother married at 15 and your mom married at 18.

    I’m 40 with two grade school age kids. My grandfather had two grand kids by the same age. Wild shit.

    Anyway, we’re talking about the older lady. I keep digressing.

    I remember her stories. The way she prayed the rosary every single day at 1PM with the radio service broadcast over AM. I remember her rocking chair and how she used to scoop me up into her arms and sing little songs as she rocked me back and forth. She liked men’s cologne and always wore that sandalwood junk you could buy at the pharmacy.

    She always took my face in her rough bronze hands and remark about how happy she was I was “blancito”. “Bello, como un Italiano.”

    My great grandmother was mixed. She was the daughter of a Puerto Rican Taino woman (as much as she could have been considering things, but the blood was there) and an Italian migrant who came to the island with his brothers when the youngest murdered a man back in Calabria. She envied her father’s paleness in comparison to her mother’s family and valued that her own daughter married a man with Spaniard blood and was even more enamored with my pasty ass father. She was in bliss at the sight of my blonde girlfriend (who would become my wife) and always spoke about the great white possibilities of our children.

    Back then I never quite understood her obsession. I chalked it up to old school racism – and don’t get it twisted, the racism was real. She was genuinely afraid of my Black friends and epithets were thrown around quite often. I would scold her and tell her she was being crazy, but we treated it like a quirk, even when that ire was directed at my uncle, who himself was darker than anyone else in my family.

    Older and armed with perspective. I can’t forgive a lot of that thinking and behavior. I realize now there’s an abhorrent aspect to it, but I also realize there’s something deeply disturbing about my bisabuela’s fetishization of whiteness and its roots in trauma. When power is taken from you; when you’re trained to believe from the very start that you are second or even third class to your colonizers, what other reaction could you possibly have but to worship the source of their privilege?

    And there’s the rub. A lot of white Latine realize their privilege don’t they? Add a little bit of that good old indoctrination and you get yourself an internalized hatred stewing. A very willing participant in the system that continues to grind so many of our people under the heel of the boot as opposed to the gentle rub from the toe. Whiteness, even if it isn’t explicitly the right kind of whiteness, provides a shield.

    So what’s the solution? How do you get GENERATIONS of people understanding the flaws in their upbringing and the flaws in their systems that not only hurt them but hurt some of the people they love? I don’t fucking know. I can call out my own privileges until I’m blue in the face, I can share a million links to causes and writers that should have exposure, but am I affecting change? Am I doing the work or am I performing? If I keep quiet does it even count? Is this all worth thinking about if its constantly centering me?

    Since I landed my agent, my writing has been less and less fearful of exploring these thoughts. I’ve gone from someone terrified of my own heritage to someone who can’t stop unfolding the layers and layers of half a millennium of colonization. At times, though, I find moments of intense pride. Imagine to share blood with a people who persevered through centuries of hell so I could even have the ability to mull over our place in the world and our identity. There’s certainly a privilege there, but no, it’s not enough to be able to think about identity and history in the abstract because a lot of that hell isn’t behind us – A LOT.

    I don’t want to be an example of my people. I don’t mean that in a bullshit lovey-dovey, pseudo-liberal way. I mean it in the sense that I don’t want a very white mechanism like publishing to use me as THE Puerto Rican, as any sort of authority of my people in whatever genre I’d find a glimmer of success in. Rather, I want to be a battering ram. I want to be someone who breaks a door down to let everyone else in. And maybe that’s fantasy with the nature of this beast, but it’s one I’m willing to entertain for now.

    And who knows, maybe someday when we meet again, my bisabuela will be happy to see simply me. Not the blancito. Just me. Maybe I can take her trauma and use it to fix something.

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