Angel Luis Colón

Bars

September 6th, 2024

Guess I’m making it a habit to update every two months now, huh?

The truth is: it’s been busy. Like, super busy. Between work, summer kid care, and deadlines – it’s been a LOT. I’m sure I’m not alone in that and I’m hoping all of you are doing well or feeling rested as the school year kicks off.

When I started writing, it was mostly as therapy. Life found me in a dark place and a reignited love of putting word to page was exactly what I needed to calibrate myself. That it would coincide with meeting an old acquaintance who would point me towards the path of publication was simply a bonus.

I tend to over research before making decisions, and when I did decide to write towards publication (a distinction that needs to be made because there is a BIG difference between writing to publication and writing to your ego) I researched a LOT. What were the hot markets like? What did I feel most comfortable writing? When I wasn’t writing my short stories or my novel, I was researching, so that by the time I felt ready to submit, I had built up quite a backlog of material.

Obviously, I failed miserably.

And that failure created a bar I had to get over. What I hadn’t anticipated was that success would do the same.

I joke that in my decade of building a writing career/reputation/platform (blergh, I hate that word), that I’ve proven to be an incremental mover. All peaks and valleys. This isn’t unique at all, but it makes me laugh because it’s exactly what I’ve always seen for myself. In a lot of ways, it’s validating to see how well I understand myself.

Anyway, that all means the bars have always done the same thing. Up and down, down and up. Never at their lowest or highest, but certainly in place to provide challenge. As I look back and see that progression, it becomes very clear that I passed a bar I hadn’t even realized existed until very recently.

I’ve never given great thought to the audience. I always worked towards impressing the people who need to get me through to the next stage: the agent, the editor, the publicist, etc. The reader is the last stop, and I hadn’t given much thought to that part of the process because I never felt as if I had much control over it.

I’d come to realize that was a half-truth. Yeah, it’s best to avoid stress over what we can’t control, but I still needed to have intent, didn’t I? The other half of my motive was a lack of confidence. I didn’t feel like I deserved to aim at a specific audience because I was convinced that I wasn’t enough of whatever I needed to be to aim at a specific audience.

It took me a long time to gain confidence in myself as a writer, but it took even longer to be confident in my identity (and truthfully, that is still all VERY much a work in progress) enough to say I wanted to write for specific people. Now, it’s easier to say I want to write for Latine readers. It’s even easier to say I no longer crave the validation of a white audience – if anything, I worryingly want their disdain, which is something to keep in check because that kind of feeling festers and I’m not about to self-sabotage myself for those who would hold me in disdain regardless of whether I fought them or Baba Loo-ed for their entertainment.

So my new bar: write for your people. That’s a high fucking bar. We’re not a monolith. We all have very different perspectives on our oppression and our place in the world. I can’t feasibly check any and all boxes because it is literally impossible for me to ever be able to understand them. I’m not Afro-Latine. I’m not a Puerto Rican from the island itself. I’m not Latine from the Mid-West or from another continent. But I can still write for them, can’t I? Not represent them or speak for them – that’s not the same. I can write to offer solidarity. To offer my own perspective. To make at least one more of us seen so the door opens a crack wider to let another in.

Bar after bar after bar. But I’m excited to try and clear them.

Anyway, I just read Seven Empty Houses from Samanta Schweblin and she remains one of my favorite Latine writers putting work out there today (along with others like Xochitl Gonzalez, Angie Cruz, and John Manuel Arias because I will never miss a chance to make y’all expand your literary horizons). Check it out when you can. Props to her translator, Megan McDowell, who captures the lyricism of her Spanish prose so expertly in English (yes, I like to read in both languages when I read books translated from Spanish – very pretentious).

Be easy.
Been A Minute

July 1st, 2024

Two months, actually. I’ve been on a deadline, but also, I haven’t felt like I have much to say lately.

It’s something I think social media (and being a writer on social media) trains us out of: when to be quiet. We’re told that we shouldn’t be. That we should always have an opinion and something to say to every single thing happening around us; good or bad. There’s no time to think on things. No time to digest and research. If you don’t immediately vomit out whatever it is on your mind, how can you ever hope to get attention?

It’s no secret that my least favorite part of modern writing/publishing is the amount of hats writers must now wear in order to be considered…successful isn’t the word I’m looking for here, more like ‘worthy’? I think that’s what I’m looking for.

What do I mean by that? Good question.

What I mean is this demand for engagement (and honestly, I do think its often more driven by appearances than it really is by the industry itself, but the industry doesn’t necessarily hate it) positions us as something of a one person band and when that happens, what hope do we possibly have in focusing on the actual creative art we chose to pursue. It gives a feeling that we’re all at the same flea market sharing the same damn stall with a tiny table and one chair, just screaming over each other as we wave our wares in the faces of completely disinterested shoppers who aren’t even looking at you.

Add the whole backlash against diversity that’s picking up steam and writers like me and many, many others are in the back of that stall, just barely visible hands shaking in the air, voices drowned out by nonsense and idiocy.

Of course, I spend two months quiet and jump back in with some depressing ish. It is what it is.

I don’t think its controversial to believe writers shouldn’t be responsible for 99% of their marketing and sales plan – even indie or self-pubbed writers. I also don’t think its controversial to believe writers suffer greatly for having to shoulder a lot of this work, especially when they are traditionally published. And I’m not saying we should all have access to bottomless marketing budgets, but I do believe we need access to more collaboration with like-minded professionals who understand marketing and sales.

Whenever I think about this, I think about the radio and how I still hear the same songs I heard 30 years ago on the same stations. There’s no effort to expand on what already worked in the past, no desire to invest in something maybe just a decade old. Its as if we’re in this stagnant place where nobody wants to put the effort in anymore because mechanisms are already in place for proven product, but the irony is those products had been given the support when they first launched, which gave them the success to become usable decades later.

And I mentioned the backlash against diversity before didn’t I? So let’s get to the destination I’ve been hovering around: this is the point of leaving it all to the writers. With the influx of more diverse voices and avenues to publication, my thinking is the lack of support is a feature, not a bug. It’s a means to prevent what came before (which is 99% white) from being overtaken while giving lip service to change. It all inevitably fails and guess what you’re left with?

See where I was going?
Defying Expectation

May 7th, 2024

I grew up in an extremely musical family. My mother was a semi-pro salsa dancer. Her brother was a musical savant; capable of playing an instrument by ear after spending 20 minutes with it. On my dad’s side, his brother was a radio DJ and his youngest brother was in a few bands.

There was no single genre anyone stuck to. My mom was probably the most devoted to salsa, but she introduced me to Motown and tons of amazing musical acts. Her brother, while an incredible conguero, was also SUPER into Hendrix and old rock. I wouldn’t know half of what I know about 70s rock if it wasn’t for him. On the other end, my Uncle Vic? Jesus, the amount of vinyl that man had. I learned EVERYTHING from him. Not to be outdone by my GOTH, GAY PUERTO RICAN IN THE PROJECTS Uncle Rob, who taught me about Bauhaus and Siouxsie Sioux.

To say I like music is a bit of an understatement, but I’ll admit that I have the softest spot for the dark wave/electronic/industrial music I fell in love with as a teenager is putting it lightly.

Don’t get me started on my love of hip hop as well.

If you’ve read other bits and pieces here, you’d know I’m not a joiner, so I never clung to a scene. I was happy to pop in and out as needed and enjoyed what I enjoyed. I rarely need validation and if you give me a weird look for enjoying Apopytgma Berzerk one moment and jamming out to DeBarge the next, then belting out some old La India track… well, fuck you.

It has always bothered me that Puerto Ricans are always associated with salsa or nowadays, reggaeton. Don’t get me wrong, both genres are beautiful and both would not be what they are without Puerto Rican culture and talent, but also, we’re not a monolith and we certainly aren’t chained to just those styles of music. I don’t like the idea of distilling a culture to one kind of music, whether we own that shit or not.

I look at my writing the same way. So many people seem to expect one thing and one thing only from Puerto Rican (and other Latine writers). They want us to convey pain and struggle, to literally write a diary of bootstrapping, so we can prove to the world we’ve had a pretty fucking rough time of it. You can even see it in the annoyance certain folks have with salsa or reggaeton – our joy is disturbing and unwelcome – only our suffering is palatable.

Its why I can’t find it in me to stick to a single genre or try to write some bullshit literary opus that will validate my experience to a pack of see-through assholes desperate to feed off the trauma that is literally genetic for folks like me.

And its not to say I don’t want to explore those traumas, but I’d rather do it in the way we’ve traditionally done it: with humor and gallows joy. The exploration of our trauma should not be traumatic, it should be freeing. It should evoke a sense of freedom and power; detachment from the gaze of those who view us as curiosities behind glass.

Anyway, random thoughts. Gonna go listen to more goth music.
Want

April 29th, 2024

Sometimes, I have no idea what it is I actually want out of writing.

In my 20s, I wrote for my ego.

In my 30s, therapy.

Now? In my 40s, I’m sort of at a loss. I know I want some level of validation, but I’m not 100% sure what form I need that to take. I know that despite some of my achievements, I feel no palpable sense of satisfaction.

What worries me is this feeling brings with it some reductive thoughts. I tell myself maybe all I want at this point is to be paid, and while that’s a perfectly valid desire for the amount of work one puts into their art, we’ve been told that an attitude like that is shallow and awful, so does that make me the same?

And then my thoughts go towards all these things I’ve been told should be important to me as a writer – the money, the notoriety, the stroking of my ego. Again, these things aren’t the worst rewards, but they don’t necessarily excite me. It’s nice to get a little extra cash, but I’m also pretty fortunate in that writing is not my main source of income. I’m privileged to not have to worry about that component. I’m also an expert introvert, so the less I need to deal with people, the better. I’d rather not have to network or worry about convention awards.

So maybe what I want is a kind of visibility. To be a Puerto Rican writer with a platform and the ability to leverage that platform to shed some light on others that need a boost. I often question whether I’d ever have the reach to entertain that without bending to the established methods. It almost feels like a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation at best and performative nonsense at worst.

I guess my frustrations lie there: following what’s been established. I’m not going to pretend I’m some major rebel, but I’m also the type to really get a hair up my ass when the folks who tend to ignore my perspective and my people are the ones telling me how to succeed within their parameters. It’s not a question of making anything easier for people like me, but more one of leveling the playing field by eliminating the process that is clearly built for a specific subset of people to full succeed within.

Which colors my idea of success and goal setting quite a bit. I’d rather not go back to being afraid to explore things about my background I was trained to be ashamed of or believe wasn’t interesting to the wider audience (in and of itself an act of self erasure). To bend would mean to eliminate what makes me, well, me, wouldn’t it? What purpose would that success or visibility be then? I’d simply be a token, incapable of doing the things I truly want to do. That’s the trap, I guess, but I can’t pretend it doesn’t drive me fucking insane despite recognizing the problem.

So maybe I do know what I want. I want to succeed on my own terms – as a Puerto Rican writer. Not as a token. Not as a transcriber for misery tourists. Not as a validator of ingrained bias. Too often, the path to success is defined as the path of those in power and I reject that idea. I reject begging for a seat at a table that remains closed off. Jesus, as I write this, the autocorrect on this platform is telling me ‘Rican’ isn’t a word – how can I not be pissed at all times?

On top of all this, I can’t even let that anger have that much air or else I’m defined by it. Which leads to more frustration and the snake eats its tail again and again and again.

I don’t apologize for airing these frustrations, I mean, if you’ve read this, it probably doesn’t bother you. I’ll say I’m grateful to anyone for reading my self-therapy here, and I do hope it provides some level of insight, whether you have the perspective in common or not.

Creative arts suffer when cordoned off. Alternate perspectives, stories, and ways of telling those stories have immense value and if we hope for our favorite genres to survive, we need to stop allowing ourselves to be hoodwinked into the belief that the path isn’t branched. We need to stop allowing our wants to be defined by the structures built to benefit the few.

Or else we’re doomed to all fall into obscurity.
The How & Why

April 12th, 2024

I’ve been thinking about the concept of motive within crime fiction.

Or really, I’ve been thinking about the fetishization of motive; this idea that we must always provide the audience with information that only serves to validate their own biases or stroke their ego.

You see a lot of this in how we handle villains across all genres. There’s a demand that you make a villain understandable or sympathetic. If you can’t do that, you make the villain a brilliant strategist or supernaturally good at timing – anything to pull them away from an actual exploration of why they would do the things they do.

Now, there are a million exceptions to this, but I’m focused on crime fiction specifically because crime fiction (especially copaganda) aims to convolute motive in such a way that it loses its impact within simplicity.

Let’s be real, how often does any real crime occur because of extraordinarily complicated circumstances? Crime is merely the intersection of desperation and stupidity, not often the result of meticulous planning or years-long vendettas as the majority of crime fiction would entail.

‘But that’s why it’s fiction, Angel’.

Sure. Yeah, I feel you, but that doesn’t mean there’s room for better exploration of the how and why; which, coincidentally, would need to explore the social and infrastructural failures that force desperation and stupidity to collide.

When I was growing up, I knew a lot of dingbat assholes. Semi-decent people for the most part, but the types who were often running scam after scam (my mother being one of these people – I have stories). These folks were trying to survive. Maybe they had kids or sick family. Maybe they were couch surfing and barely capable of holding a job. Maybe they were stuck on liquor or something worse, the kinds of folk invisibly shackled to a much larger monster. What they all had in common wasn’t that they had loose morals or a vicious streak, no, what they had in common was somewhere along the line society absolutely fucking failed them.

This was a majority BIPOC group, but I’m not going to pretend a lot of these folks weren’t white either. The Bronx is a pretty diverse place and so is its criminals. That said, there is something to this desire that we display crime within fiction as something grander in scope. It obfuscates the real reasons and hides away the fact that none of us are ‘too good’ to ever commit to our worst impulses. It’s a tool of that broken system that is now dependent on its own failure in order to ensure the same result.

This is why I found myself at a weird impasse with crime fiction. If I couldn’t find folks who would accept that I, a Puerto Rican from the Bronx, a people who have been painted as immoral and often just straight comically evil (which is usually the only time motive is distilled to anger/greed/evil, when it is directed at the ruling class) wouldn’t want to write crime to appeal to them, why should I write about it at all?

Instead, I found myself focused on family dynamic and the roots of problems that were parallel to immoral behavior, not causative. What are the failings of our environment that lead to the failings of ourselves? What are the elements that build our motives into something unwieldy and ugly? I explored familial trauma as a catalyst in HELL CHOSE ME. The weight of legacy in NO HAPPY ENDINGS. The liquidity of belief and moral systems under the thumb of a ruling class in the Blacky Jaguar stories. Did I dress those up in pulp clothes and humor? For sure. But I also didn’t lean into the bullshit that was expected of me.

I got a book out there looking for a home where my protag is the villain of the story; entirely molded by society’s demand that she girl boss her way to the top. That the top is a criminal empire doesn’t matter. What matters is she’s been fooled to believe that her behavior – dictated by the men around her – is the behavior that will free her. She’s been fooled into that belief so deeply, that she may just succeed at it.

I guess this is a long way of saying that BIPOC writers who are already expected to only write BIPOC stories for an audience only interested in being titillated deserve the space to explore their backgrounds and communities on their own terms and deserve to pick at the infrastructure that has damaged them and their people. This means we cannot expect loyalty towards convention established a fucking century ago, no matter how hard an audience with no real perspective wants their suburban biases to be validated. Like, I’m sorry cities are scary to you, but there are plenty of white dudes out there writing about those neighborhoods despite not having set foot in them.

Anyway, question the complicated motive in fiction. Especially question it when there are no causative forces around them. I’ve found more often than not, the only complicated motive in those stories are those of the writer and if you give it a little more thought, the motive isn’t very complicated at all.

Did you know my latest, INFESTED, has a paperback edition dropping this August? You didn’t? The hell is wrong with you? Preorder HERE.

Bars

Been A Minute

Defying Expectation

Want

The How & Why