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Angel Luis Colón

  • 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.

  • Ticks and Leeches

    January 26th, 2021

    I’ve been giving thought to an ugly little truth of this industry, but it’s taken me a while to really pull the words together since this is a nuanced little bastard.

    Let’s start outside of the writing industry and use an example from real life.

    We’re walking in line, complete strangers, to the same destination. Pre-pandemic, obviously. I reach a door before you, open it, and nod you in. You thank me and hooray, an exchange of pleasantries has occurred.

    Maybe some time later in the day or week, this favor is returned as you do the same for me.

    Look at us, normal humans with good manners.

    OK – great. We went tit for tat on something nice and easy. But those favors can grow, right? Maybe I help you carry something and one day you do something for me in a similar capacity b/c we live in the same building or whatever. Extend the social relationship to an actual friendship and this will happen often. We’ll do each other solids and that can be really nice.

    But the big question within all of these exchanges: do I or the other party feel owed?

    This is where that truth steps in. Entitlement. The feeling being owed either by virtue of a relationship or because of past action. Is it nice to see a return of a favor or kindness? Hell yes.

    But is it owed to us?

    Is it especially owed to us in a professional capacity, i.e. writing?

    And should that expectation be the basis of our professional or personal relationships in this industry?

    I’ve been very fortunate to have had many writers in my life that have done me massive kindness. Whether it’s been words of encouragement, a drink on them, a pair of extra eyes on a project or query – I’ve always been grateful for those favors. And because of that, I’ve tried very hard to pass on kindness the best way I can – admittedly, I’m the type that can be very apprehensive to put myself out there entirely, a mix of Bronx upbringing with a sort of kind of terrible family, but WHATEVER. What I mean is that I try to pay it forward and I always ask myself a very big question when I do:

    Do I expect anything in return for this?

    Because we’re human and it’s not always possible to not associate a return on investment, I think it’s fair to ask myself about my own motives. A means of reviewing whether I’m being level-headed or meeting expectations I’ve made of myself.

    And while all that is so fine, dandy, and noble there’s the other half of that equation: what will others expect of me if I move forward?

    That part can freeze me up something fierce. We’ve all been burned. We’ve all had those instances where a relationship in these circles evaporates once you’re not reviewing or podcasting or no longer hold the same intangible cache you did a year before. It sucks and it does color the experience in ways that can leave a person feeling used or cynical.

    So the nasty little truth: the root of that cynicism. The people who do believe these relationships MUST be beneficial (obviously weighted towards their side of the scale, but still…)

    What do we do about that?

    I have no idea.

    All I know is we have to fight for our passion. We have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable because the purpose of folks like that is to take ultimately bleed us dry and swipe us off the board. In their mind, this is a competition but they know they are incapable of competing in any fair way, so they entrench themselves and hoard whatever they can, providing kindness until that kindness no longer bares any more fruit.

    No solutions, I know. I’ve offered nothing in this exchange of my thoughts for your reading.

    Or maybe one. Corny, but true at the end of the day. Be as kind as you can until you can’t. Nothing new, but I think we need to hear that sometimes; to get permission to hold the line against folks who will habitually try to step over.

    be easy

  • Twenty Twenty Fun

    January 11th, 2021

    Oof, we starting with the bar low so there’s no place else to go but up.

    Anyway, how are we all doing? Are we adjusting to the ancient curse of living in perpetually interesting times? Excellent.

    Beyond the obvious, well, everything we’re going through, I’ve been trying very hard to think about what it is that I want – outside of simply surviving – out of this year.

    Last year was a wash. My enthusiasm for writing, while not diminished, was tough to get a hold of. What made it worse was the obvious reason for that creative glut. I’ve found it a hell of a lot easier to have more ambiguous scapegoats. Those five letters (Trump or COVID, I mean same thing) just made everything feel like marching through mud.

    That said, there were bright spots. I’ve ranted about them before. Baking. Cat. Agent. All good things. All things that are separate but would be awesome as a single entity.

    I also learned something important while being forced into a life of quarantine. I learned about my worth as a creative.

    Needless to say, there’s a lot of thinking to do when you’re not on an exhausting commute or occupying yourself with the noise of social living. A lot of restless nights left me staring at the ceiling – still worrying as normal – but also simply thinking about me and what my priorities are. What the root of those priorities are.

    Spoilers: no major revelations. More like acceptance of long known truth. My worth is not measured by accomplishment or ticks off the list. It’s not measured by whether I’m esteemed or reviled by my peers. The score simply doesn’t matter. What does matter is being content in what I am creating. And while that’s such a rote concept, something we hear parroted all over social media, its difficult to “get” that point.

    So, like the step I took a few years back in accepting my voice, I’ve begun to accept my instincts. I know I can tell a story. I know I can tell it well. Now, though, I believe I can tell the stories I want to tell. Not the stories other people expect or the stories that chase a trend. I’m sick of that. Sick of how it makes me feel trying to measure up to an invisible standard.

    A big part of that is also believing that I can do things better. Whether that’s better than others or my past self doesn’t matter. I just want to be a better writer. I want to write better stories. I know that path is paved with my intentions, nobody else’s.

    I have plans. I also have books. I’ve got an agent that believes in me and honestly, as thankful as I am for that, I believe I deserve that because I am that good at this.

    All this ranting, what I’m trying to say: believe in you, fully. Not just a part of you. Own this shit. Accept what you excel at and what you need to build. Then do it. Do it well.

    Happy New Year. May the times get a lot more fucking boring.

    Angel

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