Category Archives: Blog

In a matter of a couple of short days, my next story Resentment will hit the blog.

The four day serial is about what happens when a wife and a mistress meet to discuss their cheating lover.

The story hits the internet July 7.

Until then, here’s a trailer for the story.

You have to check this out.

He also supported my writing habit and was so proud when I came home with a copy of the high school paper. He saved every one of them. He was so proud.

So I wanted to share a short I wrote about my dad and the moment he knew he was leaving Cuba. I wrote it over six years ago and read it a week after his funeral at an event for Cuban Artists in Houston, Tx. It was the first time I had written anything about the Cuban experience and looking at it now, I want to take a red pen to it. But I can’t. There are just some pieces that need to stay as they are. This is one of them. Enjoy.

Dad’s Symphony

The wood handled machete masterfully swung from left to right as if
conducting an unheard symphony. The mid day sunlight bounced off the ocean
and reflected on to the large knife blinding its owner. The fields were
eerily quiet with only the sounds of stubborn sugar cane to break the
stillness. His hands, a template of unhealed and raw wounds, saw the rise
and fall of his family. Those hands have done so much but have so much
left to do. They have built for the family, they have stolen for the
family, and above all, they have provided for a fatherless family of
eight. Now those hands are Cuba’s hands whether he wants it or not.

No one said a word that day but he knew everyone was thinking it.
Guzano. He’s a guzano. Some looked upon him like rotting flesh
basking in the middle of the tattered pebbled street during a heat wave.
Others looked at him with pride and smiled when he walked down the street.
And still others looked at him like a mechivous child, unable to deal with the
reality that he knew something they didn’t know. Mothers would grab their
children, protecting them from the invisible, contagious and apparently horrid
disease that this man seemed to have. It wasn’t confirmed nor denied by
the government, however, he was under social quarantine. To talk to him
was like signing a death warrant but to ignore him would be diminishing
hope.

Now this man, an ironic mixture of life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, started out his day in the sugar cane fields when he found out his
status. The merciless sun was beating down on his brown skin, cooking it
and utilmatley burning it with so much fierce and brute energy that could not be
contained, erased, or corrected in any form. He turned to his left
and faced the fickle ocean. Would it grant him his wish? Or would it
deny him his human right and punish him for wanting more.

After a hard days work, Osiris Ferrer Fernandez walked home in the cloudy
weather. The sun had realized that his human guinea pig was a
guzano. He laid down on the cool white linen sheets and closed his
eyes. He was half-asleep when the truck drove down the street, booming its
horn. It was the truck of hope whose horn echoed through the olden Spanish
streets of Cuba. To Osiris, it was the truck of liberty, telling everyone
of his freedom.

“Osiris se va. Guzano. Osiris se va, lunes. Guzano.
Guzano.”

His eyes opened and he rushed to the door and outside to the street.
Finally, everyone knew what he knew. Mothers on the door stoops that were
braiding their daughter’s hair watched him drop to his knees, look up and raise
his hands to the sky. And on that tropical island the rain began to fall.
Osiris was the only man left on the street, welcoming the rain as it soothed his
sun burned skin and refreshed his hopes and dreams. His tears were
raindrops and his llantos, were thunderous rolls of joy echoing through San
Diego de Cuba.

Years after, Osiris Ferrer Fernandez, Cuban guzano became Osiris Fernandez,
US citizen. Father of four, husband of one, and eternally
remembered.

As a young boy, Estevan Vega never really felt interested in the written word.
Far more fascinating things like comic book superheroes and sketching
fantastical beings caught his eye. But in the fifth grade, writing short essays
for a standoffish teacher ignited a fire that is still burning. Using his
imaginative father as a springboard for ideas, Vega set out to write a full
manuscript. His dream to become a published author came forth when he was just15
years old, releasing his first literary creation, Servant of the Realm,to the
world, a story about a teenager who sees the future deaths of those he loves and
tries to change it. “There is something therapeutic and natural about breathing
life into the mundane, or finding escape through odd characters and strange
concepts,” says Vega.

The Sacred Sin is a very dark story. The cover could tell you that at a glance. It’s a story about the darkness within all of us. We’ve got demons wrestling around us all the time, opposing forces seeking to bring us down or mess with our lives. But this story more deeply explores the darkness lurking inside of us, the person beneath our eyes, beneath our smiles and grimaces. It follows Jude Foster on a murder case that seems as unbelievable as him cheating death a year earlier. Each victim is engraved with a crooked crucifix, and there’s a blood-stained letter left behind by the serial killer at every crime scene. It’s up to Jude and his new partner to track down this sadistic madman…but they only have a week to do it.

To buy his book clck here:

My first creative writing class ever showed me a couple of tricks to better storytelling.

The best lesson: goal, motivation, conflict charts rock!

I usually don’t give a lot of tips on technique here since I believe that real writers like those who are published and win Pulitzers and such, should give them out. But a friend of mine told me recently that I knew a lot already about what I’m doing since I’m always reading or writing or practicing different techniques.

But what to talk about? I could talk about how to structure a scene, what dialog should do, and a Hero’s journey, all WONDERFUL things to know when you’re learning the basics of story telling. But a GMC chart is step one and helps you avoid problems before they start.

Okay, the basic premise is that your character, which ever it is, has internal and external goals, motivations, and conflicts.

The goals are what they want to achieve. It could be physical like losing weight or intangible like the love of a good woman. The point is that every character good guy or villain wants something.

The motivation is the why. This is interesting and involves almost digging into the psyche. Why does your character want to lose weight? Perhaps an external motivation is that they want to look good naked. The internal is that they don’t want to be laughed at or want to catch the eye of a potential sweetheart (can’t you tell I’m a chick lit writer. ha!) This motive drives the character and your story.

A trick that I’ve learned with goal and motivation is to make the over all theme relateable to everyone. Everyone (most of us anyway) can relate to losing weight and wanting to feel good about ourselves.

The final is conflict and this is where you get to throw the book at the character. So that character who wants to lose weight to feel good about themselves and catch their sweetheart’s eye has a conflict. In this case let’s say his external conflict is that he works at Krispy Kreme as the new flavor taster. His internal conflict is his self doubt. Now we’re cooking with fire! What a conflict and what a struggle! Makes for interesting reading, I’m sure.

Now do this with all your characters, villains too. And it’ll help you avoid trying to plug in whole later. Trust me on that! The story I just finished had everything except an internal motivation and my critiquers caught that lasp quickly! Even though when I revised it, I know something was missing, I couldn’t put my finger on it. I didn’t use this technique. So you see, even people who use it often need to continue using it.

Make your own chart and see how things begin to flow. Happy writing!

Future Writers of America, i.e. the untainted writers