11/1/12 Blip Journal; the progress of a NYC writer. Here is my National Novel-Writing Month novel: the edge of the river by Odilia Rivera-Santos

The key to making art is to make art and not care where it goes and whether anyone cares.

I decided to participate in the National Novel-Writing Month thing to write a novel in a utilitarian style with a bit less concern about the outcome. It's output, not outcome that matters, no?

the edge of the river, a novel by Odilia Rivera-Santos

The sun came in through the window so bright that it reminded me of where I was. The tropics again to go to another funeral again and sort through mildewed family albums and sip coffee in a living room where I seemed to be the only one sweating profusely, no longer accustomed to the heat and lethargy of a small country town. The usual gang showed up: curious neighbors who rarely talked beyond a simple greeting on the day of my arrival and the chitchat reserved to speak of the dead. They always had the same wistful delivery and the same focus on what the dead had left undone and what they had wanted to accomplish. I ate the salty crackers with fresh butter and took another sip of milky espresso with too much sugar and kept tapping my foot to a nonexistent tune, praying everyone would just shut up and pray. A Puerto Rican wake is not as much fun as an Irish wake -- the Irish celebrate and are less morose. No one was dancing and I alone attempted to stem the tide of misery that welled up with every word. He is deceased, I thought to myself, and he no longer suffers or dreams or wants, and isn't it a shame only death can bring such bliss. Why couldn't God empty us of all those desires which twist our lives in knots. 

I only showed up in the hopes of meeting the third María, because there was nothing of me in this tribe anymore. If one could say it is possible to outgrow a family, I could definitely have said it with eyes closed, falling back while playing the trust game with the universe. And the universe would have answered my call more logically than blood relatives. No more guava slices or white cheese or salty crackers. The heat was starting to get to me and here it was only eight hours since my arrival. I'd only had time to shower, take a short nightmare-laced nap and awake again to shower with the metal slats of the window open to the backyard and the chickens' squawk and curious eyes of the cow from next door. It was a kind of home, but not mine. The third María was the one who we always waited for at these gatherings and who never showed up. I was convinced, sitting there in my plain black dress with matching plain black heels and facial expression, that she would show -- it was only fair for at least two of the three Marías to show up at their father's funeral. 

 

http://www.nanowrimo.org

November 6, 2011. Blip Journal; the progress of a NYC Writer.

Odilia Rivera Santos

I was talking to some writer friends the other day and found most of them are waiting for someone somewhere to do something. Waiting is not something I do well. The sense of autonomy you feel as an independent artist sitting glumly or cheerily at your favorite wifi-enhanced coffee shop is lost when the waiting time comes. The trick is to not let that sense of accomplishment diminish in the waiting process. You have to breathe, and laugh, and continue writing, and take bubble baths, and make hot dinners while you wait. I am waiting too because, as they say, the universe is abundant and full of miracles. But I noticed yesterday I had slipped into my old habit of denying myself pleasure as if being emotionally frozen or deprived of sensuality would accelerate decisions and make decision-makers rule in my favor. I realized this while eating a low-fat mozzarella cheese stick that tasted of cardboard - yeah, it's nutritious, but who wants to eat paper?
I resigned from my last teaching job in January. The bathroom was freezing cold, the toilet overflowed often, there was no place to eat lunch in the neighborhood, classes were cancelled when it snowed - which meant not getting paid on those days, and I realized the sense of deprivation in this place was getting to me, and although I cared for the students, the job was siphoning out too much of my qi.
I walked away and into the dangerous precarious world of freelance writing, editing, translating, thinking if teaching was something I was meant to do, it would materialize in a less hazardous and depressing setting.
One of my favorite books on writing is On Writing by Stephen King; it is an autobiography through the prism of writing as a working-class art. He held some truly frightening jobs through his process of becoming a successful writer -- the worst being one in which he scrapped blood and gore off of hospital sheets while working in a laundry. All the bizarre experiences of his childhood, growing up with a mentally-ill mother were great ingredients for an artist in the making. As a guy with a real working-class mindset I admire, King would probably never call himself an artist. He is a dedicated worker with a clear idea of his skill set.
While perusing through the writer want ads, I often come across the mantra: no pay, but great exposure. These days, it's quite simple to promote one's writing online without anyone's help.
Every job has its risks and annoyances. I am often amazed at how people become completely consumed by their work and how salary dictates how they feel about themselves.
Happiness becomes tethered to titles, material possessions and zeros on that paycheck.

I am thinking about work and writing about work for my next e-book: Work Chronicles, which I will published on Smashwords in November. In the meantime, you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
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10.21.11 Blip Journal; the progress of a NYC Writer, writing by hand, by android, by the light of an all-night diner

Odilia Rivera Santos

Last night, I watched part I of Ken Burns's Prohibition and part of a PBS mystery with an actor whose name escapes me but he is incredibly talented. It was a mystery that remains a mystery, because I fell asleep before the end to wonder who the killer was. It was early when I awoke, too early for anything but undocumented workers headed for construction sites, restaurant kitchens, hotels and illegal factories.
Despite this earlyness, I had my cup of coffee and began my visualization exercises accompanied by Samba Triste performed by Baden Powell and slipped into the train station at 5:45 a.m. to watch NYC from another angle. We have trees and silence and people who greet you with smiles not wanting or lacking anything.
I discovered another all-night diner; the Mexican busboy wears a crisply ironed white shirt and burgundy apron, his slicked back hair makes him look like a country boy who's making first trip to the big city and I expect him to start dancing and singing of the virtues of his village in Mexico and his love for our gritty little cityworld. I am sitting in a big booth by myself, but it doesn't matter because it's too early for booth people -- it's counter people time. Everyone is congregated around the counter with the TV blaring some morning news and tips on how to become more utilitarian.
The coffee tastes like instant with ground up cardboard. I am writing some new poems for reading on October 29th with Charlie Vázquez and sending out writing to different journals. Writing and editing and submitting and overusing the gerund.

I am working on a collection of essays about work entitled Work Chronicles to be published as an e-book on Smashwords in November; in the meantime, you can check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
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http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

Hispanic Heritage Month: Latinos and Education, instilling intellectual curiosity in a child.

Odilia Rivera Santos

You can provide an elite private school education for your children without spending any money. It does require that parents take a long at themselves and invest time and energy in working one-on-one with their children.

1. Attitude - the adults are the prototype for what a child envisions as his or her future adult self. Your language is extremely important. Focus on solutions and not problems when you speak. If you constantly talk about problems, a child will feel that life is difficult and he or she will feel easily defeated. If you state the problem simply and go on to talk about how the problem may be addressed, the child learns critical thinking skills and gains an optimistic outlook. Teach that every problem has a solution.

2. Self-advocacy - young children have to be taught to be activists. They need tools for setting boundaries between themselves and other kids, adults, etc. They must understand that they have rights everywhere they go and that no one has the right to be verbally abusive or to touch them without permission.
Teaching children history with an emphasis on their particular racial or ethnic group as "victims" will create a sense of hopelessness and a person who feels hopeless is less likely to stand up for him or herself.
Make sure to expose children to the history of brilliant leaders and to focus on those who triumphed despite adversity.

3. Goals - the best way to teach children to set goals is to have some goals yourself and to speak to your child about the process. If you are a parent working on getting a G.E.D., do not speak about the experience with regret or in a way that connotes that you feel like a failure; instead, focus on talking about what you are learning and the interesting people you're meeting in the process.
Don't do the "Don't do what I did" speech because it is fear-based, boring and not effective.
Consider presenting yourself to your kids as if you were an employee.
The truth is that your kids are evaluating your parenting skills; your assessment as a parent will come in the way of your child's positive or negative behavior.
Be a dynamic employee/parent who the child will admire. Children listen to people they respect, admire or find interesting. This does not mean that you become their friend and abandon providing structure for children's lives; it means that you must be a person a child would like to emulate.
You are in charge but in order to be an effective parent, you must be humble enough to admit when your parenting approach is not working.
The goal is to have a happy interdependent relationship with your children in which they can make informed decisions when you are not around to offer guidance. If the parenting methods you are currently employing are not getting the results you'd like, change.

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result." - Einstein.

4. Standards - there are certain skills that a child is expected to learn before going on to the next grade. You can find a lot of useful lesson plans to do at home on PBS Kids and Starfall is a great website for phonics help.
http://www.pbs.org/parents/goingtoschool/what_1.html
http://www.starfall.com/

5. Language - teach your child Spanish by putting time aside to speak only in Spanish. You can choose to speak Spanish on the weekend or at night, but make sure you do not respond to your child if he or she speaks English. If you ask a question in Spanish and the child answers in English, keep asking in Spanish until you get an answer in Spanish. The most natural way to learn language is through employing it in everyday life: watch films, read books, listen to music and have conversations in the target language -- Spanish.
If your Spanish skills need some brushing up, Directo al grano is a great grammar book that provides a comparison of Spanish and English grammar. MIT offers free online courses -- take a Spanish class. Lo que no mata engorda.
http://www.amazon.com/Directo-grano-Complete-Reference-Spanish/dp/0130848018
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/foreign-languages-and-literatures/

6. Recreation as work and work as recreation - you can teach reading comprehension, research skills and critical thinking through doing research on subjects that the child enjoys. You can read the same books and articles and talk about them.
Choose one day per week to go to the library and always keep the appointment.
It is a good idea to read books on library reading lists, as they represent books used in schools. Reading books at home before the child reads them at school will give them a sense of accomplishment and insure they are better prepared.
http://kids.nypl.org/reading/recommended.cfm
http://kids.nypl.org/reading/recommended.cfm

7. Oral communication skills - boys tend to give one-word answers to questions while girls only need one simple question to talk for two hours. Make sure every question you ask is open-ended. Open-ended questions force the child to think.
Did you have fun at school today? - this is a yes/no question
How was school today? - this is an open-ended question, which allows a child to produce language, review syntax, use of prepositions, etc.

Give the child your undivided attention without staring at them. Some kids feel scrutinized and as if they are being interrogated if you ask questions and make intense eye-contact. Be casual but listen closely. You can try having a conversation as you prepare a snack together or do some other quiet activity.
Do not interrupt a child who speaks slowly; he or she might process information slowly and interruptions will make the child feel uncomfortable about speaking.

Make sure the television is not always on.
Attention deficit disorder begins at home with too much stimulation: cellphones, television, radio, music, a group of people talking at once.

8.Make time for important stuff. Reading and talking with your children is vital. Throw your television out the window, but make sure no one is standing below first. Limit television viewing because there are very few jobs for people that require them to sit still, stare blankly and overeat.

A bad education is hard to undo but a great education is something that no one can ever take away from you. The best inheritance you can leave your children is intellectual curiosity.


Check out my creative nonfiction essays Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I and Latinalogue Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part II: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
http://twitter.com/#!/UrbanBrainiac
http://twitter.com/#!/bezotes
http://twitter.com/#!/latinaauthor

9.27.11 Blip Journal: the progress of a NYC writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

Riding the train from one end of the 2 line to another, you see a little bit of everything: Haitian church goers, Hassidum, Wall Street executives and protesters following their footsteps, young families headed to the lesser known nooks and crannies of Bronx neighborhoods and me.

As I sit peacefully thinking about what best to do with the hundreds of pages of writing I've accumulated, I glance to my left and notice a woman immersed in a book. I think of how many bits of information her brain must ignore to accomplish the task of following a plot.
I return to the New York Times to read an article about drug cartels and their control of a town and extortion plots and I imagine many must consider legalization of drugs to be the best option.
There would be a transition period while drug dealers get used to wearing suits and not carrying a gun while they visit hospitals, buying hospital staff monthly lunches to insure when a sluggish patient needs a crack sample, the grateful workers will reach for their brand of crack.

I fold the paper neatly to peruse later. And wait for the show.
On the train, there's always a show.
A Chinese woman walks into the car, pushing a cart. She plops herself down between between reader and writer.
We look up and make eye-contact, above the head of the Chinese lady, like synchronized swimmers.
The Chinese woman fidgets and lunges at the map and sits down again all the while exuding a diversity of funk heretofore unknown to man.
But you can't make assumptions.
She might be completely sane and have no sense of smell or she may have ingested some herbal medicines, which can make one smell like a donkey for a couple of hours or she might have some physical malady.

We, reader and writer, stand, again synchronized, and bemoan our seatless state during a non-rush hour rush hour.
The Chinese woman, her mission accomplished, unpacks some things from her cart and luxuriates, having inherited a whole subway bench to herself -- a rare event in a city where size 24 often crams into size 6 slots.

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Using SociaL Media and Getting Your Art Done

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

In January, I resigned from a teaching position, at a community center, with the clear goal of finishing two novels, my collection of poetry on the subject of love, and organizing poetry readings for my company, Haiku Empire. In addition to those goals, I decided to learn as much about online marketing as possible. The foci of an artist these days -- making art and promoting it. After much deliberation, I decided to send my novels and poetry to a traditional publisher and to self-publish nonfiction, in the form of e-books, for the rest of the year. I gave myself the luxury of completing the aforementioned projects within a year, but I was pleasantly surprised: I finished within six months. I have my parents to thank for my work ethic.
I attempted to live without a cellphone for a year, but kept receiving concerned emails from friends, so the phone is back on. When I'm writing, the Internet is never a distraction, but circuitous conversations really bore me. I really think people need to read more, so they can stop talking about their feelings all day -- it's like the Oprah couch universalized.
I have also been a person who feels very content spending time alone and this makes some people uncomfortable. I go to concerts, the movies, the gym, and even dancing alone. Sometimes, it's easier to be alone because there are no schedules to coordinate. In NYC, coordinating schedules with other people is complicated; we are all busy.
I did not have a clear vision of how my adventure into a full-time artist life would look; thus far, the experience has been magnificent. I am single and have no children, which is helpful because I don't have to discuss my plans with anyone. After talking to a lot of artists about romantic relationships, I see how it takes an extremely confident person to date someone who feels self-actualized. My friend Nelson Cabán, the Puerto Rican artist, and I talked about romance and making art some months back and agreed on how difficult it can be for the artist's lover to deal with our obsession with making art. I sometimes get up at five in the morning to write, connect myself via headphones to my Mac and disconnect from everything else. During this wonderful process of leaving work that no longer suited me, I have had the luxury of moving toward a closer approximation of my ideal life. There were weeks in which I got up, drank coffee, exercised, and wrote without speaking to anyone for days. After years as an advocate for homeless people, victims of domestic violence and immigrants, it was cathartic and wonderful to not speak.
I also connected with some great musicians, Tato Torres of Yerbabuena, Maurice Brown, Arturo O’ Farrill and Wynton Marsalis, who were kind enough to sit for interviews, allowed me to attend rehearsals and I will be posting those interviews on Leisurefications
The Wynton Marsalis interview was strange; I was sitting down waiting to order breakfast at a coffee shop. Marsalis comes in and looks at me like he knew me and I waved. When he sat down, I yelled out 'let me interview you!" He asked me to join him at his table and I asked him to join me at mine. He acquiesced and we sat for two hours talking about Jazz, Hip Hop and his fourteen-year-old son joined us. He was very gracious and fun to talk to.
I firmly believe when we let go of things and people who no longer serve any purpose in our lives, the right people and situations materialize.
Another big change is that I have decided to perform more -- people have asked me to act in their plays and movies for years, but I was never interested. Somehow, the idea of becoming a writer/performer makes sense now. I am speaking to someone this week about television work, some poetry readings and perhaps, becoming the creative director on someone else's very successful project.
My brother used to say a lot of people fear success more than failure, and I can see this is true. I chose to put myself in situations completely inappropriate to who I am and allowed people who are chaos-makers to enter my life. And excising toxic people from my life feels like clearing cobwebs along a path.
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Blogging -- Subject Matters

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

When I ventured to blog, there was the clear idea of having an audience. Instead of keeping a journal with story sketches or the happenings of my day, I could now obsessively post in the middle of the night during a bout of insomnia or instead of running down the subway stairs to go hobnob with other nerdy artsy types. This is not to say blogging replaces socializing with humans, because I love the humans, but it is nice to have a medium through which people can see what I do. I am a writer, and this fact shapes my approach to most things in life. Thoughts of fame and fortune are never far behind in American culture, but for me, fame is irrelevant -- just the fortune will do. We write because we love writing, and I suspect most of us, bloggers, consider the possibility of hitting the blogger lottery: getting paid to blog. The new American dream for those of us comfortable with the idea of a screen in front of our faces all day is the ability to earn a living in a strange outfit while sitting in a French coffee shop, eating croissants and drinking a capuchino.
Before I began this blogging journey in 2008, I thought about topics that might gain a following, so I surfed the net with an eye on numbers; it seemed sites devoted to porn and beauty tips were very popular. This was just what I gleaned from a cursory glance. I wasn't particularly qualified to write on either subject. I did, however, start to wonder what the two subjects might have in common. Lip gloss and coitus infinitus were inextricably bound. I wondered if the attraction to these sites could be a need for self-improvement, a need to cover all the bases as dating becomes a permanent fixture in people's lives; if one could both apply makeup and learn all the latest techniques for having sex, ...
An advertisement popped up the other day for a dating site for older people. The people in the pictures looked to be in their early eighties, and I wondered what people were hoping to find in this dating from junior high school to grave culture. It is okay to settle down with one person and watch him or her lose the sparkling appeal and then, perhaps, the ability to think rationally. There should be phases of a relationship in which two people are partners and then, one needs more help than the other. I wondered if people let go of each other too easily in a relationship. Of course, I am not speaking of cases in which there is possessive, jealous or otherwise unacceptable behavior. But I did wonder about the kind of baggage people drag around from one relationship to another.
It is still odd for me to hear of someone's parents being divorced. My parents got married and their marriage was dissolved as they'd promised it would be: through death. My father died after he and my mother had been together for over sixty years. They settled in and settled for that on which they'd agreed. Their agreement including sickness, as my father became ill at a relatively young age and never quite recovered. It is an old-fashioned idea to be with one person and allow him or her to annoy without even considering walking away. The love is decided and the love question is never again brought up. It just is.

Thinking about porn and makeup, I came to the conclusion -- no pun intended, that people just don't know how to settle anymore or settle down. And perhaps, there are areas in life in which being complacent would be a good thing or at least preferable to the alternative. I have settled down with writing and we are definitely staying together through sickness, health, rich, poor and all the other issues that may come up. I will write and observe, feeling a sense of satisfied complacence. Yes, I have settled and have no problem with it.



Writing on Writing
My slim volume of nonfiction essays is published!
Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I

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Writing Tips and Tips for Tips for the Artist Life

©2011 by Odilia Rivera-Santos

Many of us have been tortured souls and have created great art through and from a source rife with pain. The problem with setting up these connections, of creation and pain, is that the nervous system will eventually tire out. We wear out our myelin sheaths with the constant banging against our nervous system walls. Our bodies have a memory, so when we create from pain, it stands to reason that at the start of a writing, painting or film-making project, our bodies might go into that depressive state in which negative emotional chemicals begin to flow.
In the slaughter of animals in order for the meat to be Kosher, the animals cannot see other animals slaughtered because fear unleashes unhealthy hormones. The fight or flight response negatively affects the parasympathetic system, and causes the release of the hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
Fear and pain cannot be the source of creativity but we can use creativity to climb out of the darkness of suffering. The first rule of being an artist is to be satisfied with your work; this is not to say you should not think there's room for improvement. All artists are looking to continue their artistic evolution. But you should be happy to make art -- you, all alone without awards or a friend at a major publishing house and maybe three people who care about what you have to say.
The suffering artist bit has been done to death both literally and figuratively. If you are suffering, as so many artists I know seem to be, make an attempt to get to the root of suffering and deal with it head on. Perspective is usually the culprit; examining past experiences requires a healthy perspective in order to retrieve worthwhile lessons and leave the nastiness behind. Sometimes, people don't suffer from depression but have been taught to think like a depressive -- fearful, overanalyzing each experience and full of apprehension.

Keep your day job and hustle or hustle and hustle
There are two options when you decide to be an artist: be a full-time artist or keep a day job and be a part-time artist. If you are a natural born gambler who doesn't blink at the prospect of skipping a few meals and living with thirteen people in a studio apartment, be a full-time artist. You have to really hustle and create a rigid schedule for yourself -- far more rigid than any created by an employer.
If you're the nervous type or a natural born lollygagger who does not have the hustler gene, keep your day job. The important thing is to know yourself and to avoid whining.
Whining isn't an efficient use of time. The best kind of job for an artist is one that helps him/her cultivate a personality trait he/she would like to have. Some artists suffer so much in the attempt at normalcy that they are better suited to doing everything possible to avoid the 9 to 5 existence. Henry Miller was one of those artists who was crushed by the idea of going to work and coming home to eat dinner with his wife and child; for him, writing and a regular life were incompatible to say the least. He speaks very eloquently about his misery in the normal world and the tremendous sense of freedom once he decided, at the insistence of his wife, to pursue writing full-time: Henry Miller

Whatever work you do, outside your art, must strengthen your resolve and make you a better artist. For example, if you are losing your sense of play and joy and becoming humorless, working with children on art projects would help. When we become closed off to some aspect of life, emotion or segment of the population, our creativity suffers.
Do your art everyday. I have spoken to artists who say they need a new computer to write or a writing workshop, painters need a studio, etc., but that's bullshit. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison awaiting execution. If you want to do it, you will do it. If you resist doing your art, maybe you are a masochist or not really an artist.
If you are a writer, take pictures. If you are a visual artist, write. If you are a spoken word artist, be quiet and make a sculpture. Variety inspires us.
Learn from others but don't compare yourself to anyone. You can learn a lot from other artists but instead of trying to imitate or compare yourself to them, think about the essence of the individual's creation. I love Nabokov and Kurt Weill and realize it is their independence of spirit and belief in their work I find thrilling. They turned their art into a world, so moving from one country to another was not fraught with suffering. Wherever they traveled, they were home. They were at home in Art, which is where I live.


Writers, be careful not to die of exposure.
Buy my book here: Love When You Say Love

The Art of the Dodge or Procrastination with Purpose

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

I create writing deadlines for myself and very rarely break them. The beautiful thing about writing is all I need is a writing instrument of some kind and whatever noise I crave on a particular day -- sometimes, I listen to music, talk, or films. I rarely write in silence.
With writing, there is no need to wait for confirmation from anyone to do anything, unlike organizing an event or getting a play with actors together and all that entails.
I have sent novels out only two times because the process is slow, tedious, and I still rebel at the idea of waiting for someone else's judgement of my work.
I decided to self-publish after a very long ponder. My Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction, a collection of essays was slated for upload in May 2011. However, as I was editing and rearranging essays, I felt emotionally exhausted; it isn't easy writing about people in your life, because even with those who could be seen as villainous, I have to create a balanced portrait.
One of the most fascinating things I have noticed about people is the many ways in which they interact with others. We reserve certain parts of ourselves for certain individuals. It is often the case that a person who is extremely abusive at home is a beloved co-worker, as if he or she considered 'home' a place to express anger and rage and the workplace a place to develop close relationships. We all develop relationship frameworks in childhood, and, without retrospection, and regardless of how they may work against our best interests, we recreate them.
These are more functions of emotional training than intellect.

When I was a child, one of my closest friends told me her father was physically abusive, and I didn't believe her right away. I didn't know him as a father; I knew him as a charming, kind, well-dressed man who left for work on time every morning. He was the vice president of a bank and appeared like a nice family man. One Saturday, I went to her house, and I noticed my friend, her little brother and mother were all tense and seemed afraid to speak. It was as if something had just happened prior to my arrival.
I saw her father's private persona for the first time. He was in the middle of teasing my friend about her acne and looks. He did this until she cried. Everyone stood around, looking uncomfortable, and her mother looked scared. I found out later that having a couple of drinks and verbal abuse served as a warmup to his beating his wife and kids. I quickly grabbed my friend's arm and convinced him to let us go outside.
At the time, I was disappointed to see how deceiving a public persona could be. But, now, it seems not to be a form of deception. In truth, we are always choosing which aspects of our personality to display in different settings. We restrain ourselves from expressing happiness or telling jokes in a setting in which there is great suffering, such as, a homeless shelter or terminal illness ward. And we restrain ourselves from angry outbursts at job interviews for example. People tend to avoid imprecations while answering the question, "Where do you see yourself five years from now?"

The Art of the Dodge

This meander into human consciousness or motivation, even on a cursory level, served to slow down my editing process. It is important to write carefully and with compassion about others.
I honestly believe people who hurt loved ones usually have no idea of how their behavior will impact others. I also had the opportunity to think about how childhood experiences formed my world view; my world view is a pie with many slivers and continues to evolve.
Persons who continually hurt the most vulnerable may suffer from a cognitive deficit for which there is no cure or pill, or perhaps, it is a behavior remedied through an appeal to the functional part of his or her intellect.

Procrastination with a Purpose

Procrastination has long been considered negative and something requiring one to take a workshop to be freed of some kind of blocks in one's life preventing the attainment of riches and glory.
Today, I procrastinated long enough to think about the person at the other side of the belt.
We hear so much about the victims of something or other in this culture and not enough about what makes people crave such control over others. I felt much more at ease about uploading this book after my writing slowdown.
To be a great writer, you must be audacious, courageous, confident, and, at times, hesitant.

If you'd like to take a writing class with me, sign up here: http://skl.sh/kaBqvs

Buy my e-book!Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I

Writing Tips

©2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

HERE ARE MY TIPS FOR BEING A WRITER

1. Be audacious enough to call yourself a writer. And don't complain about the books being published and the kind of books you'd like to see published.
""If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it." — Toni Morrison

2. Turn off the TV and create a reading and writing schedule. In order to have something to write about, you must read. This is one of the most fulfilling aspects of being a writer.
You must remain a student for the rest of your life; otherwise, you fall into the trap of writing only of your own individual experience through a narrow prism.
If you have always been interested in philosophy, check out the reading list of an undergraduate intro to philosophy course and get the books from the library.
Exercise: Keep a Book Book in which you jot down important quotes from your readings or questions that arise.

3. Learn to view an event from perspectives very different from your own. This will improve your ability to write three dimensional characters and dialogue. No individual/character is one-dimensional; this is one of the telltale signs of bad writing. Even a villain was once a cute kid with dreams.
Exercise: Write the autobiography, in the first person, of a lover, relative or close friend who has hurt you -- it will help you have compassion for this person, gain a deeper understanding of their character and learn to write a three-dimensional villain.

4. Go to a museum or café and listen to a conversation. Jot down some lines from the conversation, not to eavesdrop, but to make note of the cadence, vocabulary, rhythm and pauses of different personalities. This will improve your ability to write dialogue because writing a short story differs greatly from writing a conversation with its starts and stops.

5. Always make connections with individuals who are talented writers or avid readers, so you can get feedback. This does not require money or that you take a writing course.
You can use Facebook to create a community of writers. Regardless of your topic or niche, you can always get important insights from strangers and friends who are interested in the written word.

6. Write everyday. Writing is what you think it is: pleasure or torture.
Ideas come easily if you program your mind to produce, which is a matter of setting up a writing time.
When I used to go running every morning at 6 am, my heart rate would actually go up at about 5:30 am because the body has a memory. My body knew I would be running up and down hills at 6am regardless of the weather. The human brain works in the same way to produce creative work as your body does to get adrenaline going for physical labor.
Write a list of assignments on Sunday night for the coming week and stick to your schedule.
Exercise: do a 20-minute free-write for each word.
love, work, money, music, sex, wilderness, magic
Post the free-writes on a blog and send me the link, so I can insert your stream-of-consciousness here for other writers to peep.

7. Be supportive of writers you admire. Remember to congratulate writers who are doing well and to encourage those who are struggling. Building a community requires compassion and engagement.

8. Submit your work on a weekly basis. Keep a chart with name of piece, name of publication to which you submitted work, and date piece was submitted. If you want to improve your editing skills and ability to produce writing more quickly, take a writing course. A writing course is the most expedient way to become a great editor of your own work.

9. Organize writing salons to share work once a month. There are many community centers, churches and art spaces renting space at a very reasonable rate. You can charge a monthly fee for each group member to cover cost of space or find a location where a group can gather free-of-charge. Writing can be very solitary and it is good to interact with humans. Keep yourself engaged with other writers through taking a course, salons and public readings.

10. I am not a fan of competitive artists or competitive artist events, so I won't attend any at which people are assigned numbers after reading their work; it makes me think of ice skating.
Go to readings in which people are dedicated to the art of writing, not competition. This is where you will meet people who are encouraging and want to discuss literature and artistic aspirations. I attended The Asian American Arts Alliance performance and open mic night in New York City; it was a great crowd of talented, dedicated unpretentious artists
http://aaartsalliance.org/

11. Promote yourself as a writer everywhere you go and on every post. Oh, here are links to my other blogs.

Buy my e-book! Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I
Take a writing class with me! http://skl.sh/lGWoDn
Get this blog for your Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/6yjk637

12. J.K. Rowling is self-publishing her next book. Consider self-publishing a short e-book; it's free, it's relatively simple and the real challenge is marketing.
If you do not feel ready to be your own editor, hire a writer to edit your tome. But just get it out there. E-books are great for many reasons. They will not clutter your apartment, the profit margin is excellent, you can upload a book a day if you wanted to, and you control the process.

Imagine, create, release!

Parts of this post originally appeared on my other blog: People for the Ethical Treatment of Puerto Ricans. http://peopleforpuertorico.blogspot.com/

Social Media, Marketing and Getting Connected Part II

© 2011 Odilia Rivera Santos

I spent some time today perusing articles on marketing your books online and promoting events. There is always a point at which one must ask How much can I do?
This is a very important question, because it does require time and commitment. If you don't monitor your Twitter and Facebook accounts, your followers, fans or Facebook 'friends' will get a lot of spam. There is nothing more irritating, online anyway, than joining a fanpage and seeing nothing but ads for açai-induced weight loss and Facebook-has-a-new-dislike-button-click-here posts with a picture of a nearly naked man or woman. If you know you will not keep up with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and others and you have money to spare, hire a social media firm or an individual geek.

CREATING A WIN-WIN SITUATION
Publish your own paper in three minutes! http://paper.li/
On my previous post, I had mentioned Paper.li with no intention of publishing my own paper, but I woke up this morning feeling kind of Hearst-like, so I decided to give it a try.
It is a brilliant marketing tool because you can post your links and create a paper that reaches a very specific group of readers, there is no maintenance and it's free.
You put in the tags -- tags are words used to connect different tweets. If you use the tag writing grants, every tweet mentioning those words will appear in your paper. You get to put in quite a few tags.
Today, I created The Writers for Writers Daily.
http://tinyurl.com/3bjuz2b
This newspaper is geared toward helping writers with self-promotion, freelance work, and general inspiration. I found some great articles and websites I had never heard of in my newspaper : )
If you post any articles on writing, you will likely end up in my The Writers for Writers Daily; in essence, you are creating a newspaper for you and those most likely to be interested in your work.

EDIT YOUR EMAIL SIGNATURE
We are writers, so we have to be careful about this. Keep the signature short and to the point. The title of your book or name of blog, subject matter, or event and the link. No one will read a dissertation of your work at the end of an email. I must admit to having a very long signature with my info and apologize to all who've been subjected to the excessive verbiage.

Goodreads is one of those sites I don't use very often. It is an online book club where people list all the books they've read or hope to read along with reviews. They have a space for authors to promote their work.
Goodreads Author Program: http://tinyurl.com/qzxanj
I recently included a short essay I had written entitled Lonely Art to see what would happen.

Amazon also offers writers the space and opportunity to advertise for free on their Amazon Author Page: http://tinyurl.com/nlsba5

TEACHING A CLASS OFFLINE
Skillshare
I love writing, editing, translating and reading, but there are times when human interaction is absolutely necessary. I teach creative writing classes and found this great site called Skillshare to advertise your workshop or class and set up payments through them.
http://www.skillshare.com/learn

TIME
I like formulas, so consider this one: for every five-hour block of writing, do one hour of marketing.

Social media is an experiment and we all have to see what works and what doesn't work.
“It is often the last key on the ring which opens the door” - Anonymous -- if I find the author, I'll let you know.

I will teach two workshops in October of 2012: Social Media Workshop for Beginners and Social Media Workshop to Advance Your Business at Breath and Bones Yoga
Limit per class: 7 students.
Bring a laptop to set up accounts and/or learn to connect to networking opportunities
http://www.secure-booker.com/breathbones/ClassSchedule/Workshops.aspx


Get this blog for your Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/6yjk637

If you'd like to take a Four-week Creative Writing course with me, sign up here:
http://tinyurl.com/6fzeo4d
Buy my e-book! Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I

Being and Being Productive as a Writer

Odilia Rivera Santos

One of the complaints I hear a lot from other writers is that they don’t have time to write.
It isn’t a question of time, but motivation. Some of my favorite writers have written books in between chopping rocks in a gulag and a meal of gruel. Every productive writer has his or her own method for remaining constant as far as a writing schedule is concerned.
When I was teaching in an adult education program full-time, nine to five, and teaching part-time in the evenings, six to nine, I still managed to write for hours every day. I would write in the morning, during my lunch break, and during my commute to and from the day job to the night job. By the end of the day, I had completed poems, outlines for stories or novels or some essays to post on my blogs.
Sometimes, writers are looking for an ideal situation -- some Hemingway-esque cabin in Cuba with a hammock on the porch. But what really matters for an artist is to stay productive and to always seek ways of challenging ourselves to avoid getting in a rut. And the definition of ‘productive’ can vary; there can be flexibility in one’s view of productivity. I occasionally abandon the written word and spend time observing people or go to museums to visit art. Switching from the literary to visual has a way of dislodging me from any feeling of routine when I need to abandon routines, as useful as they are.
I took a break from submitting my work to journals in 2006 and just wrote.
Prior to this self-imposed submission break, I had done well getting my work in journals I respected, but I wanted time to develop long-term ideas and concepts without the interruption of an arbitrary deadline. In 2008, I decided to start a blog with the idea its subject matter would be intentionally unclear. I allowed myself to think on this site with very few visits until my aim came into focus. In the last five years, I have written plays, screenplays, short stories, hundreds of poems, hundreds of blog posts, and a novel of which I am proud. I began to submit work to journals again last year, but my relationship with faceless editors who choose whether to publish my work has changed. I always had an independent streak and realized both teaching and writing offered a modicum of autonomy, which I found very satisfying.
I give myself assignments in order to keep my productivity flowing.
Recently, I decided to organize some poetry readings; one reading was erotic poetry and prose and the other was on Puerto Rican identity, history and place, so I gave myself an assignment: write thirty pages of new material for each reading. I met my goal and now have a twenty-five-page manuscript, covering our migration from an island to the South Bronx, taking a trip to Cuba -- which was important because the culture was so similar to that of Puerto Rico when I was a child, and class issues. I am submitting the manuscript to a Latino journal today. The erotica collection will find a home as well.
There is something to be said for structure for any kind of goal one may have.

WRITERLY PRACTICES
I give myself assignments and find this is the most efficient way to get ideas to flow. It appears the brain is quite adept at organizing information once there is a clear purpose. I wrote 365 poems on the subject of love for my poetry blog, 150 pages of autobiographical essays and even did some artist interviews as a means of keeping my writing interesting.
Socializing is important because we humans are social animals, but writing is a solitary practice, unless your plan is to write for a television show in which case, you would be sitting in a room with a bunch of people. Together, as you eat bear claws and drink designer coffee, you would build a show line by line, joke by joke, etc.
Regular non-collaborative writing can be very challenging for very social people.
Some people need applause and constant attention. I don’t. I love solitude.
Even though I love being alone, sometimes, I crave solitude with company and go to a coffee shop in order to be surrounded by people. I may be completely absorbed in my work and looking only at the computer screen but part of my brain enjoys a little ambient noise. I rarely write in silence. There is either music or someone talking while I write.
I go online and download podcasts on a variety of subjects. Podcasts allow me to ‘read’ while I write. I listen to programs in Spanish, French and English and also download lectures on subjects I wish to study. The life of a writer requires constant intellectual challenge so as to be able to write for a variety of audiences and to create multi-dimensional characters. Linguistic pliability doesn’t come in a pill or through osmosis. As I am writing this, I am downloading podcasts in French and some London Business School of Entrepreneurship lectures. After all, to write about something, you have to know something.

Take a writing course with me! http://skl.sh/lGWoDn

Get this blog for your Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/6yjk637

My slim volume of nonfiction essays is published!
Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Writing Ruminations while on Henry Miller

@20ll Odilia Rivera Santos

I read Henry Miller for the first time in junior high school. I was probably thirteen years old. Because my parents didn't speak English, I had to make a lot of their decisions for them; one of the decisions I made for my mother was signing that little library slip asking if a child can take books from any part of the library or only the children's section.
I, as a fourth grader, felt it would be an outrage to have someone dictate to ME what I could and could not read, so I told my mother to sign the all-permission, take-out-any-kind-of-crazy-ass book slip.
Firme aquí
She nodded, as she always did, signed the paper and this is how I ended up reading Delta of Venus and Anäis Nin's journals at 13. Nin was the go-between who took me to Miller.
When I love a particular writer, I read writers they liked. One book would lead me to ten other books and I was always thankful for summer so I could read without the nussiance of stupid elementary school homework assignments.

The only drug I use or abuse is caffeine; I figure if Keith Richards is almost seventy and still alive and performing and his mind seems relatively intact, I can drink a couple of cups of coffee a day.

Before coffee, Henry Miller was my drug.
His exuberance and love of life was something I admired and his pessimism seemed a bit of an affectation, not real. It was Henry Miller who led me to Louis Ferdinand Céline and Journey to the End of the Night. I found Céline's morbid humor very Puerto Rican. I read Journey when I was nineteen, and it is still one of my favorite books of all time; I sat at a coffee shop in the East Village, drinking coffee and laughing with the book as if I had been sitting with an old friend. My old friend Céline had been dust for a long time but still so alive in this work.

I read The Rosy Crucifixion: Sexus,Plexus, and Nexus, The Tropic of Cancer, The Tropic of Capricorn one after another with an understanding that his works were not pure autobiography or merely a description of quotidian life. He was in the process of a series of incarnations, in which philosophizing played a great part, and Miller describes his transformation process with humor, pathos and cruelty.
He was inventing himself and allowing an audience to watch; it is a courageous act to say, as a child, you wanted to be an artist and be free of the societal expectations of family, financial stability and routine. His desire to become an artist was audacious to say the least because he expressed doubt in his own abilities and he lived in a time at which choosing the life of an artist was considered bizarre.
Miller admired visionaries and his parents were conformists.
I guess many visionaries stand on the shoulders of conformists -- somebody has to pay for dinner, right?
Miller's parents were not artists and he dreamt of a life surrounded by artists.
I admired his fight to break free of the norm and the yoke of modernity. As a child, I also thought of being an artist and of serving my art all day long -- going to lectures and performances, taking long walks in the park and hanging out all night in a café in Paris in 1930, when it was so cheap to live there. I needed a time machine though.
Like Miller, I thought of how foreign my choice of vocation was to that of my parents. My mother made pasteles and my father was a carpenter and they both had an elementary school education. One big difference between Miller's parents and mine was that my mother and father loved music and film. My mother sat me down when I was very young to watch Jorge Negrete and Laurence Olivier so I would know what a great artist looked like.

Miller had to create himself from the ground up, following his own dictum: "a man has to save himself."
I believe we arrive in this world with a spark in which lies our true vocation or purpose and through the tedium of all the trouble we get into when we choose the wrong paths, it is dimmed. We are able to find our way back to a correct path through conscious effort and everything else is the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Every time I find myself in the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, I think that it is like a visit to The Salvation Army Thrift Store - if you look closely enough, you'll find something worthwhile but if you daydream your way through not only will you not get anything worthwhile, but someone might just pickpocket your ass.
Like Miller, I have found myself doing a lot of jobs, which made no sense whatsoever. When I was a teenager, I worked at the wallet counter at Macy's near the entrance of the store. They hired me without filling out a job application or references because they wanted a pretty girl by the door, but they soon discovered I had some very un-pretty girl-like behavior -- such as leaning on the counter to read The Decameron and biting my nails. I also did my share of telemarketing with a gang of unemployed actors, angry retired ballet dancers, alcoholic writers, and stand-up comedians in-between gigs. I did surveys on everything from cat litter to the Hollywood movies. I used to do a lot of writing at the telemarketing jobs for which I was admonished on a regular basis.

This morning, I have been listening to a series of 1956 interviews with Miller conducted by his friend Ben Grauer. In part 3 of the interview, Miller speaks about how he could never do anything for a buck just to stay alive. He advocates going to the edge and says artists don't really starve in the U.S. He spent a year writing letters to people in which he asked for anything they could offer: money, shoes, clothes. In exchange for donations, he sent people a watercolor painting. Miller was also a painter.
He went out in the streets and begged in Brooklyn instead of taking work he found demeaning such as advertising. But he found begging to be as difficult as a day job.
Although he questioned his artistic ability, he was clear being an artist was the only thing he wanted to do and this was after a long list of jobs.
He experimented with being a regular guy with a wife, a child and a job as a manager at a messenger company, which had originally turned him down for a job as a messenger -- what Miller calls the lowest job possible. He met a woman who encouraged him to quit the job and write full-time.
I know.
Women are awesome.
This messenger job was his last regular job and it was at that point, he vowed to never return to regular work and just write.
After ten years of suffering, his first book was published.
He speaks of survival as the essential aspect of being an artist. We, as artists, work on producing work others may not appreciate until we're dead. In that way, I would consider artists similar to scientists. Sometimes, art, like science, is a continuum in which building upon work already finished long ago will bring forth the greatness of ideas by some unknown personage. In a a scientific continuum, I imagine the aim would be to cure cancer and in an artistic continuum, we might aim to cure mediocrity.

“We prefer a kind of senseless insect activity to a genuine activity which may often be new activity -- inaction do you see? I don’t say to be quiet to do nothing. I don’t say that at all but I say it should have sense -- it should have meaning what we do everyday and the greater part of what we do everyday has damn little meaning” - HM

Get this blog for your Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/6yjk637

My slim volume of nonfiction essays is published!
Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69697

Why do you need a blog? By Odilia Rivera-Santos

©2011 by Odilia Rivera-Santos


One of the best reasons to have a blog is to connect with people and you must pick a topic you live and breathe, otherwise, your posts will be too infrequent to matter. I have chosen to focus only on writing on this blog, as being an author is my primary source of spiritual, intellectual and creative joy.
For those who would like to be writers, one of the simplest pieces of advice I can give is to create a reading and writing schedule. Sometimes, people say they are too busy to read; President Obama reads. I think he's really busy.
Nothing can replace a breadth of knowledge in topics that really matter to you.
If you are a poet, studying poets will enhance your poetic skills even if you spell skills with a "z." Variety makes your personal statement as an artist more interesting and universal. Most of us seek to connect with people outside our immediate circle.
As a writer, I don't only want Afro-Puerto-Rican-born-in-Puerto Rico-raised-in-the-Bronx-educated-at-a-fancy-college-with-a-degree-in-comparative-literature-and-a minor-in-creative writing-published-in-fancy-journals-only-fancy-professors-read-whose-father-worked-in-the-sugarcane-fields-with-parents-who-had-an-elementary-school-education-translating-researching-poets-novelists-reading my work. That would be boring.
I love variety in my reading and in my readers; it's nice to know people in Australia and Spain read my work and one woman who sent me an email didn't know what Puerto Rico was.

AUTODIDACT OR FORMAL EDUCATION?
I am an autodidact with a formal education and feel both are equally important. One thing we've lost in our strive for individualism, in the U.S., is respect for mentorship. I had wonderful literature and poetry professors who were very talented writers as well. Having a person who has studied Cervantes for thirty years to facilitate a discussion of his work is valuable and the professor learns from students. The neophyte presents a fresh perspective to add to the professor's primary source file. I am a proponent of taking writing and literature classes or being part of an organized group in which there is structure, assignments, regular attendance, etc.

The Informalities

Observing daily life is wonderful but there is no background story to fill in the blanks; we can observe certain habits of ethnic groups with whom we are unfamiliar but not know the roots of certain patterns. As a writer, I always research anything I find interesting without thinking of a specific way to apply new knowledge. I do research on a new topic and the information finds itself into my writing. Characters have more depth if the writer does not just write details in a perfunctory manner and the character's thought processes, speech patterns and trajectory will be more authentic with some background knowledge.

Who are you in the writer spectrum?

Loner - unarmed -- I hope, joiner, tangential participant

There are certain aspects of writing that are negotiable; for example, some people love writing groups and choose to write in groups for years and some people, find an occasional writing workshop to be very useful.
I could not be a lifer in a writing group but have found writing workshops very useful.
I consider writing workshops to be akin to therapy.
The first couple of therapy sessions are intense and frequent until you cough up the emotional hairballs. After those initial sessions or months of sessions, depending on your situation, the therapy customer reaches emotional stasis and returns to therapy sessions for the occasional tuneup.
This is how workshops work for me; I like writing workshops for the occasional creativity tuneup -- to see my ideas connecting with others and to enjoy the spontaneity of writing exercises in front of strangers.
I did hard time in creative writing workshops for two years in college and found it extremely useful for internalizing my editor.

What is the role of an editor?
In my humble opinion, a great editor reads and asks questions and a terrible editor makes changes.