tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18563689167144667572012-05-30T23:16:47.925-04:00An ongoing journal of my adventures in self-publishing.KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.comBlogger79125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-45940703327273804972012-05-30T01:29:00.001-04:002012-05-30T23:16:47.934-04:002012-05-30T23:16:47.934-04:00

Justified is now available in print! You can get a copy at Create Space, and use code Y8FN23QM at checkout for a 15% friend's discount. The title will also be available at Amazon next week. So those of you without an e-reader can now enjoy the misadventures of Edmond Styles. [UPDATE] Cuentos y Recuerdos: La Colección Latina incluye Recuerdos de Antes y Entonces, Una Noche con B.B., El

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-69576778722745831522012-05-28T09:14:00.001-04:002012-05-28T09:14:06.134-04:002012-05-28T09:14:06.134-04:00

There is no downtime when you start writing. Almost every moment becomes corollary, although sometimes the lines between cause and effect is so thin it is almost invisible. Of course, this should give folks some pause about their behavior, because all eccentric conduct makes for a good story and I’m on a roll. (There is some interesting drama going on in Facebook and there might be a

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-81333975380744819832012-05-19T21:42:00.002-04:002012-05-19T21:42:39.894-04:002012-05-19T21:42:39.894-04:00

There is no Latino who hasn’t heard the word chancleta in their life and few who haven’t been the victims of a lesson whose moral included a chancletazo. To some, even well into adulthood, the mention of it can cause a cringe and a twitch, as well as the primordial urge to flee. Nothing more than a simple sandal, a chancleta is a disciplinary tool meant to shock not harm, but it does

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-5681078165606566902012-05-17T01:27:00.000-04:002012-05-17T01:35:06.542-04:002012-05-17T01:35:06.542-04:00

I was born into a bilingual world. My parents, following in the family tradition on both sides for at least four generations, were a multicultural and multi-ethnic couple. My mother, fluent in both English and Spanish, helped me reach that same level of bilingualism. My maternal grandparents made sure I did not lose either language even as I immersed myself in Spanish while living in

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-22202422180837250622012-05-10T03:51:00.005-04:002012-05-10T03:51:38.331-04:002012-05-10T03:51:38.331-04:00

A second volume in the Kali, The Food Goddess series, Fruits of the Family Tree the short compilation of recipes from places of origin in the gene pool is now available at Smashwords. Details about it can be found here, here and (hilariously) here. There is also a delicious excerpt here. Recuerdos de Antes y Entonces is also available at Smashwords now. A liberal translation of Life, Dreams

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-81316973383806620162012-05-04T00:46:00.001-04:002012-05-04T00:46:27.403-04:002012-05-04T00:46:27.403-04:00

There is a new food column at Barbara Bretton’s website. We’ve been trying to work around some technical issues with the site and decided to run the column in the blog section and will archive later. I wax poetic about a cup of hummus and the myriad of ways you can enhance a piece of fish. Another round of royalties rained on me in the last couple of weeks to cover the first quarter and

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-70041041898618336572012-04-22T07:35:00.000-04:002012-04-22T07:37:40.296-04:002012-04-22T07:37:40.296-04:00

A vignette is defined as a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object, and as such need not contain the classic story elements: protagonist, conflict, obstacles or complications, and resolution. Vignettes are stories that may have no plot but suggest one, leaving the reader to imagine

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-45450274551911163342012-04-14T04:01:00.001-04:002012-04-14T04:01:57.516-04:002012-04-14T04:01:57.516-04:00

El Velorio de Maya is free this weekend, from April 13 - 17. It's my gift to you during this painful Tax Time. Death and taxes, after all, go hand in hand... The book, of course, is in Spanish and tells the story of Lucia's upcoming eighteenth birthday in the midst of a family death. Far from sad, it is a tale of the absurd in an extended, dysfunctional family. If you're interested in

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-74073461564582281042012-04-06T00:07:00.001-04:002012-04-06T04:06:05.130-04:002012-04-06T04:06:05.130-04:00

I conceived the idea for Because She Was a Woman out of love, or a memory I love at any rate. For two weeks, these women paraded in my head, with different faces and names and personalities. Some I knew, some I just met. Some I liked, others I'd prefer no further contact. Some are presumably white, others are Latina, some are Asian and there is one that appears to be a minion of the Beast

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-34119207024482827422012-04-02T04:38:00.002-04:002012-04-02T04:38:37.959-04:002012-04-02T04:38:37.959-04:00

It was a year ago that, finding myself without a job and a lot of time in my hands, I decided to self-publish my novel, Justified. I’d written for NaNoWriMo, after months of toiling with the story and then getting stuck because it had no direction. NaNo focused the effort, what with 30 crazy days to complete the task; and it was a perfect way to channel some demons. Prompted by awesome

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-50008948855090426352012-03-31T06:46:00.000-04:002012-03-31T06:50:59.898-04:002012-03-31T06:50:59.898-04:00

I just released “El Velorio de Maya” – the Spanish translation of “Putting May to Rest” at the Kindle Store. Like the original it is an absurd tale about a girl’s eighteenth birthday around the holidays in the 1980s and realizing her dream of seeing Baryshnikov dance, but life throws her curve ball and she has to attend a funeral first. Then hilarity ensues. Well, it wasn’t funny until

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-53253268851390089142012-03-29T00:48:00.002-04:002012-03-29T00:56:35.978-04:002012-03-29T00:56:35.978-04:00

Eons ago, I knew a gentleman who frequented this jazz club in The Village (the stuff of legend). His name was Robert John and he was a poet and a cartoonist. An old bohemian in the flesh! More often than not, he sat alone at the bar, drinking and chain smoking, a grumpy old man who just wanted to drink, smoke and listen to live music. He had friends, but he was not exactly a social

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-90288508492616793472012-03-27T05:37:00.001-04:002012-03-28T20:44:59.291-04:002012-03-28T20:44:59.291-04:00

Scarlett Rugers, a cool Aussie book cover designer who is also a published author (under the name Scarlett Archer). Like many of us like-minded individuals, she is an avid reader and she obsesses about first lines. So much so that she started her own blog to talk about it. How cool is that? Yes, first lines. You know we’ve all discussed it at one point or another. Great lines stay with you

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-51223533736802775132012-03-17T15:37:00.001-04:002012-03-17T15:37:38.681-04:002012-03-17T15:37:38.681-04:00

My friend Julia brought up Christina Aguilera songs in an ongoing conversation and one of the tunes mentioned stuck in the back of my head. Somehow, this set up the background music to several images I had in my head into a complete picture. For a couple of days, these images floated in my head and began to mash into a larger landscape that I could not only see, but I heard it, I felt

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-76253088206902045842012-03-14T19:28:00.001-04:002012-03-14T19:28:19.173-04:002012-03-14T19:28:19.173-04:00

Part of my goal in my self-publishing experiment is to try to write outside my area of comfort and expertise. This is not something that traditional publishing supports in their authors. This is the reason that many have for years been forced to write under pseudonyms, which I always found ridiculous because generally fans knew that a writer was writing under so many names. It has

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-39240724689039915382012-03-03T21:22:00.003-05:002012-03-03T21:23:07.804-05:002012-03-03T21:23:07.804-05:00

I spent a better part of the week writing an introduction to the steampunk series. It traces the days prior to our female lead being yanked out of our reality and landing at some strange world that is ever so familiar, if slightly off… I wasn’t particularly happy with it. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with it, mind you. It even starts a running gag through the series.

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-51849277829258432502012-02-28T02:04:00.000-05:002012-02-28T02:30:36.219-05:002012-02-28T02:30:36.219-05:00

To civilians – folks outside of publishing for the purposes of this piece – hear the phrase “self-published,” they are likely to be of the mind that you publish some sort of worthless marketing materials, porn or schlock.  Certainly a lot of crap is self-published, but the same can be said of traditional publishing. I defy you to go through a bargain bin at any of the major booksellers,

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-85524901957937252122012-02-16T21:36:00.000-05:002012-02-17T01:10:07.955-05:002012-02-17T01:10:07.955-05:00

I like circular references the same way I love palindromes. There’s a certain lyrical beauty in symmetry. It isn’t so much about repetition but the possibilities of funky reiterations. Not surprisingly, I decided that all my crime novels will have some variation of the concept of justice in the title. The first one, Justified, revolved around the guilty party and while I worked on it

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-73866458224863847492012-02-13T05:48:00.000-05:002012-02-16T19:15:31.494-05:002012-02-16T19:15:31.494-05:00

In the midst of my landmark where I found myself selling units across international markets, I found a bad review for the little volume of the cookbook series, Fruits of the Family Tree. A one-star review: Ouch. I respect everyone’s right to make their voices heard, and certainly we all have opinions. I don’t expect everyone to love what I do. When someone truly dislikes my work, I want

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-75325597378253432362012-02-10T06:58:00.001-05:002012-02-10T06:58:43.522-05:002012-02-10T06:58:43.522-05:00

January 2012 I hit another landmark. My books have now sold in the US, UK, Germany, Italy France and Italy. I suppose that technically “international bookseller” can be added as a description. Not a bestseller yet, but the precedent has been set. Maybe soon day, right? Whatever! I will celebrate this moment. Yay, me.

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-75150496515395897322012-02-03T20:10:00.002-05:002012-02-04T22:24:25.208-05:002012-02-04T22:24:25.208-05:00

Very productive few days around these parts, as I just finished an abridged translation of “Life, Dreams and Magical Landscapes,” titled “Recuerdos de Antes y Entonces.” (Available for sale now here.) The phrase is both nonsense and evocative, as most memories tend to be especially as we sometimes reedit them in our heads as the years pass us by. “Antes” means before or then (in the

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-87764694651707713022012-02-01T22:05:00.005-05:002012-02-01T22:05:56.501-05:002012-02-01T22:05:56.501-05:00

Sometimes inspiration hits you and you have to obey its call. I am grateful for the reviewer who took me to task for using the image of Kali-ma and it occurred to me that the best way to deal with it was to make my own logo. An original, not a logo based on a 12th century silkscreen. Something relevant, with pans and spatulas, knives and a garland of garlic heads (instead of tiny heads).

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-35346115507682651862012-01-31T06:52:00.001-05:002012-02-01T00:17:23.683-05:002012-02-01T00:17:23.683-05:00

I’ve put up an excerpt from the new ebook for those who might be interested. If you love tamarind or even if you know nothing about it, you should check it out. The excerpt can be found here.

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-73603893069132453162012-01-28T21:01:00.002-05:002012-01-28T21:01:18.319-05:002012-01-28T21:01:18.319-05:00

This volume of recipes was inspired by a bad review of “Kali: The Food Goddess, A Compilation of Delightful Recipes and Memories of Food.” The reviewer did not read the book and had no comment on its contents. Her beef (really bad pun, I am so sorry) was about the image of the Goddess Kali on the cover. This person thought it was disrespectful of me to use it; especially because in the

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1856368916714466757.post-62833133045163929202012-01-15T03:53:00.001-05:002012-01-15T03:53:58.528-05:002012-01-15T03:53:58.528-05:00

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I have been trying to write this scene that is absolutely painful to write. In it, a bitter woman, afflicted with Alzheimer’s has a one-sided conversation with her estranged daughter. Of course, she does not recognize her child and her conversation has them both stuck over 20 years in the past. Worse yet, their conversation, though connected

KaliAmandahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14305828292937192278noreply@blogger.com2