I had one week off from school during which I had originally planned to do the first rewrite of my NaNoWriMo 2011 novel. It was naive of me to think I’d accomplish it, especially because half my week was taken up by taking care of house chores that had been pushed off over the last four months, not to mention I also had to study for an exam I have right upon my return to classes. That said, I did go ahead and transfer my novel from Word into Scrivener.

I’ve been using Scrivener as my writing tool since I got it earlier this year and I absolutely love it. I knew from the start that I wanted to import the novel into it for all subsequent drafts, as I love the organizational tools available, especially for a long project like a novel. Take a look at the screen-cap above to see what I mean.

In Word, the novel was one long text file. That was fine for the first 50-thousand-words-in-30-days draft, but for rewrites I knew it would be a bitch. Scrivener allowed me to break off the manuscript into Parts, Chapters and Scenes. A wonderful thing happened once I had taken the time to reformat the text for Scrivener: I was able to see patterns I simply would have missed in Word.

In Scrivener I can see how many scenes are in a particular chapter, and how many chapters per part. At a glance, this let me know where I spent the most time developing the story and where I should go back to take a closer second (or third or fourth) look. Because each part in my novel deals with a specific emotional relationship between the main character and a woman, it also let me know roughly the amount of time in the spotlight each was getting. Furthermore, it raised a red flag that the third and last part needs to be closely inspected as it is significantly shorter than the other two. Now, that doesn’t automatically mean it lacks on story development, but it’s a little detail that I could’ve missed had I seen the whole thing as one continuous block of text.

Since the novel is now broken into scenes, it also makes it easier for me to attack parts of it as I have some time available during classes, which admittedly won’t be much, but some is better than none.

This new organizational scheme has already yielded fruit. After noticing what I mentioned above, my brain has been musing on those various elements and already I have made notes that I feel will develop parts of the novel that I felt were lacking in depth and create a richer story. I’ll continue to report on the progress of the edits as I go along.

My wife works for Telemundo, the oldest Spanish-language television network in the US, and has done so for over 10 years, most recently in the general Marketing area. I normally don’t talk about my wife’s job at all either here or in social media since I would rather avoid a situation where my words could affect her work. Today, however (and with her permission), I am breaking that silence to tell you about her new project.

Mia Mundo is a short-form bilingual web series for the modern (Hispanic-American) young professional.

What does that mean?

• Mia Mundo is a 13-episode series (as in American TV-style series, not a novela) created to air primarily on the web, with each episode being 4-5 minutes, and a finale that will show as a 1-hour special on Mun2, Telemundo’s cable channel.
• It basically follows the format of a romantic comedy, combining a dramatic storyline with some comedic moments; think Sex And The City and you’re in the right ballpark.
• The series is bilingual, mostly in English with Spanish sprinkled throughout, reflecting the reality of the modern Hispanic-American, and it will be subtitled for all audiences.
• Most importantly, it was created from the start to portray and appeal to the modern Hispanic-American crowd, especially the female demographic, though it is also general enough to appeal to the young professional crowd at large, Hispanic or not.

See, Mia is an acronym for Modern Independent Achiever, one of the psychographic segments of US Hispanics identified by a study done by Telemundo Media and Starcom MediaVest Group. As this article on Broadcast & Cable puts it, the series was built with an audience in mind, literally.

Mia is young, educated, independent, professional, and trying to find the balance between career and love life. She is not a damsel in distress, she is not a victim waiting to be rescued by her man, she is not an ever-crying sex object, all of which are overdone stereotypes in Spanish-language novelas. Mia’s conflict is that of a person who seeks to have a real balance between all sides of her being, and while she deals with dramatic situations in all arenas, she is never a victim. If anything, Mia’s goal in life is to realize that being independent doesn’t mean standing alone against the world. I know a lot of Mias out there. I’ve seen their struggles for years, and I know this series reflects their stories.

I do not, in general, like Spanish-language television programming, mainly because I don’t feel it talks to me. Telemundo has been trying for a few years now to find ways to engage the young Hispanic generation, and I feel that with Mia Mundo they have the first legitimate chance at succeeding. Yes, I am biased because my wife is part of the team that has been busting their assess to put this series together, but that doesn’t change what I believe. After all, I have never felt the need to tell you about any of the myriad other projects my wife has been involved in.

It might be easy to dismiss this series as a marketing ploy, but it isn’t. Though Mia had its origins in marketing research, the creating team has worked hard to produce a bona fide story that is entertaining and fun to watch^[1]. Which is why I would love for everyone to watch it and give it a chance. Take 5 minutes to watch it and rate it. You could be helping to usher in a new era in Spanish-language television and for sure will be rewarding the hard work that has been put into this series.

Mia Mundo Episode 1: Listen To Your Heart is now available for viewing at the Mia Mundo website (and on YouTube after a short delay). New episodes appear every Thursday at 8:00 PM Eastern.

1. ^[1] Marketing/Advertising enthusiasts, however, will surely love the “branded entertainment” aspect, and can read more in about it from Broadcast & Cable and from the New York Times. ↩

The Accelerated Option nursing program has a weird schedule that doesn’t exactly match the regular academic year at Miami Dade College. That said, last Friday was the end of the Spring Semester, and that brought the end of two of the four classes I was taking since March. How did I do?

• Nursing Medical-Surgical Skills: A
• Pharmacology: C

When added to the classes I had already finished in my first semester (what would be midterm for the regular academic semester), my current grades look like this:

I am extremely happy with my grades for this past semester. That C in Pharmacology? I sweated that C! We had a terrible time with that class due to having a really bad “teacher” that was simply not interested in teaching us the material. We mostly learned it all on our own, and with the help (finally at the end!) of our other professors. So yeah, a C there was gold, because it means I passed, and that’s what I needed.

I am still taking Medical-Surgical Nursing and Clinicals for another month, so I’ll update those grades when I get them.

Well, it finally happened: today I sold my car. I am now officially car-free.

I’ll admit it is somewhat bittersweet. This is the third car I’ve owned, and though I’ve never been a guy who friggin loves his car, I did like it the way a carpenter likes a really good hammer. Miami is a sprawl of a city, so a car is extremely convenient when you have to move around from one end to the other, like I had to when I was attending pre-nursing classes and working at FIU. It gave me mobility at my convenience, which is ultimately the purpose of a car.

But it had been failing for a while now. I simply did not have the money to do the proper upkeep it needed, and even so this green bastard kept chugging along for 16 years and over 150,000 miles. But when the brakes failed the first week of January, I knew that was it. The cost to repair it was just too much, not to mention the related costs like parking, insurance and gas. It simply did not make sense for me to have it anymore, especially since both school and the hospital, the two places I attend on a daily basis, are no more than a bus ride away. That I kept it around for four months after realizing all this was simply melancholy.

I got a pittance for it, I know. But it’s cash in my pocket instead of cash going out to pay for repairs that won’t extend the life of the car for more than one extra year. The cash I got will go to pay for my student transit cards for the rest of the year, so at least the car, in a way, is still gonna be helping me to move around.

I’m writing a whole lot about a car that I just said I did not love.

Goodbye, trusty Camry, you green beast.

I’ve been intrigued by the Steampunk genre for a while now. I like the visuals of it, the gears and clockwork and pseudo-Victoriana, but it’s a curiosity that has been left at the periphery as other things have taken priority. My friend Mick Bradley is, however, quite into it (he does Steampunk-inspired crafts), so I always have some imagery coming through my social networks thanks to him, keeping it somewhat in my radar. I was happy to leave my interest vague, simply enjoying looking at pics, until last week.

This scene popped into my head some time ago, a scene featuring an airship battle inside a thundercloud, and it fermented there long enough to want to be written down. I didn’t know anything about the characters or story beyond that vague description. So I started writing, and behold, two characters emerged fairly well defined, along with the beginnings of the battle between two airships. In my mind airships are really closely associated with steampunk; along with some of the descriptions and dialogue that came out, it seemed that this is what I was writing right here. Great!

The issue then became, what is this I am writing? Not so much in terms of the story: that I actually have a pretty decent idea what it’ll be by now; but what about this genre I know nothing about?

Understand my approach to genre is very fluid. In general, I don’t care for genre; I always strive to write a good story first, and if it fits in some genre due to X or Y, then fantastic. But I’m also a firm believer of the adage “Know the rules before you can break them.” So I set out to learn at least some basics about Steampunk.

What I learned is that there are as many definitions of steampunk as there are gears in a Swiss watch. Common things include clockwork, steam-powered technology, pseudo-Victoriana, a love for the color brown. To some it includes automata, to others it includes social warfare. The “punk” can mean street-level heroes fighting against The Man, or it can mean genre-bashing without regards to rules or conventions. To some it simply means “slap as many gears and piston as you can onto that thing you like!”

Mick has been on a quest to find out/rail against the meaning of steampunk for far longer, and he has this quote on his blog by author Mark Hodder that I very much like:

Just when you think you might have grasped it, steampunk reveals itself to be something more than you thought. You shouldn’t be surprised. After all, how can you expect to pin down a genre/fashion/attitude that references the steam powered technology of the late 1800s yet employs the airships of the 1930s as its primary icon? Bit of a mishmash, ain’t it? Therein is the joy. Steampunk gleefully borrows the flavours of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne, and mixes ‘em up with whatever it damned well pleases.

Interestingly, following the link to Mark’s website yielded these two more recent blog posts where he talks about what steampunk means to him, the first dealing with Steampunk and Empire:

I don’t hold much truck with the notion that sometimes a dirigible is just a dirigible. The idea that steampunk is popular simply because it’s fun fails to take timing into account. I have to ask, if it’s such an enjoyable genre (which it is), why didn’t it take off in the 1970s, after Mike Moorcock wrote Warlord of the Air, or in the ’80s after K. W. Jeter’s Morlock Night? Why is steampunk such a phenomenon now? Personally, I think it’s because we live in a world in which empires are crumbling.

The second on the meaning of “punk” in Steampunk:

It strikes me that the definition of Steampunk is rather a flexible one, due, in part, to the word “punk” having a more politicised significance in British English than it does in American. I was in my mid-teens when the punk movement railed against the established order back in the late 70s, and my generation still retains the attitudes that were formed back then. To us, the establishment was bigoted, brutal, uptight, and clearly representative of everything that is wrong with imperialism, market-driven policies, and the non-distribution of wealth. Steampunk is, for me, the perfect arena in which to explore socio-economic policies that seem to have spiralled farther and farther out of control since those punk years.

Both are interesting posts, though what I personally find most interesting is that, his entire argument on both articles is one that, for me, resonates more when dealing with Cyberpunk than with Steampunk. I’m forced to wonder, is Steampunk just Cyberpunk in the past instead of in the future?

Ultimately what I discovered is that I can safely create my own definition of Steampunk out of a series of elements that may or may not be considered such by others out there. And more importantly, that this is fine, even if it draws the ire of some purist somewhere.

To me, right now, Steampunk means retro-futuristic stories  set in a pseudo-Victorian (late 1800s, though not necessarily England) era where steam-powered technology has evolved to early- to mid-20th century levels, involving larger-than-life heroes with very human foibles engaging in high-flying adventures against villains that embody the social and cultural stiffness of the time.

Oh, and airships. Because, airships!

Based on that, the tale of the Airship Star which I am writing is solidly within the genre, but as I said, I’m far more interested in telling a good story than a genre story, so I reserve the right to break my own definition if I need to.

And to close with a song, here’s a video that I saw some time ago (also via Mick) dealing with the whole “what is steampunk?” question. Just take it with a grain of salt.

My professors like to say that being a nurse is really about being a compulsive observer, about catching little details that others would miss, and using that information to help treat the patient. Earlier this week, I was at the library at school and I saw a guy sitting at the table right in front of mine. I then notice that, when this young woman walked in, he perked up immediately and, almost imperceptibly, I saw him catch his breath. I noticed the way he looked at her as she approached his table, and how he simply swallowed it all up as soon as she sat down and went about pulling out books to study for their class.

That little scene stuck in my head; I felt there was a story there. I tried to tease out what it was over the next couple days but my mind wanted to run too rampant. I felt it needed to be a very short story for a very short moment. It was his breath catching that made it click for me. In order to get it out of my system, I set myself a one-man flash fiction challenge: write about the scene at the library in less than 1000 words. An hour and a half later, I had exactly 1000 words and a new short story entitled “Breath.”

I hope you enjoy it.

Breath

She walks into the library and my breathing stops as time stands still. She smiles slightly as she’s wont to do, like she’s constantly remembering an old joke that only she knows and the rest of us must wonder about. Her lips, round and moist, draw my gaze and I linger on them, wondering what it would be like to feel them against mine. Her dark eyes scan the tables past the students loitering at the entrance to the library, looking for me. I secretly enjoy the few seconds that pass between her searching and me being found as it makes me feel sought-after, not a feeling I get to enjoy a lot in life.

I see her weave her way through the distracted drones moving about the room and at that very moment, looking at her body shift left, then right, seeing the curves of her body as she zig-zags around the morose students, I decide that I simply cannot be without her a moment longer, that I must risk everything and tell her how I feel. So I stand up and walk towards her, not with cat-like grace as she does, but brusquely, determined, unyielding; I part the crowds as I walk as if I was Moses at the sea.

When she sees me approaching, her secret smirk opens up into a wide smile that dispels any doubt that may have been creeping in. She extends her hand, waves hello to me. As I take that final step that brings me right up to her, I take her hand in mine and kiss it. She stops, the smile still on her face but clearly confused. She searches my eyes, which I imagine are way too serious and looking too intensely at her, but she can’t quite figure out what’s going on, why I have done this gesture for the first time. As she looks up at me, she even tilts her head just the slightest, asking silently the question her still-smiling lips can’t quite shape: what’s going on?

I inhale deeply and the words spill out of me before I even know what’s going on. I tell her. I tell her everything. I tell her how I wake up every morning thinking of her, how I look at her profile pic on my phone and it makes me smile, how I have these overwhelming feelings for her that I’ve keep quiet for fear of ruining our friendship, how I simply can’t be silent anymore and had to tell her, had to risk loosing my study partner, my drinking buddy, my late-night rocky-road ice-cream-run accomplice, my friend. How it is all worth it simply to be honest with her once and for all.

I forget we’re standing in lobby of the library, surrounded by hundreds of students and staff, all of whom it seems have suddenly stopped, pretending to check phones, pockets or purses, just to see this small piece of real-life drama develop. Her smile fades a little, and I wonder what I’ve done, then it returns. Her cheeks turn a slight shade of red and her eyes close in a blink that to me seems to last a century.

When she opens them again, we are holding each other tightly, trembling, naked in a candlelit room in a cheap hotel not far from Disney World, where we’ve come to celebrate our first month together. I feel her pressed against me, skin to skin, and I cannot believe how lucky I am to be holding this amazing woman in my arms. She reaches up, puts her hand behind my neck and pulls me down into the incredible warmth of her lips, into a kiss that absorbs me into her whole. I am all too happy to fall in.

I come out from the kiss to the cheers of all the guests assembled as we are finally declared husband and wife. I beam as I hold her delicate hand and walk next to her down the aisle, our first few steps as a married couple. She steals a glance at me and I melt as I drink in her stunning beauty on this day, her tanned skin gorgeous against the white of her dress, her sparkling eyes hiding coyly behind sleepy eyelids that remind me of the pleasures that await us later this night.

I open the doors at the end of the aisle and walk into the waiting room at the hospital where our family has gathered to wait for the news I bring them. I laugh loudly and tell them it’s a boy, a boy that looks just like his mother, though she insists he looks like me. I am hugged by happy grandparents, uncles, aunts, and friends. I show them photos of the child on my phone, email them copies to send on to others, and promise to return as soon as she is able to receive visitors. I run back down the hall, anxious to spend every possible moment I can next to the woman I adore and the child born of that love. I open the door to the room and there she is, exhausted, craddling our baby in her hands as he feeds from her breast. She looks at me with the most perfect smile on her face, the same smile she gave me years ago in that library when I risked it all and told her how I felt. My breathing stops as time stands still.

I realize I’m holding my breath and I let it out. She reaches the table, plunks down her books and begins telling me about the bitch of a time it was to find parking at this hour. I look at her, and smile a little smile. She says we should go over the material for the final next week and I just nod silently, pull out my book and notes, and sigh away my breath-long daydream.

Music has always featured in one way or another in my fiction writing, though mostly it has been in an inspirational guise. I don’t play music while I’m writing, but songs that I’ve heard have, at times, fueled everything from scenes to entire stories. To this day there are a couple of songs that I can never listen without thinking of the story they inspired me to write years ago.

As I approach a much-needed break from nursing school in a couple of weeks, I find myself desperate to start the rewrite of my novel, which I started for NaNoWriMo and finished last December. When I say I’m desperate, I mean it. I need to get that story done with, get those characters out of my head and into the page once and for all. Why? Because they are living, breathing people caught in stasis and they take over my thoughts and my emotions. And it gets very tiring feeling other people’s emotions on top of your own.^[1]

Thing is, one of the key aspects I know I need to strengthen during my rewrite has been stymieing me for a while now. I know what the end result I want is, but I also know I need to better portray it in the novel for some of the emotional punches to really hurt. I’ve been struggling with the nature of the relationship at the center of this issue and I just couldn’t quite see how I’d work that problem out.

Enter a new song into my jukebox.

I heard this song by Gotye just last week for the first time, and today my classmate played it in her car while she gave me a ride. The words snuck into my head unknowingly. When I got home I found that I was humming it absentmindedly… And that something in the lyrics had suddenly made things click in regards to the problem I was having with my novel! I still don’t know what it was: the music, the melody, parts of the lyrics, the emotion conveyed. Something. Whatever it was, I have now taken notes that will help me during my rewrite and finally allow me to bring my novel to completion.

I absolutely love it when a song does this to me.

1. ^[1] This is where non-writers look at me kinda funny and think I’m loosing my marbles, while writers nod in full understanding. ↩

The basic unit of Nursing school, to me, is the Clinicals group. Though we’re all in the same class, and at times have taken classes at different time slots, it is when we go to clinicals that we separate into smaller units and achieve that squad-level tight focus. Above is my clinicals group for MedSurg (except for the guy at far right, we were all together as well for Fundamentals clinicals). These are my peeps. These are the people I spend time at the hospital with, the ones that stand by me, and me by them, when we face medical issues for the first time, when we have exams, when we’re stressed out, when we’re overwhelmed. These are the people that I high-five when we do something cool, when we celebrate the little victories and the big ones. We talk about wildly inappropriate things during lunch, know way too much about each other’s bodies, and are the only ones who truly understand what we’re all going through. These are my friends, and without them, nursing school would be practically unbearable.

Back in late December, we finally published my wife’s debut novel, SONGBIRD. We did an initial promotional push when it went up for sale on the Amazon Kindle Store, and again when it became available for Nook and on paperback at Amazon.com. Since then, however, we have both been swamped with work and school and have not had time to promote the novel as a self-published book deserves and needs to be. I’d like to change that.

Here is the copy at the back of the novel:

How far will friendship stretch when put to the test?

Jacqueline Aguirre is a wallflower. Her best friend Sophie Martinez is anything but. Yet somehow the two became best friends, inseparable through thick and thin. That is, until charming Irishman Liam comes into the picture, throwing their perfect world into disarray and challenging Jackie to unfurl her wings and fly. Established patterns are broken, emotions taken for granted are challenged, and the friends’ lives are turned upside down. Now only one thing is for certain: things will never be the same.

SONGBIRD is a story of contemporary women that is not Chick Lit. Personally, I like to think of it as a coming-of-self story, where we see the events that propel the main character to finally come into her own as a person. I think it is a good novel (I am terribly biased, I know, but I stand by it) and I would like for more people to read it.

Review Copies

I will give away 5 copies of SONGBIRD in e-book format (Kindle and ePub) with the only request that, if you like and enjoy the novel, you leave a review at Amazon.com.

If you are interested, leave a comment below and I will get in touch with you.

Thank you.

Just a heads up: over the next couple of weeks I’ll be doing some behind-the-scenes tinkering to the website in order to merge all my blogs under the same roof. This is something I have gone back and forth over throughout the years, but right now it makes perfect sense to do given my very limited time. Besides, I have decided that I would rather have all my interests under one roof then use the tools provided by WordPress to mark differences.

For example, if you read this post on the main page it will look as my website usually does, but if you read it under the category Editorials, you will see that the page header is slightly different. Using that same tool, I can make the category pages for Slow Bike Miami (my bicycling blog) or The Literary Nurse (my nursing blog) look different while still having them in my main blog. I will even have separate RSS feeds for each category, for those who only want to follow one topic in particular.

Mainly what this means is that this blog will see more use on a wider variety of topics, from gaming to writing, from bicycling to nursing, and so on. After all, this is my personal blog and I am the sum of all those parts and more.