- I make stuff up. It’s less pretty than acting and more respectable than lying. Writing is like theater for ugly people. I wanted to be an actress, but puberty differentiated the biologically prime and unprime for what any Californian would recognize as theatre. A brown girl in show business? I didn’t want to be J-Lo, or J-Ho as my mom used to call her. My big voice landed me all the middle-school musical leads, but by the time I hit high school I was losing spots to gringas of the hill-side variety,the kind of girls who actually belonged to the school districts I was commuting to. Not only that but genes kicked in hard, and my body didn’t stand a chance to fit most anything the costume departments held on to. When all I wanted to be was a scrawny androgynous girl, I was konked with massive curves and a terrible case of pecho tremendo. I would never fit juniors clothes agan.
Wrapping my hands around an Oliver Twist as a Hispanic Nancy.
So I should have become a writer then, but I was too dumb for that. I wanted to be a DJ. Started collecting music from every genre I could and just sifting through it until I found something I liked. The only genre I had real trouble with for a long time was metal, but most genres payed off quickly. Classic Rock, Early Hip-Hop, Dub Step, Grunge, Baroque, Hyphy, IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), Krunk, New-Wave, Gothic Industrial, Rhythm & Soul, Funk, Ragtime, Freak-Folk, Blues, Marching Bands, J-Pop, and the interminable amount of “indie” music, the unlabeled “Rock” section that had Radiohead in it and changed my 13-year-old life – I started living through collecting. I was no different than those nerds I was always eying, those high-schoolers who still played Pokemón. I wouldn’t have admitted to that even for money then.
Then, like obsession does to everyone, I got lonely. Music alone is just headphones, and massive and beautiful as my headphones were, I didn’t actually feel so good about locking the world out without having my own world locked in. So then I started writing, then I wrote stories to boys I’d never talk to in class, I’d tell them how their lives were going to be, because everything I wrote was always a letter that I’d never send. Never any characters, just a me-to-you deal, almost a fortune-telling. Never handed any of those off either. Just got rid of them, destroyed them every time I moved, which was a lot, usually once a year or two.
Eventually I got to thinking more about lyrics than about tracks in general, I thought of mix CDs as the answer to everything, and started writing my own lyrics without music. That, as angry as I’d get when people called it that, was poetry. I made a terrible poet. Eventually I started writing out sentences to explain my bad lyrics to people, and I kept those and found the explanations often more interesting than the bad poetry. And I think I was a prose-writer. It stuck – there’s a lot of other little stuff, like the literary review in high school, or the high school graduation speech I gave, but I have to be honest I hate resumés.
Just be excited I got this far, that I could parse out a little map to writing from everything else. In this section you’ll find all the stuff I’ve made up, the stories, the people, the world with women as loyal as dogs and men as pretty as girls.
[...] Fiction [...]
[...] Fiction [...]