Banned Literature

This Saturday, I'll be at Tia Chucha's Cultural Center and Bookstore signing The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood, and participating in an author panel: Liberating Queer Stories, 3:30 to 4:15. Special added short story bonus w/book.

All the Things Wrong with the World are Made Right With You

My son usually introduces me to new music on road trips. This time he navigated hwy 22 to Memphis and we talked about the future of the planet. Gerald has done quite a bit of research on global warming and said we have reached the point of no return: life as we've known it will not be the same for future generations of humans.

We were commuting from his law school in Tuscaloosa to Memphis, where my husband's family will gather for simultaneous celebrations of birthdays and Mother's Day.  I leaned toward him, hanging on every word, while at the same time admiring the vibrant green trees and pasture land we passed.  There had been frequent showers in the area and his dire warnings ran counter to the verdant zone through which we drove.  "People take all this for granted," he said. "We abuse it." 

He's living in an area of fervent unbelievers . . . in global warming. They do believe in hell fire, though, so maybe a convincing argument could be made from the pulpit.  If preachers got on the side of science they'd just have to get creative, convince people that the Lord Almighty wanted them to choose to live now.  Emphasis being their choice not the Lord's.  Gerald said it would never happen, and that's why he felt hopeless about our future.

The earth underlined his words with a blinding downpour and punctuated his hopelessness with thunder. Cars flashed emergency lights or pulled over to the side of the road. We kept moving, and talking, the Honda a tiny world of its own. Long haul trucks sped past us, fearless and mighty above our puny vehicles.  Seizing the opportunity to gain time in their individual and corporate pursuits-the American way-they pounded us with highway surf. 

I love you, honey. Your ideas are good. Now let's see if we can change the world.

FIDELITY & MORTAL ILLNESS

How would you feel about your mate having an affair if you were stricken with a mortal illness and  uninterested in having sexual relations?

The usual first response for people who love their mates is that their sexual drive would die, too.  But what if your loved one was not hooked up to tubes and drains?  What if they were functioning, yet with death hovering?

In graduate school, I did an internship in a tutorial center.  My boss was a kind and knowledgeable man who loved his wife and family dearly.  She'd had two heart attacks and the prognosis was not good.  You would have never suspected it to look at her.  She was robust and cheery, the affection between them palpable.

At that time, I had no experience with grief of the death-inspired sort, but one of the tutors in our group was dying of leukemia. Everyday he appeared paler and weaker, but he still attended classes and reported for work.  "You can tell his family has made the separation," Dr. Jackson, my boss, said one day after meeting the tutor's family. Responding to my expression, he added, "It's not that they don't love him, but when you know someone is going to die, you go through grief while they're still walking and talking.  You protect yourself from the finality."

"Does that mean you become more feverish about your own life, about living, and everything that that means?" I asked.

"I hope so," he said, "but you also pull back a little.  Your love is there, but a boundary is there, too." That's when he told me about his wife, and how a hardening within him had taken place.

Over a decade later, I hooked up with a cheap bus tour of Italy. The tour was packed with Europeans. . . Germans, Irish, British.  The only Americans were a Sikh family from Silicon valley.  There was also an Iraqi couple.

But it was the Irish couple who fascinated me.  They were in their forties, possibly early fifties. Attractive in a dull, settled way.  The wife was a bit tight-lipped.  Pissed, actually.  The husband was in a constant low-key frenzy trying to please his wife.

After a short time it became obvious that there was something wrong with her.  I decided she was mortally ill, and that this vacation was supposed to be a last hurrah for them.  Not that she ever got sick in front of us.  It's just that his behavior became more frantic at the same time that she glared at all the art and beauty around us.  It looked as if she were saying angry goodbyes to everything, as if she hated the way life just went on ready to skip right by her.

I was wallowing in my European jaunt, one of the happiest periods of my life.  One night in Rome, the three of us had dinner together.  She ordered a lavish meal and didn't touch a bite of it, just jousted with me all night, looking like she wanted to scratch my eyes out.  And not because of her husband (with whom I had no attraction whatsoever), but because I was so damn cheerful.

Death had a grip on her and she had a death grip on her husband, ready to drag him into the grave with her and not because she loved him.  Because she hated that it wasn't him dying instead of her.

Those were my thoughts, then.  Now, even though she was clearly punishing him, perhaps she wasn't dying.  I don't understand the kind of negative vehemence she had, nor do I understand her husband remaining under its power.  Only if she had a death sentence would it make sense for him to stand by her side.  If he'd chosen to seek affection elsewhere, could you blame him?

Why would I think of this now?  Just finished Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which is a treacherous tale of a sick marriage.   The wife in it reminded me of the Irish Wife in Italy and her forlorn husband.  With the passage of time and lessons learned from my own marriage (a happy one, but not without bumps), and my friends' marriages and divorces, I've reconsidered the death sentence I'd given her at the time.  Maybe they were just miserably bound for life.

How not to pitch your book at a book festival

NEW!!!  The Sandoval Sisters' Secret of Old Blood is a finalist in two categories with the International Latino Book Awards: Best Historical Fiction and Best First Book, Fiction.

            There were years when I attended the Los Angeles Festival of Books with the eager anticipation of an avid reader who likes nothing better than to stroll outdoors and wander into open-air bookstores. Readings by my favorite authors were also an attraction. I didn’t do much people watching.

            This year I dressed in period costume–a Hispana in 1840’s Santa Fe–and walked onto the USC campus armed with a pen to sign my first novel: The Sandoval Sisters.

            The response to my book was good and my venture a successful one, even though I’m a rube when it comes to marketing. This was a learning experience for me.  Predictably, there were a few missteps:

            At one signing in which I participated, several authors sat at tables with the covers of their books blown up on posters and prominently displayed alongside our books and bookmarks. Families, students, seniors, bookmark hoarders and lone crazy people streamed by our table. The families, students and seniors were self-evident. The crazies were harder to identify. Later on the latter.

            One author yelled out at a passerby, “Sir, sir, would you like a bookmark?” The man smiled cooperatively, came over, and she proceeded to pitch him. This author sold more books than anyone else at that venue. She also varied her pitch.  She explained that there was something for everyone in her book: mother, father, student, heavily medicated or in need of a diagnosis.  She had an uncanny ability to determine a potential reader’s area of interest and pitch her book in that direction. She made it sound easy.

            I didn’t feel comfortable yelling out to passersby, but fortunately at another signing, I was the only author present.  My poster of the book cover featuring the beautiful Sandoval sisters attracted plenty of people. My smiling face and period Southwestern garb–including holster–might have helped.

            Women bought my books­–the young and not so young–and I am most grateful to each of them. They asked good questions about the historical period and wanted to know what struggles the sisters had to deal with.  Many of them had never been to New Mexico and had only read period fiction featuring England or France.

            Men were not too interested in my story, even when I talked about the Texas Rangers. Most of them were mansplainers. The Urban Dictionary defines mansplain as, “To explain in a patronizing manner, assuming total ignorance on the part of those listening.”

            One gentleman in a suit and a bowtie asked for a two-sentence elevator pitch. After I gave it to him he replied that the book had the makings of a movie and asked what actresses I had in mind to play the Sandoval sisters. When I mentioned Salma Hayek he got angry and told me she was over the hill.  She has a production company and is reading the book.  He told me not to sell myself short, that Salma Hayek never did anything until she married some rich guy and that I should get a Jewish lawyer to represent me. Then he pounded his fist on my book and told me he could hire a drunk hack to pound out a similar book over a weekend.

            “I’m done here,” I said, and told him he probably needed to get to Church. That stopped his crazy motor for a second. “Church?” he yelled.  I gestured at his suit and bowtie. “Okay, well then the funeral you were going to.” He glared at me and stomped off.

         Later, an athletic-looking middle-aged woman with a masculine haircut, who might have been a women's PE teacher, was particularly enthused over a fictional account of a cross-dressing woman of the old west.  She wanted to buy the book on the cowboy/girl, but the only book for sale was The Sandoval Sisters, one of whom dressed like a man in 1840’s Santa Fe.  She married an older man with whom she had a happy marriage, but when widowed fell in love with her childhood best friend, Monique. This aspect of Pilar is not even a subplot, but part of the spectrum that has always colored not only the west, but Santa Fe. I thought this woman might be interested in this tidbit, but the bowtied gentlemen had knocked the wind out of my sails, and I failed to speak up.

            By the time another woman, also rather jockish, appeared interested in The Sandoval Sisters, I’d had time to pull myself together. She loved the historical detail on the U.S. Mexican War, and the empowered Sandoval sisters dealing with the influx of American soldiers into Santa Fe. She took the details of the arranged marriages for Alma and Pilar in stride, and had no trouble with Pilar wearing men’s clothes for her work with horses.

But when I mentioned her relationship with Monique­­, she snapped her shoulders back and looked disturbed verging on panicked.  She quickly fled.  I obviously need more practice in assessing reader preferences.

            The parents of a ninth grader came by and studied my book. Part of her homework assignment was to interview an author. I learned that history, any history, was not part of her curriculum, so we talked about Manifest Destiny and what that meant in conquering the West, and New Mexico, in particular. She asked good questions and enthused over the book saying she wanted to read it.

            Her parents stood on either side of her. I quoted a recent review in which a reader advised all parents to have their daughters “whether 15 or 65” read The Sandoval Sisters. I should have stopped there . . . or made a safe return to Manifest Destiny. Instead, I said to her parents, “There’s a bit of sex in the book.” Even that wasn’t so bad, but then I felt compelled to add, “But the good thing is that the sisters really enjoyed it.”

Signing The Sandoval Sisters at the L.A. Festival of Books

UNBELIEVABLE FESTIVAL SPECIAL

ME!!!

Saturday

I’ll be signing THE SANDOVAL SISTERS 

@ 

Women Writing the West, Booth #160: 

12:00-3:00 

&

4:00-6:00 

@Booth # 953 (GLAWS)

Sunday

10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.  @ #160 &

12:20-2:40 @ #953

Wonder what GLAWS is? Stop by and say Hi!

All will be explained.

www.thesandovalsisters.com

ISBN: 978-0615615103 

La Gente Press

Love During the Conquest

"Highly recommended, especially for those who love a good family saga! ”*

Arranged marriages

A runaway bride

Sisters  

Adultery

Witchcraft

A woman doctor

Secrets  

The Sandoval diaries

"I really liked this story. There were certain parts that were just so real when I read them that it was hard to not get involved with the Sandoval sisters."*

Santa Fe was the first foreign capital captured by the U.S. An unbelievable influx of men occurred, but nary a word has been written about how that affected the New Mexican women. Until now.

I grew up in Santa Fe and spent summers in Texas, but now make my home in Los Angeles with my husband, two sons, a dog, a cat and two quarrelsome parakeets.  

• Cast of Characters:
• Oratoria Sandoval: "I first entered the Sandoval compound a barefoot slave . . . Estevan had traded for me—a bag of flour for a ragged peasant girl of five—after I had been captured by Apaches in Mexico. He brought me to this high mountain desert, to Santa Fé, the City of Holy Faith, as a wedding present for his bride. I became doña Teresa’s favorite, who was sixteen and far from her family in Mexico City. She taught me to read and to cook, and christened me Oratoria because of my skill with languages. 
• Alma Sandoval: "I’d been in the grip of ancient memories, reciting a list of family secrets that stretched back for centuries. I’d developed an eccentric reputation in Santa Fé, even for a Sandoval. I wasn’t sure if the memories were from an unknown part of my mind, or if they came from reading Sandoval diaries when I was much too young."
• Pilar Sandoval: "I’d read a few . . . Bunch of whiners and schemers, if you ask me. I like creatures who are half this and half that, in myth's and biblical stories, not in my flesh and blood relatives."
• Geraldo Quintana: “I’m no saint,” he said. “I loved my wives, but I was a young man, selfish and uninformed. Penetration, the young man’s dream, is not all there is to lovemaking.”
• Consuelo Benavides: “You Sandovals think you can take everything. You’ll suffer. I’ll make you pay for what you’ve stolen from me!”
• L.B.: “Mexes ain’t too poplah round here, but I guess you knows it already . . . you as white as B.B., Miz Alma. You could pass fa her daughter. Make the most of it, girl. Passin’ is good.”

The first chapter can be found here and here.

"This is a book about personal power and what women achieved because they were willing to "speak their truth". This is a book that every parent should give to their daughters, regardless of whether their daughter are 15 or 65."*

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1 THE SECRETS 1

2 A DANGEROUS TIME FOR GRINGOS 9

3 SPANISH LESSONS 13

4 CHILD’S PLAY 24

5 A SISTER FOR A SISTER 29

6 THE BACK ROAD TO TEXAS 38

7 HALF-BREEDS AND PEDIGREES 45

8 PASSING GOOD 57

9 THE FOURTH WIFE 63

10 SUMMER’S KISS, WINTER’S EMBRACE 66

11 POLLARD’S CORNER 70

12 DREAMWIFE 82

13 HOMECOMING 90

14 OF NUNS 96

15 JEZEBEL 105

16 THE DEMIMONDE 111

17 LA SOLTERA 118

18 HISTORY LESSONS 126

19 FRIENDS AND LOVERS 136

20 A WOMAN DOCTOR 144

21 SEÑORA SANDOVAL 148

22 THE FIRST WHITE WOMAN 161

23 SONS AND LOVERS 173

24 THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER 180

25 AT THE PLAZA 187

26 PESTILENCE 201

27 ABOGADO 220

28 THE SANDOVAL WIDOWS 230

29 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE ON THE FRONTIER 250

30 THE SECRETS FORETOLD 258

A complete list of my published work is at www.thesandovalsisters.com

I love stories that have the multiple main characters, separated into individual stories, before they're finally all brought to together again. *

The sequel to The Sandoval Sisters' will follow the next generation of this uniquely blended family into the 20th century. An excerpt from the first chapter is at the end of the book.

Follow me on Twitter 

or Facebook      

*A few of the 5-star reviews from Amazon.

My Ideal Female Superhero

I get tired of the same hyper-voluptuous body types depicted in comic books. I'd like a superhero who is wholesome, but husky, maybe played LaCrosse in college. She works hard as an executive assistant for some big Hollywood studio, has good ideas but no one pays attention to her, except for 8 days out of the month when she's all PMS'ey.

During this time, she states her ideas fiercely and people are afraid not to listen. She becomes ultra aware of bad vibes and evildoers galore.  My superhero wants to ignore them and get her work done, but they always end up getting in her face by abusing the defenseless when she's having a hormonal surge.

Bad timing for them because her anger and fearlessness increase beyond imagination.  Her superpower is her perception of the evildoer's most vulnerable psychological weaknesses.  She's a hormonal Hannibal Lechter when it comes to using words, articulate and razor sharp.  She has an uncanny ability to hone in on the secrets hidden in the dark hearts of her opponents, and often goads them to tears or to some act which is their undoing.

When she gets her period she dyes her hair and wears tailored clothes. She sleeps with her competitors and drops them right after. The week after this she returns to her mousey self as if nothing happened. The men and women she's tossed aside either become her staunch supporters hoping for more, or her bitter enemies. No one can figure out her variable schedule. She barely understands it herself.