Archive

Archive for the ‘Stories’ Category

Fear and Lusting

June 6th, 2004
Comments Off

Think of it as a cliché, if you will, but I write for myself first. Or at least, the stories I end up finishing are those I’m writing first and foremost because I enjoy writing them. A close second comes writing for my friends, hoping they’ll enjoy it half as much as I did, specially those with whom I share enough points of reference that they’ll get all the random stuff I end up throwing in.

In third place comes the rest of the world. If they get it, great, if they don’t, you can’t please ‘em all. It’s not like I’m aiming for bestsellerhood.

With that in mind, I particularly like the following short story, Fear and Lusting in Las Palmas. I had just so much fun writing it that it was terribly hard to edit. It has references to things I find amusing sprinkled like so much green-fairy dust; and if you’re wondering, yes, it’s not as much a nod as a stagedive in Hunter S. Thompson’s direction.

Enjoy.
Read more…

Ricardo Stories

Living in the past

March 31st, 2004
Comments Off

Recently I started writing this long story, something a bit more personal than the goofy Apocalipsis. It is shaping up like a longer narrative (dare I call it novel?) and started out as two parallel stories about characters with a few traits in common, alternating between both stories one chapter at a time. The idea was that as it progressed the reader realizes that they’re actually the same person, one of the stories being the character’s past and the other one his future.

I began writing it to exorcise some recent issues, as a way to crawl back up from the creative wasteland said issues had moved me into, using it as a tool to force myself to create something more intimate, in the manner of my earlier photos, instead of hiding myself behind the patina of sense of humor and sarcasm of my other stories.

At first the story progressed quickly – words came easily, phrases started building up, paragraphs just appeared out of thin air. Every so often I’d hit a bump, but with the help of stubbornness and a few screwdrivers I managed to just ride over them, finishing a section and moving on to the next one.

Then something happened and I stopped writing. The flow of words had become a trickle and I just couldn’t seem to get over the current section. Last Sunday, after trying to force myself to put down 1000 words and not managing to get more than 400 out, I just collapsed on my couch to wonder what the hell was going on.

I went over what I had written, reviewing which chapters managed to hold my interest and which ones I just fast-forwarded through to get to the next one. A pattern slowly emerged. Just as it had happened when I was writing, I realized that the bumps in the story were the even-numbered sections, those set in the character’s past. Those were there only because I had sold myself on a gimmick for the story and wanted to carry it through because I liked the idea. Pulitzer delusions, maybe.

The obvious solution was to cut them out, prune them, leave them in the floor of the editing room. Something stopped me, however. Those chapters were the ones that were more self-indulgent, the ones I had been writing as a way to spite a person, or just to fictionalize some recent events. Bendrix, from The End of the Affair, came to mind immediately: a book takes me a year to write – it’s too hard work for revenge.

I had run out of anger.

Off those chapters went. Put together they constituted less than 25% of what I had written, and the result is something much cleaner, something I want to continue building on top of.

It also gives me the feeling that my subconscious was telling me that the future is much more interesting than the past.
Read more…

Ricardo Personal, Stories

Apocalypse

July 18th, 2003

I’ve been writing this story called Apocalypse for a while. It gets written in fits and starts, whenever I get the impulse and add another chapter, but I’ve decided that I need to be more methodical about it if I’m ever to finish it.

It’s not that I lose interest, it is just that I lose focus – I start to overedit old stuff and don’t get anything new set down on paper.

Then tonight, while drinking some Glenlivet and watching a live performance of Moby Dick, an idea ocurred to me. I’m going to start publishing the various chapters online as I finish them, instead of just keeping them somewhere expecting the whole blasted thing to be done. This will probably force me to write regularly, and to remove that pesky overediting obsession.

A new section will be uploaded at the very least every other Monday, and I promise not to go back and edit the old ones, except when absolutely necessary to fix an error. The only little detail is that they’re written in Spanish (with a nice dose of Costa Rican slang and some Spanglish), so they might not be easy reading for a non-native.

We’ll see how it goes.

Ricardo Stories