Let’s not bury the lede today: I am celebrating a win! Over the last couple of weeks, I was accepted to Northern California Writers’ Retreat for a writing and publishing retreat in glorious Carmel, CA (I am pretty sure it is glorious, because I have never been there, but people tell me!), AND further, the retreat folks awarded me funding to help me actually get there.

John Leguizamo is my mom's best medicine. (part 3 of unplanned Puerto Rican heritage adventures) Comedian, actor, playwrite and activist Leguizamo (IG @johnleguizamo; has appeared in more than 100 movies - Ice Age, Carlisto's Way, Encanto, Romeo + Juliet; TV: Freak, When They See Us, Miami Vice; Broadway acting and directing, stand-up, and so much more) Leguizamo is like un primo, a cousin (We all thought he was Puerto Rican, but Professor Henry Louis Gates found out otherwise and we were so upset in my house!!!).

I planned to do a Part 2 of my unplanned personal Puerto Rican Heritage Month weekend right away, but, as we say in Spanish “El hombre propone y Dios dispone,” which is equivalent to (but more positive than) “Man plans and God laughs.”  In this episode, we shop Boricua. Be warned: this is not my usual book-related post, but I am called today to shine a light on mi gente, my fellow boricuas celebrating culture and creating art and living the diapora experience.

(also, Part I of accidental Puerto Rican Heritage Month weekend!) Magdalena de Cárdenas really wants her story told. So much so, that she reached across the centuries to shove me into a series of serendipitous encounters this weekend that made the hairs on my arms prickle and my heart race. And also shook me out of my book writing doldrums.

Unlike parenting, where you are not supposed to have favorites, in writing, you can have favorites. You can also have absolute clunkers that embarrass you later on and that you would like to disown, but that's for another day. Today, I am revisiting one of my very very very favorite pieces of my own writing, which is a review of someone else's book: …

After a hellacious couple of weeks, my writing life has stalled out; not a surprise, since my current location is Crazy Town. A short list: Buying a new (for me) car, an ambulance and parental hospital stay, IRS hounding me for money already paid for a trust, professional disappointments and frustration, deadlines, crises and serious self-doubt. Clearly, it is time to hit the reset button.

(I have to write this one like no one is ever going to read it, or at least, as if she is never going to read it, and I guess she won't, because, well... you'll see. But please don't tell her. Please. A writer's gotta write, and even though most of the time a daughter's gotta daughter, the writer's gotta publish.

My partner of 15 years left me stranded on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, all alone and 114 miles from home last Saturday night…and I needed a bathroom. It was a cruel ghosting after 200K plus miles together.  Yes, we are talking about my car and yes – in the absence of any romantic partner – it was an important relationship in my life.

Sometimes it feels weird to be Puerto Rican and yet writing a first novel set in colonial Spain, Mexico and Cuba. Sometimes it feels like stealing time and resources from my project to be visiting Puerto Rico instead of those places, but, fun facts: William Shakespeare never visited Venice or fair Verona, and Bram Stoker (Dracula) never set foot in Transylvania (nor did Richard O’Brien visit the fictional galaxy of the same name to write…

Sharing creative space with creatives is like compost for the creative process, fertilizer for exuberant action. Last night I met my bestie, Adriana, in Manhattan for a storytelling extravaganza and today, I feel this burst of vitality that expressed itself in some really productive creative work. I feel so good! So, the storytelling:  If you haven’t heard of The Moth…

I don’t think I can keep up the pun fun for a whole post, but the header was fun to weave. And I will keep it in mind as I stitch together my newly rediscovered love of crochet with the lives of my protagonists and show how I applied it to my journalistic life for fun and profit, while reflecting on the power of women’s work across millennia.

So, I didn’t do the dishes last night; just left them in the sink to deal with in the morning. I don’t usually leave them there; living in Puerto Rico quickly taught me that the insect world finds out fast when there is a country fair’s worth of sticky, meaty crumbs and tidbits stuck to plates and pans in the sink, just waiting for them to scuttle on in.

Spoiler, not spoiler: Let's start with the fact that I really, really liked both these books (one of them I am "reading" for the second time) and that this post is not a review. If you are looking for a recommendation, I resoundingly recommend both (I am not sure you'll find La cofradía in English though). So what's it all about?

Today we have the Met Gala (Black Dandyism Came to Slay Last Night and I am not over it yet*), but back in the 1600s, it was all about the royals and courtly fashion. It is a long way from hoop skirts to my current sabbatical uniform of workout clothes (part to inspire me to exercise and part because they are the next best thing to pajamas and I can't work effectively in pajamas - as I quickly learned during the COVID lockdown).

My protagonist and many of the people close to her (real and imagined) were set up - by their Church, their government, their community - to believe that The Almighty had presented them with a so-called New World to own and dominate and exploit. Many of them are among those Europeans for whom New Spain represented opportunity, albeit in different ways.

I first found Rebecca D’Harlingue on Paper Lantern Writers, the website of a historical fiction writers’ collective where writers talk writing. I have found it really useful in my own writing journey! D’Harlingue’s first novel, The Lines Between Us, is set in a similar time period and location to mine so I quick quick requested it from my library.

How DtMF album drop has galvanized a new generation to become salseros. Newsday: April 15, 2025

I kinda knew it was time to clean out the fridge, in that mental note, non-urgent, I'll get to it sometime this week, (but not today) sort of way. Instead, I had a nice little afternoon of reading and research planned for Sunday; a bit of work on the book after I had spent a morning on a woodsy walk with a friend and a casual lunch out with family and friends.

The nice thing about webinars is that you don't need to dress up, or comb your hair, apparently. "I wish I had...." I hear it all the time. I hear people wish they played an instrument (I am one of them, actually, but more on that later). They wish they had traveled more. They wish they had tried a sport. …

An ancient Moorish hammam (bathhouse) serves a different kind of suds This is right on the floor of the main entrance/bar/restaurant area of Cervecería Giralda, getting stepped on and spilled on all day and night, every day. How we trample on those that came before! One of my many offbeat jobs was six months as a jeune fille au pair…

When Research Flies Off the Page and Into Your Heart Plaza de España and me in the sweater I always seem to be wearing. NB: this Plaza postdates my story, but is a must-see! My first trip to Europe was to Madrid decades ago, when I was a know-it-all-know-nothing American teenager on a summer college study trip that my mother insisted I go on so I had actual experience of the world to go with my sopho-moronic arrogance.

Live from the 16th century: Sonnambula at The Hispanic Society, including musical snippets...

I like to think of myself as a native New Yorker - but there's hierarchy and hair-splitting to that self-identification. For example, I was born in Queens, which makes me a NYC baby, but I didn't go to high school in any of the five boroughs, so for many folks, birthplace New York City-zenship doesn't count. I did do all my undergrad and first masters in Manhattan, living there on-and-off, so there's that.