Voting Booth After Dark: Animated Video Review, Interview & #Hashtag

On my book

The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive:

The Book’s Hashtag Reference for Twitter convos: #vbafterd

Find & Join conversations about books you love through Book#Hashtags.   Twitter it up, my freyngs!

BOOK REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS

• Popular Literary Blog “I’m Here. I’m Queer. What the Hell do I read?“includes #vbafterd among its reading recommendations.

• The Lesfic Underbelly gives #vbafterd a hilarious and spot-on animated video review, which you can watch here:

• Journalist Daniel Hernandez reviews #vbafterd for his renowned blog Intersections and interviews me on these topics:

[INTERVIEW EXCERPT: Answers edited down for space]

Q: How did the book come about?

A: I wrote The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive over a period of about 3 years. I didn’t know I was developing a book, however, until the end of the 3rd year. During that period (2005-2008), I bottomed out on nightclubs, Mickey’s Malt Liquor, and half-hearted affairs with bi-curious women in heterosexual relationships. They weren’t my proudest moments, but undeniably some of my most consuming. An intense period of trying out remedies that seemed to cure other people’s despair, but just deepened mine.

[… My friends and I] were driven go-getters with artistic aspirations working hard to forge our paths in the adult world, which required embracing thwarted expectations on a daily basis. We worked loathsome pay your dues jobs and took to the LA Eastside/Downtown/Chinatown nightclubs in desperate attempts to forget our unpredictable futures. George Bush Jr. was president at the time, Hollywood was making Mission Impossible 3 or 4, and oppressed Palestinians continued suffering merciless injustice. Feelings of utter powerlessness and hopelessness overwhelmed us, and we grew apathetic together.

[…] I spent late nights, usually in the sober moments before I cracked open a bottle of Carlo Rossi since I can’t write while boozed, jotting down our emotional dismemberment. I didn’t think many people would want to read them. I mean another poem about drunken misery? Honestly, I sort of hated myself for them.

[…] Everyone is affected by and affects politics whether they’re political or not. So in regards to the characters in my book, they continue to live the minor accounts of their daily lives in the backdrop of the 2008 presidential elections — meaning that they still form some part of the greater political puzzle.

Q: Where did you grow-up? Tell me more about your background.

A: I was born to a middle-class Cuban family in Los Angeles, CA. I’ve lived throughout the burbs’ & hoods of Los Angeles such as Glendale, Downey, South Gate, Bell, and Koreatown. I also lived in Miami & Ixtlan Del Rio, Mexico for several months. I moved around A LOT as a kid. Around 25 times, I think. I spent most of my childhood at the Maywood Baptist School and then transferred to a couple of public schools in Downey. Ultimately, my high school home-stay was the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA) where I majored in Theatre Arts, and I graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 2005 with a Bachelors in Film Production & minor in Theatre.

Q:Will you be voting for Obama next time around? 

A: NO. No I definitely will not be voting for Obama in 2012. As someone once said, “I was in love with the idea of Obama.”

You can read the review/interview in its entirety by clicking here.

For more fun excerpts, interviews, & articles on The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive click here!

Thanks for your support & I hope you enjoy the read!

Big Hug ~ V

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Fun Excerpts, Interviews, & Articles on my book “Voting Booth After Dark”

Over the past few months, I’ve participated in some fun interviews, written articles on and published excerpts from my debut book The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive.  It’s a 92-page collection of short stories and poems interwoven into a gripping narrative that follows a group of gay & lesbian Latino club kids during the course of the 2008 presidential elections.  As they plunge deep into the agonizing lows of anxiety and addiction, we see how they affect and are affected by the national politics happening around them.  It’s available for purchase as an e-book & paperback at numerous well-known and independent sites such as Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com, and GiovannisRoom.com.

Kick your heels up, eat some ice cream, & check em’ out! ;p

BOOK EXCERPTS

• “Guerilla Reads” featured my video-taped reading of the short story excerpt “Mourning” at the West Hollywood Book Fair.

• The Furnace Review published the poetry excerpt “Sorrow”  as a sneak peek into the book.

• This Great Society published the short story excerpt “Anguish” in their May 2011 WORK Issue. 

INTERVIEWS

• “Livin’ La Vida Latina” reviewed The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive & interviewed me on topics such as:

How do you feel your work influences Latinas?

What does being Latina mean to you?

What do you think the future holds for today’s Latina?

• Sea Minor’s celebrated Dancing with Myself Author Series published an interview in which I answer questions like:

What’s the story behind your middle name “Libertad”?

You’re sort-of broke right? Which means you made this book on very little $$$. Who are some of the core people that helped you bring The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing Repulsive to life?

What are some quotes you turn to for inspiration, guidance, and relief when FEAR tries to strangle you, and force you to sabotage your life?

ARTICLES

• Spike Magazine published my article “Enmeshed: Gay & Lesbian Latino-Americans in Los Angeles’ Eastside Scene” about the subculture at the core of The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive.

• InDigest Magazine published my article “The Birth of Embarrassing, Despicable, Repulsive”, which chronicles how the book came to be …

If you’d like to read other people’s reviews on the book just click here.

Thanks for your support & hope you enjoy the read!  

Big Hug!  🙂 V

Making a Movie Day 3 — “I” ain’t my career.

So, I decided to get started early on today’s blog — like at midnight of January 15th instead of at day’s end because …

I have a loooooong Saturday ahead of me.  A long weekend, actually.

I keep wracking my brain for the next “To Do” regarding my film Dear Dios and my book The Voting Booth After Dark: Despicable, Embarrassing, Repulsive — whose characters are based off of the Dear Dios script characters.  I’ve decided to focus my energies in 2011 on these two specific projects.

1) Continuing promotion on my book: Interviews & Reviews.

2) Getting my film off the ground — meaning done with pre-production and ready for production a.k.a. producers, production company, financing, cast/crew, and distribution deal in place … or at least 3 out of the 5 😉

Still, being an artist is being someone who internalizes every single bloody thing that happens, reflects upon the internalized, and expresses their contemplations through an art form.  Consequently, I can’t just focus on the business end of things and push aside the creativity.  It’s like pouring water on a space heater.

When I tried to do that in my early 20’s; my heart imploded into my brain and my brain exploded into my mouth and my mouth poured into the world a rotted deteriorating sight, scent, and sound.

Believe me, I tried for many years to BE what I DO for career — to identify myself solely as “writer/filmmaker,” but we human beings are much much much more than what we professionally do.  Our innate profundity always sabotages our cheap conscious-level efforts to be lesser.

To derive any real three-dimensional joy out of life, I must continue to work on myself as a whole human being.

There is no stagnancy in Life — you either grow or shribble and die.  Your pick.

I’ve done the whole shribble and die dance and UGH, it’s sooooo boring and AWFUL!  Consequently …

A huge part of choosing growth is choosing to grow my whole-self, which requires developing emotional, psychological, and spiritual health. Nurturing the well-being of these specific areas cultivates my gratitude, humility, and compassion. Thus nourishing my perspective and as a result, my art.

I must be honest with myself.  I’m meeting with my group therapy mentor on Monday and reading her the inventory on my entire life.  All 80 pages  (9-point font), which took me a year and a half to do.

I have 2 days worth of work left to do on it and 2 days until we meet, which means:

I must finish the assignment this Saturday & Sunday.

It’s vital to my personal healing = overall well-being.

I can’t realistically research and watch films on Fandor this weekend.  I must go to work on Saturday from 8am – 4pm and spend the rest of the weekend finishing the inventory.

I feel like a slacker, like a lazy bum, like a slothful ingrate when I don’t work on my film and book 24/7.

I must embody the mindset that I’m working on my film even when I’m not working on my film as long as I’m fortifying the other poignant areas of my life …

Next Week’s Strategy for Dear Dios (while I wait for the 4 film books to arrive in the mail):

1) Update my Director’s Reel

2) Update the Dear Dios web page with synopses

3) Update Main Web page with Bloggimia info

4) Update Press/News Site with new publicity info

5) Renew my IMDBpro subscription

That’s of course, aside from my book promotion tasks, which I’m not detailing in these posts because they mainly entail research on blogs, magazines, newspapers, radio/tv/internet shows, sending them emails, following up, and mailing them books for review.  You get the picture.

Alright, enough of my boring rants!  Gah!  Hopefully mah’ funny kicks into these blog posts soon.

Layta Gaytaz!

Ps. I’m beginning the book When God Was a Woman tonight before clonking out. Woohoo!