Backyard Process

Update on the Little Lolo revisions. It seems as though the process of revision is going very slowly and I don’t seem to have any new ideas for short pieces. I am up to Ch 30 of Little Lolo just trying to get it all into present tense which is much more of an endeavor than I had at first thought. Once that is all in present tense I still need to go back through and clear up scene/summary issues. I’m still not creating enough of an immersive experience. Not quite enough detail and tension–uncertainty to draw the reader in. And I know I have drafted this fairly quickly but I am bored quickly.

Perhaps that is why last night I had a dream that I had enlisted the help of Harry Crumb to make Little Lolo Stories into a graphic novel–together we continually tried to draw little Lolo’s face and also Mitedio’s face. I know my sister has soe pictures of the real life Mitedio so perhaps I can get some insight from that. Maybe I can interview my cousin Frankie since Mitedio was practically his father. At any rate in the dream I wanted to get those faces down.

On another note–I am typing this in a back yard in Colorado. My sister and I used to joke that we grew up in back yards and most of my fiction has to do with basements and backyards–places without windows and places without shelter. And I do miss my window just right off my desk. Now I have an internet card and can go online in any backyard I want–to write about backyards.

I am planning on visiting some bookstores arond here to get some pictures and perhaps some video–also I want to get some video at a great coffee shop here and in Walsenburg I like to visit from time to time so maybe I will be posting that soon.

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john paul jaramillo

John Paul Jaramillo’s debut story collection The House of Order was named a 2013 Int’l Latino Book Award Finalist, and his most recent work Little Mocos is now available from Twelve Winters Press. In 2013 Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature listed Jaramillo as one of its Top 10 New Latino Authors to Watch and Read. He is currently a professor of composition and literature at Lincoln Land College-Springfield, Illinois.

2 thoughts on “Backyard Process”

  1. I like your dream–I’m surprised I’m not dreaming something similar, as steeped as I am in Persepolis these days. We need to see that together.

    I agree that you can do more scene work in LL stories, but their is tension in the characterizations and the relationships. I know you said you are kind of off reading fiction lately, but Alexie and others blending so-called adolescent or children’s lit with so-called adult lit might be interesting to examine. Not to cramp your style, but to tease out the adult/child boundaries tension that I think is so beautifully shown in your work.

    <3

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