Tables chapters posted so far:
11/6/2019 - Tables Part 1: Table Setting
11/20/2019 - Tables Part 2: This Is A Story About A Fish
12/18/2019 - Tables Part 3: In The Beginning, There Was An Egg
2/26/2020 - Tables Part 4: If I Could Save Time I A Boule
I’m working on two serialized pieces for this blog: Tables and Before the Light of You.
Tables, put simply, is about the tables I’ve known throughout my life. It’s a story that I’ve been thinking about and occasionally writing for over a year, inspired by my first and only attempt at live storytelling that I did with Story Collider back in 2018*. The story was about my experiences growing up half-Puerto Rican and half-Italian while living half of my life as a comic book writer/editor and half of my life as a scientist. One of the motifs running through that story centered on sitting around Grandma’s kitchen table as a kid, losing that communal experience as an adult, and finding it again with the youth that I was working with for Voces Sin Fronteras**. I thought that part of the story would make for a great story on its own and started writing it.
I plan to start posting parts of Tables this week. I’m thinking I’ll post new parts every two weeks, or so. Right now it’s sitting at 10 parts but I want to add some more to it and rearrange some of the earlier parts as I post them. Food ( particularly hosting) is a big part of the narrative. Since I started writing it, Liz and I have moved towards 50/50 vegan/vegetarian. That transition came with a lot of challenges and further introspection and a whole new set of hosting experiences so I want to make sure I work that into the story.
Tables is a very personal piece. It’s sometimes difficult to write and it’s almost always a bit difficult to read back. It’s not globally triggering or anything like that, it’s just occasionally based on stuff that I simply haven’t shared publicly. I used to be a big public sharer but, as alluded to in “Something Meaningless Under The Sun,” I wasn’t a particularly truthful sharer; I was more of an effective bragger. Only the good parts, never the bad. It really ended up trapping me. I’ve since learned the importance of effectively sharing the right amount of information to the right audience. You all, the folks reading this blog, you don’t have to know every detail of my life, but it’s good to have a certain context.
For example, I got divorced. Up until now, I’ve never said that publicly. I shared all the good parts on Facebook and Tumblr and wherever else, but when the bad part came...the marriage just disappeared from the public record with no explanation. There wasn’t even a friends and family post on Facebook. I didn’t tell people about it, didn’t talk about it. People just figured it out as they figured it out. It’s an important contextual part of Tables. Not the details, just the transition. And the transition is likely so mundane to so many people, but it’s still something that’s sometimes difficult to write and almost always a bit difficult to read back.
Over the past four years since the separation, and the years prior to that when separation occasionally seemed inevitable, I wrote entire collections on my experiences. They were just for me, locked up in a password-protected folder. I’d guess somewhere north of 50,000 words focused on anger, sadness, trials, errors, and growth. And now here I am, about to start publishing Tables, the first piece meant for public consumption. And the only context necessary, and honestly the only detail that’s exposed, is that I got a divorce and that there was a transition. And that tables and food were a big part of that transition. That’s the extent of the context you’ll need going in.
My process is to reconfigure and edit the sections as I put them out - working from the second draft and posting it bit by bit. Liz Laribee is going to be my editor on this, as she is with everything on this blog. I talked through enough of this with my therapist that she’s essentially a co-editor. And I’m relying on my family to help me get some of the facts straight from my younger years. In fact, I just now got off the phone with Mom because I wanted to verify the descriptions of some of the tables I’ll be talking about. My mom not only remembered what the tables looked like, but where they were all purchased and how much they cost.
As for Before the Light of You, that’s a sci-fi mid-length story. I honestly think I’m overwriting it right now so I’m probably going to cut it down by half. It’s based on a comic pitch that was never picked up. I’ll introduce that one some more when I get closer to posting pieces of it, possibly early December.
That’s the way I see this blog going. Serialized mid-length stories broken up by shorter stories, ruminations, and non-fictions. It’s probably a good time to point out that you can subscribe to this blog. All you need to do is head over to the contact page and send me a message.
Alright, well. Let’s get to it. The first part of Tables is coming later this week. I’m committing to it, no turning back now.
*You can listen to the Story Collider piece here. It was actually selected as the best story of 2018 from the DC show. I’m very proud of it.
**Voces Sin Fronteras is a book I worked on with Shout Mouse Press. It's a collection of comic memoirs from immigrant youth. I helped to conceive and plan the book and co-ran the comic book workshops alongside Liz, Santi Casares, and Evan Keeling. Afterwards, we co-designed the book and finished some of the art. You can find the book on Shout Mouse's website.