In all seriousness, if I have English-speaking readers (those that don’t know any Spanish, I’m not counting swear words) I want to let you know; I’m still planning on translating that story into English, since it’s one of the stories that I’ve enjoyed writing the most.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect to be writing this post; at least not so soon, but I want to give you a peek behind the curtain regarding “Enero”.
Enero has become the first longer story I’ve written that holds elements that I wanted to use and play around for a little while. I mixed literary mythology alongside other topics I already had in my mind. Being fully honest, the story that I ended publishing isn’t the story I had originally planned on writing.
Originally, Enero was only going to be about Carlos and his father (in Spanish “el señor Beltrán”) and how Carlos would end up disappearing from his father’s life without leaving a trace; not before finding out about a secret his father was hiding. I do intend on using this plot point somewhere in the future, but I want to make sure I write a story that inherits this correctly; almost like an organ transplant, it has to make a perfect match.
Now, you may wonder why I’m dedicating a couple of paragraphs to the way the story was going to unfold originally, and that’s because the story was originally going to be written in English. I had the plot ready to be written, character’s names were going to be very different since I wanted them to be translated correctly between languages, and most important of all, I wanted to appeal to a larger audience.
I know, in my last post I mentioned I should write for myself; so I’m kind of contradicting myself here. Well, yes but not (it’s complicated, such is life). Enero was going to be written in English, the characters were going to be different, and the plot as well; so you might wonder, what happened?
I’m very picky with my writing, and I do believe details are very important; character’s intentions, locations, people they’ve interacted with, etc…, all serve the larger purpose of telling a story. What I didn’t realize until later on was that the story I was typing out in my Word file was really becoming something I hadn’t thought (or even planned out) earlier.
From the get-go, I wanted to use pseudo-mythological creatures in my story (I won’t spoil the surprise here, since I’m using a few for a couple of works I have in the planning stages) and, most importantly, I wanted them to interact, to toy around, with the protagonist or even one of the characters.
Although most plot points changed in the story, the most important setting (where the original story was going to take place) was recycled and became a place that will have importance in the story. You can try to guess and send me a message with your answer and I may or may not confirm to your supposition, you’ll just have to wait for some more time.
I’ll be fully honest with you, Enero will remain public in this site, but I won’t be publishing the rest of El Anuario until I have completed it. It’s not a lack of trust or anything of sorts, but it’s mostly because I want everyone to experience this story from start to finish; that does mean I wont be leaving you hanging!
If you may remember from a post I published a few weeks ago, you might recall me mentioning a story titled A place to hide, well; that story is written and waiting for me to revise it. A couple of days ago, I came back to my home and, whilst I was driving, an idea popped into my mind. So I decided to reuse the title and convert the original story into something completely different; do remember, titles may or may not have things to do with a story. I’ll be trying to publish that text in the coming weeks, I still don’t know when, but keep your eyes peeled!
The past week was full of many things, for starters, I had trouble sleeping and I lacked the energy I give into this posts, so I decided to work on this when I felt better, since I didn’t really want to rush and publish a post that I didn’t feel that accomplished what I expected.
As I mention above, expect my next short story (which I think I’ll add a trigger warning to it) as well as a future update on El Anuario and the translation of Enero to English. I would use Google Translate on it, but I want it to have the same work put into it that the original version had.
As for me! There are things that are happening in my life that excite and intrigue me, which I think is normal for everyone. So, if you start noticing a sort of weird jumps in the themes my stories tell, that may be why.
With that said, I bid all of you a farewell until next Friday! Thanks for taking your time reading this posts and, most of all, for taking part in this projects; it really means a lot to me.