A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) Q.: Now that the story has been on Amazon for 10 days or so and has gotten good reviews - one reader wrote, "I really enjoyed reading this story. The author's descriptive writing brought me back to high school.    Really made me think about the 'what ifs' in life." - what are your plans for Reunion ? Will you expand it into a novel? Will there be a sequel?  A.: Before I decided to go ahead and publish Reunion: A Story "as is," I considered expanding it into a longer book, perhaps a novella at the very least. After all, the story expanded outward from one short scene into a fully-fledged short story once, so why not try expanding it further. There are a lot of references in the backstory - Jim's breakup with his first girlfriend, for instance, or maybe the whole business with Jim asking Marty to sing a duet with him at the (sadly) canceled Spring Concert - that could have been expl

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) It is June 1983.  Jim Garraty is a senior at South Miami Senior High. He's a staff writer for the school paper, a college-bound scholar who plans to become a historian and author of books on military history. He's well-liked by his peers and teachers, and his future looks bright.  But as commencement draws near for the Class of 1983, Jim must deal with unfinished business. The girl he loves from afar is also graduating, and rumor has it that she is going away for the summer before starting college in the fall. Worse still, Marty doesn't know how deeply Jim's feelings for her are - unless he tells her. But when an opportunity arises on the last day of classes at South Miami High, Jim hesitates...and the window of opportunity closes. Now, 15 years later, James Garraty is an up-and-coming history professor whose literary career is on the rise. Respected by his fellow faculty professors and recipient of

(C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and CreateSpace (an Amazon company) On June 28, 2018, Amazon Digital Services published Reunion: A Story, my first work of fiction, through its Kindle Direct Publishing division. Currently, it's ranked #20 in the Best-Sellers - Kindle Short Reads - Teen & Young Adult Categories. Two days later, the print version of Reunion was released in a 40-page paperback by Amazon's CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Though the print edition is selling more modestly than the e-book, it's still doing better than my first book performed six years ago.  (C) 2018 Alex Diaz-Granados and Amazon Digital Services, LLC Like most writers, I'm often asked questions along the lines of "Where do you get your ideas from?" and "How did you write this story?"  So, to give you some idea of how Reunion came to be and what it's about, here are some questions and answers related to my new short story.  The Premise:   I

Hey, there, Constant Reader. It’s 6:05 p.m. EST on a warm March Tuesday in Miami, Florida. I’m off to a slow start with my writing; I had a few important errands to run and I didn’t get home until 1:00. I ate a late lunch at a Cuban restaurant; it was delicious, but I think that the huge tortilla with potatoes and fried sweet plantains has made me feel sleepy and a little lethargic. I probably should be taking a nap now, but then I’d be up all night. Then tomorrow I’d feel the same level of tiredness and lack of concentration, and that would suck big-time. So, here I am in my new study, tap-tap-tapping away on my keyboard and trying to get my little gray cells up and running so I can write. As I said in an earlier blog entry, the Muses Thalia (comedy), Melpomene (tragedy), Erato (love poetry) and Calliope (epic poetry) aren’t picky about what I write; they only care if I write. Anyway, it’s a bit late in the day to write a review for Examiner; I have several of those on my to

Hi, there, Constant Readers. It's Monday, November 24, 2014, and right now the temperature in Miami is 86 degrees Fahrenheit under mostly clear skies. The humidity levels are tolerable, but the heat index outside is 96 degrees. Much too summery for my taste; if it wasn't for all the pre-Black Friday ads online and elsewhere, I'd have forgotten that Thanksgiving is this coming Thursday. I apologize for not being a Constant Writer, folks. I haven't been tending to my blog as much I should, but the complications of being a caregiver to a sick parent, trying to find online revenue streams to replace Epinions and Yahoo Voices (a.k.a. Associated Content), the stresses of managing my household finances, and a host of other issues have made a hash of my plans for "A Certain Point of View."  It's hard for me to find a good balance between my personal and working lives, especially when both inevitably overlap. I've been fairly busy over at Examiner, where I&

Although I’ve written literally over a thousand reviews about many different products, it’s a fair bet to say that my favorite subject to write about is movies, both theatrical and made-for-TV ones. It all started when I was struggling to find out which beat or section of my high school student newspaper I wanted to be assigned in.  Because I’d been “drafted” into my first journalism class by my ninth-grade teacher before I even set foot inside South Miami High, I literally felt like a fish out of water in Mr. Gary Bridge’s Newspaper Reporting and Editing class. Fortunately, we students were issued a huge hardcover textbook that covered all the essential points of a journalism course.  Topics ranged from what a pica and a font are to the thorny issues of what constitutes libel, and somewhere in between there were chapters devoted to each section (News, Features, Sports, Op/Ed) in an average student newspaper. I browsed through these chapters rather half-heartedly, not really

I know that many, if not most, of the problems that affect everyone's hit counts are purely technical or related to the site's business model. We reviewers can't solve  those  problems. Sure, tech-savvy Epinions members who know how to crunch data and have hands-on experience with website design and operation should chime in and suggest fixes to Damon and his colleagues. I'm a writer, so I can only sit on the sidelines when we discuss Google Panda, Alexa ratings, the SdC database, and things of that nature. As a writer, though, I think we need to consider the possibility that we need to change how we write our reviews. Many of us, including me, tend to write long and detailed reviews in an attempt to cover every feature of a product. We have a site-wide tendency to describe not only a product's important features, but to pad reviews with "facts" that a typical website reader might not care about. The average reader does not like having to wade through

Dear readers, Even though I am not feeling all that well as of late (I seem to have picked up a nasty chest cold or something), I will be working on a few reviews this week for Epinions' $10-for-10 December promotion. I'm not sure in what order I'll do them,  and given the circumstances I don't know if I'll even be able to get them all done by December 31, but these are the products I plan to write about: Prometheus, the Alien semi-prequel directed by Ridley Scott The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan's final film of his Batman trilogy Seven of the Harry Potter movies (I've already reviewed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ) Charles B. MacDonald's Company Commander Regarding Henry , a film by director Mike Nichols.   I bought it for my mom's Christmas present so I haven't watched it yet, so if I do review it, it will probably be one of the last reviews I'll write this year. If I can "suggest a product" (SA