The long ponder about self-publishing

Odilia Rivera Santos

Many of you don't know this, but I am stubborn -- which has its up and down side.
I have considered all the paths to publishment of my novels. After sending them to publishers, agents, etc., I begin to think of self-publishing as a more progressive or empowering option.
I guess publishing houses think of branding first. I will not write a Black Puerto Rican version of Sex and the City. I don't care about those women and the fact is that the focus of the show is just revamped 1950s ideas about getting a man.
It was a show about courtesans, except, unlike courtesans who were educated and prized for their intelligence and ability to engage in discourse on art, philosophy and literature, the women of Sex spoke about bullshit: shoes and how to behave in order to please a man. Very retro.
I did see the show for the first time on a plane headed to Spain in 2005 and realized it was just consumerist porno. I watched it as a sociologist while I folded laundry at home and needed a light distraction from the taint of housewifery.
I won't write a gang girl novel because although I saw plenty of that kind of life growing up in the Boogie Down, I was never of it just simply walking past it.

To self-publish requires me to change perspective.
I know that the urban literature genre is about writing in the dialect used and about subjects considered relevant in urban ghettos. Dante did it and it worked well for him.
Some of us who have been nurtured by our experience in the ghetto have different interests and concerns. I am an urban intellectual who reads voraciously and has no baby daddy drama.
No Tyrones in my life, so I don't need to call him to come git his shit.(Badu reference; clever, no?)

Self-publishing does give one control over creative work and considering the many times artists' work is abused, that is a good thing. I think.
Anyway, I would love to hear about others' experience in the self-publishing world.

Buy my e-book! Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I

Axis of two evils

there was a time at which it mattered and I did yearn for it, but now, I don't care.
Granta and The New Yorker will never published anything I write and it doesn't matter.
I have no ancestors that I know of who were kings, no beautiful pictures because there was no money for cameras or professional one-horse-town photographers; we had only stories to tell and our eyes as a camera.
my grandparents did not save some ceremonial robes sewn with gold thread in a rosewood box for their granddaughter to hold up in show and tell.
we are ordinary in those terms and extraordinary in ways that would not matter in certain circles; those circles full of people drooling on each other over the people with whom they are connected.
we were not connected.
we were quite disconnected i think.
we were just Black Puerto Rican warriors in a small ramshackle town, which we packed up and transported to the mainland.
someone teaches you that poverty is a crime and the solution is that evil over there that attempts to disregard you and siphon out some of your culture just for a thrill and perhaps to experience the euphoria of power over supplicants?
lostness would surely ensue and to submit at this point to another's way
to photograph life's circumlocutions . . . is impossible.

Buy my e-book! Latinalogue, Puerto Rican Nonfiction Part I