WHEN WHAT YOU WRITE TAKES LIFE OF ITS OWN

A couple of years before moving to New York City I wrote a book.

Yeah, you know “plant a tree, have a child, write a book.”

Nah, just kidding.

Actually, I was in my transition from writing for theater, TV, films and other media to what I thought I wanted: to write books.

So I wrote a story that came to my mind some years before and I based my characters in real people that I know.

Hey, I BASED, I didn’t use their real lives.

Okay, the story was pretty interesting, a mix of lots of fiction with some real events.

The idea was to make a Road Movie into a Novel.

Now, how to get a publisher?

I wrote the book in Perú, where there WAS a book industry but since many years ago, mostly due to the books, DVDs, CDs, and whatever-format-you-can-imagine piracy, to publish was an effort, lets say… stupid.

Anyhow, I decided that if the market was a Pirate market, well, I was fully allowed to publish my own pirate version of my book. Catch the nonsense in all of this?

I invested some money and got a lame printed, ink spotted, cheap paper, grammatically incorrect, missing pages book. My real and own pirate book!

Then, I invested some more and printed the real version, better paper, properly printed, not so grammatically incorrect (I thought.)

The real version of the book was distributed in the main bookstores of Perú. I kept some copies for me and friends.

That was it.

I totally forgot the book and after almost eight years somebody sent me the following link found in Google:

http://www.incabook.com/shop/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=66996&category_id=VARIOS&PHPSESSID=b5af599841fed75d06e7f5ea2b7f8c93

Somebody was selling the book in a virtual bookstore!

I thought “Hum, that’s interesting.”

Then, some months ago, another somebody sent me this link, also found in Google:

http://www.bibliotecasvirtuales.com/comun/foros/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=48548

It was the critic of somebody who found my book (don’t know if the own-pirate version or the real one) between the cheap books of a flea market.

And he liked, a lot!

Like with those old shoes that you give for charity, you never know what’s going to happen with the stuff you write.

Somehow, it’s like some of the stuff that you write takes life of its own, refuses to die, and find the way to stay alive.

Good for you, my dear “La Tierra del Fuego”, keep kicking, keep staying alive. I love you.

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