(Almost) All About Me: An Introduction.

Hello all visitors! Welcome to my humble blog.

My name is Jorge Gamboa and I’m a writer. This blog is my personal space to write about the “behind the scenes” aspect of each writing endeavor I pursue, as well as a place to ask and answer questions, post some book fragments, share book recommendations and just all around have a good time as part of a community of readers.

A little bit about myself: I was born in the beach town of Puerto Peñasco (Rocky Point for our English-speaking tourists and part-time citizens) in the state of Sonora (that’s the Mexican state that borders Arizona, for those who can mentally conjure one of your Geography lessons; if you cannot, a handy map is provided below). But I only spent my first few months there, and I grew up in my dad’s hometown of Sonoyta, forty minutes away from Peñasco and located smack dab in the border (the town on the US side of the border is Lukeville, named after World War I flying ace Frank Luke).

My parents ran two grocery stores while I grew up and I and my sister Rubi (who is 4 years and 5 months younger than me) grew up in this small town that was light on city comforts, but heavy on ways to improvise and imagine ways of having fun. Also, watching a lot of TV, movies and video games helped. I was always an imaginative, introspective child, and due to this temperament and some circumstances in my life, I got used to playing around my backyard, imagining my very own cartoon action scenes with me as its protagonist. These scenes were so vivid and I was so involved in them that I would jump around and make the explosive noises without a care in the world (Note: our backyard used to house a mechanic shop before we lived there, so we had two car pits to play around with. Somehow we survived our childhoods without us or any of our cousins and friends falling in)

We moved around a lot, and I had trouble adjusting to the different people and settings, although I can see now how each experience was an enriching one. And my curiosity and affinity for education helped me a lot. I learned English fluently thanks to the fact that my dad always brought me VHS tapes from animated movies in both their English and Spanish editions, and I would watch them both back to back, thus understanding sentences and even translation changes with ease. Thanks to additional classes and early forays into English-language fiction, I learned the language and I treat it as my own. I find that I flow better when writing in English than I do in Spanish, although I also work and have some projects planned in my native tongue.

How I Became A Reader

I didn’t become a reader until I was about eleven years old. Before that, my dad would read me some books. The first book I ever recalled “reading” in this manner was Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. That book was given as a gift to me by one of my dad’s college friends and I still treasure it to this day, for it came with a lovely inscription that I hold dear to this day.

At eleven  I began to read a series of classic books that were condensed for children and pre-teens. I read The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Song of Roland, Jerusalem Delivered and a collection of stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. From then on I was hooked. Eventually I read the Father Brown stories by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Larry McMurtry’s western novels and Mario Puzo’s crime novels. Those were my introductions to how awesome books could be.

How I Became A Writer

Ever since I was a child, I wrote and drew (not splendidly, mind you) comic books, and I enjoyed the writing assignments in school. I always thought writing was a great outlet for the thousdands of worlds and people inside my head. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I began to write seriously. Since I was fifteen years old I been writing film reviews and criticism, and I haven’t stopped since. And it was around thirteen when I started the first draft of an ambitious historical novel about the Texas Revolution that has become a lifetime obsession for me.

Besides the already mentioned McMurtry, Puzo and Chesterton, early literary influences include James A. Michener, Ira Levin, JK Rowling, Ignacio Altamirano, Marcial Lafuente Estefania, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. More recent influences include George R.R. Martin, Kim Newman, Richard Matheson, Edmundo Valades, Carlos Fuentes, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

I studied a bachelor’s degree on Hispanic Literature in the University of Sonora. I’m currently finishing my thesis on an epic, little-known historical novel from 1945, Quince Uñas y Casanova: Aventureros, by Leopoldo Zamora Plowes, which spans Mexican history between 1844 and 1853, telling the story of Santa Anna’s dictatorship, the Mexican-American War and the adventures of a cast of hundreds.

While writing the thesis, I worked on two novellas whose conception started around 2013. I finished and published the first novella, a mystery action-thriller titled God Forgives, I Don’t, through Amazon Kindle. It is available for download and I shall dedicate the first entries of this blog exclusively to talking about it: the story, characters, the references, what went behind almost every decision during the time of writing and other tidbits.

I plan to publish my second novella, a neo-gothic horror tale, during January.

Hope you enjoy being part of this community. I hope you’ll enjoy my works.

Forever in debt,

Jorge.