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.
