It’s been a while since I last posted.  Why?  Because I started teaching one of my favorite classes at my absolute favorite school:  UCLA.  The class—Freshman Summer Program—is a bridge program that targets students from underrepresented groups.  These young minds will matriculate Fall term but cut their vacation short in order to pick up some of the essentials—skills, credits, friends—that will give them a leg-up in the hurly-burly, the chaos, the crazy that is the perfect storm on the horizon of their mindscape.

UCLA got rid of Affirmative Action long ago.  So this program represents one of the few opportunities for the university to maintain a healthy level of diversity; the strategy centers upon retention, not recruitment.  My kids have been accepted because of their own merits but, quite often through no fault of their own, many arrive with gaps.  This is because they may have received their educations from schools that are underfunded, from teachers that are simply putting out fires, from parents who are not as savvy as the kind of suburbanite student body that comprises the major part of the incoming class at UCLA.  These young whipper-snappers, they’re smart and eager to learn, so they pick things up quite quickly.  And I love that they are so grateful, so appreciative.  But the teaching is intensive; the interaction, taxing.

I love it.  I hate it.  I come home tired every evening.  Unlike any normal teaching gig, this one has me waking up at 5 and not getting home until 7.  Even though I often feel punch drunk, I would not give up this teaching experience for a hill of glittering, gleaming diamonds!

So this has made me meditate about a pressing question that all writers must face:  how do you balance the life of a scribbler with the demands of a steady job?  This is a mystery I’ve been trying to solve for years.  Here’s a case in point:  the woman who hired me to teach Creative Writing in the English Department at Grinnell College hardly ever published a thing.  And this allowed her to ascend to one of the uppermost ranks of academia:  she became a Dean, second-in-charge, the wingman to El Senor Presidente of the College.  This is not to diminish her quite substantial achievement in administration.  Rather, this is to observe that she did spend many years getting an advanced degree at a prestigious Creative Writing program, only to find herself derailed.  I could see her visibly wince when she would host dinners for big-wig visiting writers whom we would pay thousands of dollars to grace us with their presence.  “Forgive me…I haven’t come across your work…what have you written?” This is a question that would cause her to wince.

My senior colleague’s office was one of those places that reflect the anal retentive cleanliness of someone who might possibly have danced a tango with certain obsessive tendencies:  clean, hard surfaces; ponderous, proprietary order; every tchotchke and knick-knack virtually dustless.  I was sure that there was a system to the organization of her books.  “Gosh, it’s so hard to get writing done during the regular term,” she once remarked after a meeting in which I sat in the visitor’s chair quietly wondering how much time it took to clean such a relentlessly orderly space.  “How do YOU get things done?”  What a question to ask a newbie—a telling one at that.

She clearly channeled her energy into matters that commanded her immediate attention; shortly after my arrival at the department, it was announced that she would assume the Deanship; that uber-clean office would become a loaner to a series of visiting faculty members who lived their lives by stringing temporary gig after temporary gig together, like beads on a motley bracelet.  Those people, they actually published—successfully so–but none of them had a steady job.  You could see it in their eyes, in the anxious way they cozied up to me—a person who would eventually vote about the extension of their short-term contracts.

I’m an honest person.  I don’t lie.  I told her that it was my first semester and, frankly, I hadn’t found the time to get much done in that department—academic, creative or otherwise.  I still don’t have an answer to my colleague’s question but I wonder if you do.  How do YOU balance work and writing?

John Updike—that late, great genius of the short story–once wrote that he reads other writers only for one reason: to plunder.  When I taught Creative Writing, this is one of the quotes I’d trot out for the kids.  And this little nugget would upset my students very much because they had just learned that plagiarism was bad—really bad.  “Isn’t that cheating?” someone always asked.

Plagiarism is terrible.  But this is not what Updike meant by his colorful term “plunder”:  he wanted to see how sentences were constructed, plots arranged, characters developed.  And then he took something away from it—and this take-away is what he lived for.  It was the treasure that he pirated, pillaged, plundered.  Every writer is at heart a pirate.

I am reading James Lee Burke’s amazing novel Burning Angel—the story of a Louisiana detective caught up in a paramilitary intrigue and I’m doing so because I want to learn…ummm, I mean….plunder.  It’s got colorful characters in a cool setting.  And a first person narration in a distinctive regional voice.  So, when I picked up the book, I was a pirate who had my sights set on a certain type of booty.  I thought that’s what I’m going to plunder.  How does that man get a sense of time and place?  How does he keep his voice interesting?

But the glimmering treasure I was after was not what I took away.  What did I plunder….umm learn?  Well, every male character in this yarn is sexy.  The main character, the villain—both all around hotties.  Hell, even when the villain meets up with the protagonist while jogging, the main character notes his sexiness in a decidedly appreciative non-gay way—checking out his rippling muscles and even the firm buttocks which, he observes, a woman might squeeze in the throes of sexual congress.

The men  in James Lee Burke’s novel ooze testosterone.  They’re not GQ pretty-boys.  They’re real men who train at boxing and have chest hair and are damaged by war and sweat buckets of musky man-scent, so powerful it could be harvested to make a thermonuclear cologne.  They have real scars and tattoos and women can’t resist that.  So, that’s my take-away:  the treasure that I hauled back onto my galleon.  My character is going to be sexy.  And he’s going to have more sex.  It makes for good action.  It gets him into places and situations that move the narrative.  A healthy sex life, I’ve discovered, translates into a page-turner.

A while back I wrote a blog, entitled A Friend Coming Back From the Dead.  Such an occurrence actually happened to me:  my friend Craig from undergrad was a motorcycle enthusiast who wound up in a coma; the last time I saw him—twenty years ago—I thought he was a goner.  Then, lo and behold, I saw him again.  Talk about a double take!

Well, you can imagine how this sent me into a tizzy—turbulent emotions overwhelmed me; memories of a time long forgotten flooded my consciousness:  nostalgia, horror, pain—these emotions mixed in whirls and swirls.  This can either be good or bad, depending upon the situation.  For me, it was good:  cathartic and bracing and optimistic.  I was ecstatic Craig managed to come out on the other end alive.  But I can see how the return of a friend from the past can also really suck:  dark and ugly and terrifying.  In either case, this is exactly the kind of situation that will make a narrative take off.  It’s a major plot-maker.

A Friend Back From the Dead scenario also is a great characterization exercise.  This point was made by Margot Kinberg who, like me, writes detective fiction. Responding to my blog, Margot pointed out that a friend back from the dead “can give such interesting backstory on a protagonist and can add a layer of interest in and of themselves.”  So, if you’re stuck, if you don’t know what you really want out of a character, if you just feel like you don’t have a hold of motivations, than this is the exercise for you: write out a short scene in which a friend comes back from the dead.

If you do this, you might consider some of these factors:

1)    What does that friend want?

2)    What secret does he know?

3)    How can he wreck your character?

4)    How can he save your character?

5)    What kind of revenge can he exact?

6)    Who loses and who wins when this wildcard emerges?

7)    What kind of monkey wrench can he throw into the works?

8)    How will this destroy friendship?

9)    How will this strengthen love?

10) How will this incite justice?

There are many great novels—classics–that use this as the starting point for their narratives. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy is one such example; when Susan, the long-lost wife of a successful man, reappears, her arrival throws his entire world into upheaval—including his marriage plans.  But even more recently, Kill Bill by Quentin Tarantino told the story of a young lady who awakes from a coma and goes on a revenge-seeking bloody rampage.

As an exercise, then, this will give you not only a character but, also, a plot.  If you’re weak on plots, this will furnish you with a plot that should write itself.  Additionally, it will throw the contours of your character’s world into wild relief.  You could do well, though, to write this as something beyond a simple exercise.   If you’re having trouble thinking about which friend to bring back to life, ask yourself this:  Who is the last person you want to see?  Who would give you the willies if they turned up at your door?  Who would tap you on the shoulder and make you leap out of your skin?

There always comes a moment when we set a goal—whatever it may be—humble or lofty or grand:  sure, let’s all lose ten pounds; pay off that credit card debt; buy a house.  Goals, we are told, are the sign of a highly ordered life—one that is consciously lead—which also begets best laid plans:  that 401K; the house in the Bahamas; a mistress in the city.

Isn’t it interesting how goals engender goals in a chain, a progression, that leads onward—sometimes upward?  If I buy that BMW, I will get a girlfriend; if I get a girlfriend, I will feel so much happier and my acne will clear up; if my acne clears up, I will smash my arch-nemesis at our high school reunion…but I’ll never be able to get that BMW if I don’t write this book!

Goals—written ones—are the moments in which we strategize, plan and hold ourselves accountable.  Goals—they’re the archetypal moment of plotting: that moment when we rub our hands together and laugh devilishly:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

The rest of the time, we don’t live in the world of plots.  We just go about life, pretty much cluelessly, eating free samples at Costco and channelsurfing on Youtube.  The rest of the time, we are breaking every diet known to man and frittering away the few moments of our life by watching cats doing the darndest things on the interweb.

But every once in a while, we straighten up:  we actually set ourselves into a plot by creating lists of things that have got to get done:  call them bucket lists; New Year’s resolutions; empty promises:  the most effective lists are the ones we write down—the ones in which we script ourselves into a narrative arc.

Does your character have such a list?  Does your character have a goal?  I can tell you now:  after many years teaching kids who want to write artsy fiction, most probably your characters do not have focused goals.  That means your narrative is basically going to suck.

Your characters, they don’t know what they want . They don’t have aim.  They don’t have a measuring stick.  So they are rudderless.  They are walking around the Costco of life, sucking down free samples, bewildered by the selection of wide screen televisions and the many cut-rate diamond bracelets.  They will do things without thinking.  Ugh.

So, take a moment to give your character a set of goals.  They don’t have to fulfill them.  In fact, it is best to make those goals lofty…and have your characters fail miserably.  Why?  Because failure, humiliation, is compelling:  funny and interesting and heart-rending.  If you really want to make this complicated, try to give more than one character a goal—have two enemies write down the things they really want—and you’ll see how a truly complicated narrative will spin itself…like the webwork of a black widow in the dead of the velvet night.

I hate my daughter because I’m afraid she will be more beautiful than me.  I actually don’t like my stepmom’s signature apple pie.  My husband’s best friend is better at kissing but I still prefer to sleep at home.  Everybody has a secret:  hidden, shaming, repulsive.  Everybody has a surface, too:  shiney and bright and inviting.  And so these two aspects of the self exist as binaries:  moon and sun; saint and sinner; virgin and whore.

Perhaps this is the single problem that most beginning writers—and even veterans—experience: their tendency to dwell on the surface…without taking into account the underneath that is enriched by the world of the half-hidden and repressed.  What will give your protagonist depth is prying open that small dusty box that your character keeps hidden in the closet of the self and discovering this:  his secret.

I pattern this exercise off of the hit website Post Secrets.  Never heard of it? “PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard”—that’s what the website says. Quite often, people elaborately decorate the cards:  glitter, paint, collage, photography—you name it; the methods are as diverse as the participants.  Some of the art is strictly amateur hour; a lot is extremely punk rock…in a good way…with that DIY aesthetic:  the objects organically express the peculiarities of the secret in a meaningful way.  Isn’t that what great art is all about?

Here are some examples from the Post Secret Website:

See what I mean?  This exercise is fun and crafty.  It will allow you to fuse the writer inside you with the inner Martha Stewart.  You could do this exercise many alternative ways:  as a series of lists, for instance.  But I choose this method—turning it into a craft project—precisely because physical objects are easier to focus our attention on.  Isn’t that what souvenirs are all about—repositories of memories that, otherwise, would evaporate?  Once you have this physical object in your hot little hands, you will have gotten a handle on many things.  But don’t let the novel quality of the assignment fool you:  this exercise will work all your writing muscles—from your quadriceps to your glutes—until you feel the burn!

This was a piece of digital folk art that everybody was bandying about on Facebook.  It’s a list of 25 things your friends don’t already know about you.  At the time, I had just started up using social media and this was my first attempt to post anything of any length on the internet.

This is quite literally my first blog…the embryo…the proto-blog!

25 Things You Don’t Know About Me!

1. I used to believe that the world was made up of robot-people and I was the only person who was real flesh and blood. This is not to say that other people did not exist; they just existed as flesh-and-blood in alternate universes where they were surrounded by robot-people. This gave me a taste for the flavor of a certain kind of loneliness that I would carry with me for the rest of my life.

2. I used to play a game called Cockroach Auschwitz with my brother. The components: hairspray, mason jars, matches, matchboxes, newspapers, roaches.

3. I used to squint my eyes and stare into the sky, believing I was able to predict the weather. I could see invisible particles that were either long, transparent cylinders or simple ovoids that had the look of paramecium under a microscope. If I saw cylinders, I knew it would rain.

4. As a child, I was teased mercilessly by a monkey on the way to the library. It often imitated me. I would stop to gesture at it. It would imitate me some more. It would follow me along the wall. I hated that monkey and to this day upbraid myself for letting it get the best of me. I should have kept walking. That would have shown him.

5. Once I saw a UFO. But it was really because I was an FOB. That thing in the sky with the colorful lights was a Goodyear Balloon advertising things at night.

It is not an UFO

6. Whenever I read a story as a kid, if the main character was a child but older than me by just a few years, I would get incredibly upset and competitive. Encyclopedia Brown was, therefore, a source of much unhappiness for me.

7. I got many of my siblings addicted to high class trash porn: Jackie Collins, VC Andrews, etcetera. They knew that if I was reading it, there was probably a lot of sex-parts.

8. I used to get very competitive with the moon, which followed me home in the evenings after piano lessons. I would run very fast to see if I could beat the moon. The moon always seemed to gain on me when it was full.

9. Most of my early memories, I believe, are a function of indoctrination from a refugee family hoping to implant the micro-chip of propoganda in my head. Or so I think. For a long time, I thought that most of my parent’s stories were simply that. People make up all sorts of crap when they come to the States. It surprised me later when some of those stories were actually true!

10. It took me a long time to realize that I had been, quite literally, an exile for most of my life. This happened in grad school when being “exilic” was a source of glamour. All the really cool kids read cool books about the exilic condition. These books told you that the exilic condition was liberating and postmodern. It made me wish I was exilic, too. Boy, was I pissed when I realized that I had been an exile without the benefit of any of the glamor. In fact, exiles were pretty much a dime a dozen in my world. Then, I realized that all those fools who were into the idea of exile were posers and frauds. There’s nothing glamorous about being an exile if you have to actually live it.

11. I had an inferiority complex because I never lived a bohemian hand-to-mouth life in New York. Finally, I went to New York but developed an inferiority complex because I didn’t stay long enough.

12. I got a red toy rat for Christmas. It was one of my favorite toys. Inside, it was stuffed with styrofoam pellets. It smelled of gasoline. There is a picture of me with the rat and I am smiling.

13. My parents hated all hippies because of their protests against the Vietnam War. This made me compelled by the hippie aesthetic but, simultaneously, afraid of them, too.

14. Because they were strict and proper FOB’s, whenever my parents saw kissing on television, they would switch the channel. Then, they would turn it back when the kissing was safely over. Inevitably, kissing meant for me that I would miss a vital piece of information.

15. As a child, I thought I would never ever get married because I didn’t want my parents to see me kissing. So I got married and didn’t invite my parents to the wedding.

16. I invented the taser as a child. There were blueprints and everything. So, I felt supremely cheated when many years later, the taser was invented.

17. In graduate seminars during my first year in the Ph.D. program, it was fashionable for the young professors to have people read out loud. It was supposed to get us back to the enjoyment of reading. Often, when it was my turn, I wanted to break down crying and tell everyone that I didn’t know how to read.

18. I used to write all my sister’s Creative Writing assignments when she was in High School. We’d lock ourselves in my room and I would dictate. My mom would stand outside the door and eavesdrop. She was convinced we were having an incestuous affair.

19. I am fascinated by the abundance of pornography in the world. Sometimes I walk into those truly stupendously large porn stores just to gawk at the triumph of capitalism…this is what I tell myself…and I’m not sure if this is a rationalization for what are fundamentally base appetites.

20. I used to tell the elementary school kids that I learned kung fu from my grandfather in the backyard…as if it was no big deal. My schoolmates, after all, paid for real lessons, I told them. This impressed them immeasurably.

21. I was always impressed by my older brother’s tan. He had that high pro glow. When I tanned, I just got dark.

22. My first playboy was on microfiche.

23. I once surfed with dolphins and it scared me.

24. I met up with some old church friends from my Mormon childhood during my brother’s graduation celebration. They told me that they always thought I’d become a concert pianist. I kept thinking, “What planet were you living on?”

25. For a long time, my idea of a truly chic, sharp look was a turtle neck. I still don’t think you can go wrong with a turtleneck unless you have a fat face.

There are not that many Asian American writers out there.  And still fewer Asian American writers penning mysteries.  So, you’re probably wondering:  “brother Khanh, what’s with all this hating?”  Why would anybody create a list predicated on the idea of hate?  And why hate on a minority within a minority?  Isn’t that just mean-spirited and unproductive and tearing-us-down?

Well, I’ve got my response aimed right at you, like a rock in a slingshot.  Short answer:  there’s productive and nonproductive hate.

Long answer:  If you don’t know what you despise, abhor, can’t-stand, then you won’t develop an aesthetic compass.  I used to teach Creative Writing students on the college level at a pretty exclusive school.  It is often touted as the richest school in the country.  And it is pretty highly ranked.  The majority of the students are drawn from polite society and that means that they have learned that hate is a bad emotion.  In their suburban worlds, hatred is meant to be sublimated or repressed.  I kid you not:  half the campus is vegan.

This meant that they were disinclined to express strong emotions of any sort and their fiction suffers for it:  it becomes characterless.   Hatred can be a useful tool.  This doesn’t mean that I want to kick the ass of the few Asian American writers out there.  Neither do I want to burn a cross—literal or figurative—in front of their house of fiction.  I read them.  I need them.  They are my lifeboats and role models.  If I ever met one, I would offer to buy the first round of drinks…and the second…and the third, actually.  I’m pretty much a fanboy at heart.

I’m a relatively new writer of mysteries and so have never developed the kind of systematic hate that will translate into a refined aesthetic sense.  In other words, I have yet to follow the advice I give my own students.  So, here is my list of god-awful, poop-in-my-pants things I hate in Asian American mysteries.  Follow me on this journey to self-discovery:

1)                     Ethnic Enclaves:  I hate Chinatowns and Pilipinotowns and J-towns and K-towns.  Little Saigons and Little Indias—these places are belittling:  the world of the postage stamp.  I know they exist but I will never write about those zones as the exclusive world of my detective.  It smacks of segregation.  It’s just not me.  Okay, maybe I’ll do it for a third or fourth mystery—I’m such a backpeddler.

2)                     Dragon Ladies:  God, my little sister moved to the Midwest to work at a company.  She was a ballbuster and people started calling her a dragon lady.  She owned it.  Posted a comic strip with a dragon lady in one of those Chinese dresses with a high slit and the mandarin collar on her door.  It was framed as a joke.  But she didn’t like it.  It was a joke that was no joke at all:  the worst kind of joke.

3)                     Gangs:  Tongs or triads or yakuzas—whatever you wanna call them–are gross.  I know I have an open market with those Vietnamese gangs.  People love criminality.  If there is one way we Vietnamese have distinguished ourselves, it has been through gang violence…but I just don’t like all that pinky-cutting!  Funny thing:  I’m totally interested in human smuggling, which makes this kind of a conflict of interest.

4)                     Educating the public:  Public service announcements suck!  I’m not really there to teach you how chopsticks work.  It’s just gonna ruin my own meal!

5)                     Overcompensating Angry Asian Characters:  The Angry Asian Male bit—I get it.  I got a bit in me, too.  But there’s a website for that:  Angry Asian Man.  I visit it, so I can get my fill of rage.  Then, I get back to normal.

6)                     Cultural Tours:  I had a Vietnamese friend who took his white friend to Vietnam.  He spent the entire time translating.  It ruined the magic of the experience.  If my detective knocks on a door and sees some Red and Gold squares on it and then a girl answers—all in white—guess what?  You’re shit out of luck:  figure it out on your own (maybe I’ll give you a clue, though).

7)                     Italics:  Italics are the sign of the perpetually foreign.  They pander.  They’re cheap.  They’re lazy.  Readers love italicized foreign words because it allows a sense of interiority.  “I’m an insider now!”  But since when does learning a few phrases make you an insider?  Only dillholes think that!

8)                     Incense and Gongs:  All the paraphernalia of orientalism does not belong in my stories—except poison dart guns.  I love poison dart guns.

9)                     Sexy Stripper Asian Girls:  I love the Sexy Stripper Asian Girl as much as the next guy. A girls gotta eat, right?  I even love her better when she’s a Ph.D. student working at a hostess bar in order to support her expensive coke habit.  Okay, I was leading up to a thorough trashing of this terrible, terrible convention.  But actually, this is sounding pretty good.  So, it’s decided:  Sexy Stripper Girls are fine by me!

10)                 Pidgin:  Pidgin should never be spoken; it should be eaten.  ‘Nuff said!

Khanh Ho is writing the first Vietnamese American Detective Fiction ever.  Why?  Because being the first is a power trip.   Like what you read? Share, comment, subscribe. 

I spent three years traveling.  Backpacking.  And I did it with my best friend and life partner.  We got hitched right after I handed in my doctoral dissertation.  Of course, like all newlyweds, we honeymooned in Hawaii but, unlike others, we began our married lives, quite literally, as homeless people:  camping in beach parks, hitchhiking from spot to spot, depending upon the kindness of strangers.

It was the most fun I ever had.

We bought our expensive tent from the wilderness store—the one that the Hollywood executives frequented–with the rows of gleaming BMW’s parked out front.  “At least this way, folks will know the difference between us and the homeless people.”  I was just trying to take away the sting from the sticker shock of buying so much expensive gear.  In one visit, we spent several thousand dollars.  We only got top of the line stuff.

This store is frequented by rich Hollywood types but I’ve been going to it since I was a cub scout.

It was just a lame joke but this would prove prophetic: the indigent in Hawaii abound in the many beach parks, which boast the very best, the choicest land; that is why so many homeless flock to these parks–that and the fact that the Hawaiian rangers have a hard time finding it in their hearts to dislodge those already displaced.  The upshot: beach parks are filled with people who are making the most of their situation.

If it weren’t for a few signal differences, it would have been easy for us to be mistaken as one of our peers who were down on their luck.  And we made a number of great friends–John from Alaska who had been through such a terrible divorce it caused him to bicycle from Alaska to California to Hawaii; Steve who was getting over his bipolar disorder by enjoying all the island’s rainbows.

What was the essential difference between us and them?   Well, the homeless have terrible gear:  Coleman tents—domed numbers that can turn into kites with a brisk wind.  Alaska John’s tent caught on fire one night.  He probably shouldn’t have been cooking in it.

After a year, traveling gets tedious—at least the conventional way of schlepping about:  moving quickly; covering as much ground as humanly possible; crossing off all the sites; visiting temple-after-temple.  It takes a toll.  So, we developed a pattern of settling in one place for a month and then—zoom—taking off for another month of extended travel.  Like birds of passage at a watering hole, we hunkered down for a spell and got to really know an area.

3 day border crossing from Bolivia to Chile: saw such wonders high in the mountains!

And this is how I’ve done it ever since—even after the three years of constant traveling came to a close.  A month-long stay is conducive to a writer’s life.  It also allows you to get to know a neighborhood.  You favor a certain bar and café.  You frequent certain shops.  People get to know your face and, sometimes, even your name.  You become a regular—incorporated into the life of a neighborhood:  a welcome sight–you become part of the world of the expected.

The secret of doing this well—the secret to getting some great writing done in the process—is a bit counter-intuitive and flies against the typical advice that young, budget travelers bandy about: don’t cheap out on your digs; splurge on your accommodations.  Spend every spare nickel and dime on a pad you can spend a lot of time in.  If you’re a true writer, you will no doubt fritter the better part of the day inside.  So, try for an ocean view.  Go for the doorman building.  Get air conditioning.  Make sure you have tasteful art. High class appliances are a must.  You can economize in other ways.

Secure an apartment in a truly nice neighborhood.  I loved my little piso in Palermo Viejo—the upper middle class section of Buenos Aires with its many boutiques and restaurants and bars.  It was right off a plaza with views of a cathedral.  During my jog, the little private school kids would be let out for lunch and they would swarm in a swirl of uniforms; it was just like swimming through schools of fish–the sort you might see among the coral reefs of Hawaii.  Afterwards, I ate empanadas at the corner bakery:  three for a dollar.

Paying the most that you can for accommodation often runs counter to the code of the budget traveler, which states that accommodation is the lowest priority–simply a place to sleep.  Within this worldview, you should spend as little money on your bed.  That way you can buy booze and go parasailing and pick up an especially nice sombrero.

We hated hostels: useful only for a day while you’re looking for permanent digs, mainly because they’re information hubs

But to a writer, an apartment is more than simply a place to lay one’s head.  It’s ground zero:  headquarters–the tent in the vast terra incognita in which you plan campaigns that will take you into the heart of darkness.  I have a lot of fond memories of my old neighborhoods.  The apartments live forever in my memory.  All the people–the butcher, bartender, grocer–have become characters, if not in my fiction, than in my imagination.  I hardly remember my visits to the National Museum and I do not cherish all those sombreros sitting in my closet, taking up space, ready to go to Goodwill.

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