If you happen to be in the Bay Area

I will be speaking to students of the Creative Writing Program at California College of the Arts this coming Friday, October 24, at 4:30 pm, as well as reading them a chapter from the novel on which I am putting the finishing touches. The event, free and open to the public, will be at the Writers' Studio of the San Francisco Campus, 195 De Haro at 15th Street. After, I will take questions from the audience, and try to reassure them they are not wasting their parents' money on their tuition.

A word to Tezcatlipoca

I have been spending a lot of time in a town called Malinalco, finally finishing a book that I have been working on for what seems like a century. The closest other place of note is a town called Chalma, which has a sanctuary that is the second-most visited religious institution in Mexico, after the Shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City. The other day, after dropping off someone in the Chalma bus station, I stuck around, because as many times as I'd passed through to get to Malinalco, I had never visited the church. I thought it might be a good opportunity to put in a word to Tezcatlipoca (often known as the "black Christ" of Chalma), and ask for a safe passage for the book into the world at large. But it was a Sunday. The lines to get inside were dizzyingly long in the blazing sun and I didn't have a hat. I thought it prudent to plan a return in the middle of the week.