Possibly Breaking Up The Harvest Novel Draft into Smaller Online Chunks

2/16/2017

I guess I should ask my two avid readers what they would prefer. I am nearing 100 pages, and that is a lot of text to scroll down. I like the Scribd format of the file, but you can't read it on the phone, which sucks. My sister hasn't said what she prefers, and my husband reads the draft on the laptop, though I get more insight from reading out loud to him.

Still, I am on the perpetual hunt for that ideal reader to give me constructive feedback. Most of my writer friends really don't have time, and I don't have the plata to pay someone to read my work. Besides, I drafted these great beginning workshop questions that I really should follow myself or duh, give my husband.

Then the real torture will start with the revising. Did I mention that I was rewriting The Harvest for the third time? Technically, this version is not a revision, but I gleaned as many of the old good ideas for it. Some of the other characters are still in it, but they ring truer this time. I also have to flesh out the level mods for the social order the girls live in. Simpler is better, 1 through 5. Everything else is a capitalist trick. Well, it all is in this novel.

So, I am still nursing this cold, which sucks. Earlier I was in my writing groove with my new writing schedule (kapow), and my brain just stopped. It freaked me out, but it was just my body telling me to rest.

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Dr. Jesú Estrada,
Chicago, IL

I grew up on the outskirts of Yuma, AZ, close to the Cocopah reservation. Because I was ever-bored, I became an avid reader of Spanish comic books and anything in English. Then I moved onto Steinbeck and Stephen King and now read international authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Atwood, and Marouf. I also read a lot of coming of age fiction.

I have been writing stories in both Spanish and English since I was six years old. My fiction and poetry focus on working class issues, primarily about laborers in the Southwest. I also write non-serious fiction, like zombie fiction (I was into it before it got popular with the Walking Dead series, which I love) and dabble in magical realism with a fusion of cuentos and folklore.

I have a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Washington State University, a Masters Degree in English from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors of Arts from Northern Arizona University. I have also taught creative writing, and will do so, spring 2017. Currently, I live in Chicago and teach full-time at Harold Washington College to an amazing student population.

More about me. I am happily married, been so for over eight years, and have a fabulous seven-year-old who makes my life phenomenal: He too is starting to write short stories. I recently had a second baby, Simona, which put a temporary set-back on the publication of my first book, but made my life infinitely more wonderful. My husband is also incredibly supportive, and I have enlisted him to market whatever I do that is worth marketing.

That damned itch just won't let me be, so I'm back to my original love of words.