Hi, Iām Melanie
I am am an empathic, tech-literate GenX Puerto Rican woman living in Orlando, currently the largest metropolitan diaspora on the mainland of Puerto Ricans. My mission is to transform Puerto Rican history into novels.
Since 1999, I’ve been publishing stories about my family’s journey from the island of Puerto Rico to the islands of Nueva Yol’ to the Islands of Adventure in Orlando for various types of print and online publications, as well as platforms like Wattpad.
Why do I write in English?
English is my first language, and it’s the language most people around the world understand. But I love speaking Spanish even though I sound like a Super Gringa. š
Early on
I was 8 when I started creating characters and writing in journals about my feelings, dreams, family, friends, boys (lots of boys) and news events. Mrs. Lanny was the school bus driver with a big butt. Margaret was the girl who lived on the other side of the mirror. And Hurricane Gloria in 1985 was the first time my TV screen matched the scene outside my window in Long Island, New York. It was clear that I saw the world through a storyteller’s lens so I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a little scholarship from the National Association for Hispanic Journalists. After 10 years traveling and working in Michigan, Denver, San Francisco and Miami at different newspapers, magazines and websites, I earned an MA in Film at American University in Washington, DC and started converting my written stories into visual productions like music videos, web episodes, animations and documentary.
My family is pretty awesome and provides some of the best material for my stories. My dad was a cop in the NYPD between 1965 and 1987, so when I lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 2018, I walked around his old 77 and 79 precincts while listening to him tell stories about the neighborhood. My mom grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, so when I was living there in 2017, she told me how hard it was to be a good Christian girl with so many temptations around every corner (like my dad, the cop, haha).
Current
Over the past three years, I have been writing two novels with the purpose of landing a literary agent. One novel is about my great-grandmother, who was a rum runner in 1920s Puerto Rico. It was my aunt who sparked the idea. One day while I was hanging out with her at her sweet rent-controlled apartment in Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan, she showed me some old pictures of her grandmother, aka, “Maria La Gata.” She smoked cigars and told everyone who spoke English, “pa’l carajo,” which means “go to hell.” Like most women in her generation, she struggled to survive, but the two details that stood out to me were that she was a rum runner and had several children by several different men. She sounded like the perfect heroine for a novel.
After getting feedback from literary agents, writing professors and workshop peers, it was clear I needed to write my own “personal narrative” before attempting to rewrite the novel about my great-grandmother. But how? I’d already tried with The Femmebots, Sirens, and the Genesis of Change.
Enter stage left: my stacks of journals, dialectical behavioral therapy, and an incident that happened on New Year’s Eve 2022. At first I was calling the novel-in-progress, “I Am La Ceiba,” but after taking a character and conflict class with Colette Sartor at UCLA Extension, the novel’s working title is now, “Model Ricans.” I’m at 75,000 words now and will soon be sharing it with my writing peers before sending it to my writing Madrina for developmental editing.
Who knows how much longer it will take for me to achieve my goal, so to support this endeavor, myself and my new family, I work as a media consultant for several different clients based in DC, LA and Chicago.
Want to improve your writing?
I’m an excellent beta reader for your script, novel, or blog post.