Author Archives: Joe Hinojosa

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About Joe Hinojosa

Official account of a writer in potentia. Blogger, student, bibliophile and novice book reviewer.

Reading, writing, and I hate my job…

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This is the first time since last May that I haven’t posted a book review. It’s a little weird. I had considered reviewing the Divergent series just for the hell of it, but time got away from me. I’m not committing myself one way or the other for now. I do need to get myself a book to read.

Actually, I don’t. I’ve focused so much of my energies to reading and reviewing, that my own writing has suffered. I need to get back on track and do some real writing. As you know, I pulled out a piece I started working on back in 2012, and I think I’m going to finish it. Then I’ll let a few people read it before deciding what to do with it.

But first, I have a book I’m beta-reading for a friend. Allan Krummenacker is working on his second book, The Ship. It’s a simple read and comment job, meaning I’m stressing out about it. I have a three-day weekend starting Friday, so I’m planning on taking some time out to actually read and take some constructively useful notes to pass along. I want this one to be better than his first!

Between you and me, I’m in an odd rut. I’ve ended my twice monthly reviews. I’ve stopped posting on a regular basis, and I’m not writing a diligently as I should. I have come to realize that my job will likely take me no where, that despite all the hard work I put into trying to move into full-time, the reality is that hard work is not rewarded at The Home Depot, cronyism is. That kind of bums me out.

So, my out is to write. Retail is a horrid environment, that offers only part-time work, and routinely cuts hours, further pushing me into poverty. I never had this problem when I worked at Wal-Mart. They gave me a chance and I moved up into management there, though I wouldn’t go back no matter what they paid me.

I’m going to work on my writing and hope this pulls me out of my funk. I can’t rely on employers to do it. They only feed the maw of poverty and the welfare state. I want out of the rut, and I deserve it, or at least I think I do.

Just some thoughts for me to consider while I drive to work this afternoon. Hope your Tuesday has treated you kindly.

Opening up my Limbo File

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I hate getting stuck, which is where I’m at on a project at the moment. It’s so frustrating but I felt I had no choice but to set it aside for a while. It’s now in the limbo where I consign half-written projects.

While I was in the limbo department, I decided to check out something I began writing back in the summer of 2012, and Young Adult book about a former Angel of Death who is now trying to bring about the end of the world, and the girl who stands in his way. It’s always a girl, isn’t it?

I opened it up and began reading from the beginning, and I like what I have so far. What sucks is that it ends mid-sentence, and now I have no choice but to finish writing the damned book so that I’ll know what happens. It’s actually okay with me. I had always intended to come back to this piece eventually, and apparently eventually has now arrived.

I like the general tone of the book. It’s not too dark, nor is it too saccharine. It begins after the death of my main character’s seemingly neglectful mother and my m.c.’s reunion with a father she hadn’t seen in six years. Understandingly, there’s some bitterness about the separation, but she soon discovers the truth behind her parents divorce and the estrangement it produced.

Where it goes from there is still uncertain, which is why I stopped writing in the first place, but I have a few ideas that I’m entertaining. I would like to write this as a series, and I have a few ideas about what I want in the third book, a look into her mother’s decision to divorce her father, and the last moment of her life, when she gave up her will to live, and surrendered to Death’s embrace.

Maybe it’s a little to heavy for a Young Adult books series, but I don’t think so. I hope that I succeed in writing about the power of love and the need to accept death as a continuation, and not an end. We’ll see.

The success of How I Met You Mother

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Quick note, if you haven’t already seen the series finale and would like to, there are spoilers in my post.

~Joe~

himymI just got done watching the series finale of How I Met Your Mother for the second time. It’s been two days since it aired, two days since fans felt betrayed by the show’s creators, two days since fans had their hearts broken by the revelation that the eponymous mother was in fact dead.

It took eight seasons to meet her, but it wasn’t until the end of the finale that we are finally introduced to Tracy McConnell. What should have been the satisfying conclusion, and ultimately the beginning of a modern-day romantic fairy tale, became instead the requiem song of a lost love, of a man still in mourning but who wants to live, a man who feels compelled to ask his children for permission to move on.

The ending upset a lot of fans, and I want to say that that’s a victory for the creators of the show as well as the writers, the crew, and especially the cast. Together, they made us care about a group of five friends trying to make it in life and in love. Together, they made us root for them, to laugh and to cry with them. We fell in love with their journey, and it’s a journey most of us can relate to.

From the start, we knew it’s about Ted Mosby’s journey to find the great love of his life. We know that Ted will find her, and that they will have been blessed with two children. Still, we came back week after week for nine seasons, to finally have the answer as to how he met this mystery woman. We have the answer, and we are upset because we discover that the real reason for the story is not to tel about meeting the mother, but because it’s about asking for permission to date again.

Check out Twitter, read the countless other blogs and articles across the web and you will see what I mean, if you haven’t already. In light of all this anger, how can I say that this is a success? Easy, because we care enough to be angry. We care about Ted, seeing the ups and downs he had to endure on his way to meeting his wife, that we were blindsided by the fact that it ended so soon. Happily ever after only lasted about ten years, then the end.

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The real reason we are upset is due to the success of the writers in creating wonderful characters, rich in history, their eccentricities on display, unique in a way that made them relatable. We know people like them or wish we did, and many of us would like to know them or to be in a group with them. They were our friends.

We saw in their struggles many of the same things we struggled with in life. They faced fears and doubts in their professional lives, in the personal love lives, and with each other. Not one of the five was one-dimensional. They were all complex, and had a range of attributes, some great and others quite ugly.

They became real through the telling of the story so that nine years later we felt a very real emotional connection to them. We were shocked by the mother’s death, a character we didn’t even know, because we cared for Ted and knew how hard he fought for his ideal of love.

It’s not an easy feat to have an audience accept a cast of characters to be genuine, but we did for them, and that’s a legacy that Bays and Thompson should be proud of. For all the writers out there, this is something we all want to emulate, to create characters that pulls the reader into the story we are telling, to make them care enough to laugh and cry, to feel joy or to become angry at our decisions.

On Monday, we finally became privy to the story HIMYM had been telling us for years. I hope those of you who were fans can take a moment to appreciate the magic we witnessed. Had we not cared, we would not have become angry when the moment of the grand reveal happened. For better or for worse, this was the story that they had wanted to tell all along. I for one applaud them, though I would have loved it if Ted would have been granted his fairy tale ending. He deserved it, as did we all.

In Memoriam

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In Loving Memory
Tracy McConnell Mosby
We hardly knew you

Short Story: The price of war

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I shouldn’t have to say it, but this is a work of satire. Although wouldn’t it be funny if the idiots on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox reported this as factual? It’s happened too many times to take any chances. This isn’t real!!!

You hear it everyday in the evening news: conflict. In the Middle East, America is the Great Satan. Propagandists are busy indoctrinating their country’s children to hate our country, and the freedom she represents.

The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan may be winding down, but terrorists are quick to fill in the void left in the wake of our leader’s retreat.

North Korea and the mentally unstable regime headed by the sociopath Kim Jong Un are wanting to destabilize the region, and eradicate the fragile illusion of peace.

Now Russia is trying to resurrect their past glory by reviving the old cohesiveness of the Soviet Union, eschewing the democracy that so many lived and died to set into place.

And what of China? India? Pakistan? What of the rest of the world? Who will be the leader building up a cult of personality, whose hubris will march the world closer to annihilation?

The world is indeed a scary place, and more so than it has been since the end of the cold war, and longer since the days of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. It’s been more than fifty years since the specter of nuclear war has hung so precariously over humanity.

What can we do?

Hello, my name is John C. Weiss, founder and C.E.O. of Weiss and Fleece National Defense Contractors Inc., with a proposition for our American viewers. The price of peace is at an all time high, and the price of war is sure to bankrupt our government, jeopardizing our sovereignty for the first time in centuries. This is where you can help, and why I’m here calling on you.

As a way to minimize costs for our national defense, I’m asking all patriotic Americans to donate to the Secure Our World Defense Fund. S.O.W. was created with one purpose in mind, to raise funds to build up our national stockpile of chemical and nuclear weapons, as a deterrent to the further escalation of hostilities that heretofore have remained simmering just under the surface, waiting to boil over.

Mutually Assured Destruction may have worked in the past, but it’s high time we build an arsenal that can not only take out our threats, but can also intercept any launch headed towards us, or to any of our remaining allies.  With our Predictive Launch Algorithms, we can now accurately launch a preemptive strike on missile bases in even the most remote of locations.

Further, we intend to build Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, with the names of all our sponsors etched into each individual hull, to let our enemies know once and far all, who paid to kill them, not that they’ll live to read it.

And in desert, we are building a monument, a final testament to the spirit of a race so determined to render itself extinct, that they fought to the death of not only themselves, but to the only known center of life in the universe.

If life does exist out in the cold reaches of space, and in the event they learn to traverse the distances and visit us, then they can witness the monumental stupidity of a race that killed itself, and read the names of the ones responsible. For a one-time donation of $100, you can have a brick engraved on the walk leading to the monument. For $1 Million, you may have an obelisk built in your honor. There are many more options to choose from in between!

Don’t be the only ones left out from this one time special offer to destroy all mankind. Space may be limited, but not as limited as the time of man on Planet Earth. Finance your own destruction. Call now, and the first 500 callers will receive this special t-shirt as a free gift, not that you will have too much time to boast of your murder.

Thank you, and please be generous.

My other short stories

Nowing hour

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I woke up this morning to see a friend of mine make a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky. Naturally I reread the poem, and one thing led to another, whereupon I came across this website for archaic words. I started playing around, writing my own poem as a writing exercise. I’m not really a poet, and I’m not even sure this makes any sense, but if it doesn’t I’ll claim poetic license. Enjoy!

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Nowing hour

I began one stagnant eve
upon the threshold between yore and nowing hour
where I stood a waffling man
shifting amongst wants with mask aglower.
Inly I began to sweven
whenas slumber I forsook
the nowing hour nigh upon me come
wist ruth, desire aflamed in my coeur.

Afore decisions be made
a rede I hight hither now
of yore I shan’t return
of morrow erelong I must embrace.
Verily, the path long sought
peradventure must be trod
afore the threshold between yore and nowing hour
breaks, erelong shackled I be made.

My other short stories