Pump Up Your Book Chats with Marc Cortez, author of A Gangster’s Garden

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ABOUT MARC CORTEZ

Marc Cortez began his storytelling career in the third grade, when he entered a school writing contest and won with his story THE ANT WHO STOLE EASTER. Since then he has become a marketing writer and frequent blogger, leveraging his writing skills into success as a business executive and entrepreneur. With A GANGSTER’S GARDEN, he has turned his lifelong passion for storytelling into a full-length novel.

Mr. Cortez studied creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lives in California with his wife and two children. A GANGSTER’S GARDEN is his first novel.

To purchase A Gangster’s Garden, click here.

To find out more, please visit him at http://www.gangstersgarden.com

ABOUT A GANGSTER’S GARDEN

Deep in the heart of Denver’s Five Points varrio, an innocent teenage boy is killed in a gang-related shooting.

The intended target, gang-leader Benicio de los Santos, assembles his Latin Disciples into a Denver basement to plot their revenge. Does it matter that the hit planned for him killed an innocent boy? No. What matters is how careless his main enemy, the Sureño Daggers, have become. His cholo brethren demand the bloody removal of their enemy’s chief, King Diaz, and the quick takeover of Sureño drug turf. But Santos recalls a lesson from Sun Tzu – that true generalship destroys rather than counters enemy plans – and so commands his soldados to do nothing. He’ll avenge his wife and son’s murder on his terms, when he decides.

Across town, a family struggles to come to terms with their son’s murder. Businessman Miguel Rodriguez wonders what led his son down to the varrio in the first place, the very streets he’d fought so hard to overcome. He’d renamed his son precisely to distance him from their varrio past, despite the repeated protests of his wife Carmela. Wouldn’t life as a white Julian Ross, mingling with Denver’s elite, offer more than a brown Julio Rodriguez? They’d fought about the name change for years. And now, with Julian gone, Miguel realizes that the only way to find his lost son is to return to his childhood streets.

A GANGSTER’S GARDEN is a story of murder, faith and redemption, set in Denver’s Five Points varrio.

Q: Can you tell us why you wrote your book?

A: I’ve always been interested in the 4 L’s – language, loyalty, lineage, and legacy – and how those mix and interplay throughout a person’s life. I grew up in Oakland, and was exposed to gangs and the street’s dynamics from an early age. I remember watching my uncle, whom I loved dearly, chase a thug down an Oakland street with a baseball bat. So I was always interested in what goes on in the streets, and how it was different than the regular world. And then growing up as part of a Mexican family, there was always a language conundrum: do you speak English, assimilate, and betray your own, or do you commit to Spanish and limit your opportunities? So language as a powerful force in one’s life became an important theme for me.

When I moved to a mostly-white Denver suburb in high school, I experienced racism first-hand, and I became very protective of myself – not only of my lineage, but also of how my past would show up as I moved forward. And so the fundamental ties between my past and present and future have always been there for me, and these are themes that resonate throughout my book.

Q: Which part of the book was the hardest to write?

A: The biggest challenge I faced in writing A Gangster’s Garden was making my main character, gang leader Benicio de los Santos, a sympathetic figure instead of a stereotype. How do you get readers to care about the leader of one of Denver’s most violent Mexican gangs? I did it by painting the framework of the world that he lived in: the warped yet internally-consistent morals of his gang set, the pain and loss he feels for his slain family, the rules he’s constructed about him to give his world a sense of consistency. I try to show that he’s not a simple street thug; he’s a general, planning his enemy’s destruction out of love for his fallen family. And in his twisted world it all makes perfect sense.

Q: Do you remember when the writing bug hit?

A: In the third grade, when I entered and won a school writing contest with my story The Ant Who Stole Easter. I was hooked! And while I’ve been writing stories ever since, A Gangster’s Garden was the first time a story I conceived turned into a full-length novel.

Q: Besides books, what else do you write? Do you write for publications?

A: When I began my career as an engineer, I would often write technical presentations and papers, and this progressed to brand creation and promotion as I moved into business marketing and strategy. And when I became an entrepreneur, storytelling became my lifeblood: I was convincing people to invest in me and my company simply by crafting a compelling story. So writing A Gangster’s Garden feels like a natural progression from the stories I’ve been writing all my life.

Q: Do you have a writing tip you’d like to share?

A: Write! Don’t edit, criticize, theorize, strategize, or editorialize. Don’t write as if trying to be good. Just write. Sit down and write whatever comes to mind: your grocery list, your bank balance, the indigestion you’re feeling, whatever. Writing is about momentum, and momentum can only be created by getting things in motion. Worry about liking it later.

Sit.

Write.

Q: Where’s your favorite place to write at home?

A: Actually, I love writing in crowded, noisy places, so in that sense I’m probably a very atypical writer. My favorite places are book stores and coffee shops, places that get a lot of traffic. I actually wrote a lot of A Gangster’s Garden on airplanes and at airports. But quiet, serene places begin to drive me a bit crazy. Who knows, maybe I need the noise around to force me to dig deep and concentrate. But for me, the noisier and more crowded the place, the better.

Q: What do you do to get away from it all?

A: I strap on my running shoes and go for a long run on the beach. Somewhere around mile five my mind begins to relax, and it’s when I have some of my best ideas.

Q: What was the first thing you did as far as promoting your book?

A: Doing an online book tour! One of the best things about doing it is that I’ve been able to really hone in on the book’s main themes and communicate those as succinctly as possible. Many books cross genres, and because of that might be misplaced or positioned incorrectly when it’s being marketed. I’ve found that the more interviews I do, the better I’ve been able to find my core messages.

Q: What is the most rewarding?

A: I love creating characters. What’s cooler than creating people? I love finding those small details that take a character from being interesting to being full-blown, three-dimensionally fascinating. Benicio de los Santos, my main character in A GANGSTER’S GARDEN, is engaging as a street-gang leader, but becomes riveting when we see he studies the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu. He goes from being an ordinary thug to a master strategist in an instant. So it’s creating characters that I find most rewarding.

Q: Your book has just been awarded a Pulitzer. Who would you thank?

A: My mother, the artist, my father, the fighter pilot; and then of course my beautiful wife Kathy, my son Mason, and my daughter Kayla.

Q: Thank you so much for this interview, (name of author). Do you have any final words?

A: Thanks so much for the opportunity to tell my story. It’s been my pleasure!

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How do you make sales happen for you?

A lot of hard work! I sponsor a lot of on line parties, festivals and contests. Book sales don’t magically happen, believe me. An author has to work hard to earn her readers. And then she has to work hard to keep them by giving them something they’ll enjoy reading. I try hard to make my books worth a reader’s time.

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