Alex Temblador is a Mixed Latinx award-winning author whose debut novel, Secrets of the Casa Rosada, received numerous industry accolades including Kirkus Reviews’ Best of YA Books 2018 and the 2019 NACCS Tejas Foco Young Adult Fiction Award. She is a contributor to Living Beyond Borders: Growing Up Mexican in America and Speculative Fiction for Dreamers: A Latinx Anthology, and a travel, arts, and culture writer with pieces appearing in Conde Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, and Architectural Digest, among many other publications. She lives near Dallas, Texas.
Q: Can you tell us what inspired you to write Half Outlaw?
I’d written a chapter of Half Outlaw while I was still in grad school working on my MFA in Creative Writing. My uncle had called me a ‘half outlaw’ and that phrase stuck out to me as something important. I wanted to explore what that meant. At the time, I had an initial idea for the novel – a half-Mexican, half white woman would be raised by her uncle who was part of an outlaw motorcycle club. I am half Mexican, half white and I had always wanted to write a story about a Mixed woman, but that wasn’t enough to move forward with the story. So I let that chapter sit on my computer for a few years.
After 2016, when Trump was elected as president, I was having a difficult time understanding how many of my family members voted for Trump. How could they vote for someone who said and did hurtful things to women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and the disability community – all of which are identities I am a part of and/or my siblings represent? I needed to explore this question and I realized that Half Outlaw could be the device to do that.
By the end of the writing process, I discovered some nuanced answers to my question – some I liked and some I didn’t like. But ultimately, I think I created a novel that is full of adventure and memorable characters, and explores the concept of family and how far you’re willing to go for them.
Half Outlaw by Alex Temblador (read by Luzma Ortiz) on xigxag
Q: What does your writing process look like? Do you plan everything out or write
freestyle?
With Half Outlaw and my first novel, Secrets of the Casa Rosada, I did not create a detailed outline of the story beforehand. I did what is called ‘pantsing,’ or ‘writing by the seat of your pants’ which is a colloquialism that means ‘figuring out the story as you go along.’ The only form of an outline that I created when writing Half Outlaw was a list of the places that Raqi and the Lawless motorcycle club would stop during their journey from California to Arkansas. Doing this helped to ensure that the timing of the motorcycle journey was realistic and allowed me to think about whom Raqi might meet in each destination.
Since Half Outlaw, I’ve written another novel (which hasn’t been sold yet) and I did create a detailed outline before I wrote it. Through that experience, I’ve learned that an outline is considerably helpful with writing a plot and an ending, two things that I struggled to figure out in my first two books.
Beyond that, my writing process is quite simple. Once I have an outline complete and I’ve done some preliminary research for the story, I write about 20 minutes in the morning as soon as I wake up. If I feel like writing more in the evening, I will, but I don’t make myself. I can complete a first draft out in about three months.
Q: You are an accomplished public speaker. Were you ever tempted to narrate the
audiobook yourself? What attributes did you look for in a narrator?
I would love to narrate my novels as audiobooks one day, but unfortunately, I have not had the opportunity to do so. It doesn’t seem to be a common practice among authors to narrate their novel, unless you’re a celebrity in some other right or have become what I think of as ‘author famous.’ For each of my books, I was provided a range of narrators to choose from. I requested first and foremost that my narrator be Latine or Mixed Latine (half Latine like I am) as that is the identity of my protagonists and I felt that the narrator could connect to the stories from a personal standpoint and that would come through in the narration. Whether they were fluent or not in Spanish was not necessary for the narrator, but in having a Latine background, I hoped that the narrator would have some familiarity with Spanish which is sprinkled throughout my books.
I was provided a five-minute recording of each narrator reading the first 10 pages of my book. In addition to considering their pronunciation of certain words and phrases, whether it be Spanish or regional colloquialisms, I took into account their narration style, preferring those who let the story speak for itself. In the end, I think it boiled down to choosing a narrator who sounded like what I thought my protagonist might sound like.
“I love that xigxag is making books more accessible, which is something that has long been important to me.
My sister does not have the capability to read on her own, and so the only way she can experience the books that I’ve written is through audiobooks.”
Q: At xigxag we are passionate about using the power of technology to create an
accessible audiobook experience for listeners, including our listen-and-read x-book®. What innovations would you like to see to make reading more accessible and inclusive for all?
I love that xigxag is making books more accessible, which is something that has long been important to me. My sister does not have the capability to read on her own, and so the only way she can experience the books that I’ve written is through audiobooks. Over the past few years, I’ve learned that many of my readers speak English as a second language and have found that listening to my audiobooks is easier to understand than reading the actual text. Even before my books were published, I had firsthand experience with helping media to be accessible to people of different backgrounds through a job writing captions and subtitles for TV and film.
I’ve seen how impactful technology can be to making stories accessible, and so it’s amazing to know there are things like xigxag and the x-book doing just that. That said, we can absolutely do more with the technology available to us. I’d love to see technology be used in such a way to make books more accessible to people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. I also think there is opportunity for technology to be used to make books more easily available in numerous languages – in both text and audiobook format.
Secrets of the Casa Rosada by Alex Temblador (read by Frankie Corzo) on xigxag
Q: Is there any book in particular that has had an impact on your life?
There have been so many books that have had an impact on my life like Ana Castillo’s So Far
From God, which was the first book that introduced me to magical realism, a genre that felt like home. For years, I was looking for a writing style that matched my perspective of the world and So Far From God showed me the beauty of magical realism and the impact it can have on a
story. Once I discovered magical realism, it felt like I was able to finally begin my journey as an
author.
Then there’s Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale which lit a fire within me at 16 years old. I remember reading a harrowing chapter and then crying in my closet because the story affirmed so many things that I knew to be true about our patriarchal society and how women are treated in it. The book showed me how effective storytelling can be on a reader and really inspired me to speak up when I see injustice at hand.
Lastly, in grad school, I stumbled across a collection of short stories by Mixed writers called
Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience. It was the first time I saw my experience as a Mixed girl and a woman written in stories. Each author and their story made me feel seen and when you’ve grown up in a world where your story isn’t told in books or on screen, that is incredibly important.
Q: What are you listening to at the moment?
At the moment, I’m about halfway into a novel by Rudy Ruiz called Valley of Shadows. It’s set on the US-Mexico border in the late 1800s and is a neo-Western mystery novel with magical realism elements. Rudy is a phenomenal writer whose writing style I admire. He has this cadence to his sentences that really impacts the tone of the story and brings those borderlands to life. Plus, the story’s protagonist sees and talks to ghosts, and who doesn’t love a good ‘ghost story’?
Valley of Shadows by Rudy Ruiz (read by Gary Tiedemann) on xigxag
