Our real world has evolved. It's become something much different, and inadvertently about healthcare, and about what it means to have good health, and to be able to have good health.

I feel possessive about stories I write in Spanish and so I usually end up translating those into English myself.

I've gotten to try on voices very different than my own, and I've become much more aware of structure than ever before. Also, you really weigh every word. There's no closer reading then when you read to translate.

Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature's unpredictable creatures.

We're a long way from the embargo ending. Look at what just happened with the rollback of Obama's Cuba policies. Two idiot congressmen convinced our idiot president to make it harder on Cubans on the island.

Each genre has its own process. I'm very intuitive about poetry. I usually write first and second drafts out by hand. The other end of the spectrum is journalism, which is much more cerebral, more thought-out and planned. Fiction lies somewhere in between. I usually start intuitively but eventually I need to stop and consider structure, or research, or both.

In journalism, if there's a hole in your story you figure out a way around it because you've got a 4 p.m. deadline. It's a neat skill to have but it's deadly for literature. In literature, you need to stare at that hole, not ignore it. You need to figure it out.