After Hours: The Novelist

As a senior writer in UCLA Development Communications, Mike Padilla crafts proposals, profiles, stories and more to help the university foster productive relationships with donors. Padilla is also an award-winning writer of fiction. His first book, “Hard Language: Short Stories” (Arte Publico Press, 2000), earned him a UC Irvine Chicano/Latino Literary Award and an Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. On June 22, “The Girls from the Revolutionary Cantina,” (St. Martin’s Press), will launch. His publisher says of his writing, “His characters run the gamut of personalities, from cholos to movie stars, from elderly comrades to party-seeking club rats.” Wrote one reviewer: “Padilla’s debut novel delivers plenty of laughter, a pinch of intrigue and a whole lot of drama. Readers will be so eager to find out what happens next, they won’t be able to put this down.”

 

A writer’s beginnings: “My parents came to the U.S. from Mexico. I was born in Oakland. My father ran his own business, buying scrap metal, very intense manual labor. My mother did the bookkeeping. I’m the first person in my family to go to college. I went to Stanford, thinking I would major in physics. I took one advanced calculus class and was lost. At the same time, I was taking a poetry class and discovered this was something else that I liked. So I decided to become a writer. I knew it wasn’t going to be particularly lucrative, but my family was supportive. To them, being a teacher or a writer is the best thing you could possibly do. That’s what they understand and respect.”

 

How “The Girls from the Revolutionary Cantina” came to life: “I started playing around with the characters in my book probably 12 years ago but in short story form. Two years later, I started developing it into a novel, and two years after that, the novel started to take shape. I worked on it off and on for years, but wasn’t too dedicated. I had a social life, dating and stuff, and that was taking up a lot of time.”

 

True to character: “­­The characters in my book came from my imagination, of course, but, looking back on it, these were the types of women in my extended family in Southern California and Mexico. My mother and sister were very traditional, but we had these women relatives, mostly cousins, who would visit us in Oakland. They had this energy and life. Yes, they wanted to get married and have kids, but they were also very much focused on having jobs and money, having a good time, flirting with guys, going out to discos. All of that was so refreshing to me when I was a kid. And being just 9 or 10 at the time, I got to hang out with these women and hear how they talked and what they talked about. I think they’ve been in the back of my mind all this time, and when I started crafting my novel, they started coming out.”

 

Creative crisis: “Around the time that I turned 40, five years ago, I had this — I don’t want to say it was a midlife crisis but it was very close. I didn’t want to be the 45-year-old writer who has been saying he’s a novelist his whole life but hasn’t actually finished writing a novel. I knew I had to finish it or I would have lost my sanity — and I mean that quite literally. I realized I was never going to finish if I didn’t dedicate myself to the writing and get some help. So I thought, let me just try taking a class at UCLA Extension and see if that helps. I ended up in workshops in the Writer’s Program for about two years. It turned out to be the smartest thing I could have done, because it got me really motivated.”

 

Plotting the plot — or not: “Some writers outline their books in advance. For me, it doesn’t work very well because things go in a different direction than what you expect. An outline might give you a sense of security, making you think that you know what you’re doing and giving you the confidence to do it. I don’t tend to work that way. I enjoy not knowing what’s going to happen in the next chapter and then finding out for myself. To me, one of the most satisfying things about writing fiction are those moments when you end up writing something and have no idea where it came from or why the character said what she just said. It’s just suddenly there on the page, and it’s exciting. It’s almost like you feel you didn’t do it yourself, like somebody else did it for you.”  

 

Buckling down: “I wrote the majority of the book in about a 2½- to 3-year period. I basically had to give up my social life for a couple years. Weekdays, I would come to work here at UCLA, work my eight hours, maybe go to the gym, go home, eat and try to write if I wasn’t too tired. If I had a lot of energy I could make it for an hour. On weekends, I would come here to my office at the Wilshire Center so that I wouldn’t be distracted. Both Saturday and Sunday, I would work anywhere from 4 to 12 hours. People who knew I was doing this would say, “Wow! You’re really dedicated!” But it wasn’t dedication as much as fear and desperation. I finished the book late in 2006.

 

A native Californian, Padilla set his novel in the San Fernando Valley.

Partner support: “Dan Faltz, my partner, has been really supportive. He’s an aspiring filmmaker. He’s made shorts but hasn’t made a feature yet. He’s got a couple of day jobs with odd hours so he can work on being a filmmaker. He understands what this process is like.” 

 

Finding an agent: “It took me until 2008 to find an agent. It’s a time-consuming process. You use what few connections you have and send out some query letters. A few people will say, “Yes, I’ll take a look at the book.” And then there’s a lot of sit-around-and-wait. But I found a great agent. I revised the book for her — that took a few months — and then she started shopping it around to publishers. After six months, she told me that St. Martin’s Press was interested and would let her know soon. She was very optimistic, and I was very optimistic. But we ended up waiting what felt like three very long weeks for an answer. 

Getting the word: “When my agent called me and told me the publisher said yes, I was just so relieved to have an answer — any answer — I said, “Oh my God, it’s a relief, thank you much.” I was happy about it, but the full impact didn’t really hit me. I got off the phone. It wasn’t until about an hour later when I was pushing a shopping cart down the aisle at Trader Joe’s that it suddenly hit me that my book really was going to be published. I started shaking. I couldn’t finish my grocery shopping but had to leave the store. It was a delayed reaction.” 

Made in Manhattan: “Having an editor in New York is every writer’s dream, very exciting. I finally met her in person this past March when we met to go over some final revisions. I stayed with friends in Manhattan. Checking a map, I saw that the address for the building she was in wasn’t far, so I started trudging over there. I finally found the building, looked up and — and it’s the Flatiron Building! I was walking into that iconic building for a meeting with my editor. It was pretty awesome.”

 

Advance acclaim: “I already have some good reviews. My book is even listed as a feature release at the Chicklit Club website — not that I set out to write a ‘chicklit’ book. I started out with a protagonist who happened to be female, and she happened to have female friends. From there, a story about female friendship evolved. I don’t think the term ‘chicklit’ had even been created then. But now that some people are looking at it that way, I love it. I want that audience.”

 

Next book: “I’m exploring male friendship now. My next book — I’m about two-thirds of the way through — has all male characters. It’s primarily a father-son story, Latino characters, a small family in Northern California in the early ’70s against the backdrop of the Vietnam War coming to an end. It’s not that I sat down and said I’m going to write a story with all men in it, it’s just kind of happening that way.”

Keeping his day job: “Although it’s certainly the ideal to be able to write your own stuff full-time, there may be all of 50 writers in the country that make their living just writing novels. So I don’t anticipate leaving my job at UCLA anytime soon. But in a lot of ways — and I wouldn’t have believed this when I started here 10 years ago — my job has actually improved my writing. Okay, compared to the flight of imagination that’s fiction, writing for an academic institution is pretty dry, although I try to make it as interesting as possible. But my job has given me a greater appreciation for the precision of language. In fiction there’s a lot you can get away with, and sometimes you end up getting away with too much in terms of stretching the rules. This job has honed my skills so when I’m writing my fiction, I’m much more aware of every word in the sentence, which is how a writer should think. Also, my coworkers have been really supportive. The cool thing is that a lot of the people I work with also do creative stuff outside, so instead of puzzlement as to why I do this, there’s appreciation.”

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Padilla will launch his book on Tuesday, June 22, 7:30 p.m, by giving a reading at Barnes & Noble in Encino, 16461 Ventura Blvd. (818) 380-1636. While an RSVP isn’t required, you may do so at his Facebook page. He also has readings scheduled for later dates at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, the West Hollywood Book Fair and the Latino Book & Family Festival. See Padilla’s website for more information.