Writing

In summer of 2009, I visited the Merchant's House Museum in Manhattan for the first time. It so captured my imagination, I decided the time had come for me to finally write a book. Then I learned I was pregnant, and got sidetracked again. Luckily, motherhood was my turning point. An upside to post-partum blues was that they stripped away all my previous "definers," and forced me to ask myself what I really, really, really wanted to do when I grew up. And if I wanted to teach my kid to pursue his dreams, was I setting an example in my own life? At long last, there was no choice but to tell the truth, and start writing. My first novel, for now titled Loving Anna, is the result of that 2009 idea, plus several subsequent years of courage, soul-searching, research, and butt-in-chair discipline. I am currently querying agents and editors in pursuit of its publication, and beginning research on my second novel.

I don't have any pets (sorry)

I live in Washington DC with my husband and our five-year-old son. (And I'm the only author I know who doesn't have pets.) Our home is a 90-year-old rowhouse in the wonderfully quirky historic DC neighborhood of Mount Pleasant, which has inspired my second novel, about a real-life unsolved murder in the 1920s.

Background

I was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and have wanted to be an author ever since I first read Superfudge, and decided that writing stories was the truest, most natural thing one did when one grew up. But I got sidetracked for ... oh, about 30 years. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico in 1997, I moved to Washington DC, and earned a PhD in Spanish Linguistics from Georgetown University. For several years, I taught college Spanish and Linguistics in the DC area. In all that time, I told no one of my dream to write, wrote only in my journal, and kept my books about writing hidden in the bottom of a drawer. When I became a mom in 2010, I quit my teaching job to stay home full-time with my baby boy.

Sandra Falcón, Author