Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This is not a love song. Meche could not stand most love songs. Especially the sappy ballads of the 80s, so cheesy you could choke on them.

Mexico City, 2009

Meche folded the magazine and finally decided to look out the window. The Federal District lay below, a great beast that seemed to have no beginning and no end, towers and buildings rising and dotting the valley. The roads were twisted snakes criss-crossing its surface, the cars tiny ants raising to their anthill. Twenty million people all gathered together – smashed against each other in the subway, crammed into the buses – with the Angel of Independence saluting them from above its pedestal.

It was eighteen years since she’d seen the city. Twenty since she’d last seen her father.

Now he was dead.

He had been pickling his liver for three decades and smoking since he turned twelve, but she’d thought him immortal.

Meche rubbed the bridge of her nose.

She didn’t even have a black dress. She knew her dad would have said to wear whatever the hell she wanted: dead is dead. But her mother would expect black. The whole nine days of mourning. The food they’d feed the guests. The nightly prayers.

If it had been up to Meche she would have cremated him and tossed his ashes in the Gulf of California, like he wanted. But her mother had insisted on the casket, the funeral, the prayers to follow.

She collected her bags and pulled the luggage, trying to find the familiar face among the sea of strangers.

So it begins. Revisions for Sound Fidelity, my novel split between two time periods: a group of teenagers in Mexico City in 1988 and one of those teenagers returning home many years later. What is worse than writing 75,000 words of a novel? Revising those words. I have no idea how one is supposed to do that, though I have a little notebook and a red pen for corrections. Well, plus the printed pages of the manuscript. I plan to be done in a couple of weeks.

If you’re interested in reading the revised copy when I’m done, let me know. I need a Beta Reader before I start shipping it out.

I spent a lot of time listening to the songs below when I was writing. Hell, I spent a lot of time listening to music because the novel deals heavily with records from the era.

Keane, Somewhere Only We Know (This not from the 80s)

Miguel Bose, Aire Soy (This is the 80s. Can’t you tell?)