Rising Stars: Meet Ricardo of Eagle Rock

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ricardo.

Hi Ricardo, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was born and raised dirt-poor in a trailer home in Nogales, Arizona (that’s a small town on the U.S./Mexican Berlin Wall in case you blink and miss it on your drive through). At 15, I earned a full academic scholarship to attend The Lawrenceville School (a New England prep school for rich kids that’s been around forever). After culture and climate shock, I attended Stanford University, spent a year wine-tasting, I mean studying in Paris, and graduated with a highly employable BA in English and French Literatures (not!). I swore never to return to the East Coast lest I hang myself, but I did return (but didn’t hang myself) and worked at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital psychosex ward as a research assistant whilst I put myself through Columbia University’s film school, where I earned my (doubly highly employable) MFA with a concentration in Screenwriting (with honors no less!). I then moved to Denver (God knows why, or maybe She doesn’t), but after a year and a half of prostituting myself to temp agencies, I learned that my-then girlfriend of seven years had suddenly changed her mind about our being together forever. So I took all I had (books and clothes) and stuffed it into a used Honda and drove my broken heart through the icy, treacherous, bittersweet Rockies to sunny, hazy L.A, where I worked day jobs to pay for that highfalutin education mentioned above: from the depths of the typing pool to the dizzying heights of copy editing, from humbling communications management for the farm workers to schizophrenic, paranoid episodes teaching high school English, to being buried alive with admin work at a law firm for the past 17 years because I married the love of my life (when she’s in a good mood and I get paid) and now have a mortgage to pay as well and two mostly well-behaved teenagers (who mostly heed their father’s advice when they feel like it!). All I know for certain is that the only thing I need to do in my life is write (or if not, I will drop quite dead and unhappy and unfulfilled, and that ain’t gonna happen!).

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
If you’re a writer, write. Write every day. Publish as young as you can, and publish as much as you can. Submit to any and all journals and zines and online forums and social media platforms. Get as many credentials under your belt as you can; win as many or any competitions that you can. Never stop learning, but beware not to be exploited by exorbitant tuition and fees for writing schools, courses and contests. I took on $90,000 in student loans to attend film school, and most of it I could’ve learned hands-on by working on a film or making my own. As for contests, I placed as a quarterfinalist and semifinalist in many of them, and even won the grand prize for one of them, only to receive the dubious honor of pitching to a production company that wasn’t even interested in my grand-prize-winning script after all. Attend and participate in as many readings as you feel comfortable with, if only to hear your words and to find your voice. If you’re truly a writer, whatever you do, don’t compromise your time and energy by working a day job like I did (unless you really have to, like I did, to actually pay for rent, bills and those student loans!). The time and energy you can spend writing will be stolen and consumed doing busy work for someone else at a meaningless day job and all for a pittance at that. And you’ll look back at your life in regret to have ended up an office zombie instead of a writer.

There’s no set path for a career as a writer, and that like everything else, it’s a racket about who you know and not what you know in order to get your foot in the door. Even an Ivy-League education means nothing to publishers and film producers when you’re a no-name and a nobody. You have put yourself out into the world as a Writer and be a Writer.

Create your own luck. Believe in yourself. Have faith in yourself. Do it all yourself. It’s the only way to go as an artist. If you wanna make a film, go film it yourself. If you wanna write and publish a book, then write and publish it yourself. Don’t ask for permission or validation. It’s not up to society or others to decide how you live your life; it’s up to you to live the life you want to live!

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m a Writer. I write poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels and screenplays. My writing is similar to my literary heroes John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Sherman Alexie, and Junot Díaz in that my writings are semi-autographical, but from a Mexican-American perspective; whereas, my graphic novels and screenplays are more influenced by Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone, and the supernatural and horror genres.

Because no one wants to hire a writer, I have had to say yes to myself: by self-publishing 2 books of poetry and photography (under the influence and Greetings from Heaven & Hell) and a graphic novel (The Realm); by writing and producing a PBS-award-winning short film (L.A. Noir); by filming my own video poems for my YouTube channel; by hosting (along with my genius musician friend, electric-violinist extraordinaire David Strother) a monthly poetry/spoken word salon in Pasadena and Glendale, years before Covid hit; and by typing up on a manual typewriter and posting a poem per day, every day, come rain on shine, for the past year on Patreon.com.

How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
I wrote my first novel Prodigal 20 years ago, even made it as far as Quarterfinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel. I spent years editing and querying literary agents only to receive the form reply: “It’s not what we’re looking for right now.” (In other words, I don’t know you, and I’m not even gonna bother to pull it out of the slush pile and read a lick of what you wrote.) Since Covid, I’ve been toiling away in my garage/man cave writing a four-book series following Prodigal’s protagonist Ray Mundo from boarding school to college to grad school to the working world and adulthood. And after years of rejection, I have had to pay a hybrid publisher–Archway Publishing, an imprint of Simon & Schuster–to finally and at long last publish Prodigal. So please buy a copy of Prodigal on Amazon.com and write a review so that Prodigal becomes an Amazon and New York Times Bestseller, and I can bypass the truly rigged, traditional publishing maze and fully profit by self-publishing my own books. GRACIAS, in advance!

Pricing:

• $24.99 for paperback of Prodigal on Amazon.com
• $3.99 for ebook of Prodgial on Amazon.com

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rickyluv.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rikiluv
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/writericardoacuna
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardo-acu%C3%B1a-a-k-a-ricky-luv-29a5866/
• Twitter: https://x.com/writeracuna
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@writericardoacuna

Image Credits
Ricardo Lira Acuña