It’s funny to me that I cannot remember when the idea for Baja Air & Sea came to me. I do remember that the name is the first thing I thought about, and later when I was staying at Chucho’s beach house in Centenario, I had a vision about a Port Captain who goes rogue, that captain’s name? Julian Mayorca.
The summer after my high school graduation was when I realized I wanted to be a writer. Being the sensitive and conflicted soul I was in my late teens, I became a poet. Poetry had always been a small part of my life, but when I first got to college I got really into it and I began writing poetry profusely. Poetry is a strange art, because you’re essentially writing to other poets, and even though it can be highly enjoyable to write it, sometimes it’s not so enjoyable to actually read poetry. The lack of an audience always made me look for jobs outside of literature. Even though I was a philosophy major in college, I never wanted to be an academic. I was an extrovert, so I always did well in the hospitality industry. I say I was, because writing a novel turned me into an introvert, but that’s a whole different blog.
In my early 20’s, I moved to La Paz, Baja California Sur, and I became the Maitre D at the nicest restaurant in town, Aljibe. I first got a taste of the yachting life after a year at the restaurant. An old seawolf told me “you’re going to have more fun, meet more girls, and have a better life if you spend more time around marinas than around cantinas.” I loved the marinas and yachts so much that I eventually left Aljibe, and for two years I sailed the Sea of Cortez as a wine steward aboard luxury yachts. I can’t actually go into details, not because I don't want to, but because I don’t remember much of it with clarity. There was a lot of drinking in those days, and most of my life experiences have been rehashed and retold with creative liberty throughout the novel. But I do remember the man that first invited me on his yacht and the lady that inspired me to spend an entire two-week salary on chartering a 100ft yacht for 5 hours. I bet you think I’m going to tell you about them, but I’m not.
I continued to write some poetry through the years, and as I matured and had more life experiences, I began writing some poems with a storyline and plot. They were quite strange, and a few early readers told me “You should skip the poetry and just tell the story.” I took their advice and discovered the beautiful craft of screenwriting. I had always been a film buff, so when I began writing speculative screenplays I had extensive film knowledge.
After the yachting life came to an end, I enrolled in the only film school in Baja back then, the Centro de Estudios Cinematográficos de Baja California, in Ensenada. When I arrived fresh off the boat I could tell that the sea had given me not just a unique worldview but a real story to tell. I already had the name Baja Air & Sea and a vision of this rogue port captain. Throughout film school I got involved with productions and the Mexican Film industry. Because of my connections in Baja and my background in hospitality, I got invited to produce a horror web series that became quite successful called EL PORVENIR. Even though horror has never been my genre, I learned a lot about the craft and business of filmmaking. Miguel Yee, the showrunner, invited me to act in a non-speaking role, and this opened a whole new world for me. Turns out that people liked my face and my voice, so I began getting invited to act all the time. Short films, voice overs, theater work, and every kind of weird acting job you can imagine. Eventually I moved to San Diego to pursue more theater work. Even though I was getting paid to act, I never considered myself an actor, I was a writer, taking acting jobs. But again, any job you take and do with passion begins to change you. I learned a lot about life through theater. I got Involved with Chicano theater and that gave me a clearer perspective of my binational identity.
At this point I had also written and co-written several decent spec scripts that had led to me being the beneficiary of a handful of Baja California screenwriting grants and awards. I also began teaching screenwriting at the University of Tijuana and other institutions. The semi-successful screenwriter is one of the strangest professions because I had written 10 movies, had won grants, awards, even wrote movies on commission, but none of them had been made and by the looks of it were not going to be made. But I still had this story inside me, this story of the rogue port captain.
I quit my teaching job at the University of Tijuana and went up to Los Angeles. I was still doing a little theater for the Chicano and marginalized communities, but I was mostly focussed on the craft of screenwriting. One of the allures of screenwriting is the cultish way in which it is taught and learned. There really is so much knowledge about screenwriting that you think there would be better movies out. During this time in Los Angeles is when I began plotting Baja Air & Sea.
From this point on, it's a weird rollercoaster of fact and fiction, but I eventually settled on telling this story in a new medium for me, as a novel. And It’s one of the best decisions I ever made. There is freedom in writing a novel that is not available in any other medium. I moved back to Baja, and my novel writing separated me from the film industry and brought me closer to my first love; books. I read and wrote all day between acting and copywriting jobs, until one day at the La Jolla Writers conference I met Jared Kuritz, who became my publicist. He helped me get on track to publication, and in May 2020, in the middle of an unprecedented global pandemic, Baja Air & Sea was no longer just a vision of a rogue port captain, but a novel available to anyone with the time to lose themselves, as I once did, in the Baja California sea.
