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Me and my Writing. Just do it, Pedro.

Sometimes I feel like Walt Stack, the legendary 80-year-old runner featured in a 1988 Nike’s “Just Do It” TV commercial. Not that I can run like Walt. Or that I ever could. But there’s something that he had that I also have. I call it “ganas.” He probably called it willpower. At age 77, I still have that resolve, that desire to get stuff done. And a determination to continue to follow my dreams, which…
Pedro Chavez
July 28, 2023
ColumnsNovels

Guarding the Haven, Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO Born near El Salto, Colima ALEJANDRA HAD TURNED thirty-six recently. Just like her daughter, she was born at home with the help of a mid-wife, but in a different part of the country, in a two-room shack and in a settlement next to an open ore mine. Her place of birth was a shanty wedged on the side of a ravine, along other shanties that hung for dear life on unstable squatted land.…
Pedro Chavez
November 28, 2021
ColumnsNovels

Guarding the Haven, Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE Early December, nineteen-ninety-eight ALEJANDRA HAD AN off-and-on vexing discomfort in her stomach, a strange nagging feeling of queasiness and lightheadedness that had been pestering her all morning long. It worried her because it was different than any other bellyache she had experienced before. She was alone. Her nine-year-old daughter Juanita was at school and her husband Manuel was at work. She thought about resting for a while to see if the rare vexation…
Pedro Chavez
November 15, 2021