Welcome

I am finishing my debut novel, The Women Drink Perfume (70,000-word literary fiction), a story set in early 1980’s San Diego and Tijuana during an era when a burst of sprawling developments overtook native scrub and chaparral to create today’s “New California.”

Within this world, 22 year-old Alex Luna is a college student navigating his chaotic and unpredictable life with his mother Ana, who suffered a stroke ten years ago and has lost her voice. She is hardly eating and has started hallucinating from unbalanced meds.

Alex discovers Ana’s spiral notebook from her long ago night class, and a flyer falls out. It reveals his mother was Ana Blue, a club singer in Tijuana back in 1956, before Alex was born!

While working with the doctors to stop his mother Ana’s hallucinations, Alex goes on adventures to Tijuana to find proof of her previous life as Ana Blue.

Author Bio

Frank writes literary fiction that explores themes of elusive love, isolation, obsession, and inconsolable trauma. He enjoys a broad swath of writers in both English and Spanish, and some of his favorite writers include Kazuo Ishiguro, Denis Johnson, Juan Carlos Onetti, Ali Smith, and Gabriel García Marquez.

Frank studied English and Latin American Literature at UC San Diego. His short story, Mellito’s Notebook, was published in Spanish by New Mexico State University. He contributed to a special collection of student literary works at UC San Diego with his Spanish to English translation of Juan Carlos Onetti’s novel, Los Adioses (The Goodbyes).

Frank was a conference interpreter and translator, then had a long career with global software companies, including Microsoft and Algonomy. He worked for several years in Latin America, with constant travel to Chile, Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, and Venezuela. Frank is happy to be writing full-time, and lives near Washington, D.C.

The Women Drink Perfume

All this week I’ve been figuring out what to do about the return of my mother Ana’s hallucinations. We’re deep into our spring term, so I can’t get distracted by her current episode. She’s seeing things and people that aren’t there, and spending most of the day sitting and standing out on the front porch next to the folding card table I set up for her. It’s covered with half-filled coffee cups and a spiral notebook she scribbles in. Even when I’m not at the house, I know she’s sitting or standing out there in her magenta blouse as loud as her beloved bougainvillea, pointing at the cars passing on Rancho Road.

Next Novel:

Dreams of Falconry

What if the career we choose turns out to be an empty shell of what could have been?

53 year-old Alex Luna is Executive Vice President at a global software company, in charge of North and South America. He and his attorney wife Vivian have two children and live in Atlanta.

During one of his frequent trips to Santiago, Chile, Alex sees a woman who looks exactly like Jen Chernov, a long lost love from his first year after college. She was a writer, and he remembers writing every day when they were together. He misses his writing life and upon his return to Atlanta he searches for boxes containing old journals and manuscripts.

At work, management is pushing Alex to drive more revenue by quarter’s end, and he has to help his sales team win the business by visiting a prospect in Venezuela, one of the world’s most dangerous countries. It happens to be during authoritarian leader Hugo Chavez’s dying days. While there, he suffers life-threatening situations that bring on an existential crisis. He questions the choices he has made during the last 30 years, and goes on a journey to rediscover the writer within.

Quotes & Poetry I Like

… his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

W.S. Merwin - “Berryman”