I have spent a lot of time (and I mean, A LOT of time) trying to figure out exactly what to do with my starry-eyed childhood dream of, "I'm going to be a writer when I grow up!" It seemed so simple back then, and in the ensuing years of teenage optimistic naivete: write stuff, … Continue reading New Year, New Writer: Day One of the Rest of My Career
No Más Fantasía
An inspiring story of returning to life and finding purpose, after both seemed lost.
Chris Outcalt | Longreads | December 2017 | 16 minutes (4,461 words)
On a warm, sunny morning in November 2016, a few dozen people packed a county courtroom about 20 miles northeast of Denver, Colorado. Of the cases on the docket that day in Brighton, a working-class city of 34,000 situated amid the state’s plentiful oil and gas fields, one in particular drew the crowd: a hearing to determine the fate of Giselle Gutierrez-Ruiz, a 37-year-old man who’d been sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in a fatal highway shooting in 1997.
On that night nearly 20 years ago, Gutierrez-Ruiz, a kid in a strange country, left a dance club north of Denver around 10:30 p.m. He drove someone his older brother knew south on Interstate 25, the main north-south thoroughfare through the city. A few miles down the road, near the city limit, the passenger pulled out…
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So this is WordPress… Huh.
Well hello. Come here often? ...First time? Yeah, me too. Nice place so far, but kind of drafty around this domain in particular. A notable lack of posts. Some ramshackle, bare-bones formatting, a few pictures. Not a bad start, but could use a bit more TLC on the trimmings. Hence the blog.
