I’ve always been a reader and a writer, since I was a kid. I loved – love – all kinds of genres: horror, suspense, romance, but Jackie Collins, in particular, always held a special place in my heart. I adore her work and all Hollywood fiction. I gobbled it up when I was a teenager. Eventually, I was re-reading one of my favorites of hers while I was in grad school in Los Angeles, and it hit me. Where is a Latina Lucky Santangelo?
I wanted to read about a badass character like Lucky Santangelo, but I wanted her to be Latina. And that’s how it started for me. I began thinking about the popular stories I liked to read and decided I was going to create those kinds of stories but put a Latina at the center of the action. That’s definitely something I wanted to read. I couldn’t find it, so I started writing. And that’s how All That Glitters came to be.
All That Glitters is a women’s fiction novel that has glamour, Hollywood and some romance mixed in for good measure. It follows the rags-to-riches Hollywood journey of a creative, ambitious, street smart and gorgeous Latina, Alexandria Moreno, who sets her sights on making it big in Hollywood as a writer and film director in the 1980s.
The book is also about relationships. There are three key relationships in the book, and each of the relationship highlights different but complimentary themes that overlap. Themes that include the redemptive nature of loyalty and friendship, the destructive power of giving into your worst impulses, facing your demons, learning to love yourself, self-acceptance and trust.
But, I’m most intrigued by the idea of free will vs. fate. Do we have free will or are things set before we even take our first breath? How in control are we of our life journeys? Is there some pre-determined destination that all of our little, everyday decisions ultimately leads us? Or, is it all just chaos? And, if it is chaos, then how do we account for certain repetitions in life? I suppose I’m quite taken with that theme because I see it played out and the questions come up again and again in different stories I’ve written. And, to all of this, I’d say that the themes became apparent after I wrote the story.
Liza Treviño hails from Texas, spending many of her formative years on the I-35 corridor of San Antonio, Austin and Dallas. In pursuit of adventure and a Ph.D., Liza moved to Los Angeles where she compiled a collection of short-term, low-level Hollywood jobs like script girl, producer assistant and production assistant. Her time as a Hollywood Jane-of-all-trades gave her an insider’s view to a world most only see from the outside, providing the inspiration for creating a new breed of Latina heroine.
Click to Buy on Amazon: All That Glitters
