17-Year-Old Bath Beach Immigrant Pens Sci-Fi Epic

Source: AuthorHouse

Some days it’s a struggle to crank out a four paragraph post, but 17-year-old Alvaro Blanco is already hard at work on his second novel. And the kicker is, until only five years ago, the Bogota, Colombia-born Bath Beach resident didn’t even speak a word of English.

Currently attending the High School for Economics and Finance in Lower Manhattan, Alvaro told The Daily News that he mastered English within a year after working on his grammar and vocabulary with his stepfather for two hours every night.

The hard work eventually paid off:

More than five years later, Blanco held in his hands his first novel “Memoirs of a Revolutionare: Days of War.” The first story in the trilogy is selling on Amazon.com for $15 a copy.

The epic tome follows the adventures of “a soldier fighting against an alien invasion 300 years in the future.”

From the description on Amazon:

The story is all told through the memoirs of Juan Salvador, who is the main character. Juan is the son of a senator and a nurse, and after college he decides to join the army, not knowing that the people of his home planet were going to be attacked by aliens in just a few months. This story is about his journey through the war and his fight to survive a treacherous battle.

Blanco is also getting a little bit of help with sales of “Memoirs of a Revolutionare: Days of War” from his mom, Coney Island Hospital nursing technician Luz Eckmier, who has sold copies of the sci-fi novel to her co-workers.

Eckmier “remembers her son jumping up from the dinner table and racing to his notebook whenever a new idea for his book popped into his head.”

Not bad for someone who “never read much” when he was growing up in Bogota. Blanco says he plans on taking readers on many other sci-fi journeys.