laurence kesterson
“There were a few things I wasn’t seeing in a lot of kids’ literature,” says author Victor Piñeiro ’00. “One of them was Puerto Rican protagonists.”
A Place to Escape To
How the daily habit of writing on the train gave way to an award-winning book
ictor Piñeiro ’00 has had a rich assortment of callings. Now the director of digital innovation at HBO Max, Piñeiro moved to New York City after college to teach third grade.
Outside the classroom, he was a filmmaker: Years before the idea of the metaverse took off, he wrote and produced Second Skin, a 2008 documentary about gamers occupying virtual worlds.
Then, Piñeiro became a pioneer of social-media marketing, having helped craft the identities of brands like Skittles, Hasbro, YouTube, and Google Maps.
Across each of his adventures, Piñeiro has always craved one thing above all else — the time to write a novel.
“I’ve wanted to be an author since I was 7 years old. That was the life goal,” he says. “But for decades, I found that I didn’t have the focus.”
In 2017, Piñeiro and his wife, Evelyn, were expecting their first child. His work life, too, was intense. It was, he realized, now or never. But how to find the time?
“For the longest time, I thought, to be a writer, you had to quit your job and write all day,” he says. But then he read an interview with Haruki Murakami, in which the Japanese novelist mentioned that he wrote in short bursts, 30 minutes a day. As it happened, that was the duration of Piñeiro’s commute into Manhattan.
In 2021, Piñeiro’s first novel, Time Villains, was published by Sourcebooks. Aimed at children aged between 8 and 12, Time Villains was Amazon’s Book of the Month in July 2021, and was chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the best books of that year.
It is a fast-paced and fantastical thriller, in which Javi Santiago, a Puerto Rican sixth grader, inadvertently summons characters from history and fiction to dinner, and must deal with the uproarious consequences. Imagine, says Piñeiro, “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” set in elementary school.
sourcebooks
“I like wild, wonderful adventures,” says Piñeiro. “I’m a kid at heart.”
“There were a few things I wasn’t seeing in a lot of kids’ literature,” he says. “One of them was Puerto Rican protagonists.” At the same time, he noticed that books that did feature BIPOC characters focused on identity.
“As a kid, I was not too interested in that kind of book,” says Piñeiro. “I liked wild, wonderful adventures.” While he wanted to delve into Puerto Rican culture, he also dreamed of writing an unputdownable book, an otherworldly escapade.
“To capture the magic and wildness in my childhood,” he says, “and channel it to other kids.”
Born in Puerto Rico, with a dad in the Air Force, Piñeiro and his famiy pinballed around California, Florida, Texas, and the D.C. area, where he went to high school.
A self-described nature freak, he fell hard for Swarthmore’s setting. “I just loved that the College was cradled by woods,” he says. An English major with a concentration in film, Piñeiro also took education courses.
“I’m a kid at heart,” he says. “And there’s something very primal about teaching. You feel you’re in the natural order of things, empowering others with knowledge.”
The brief? Build a social media personality for the candy company from the ground up. Piñeiro concocted a fresh, zany voice for the brand, and one post from 2010 (“If you love somebody, let them go. Because they might come back with Skittles.”) became one of Facebook’s most liked. It is widely considered social media’s first marketing success story.
After a decade doing social-media marketing, Piñeiro joined HBO Max in 2019, where he heads up digital innovation.
When a big show like Game of Thrones is released, Piñeiro’s team uses emerging technologies to build immersive worlds for fans to engage with.
“It’s everything from Alexa and voice, to virtual reality, the metaverse, and AI,” he says. “It’s just so fun to be on the pulse of tech, but also to create things that are meaningful to the stories the company is telling.”
Piñeiro works at balancing his role at a big corporation with the solitary creativity writing demands. The secret, he says, lies in harnessing his circadian rhythm. Before he falls asleep, his brain switches into book mode, imagining the characters that populate the world of his novel. Then, first thing in the morning, the writing flows.
When he gets to the office, he channels that creativity in a fresh direction. While they are very different universes, Piñeiro’s firm belief in the importance of escapism unites his work with his writing life.
“There’s nothing more important,” he says, “than giving children a really interesting, rich place to escape to.”