Eventually, maybe I’ll be deleting this blog, I’m not sure yet.  For now, I’m still in the process of nesting in my new home.  It’ll probably take me a couple of days to tweak it to my satisfaction, and set up the necessary links to the people I’ve met on this blog.  In the meantime, update your own links.  I’m probably going to be pretty active from now on.

Join me then!  I’m now at The Tao of a Writer.  Haha… and I like the title, too.

It’s funny now, in retrospect, though in the midst of it, it was anything but.  For one thing, I had no idea what to do with the damn thing.  I knew it needed editing, probably some serious revising, and of course proofreading, but to be completely honest I was so sick of the damn manuscript that I went casting about for any and all means to get rid of it.  Except that when I looked at the potential markets, they had what I considered to be pretty steep demands – query letters, synopsis, possible further editing work, and of course, the necessary waiting game.  Lots of administrative details I wasn’t really sure I could hack.  Like I probably said once before, it was nauseating.  I couldn’t even find it in me to write a two-paragraph synopsis.

I considered self-publication, if only to find an easy way out of all of that (shortcutting is the story of my life, you understand), but then it turned out that self-published work needed serious moolah.  There were options of minimum payments, but that meant that the task of marketing and sales would be completely up to me.  Now, with all due respect to the great salesmen in the world, but I hate sales.  I respect the field, and have even greater respect for their skills, but I was prejudiced enough to know that I hated it.  At least, I knew little enough about it to hate it.  On this point you can’t blame me though.  I spent a great chunk of my life learning legal skills, and now I’m cramming literary skills in to boot.  There was no way I was going to voluntarily cram marketing sales skills down my throat, too.

All in all, this left me at quite a quandary.  I needed to edit and proofread.  I needed to start drafting synopsis and letters and to decide on a networking plan.  I needed to steel myself for the inevitable rejections.  And all I really wanted was to start working on my next major work.

So I did what any inane person like me would do.  I whined.

I began complaining at how difficult the whole thing was.  I filled pages and pages of my personal journal going over every nuance of the difficulties I’m facing (i.e., obsessing) – which, thank heavens, I had sense enough not to blog about.  I even considered going back to full time legal work, almost fully convinced that I was kidding myself when I thought I wanted to be a writer – even got myself a couple of interviews and another damn good offer, too (this, after having woken up from a semi-dreaming state when I fancied that a voice was whispering in my ear to just get a damn job).  I redecorated my apartment.  That is, I moved the floor-length bookcase to another wall and my desk and computer to another side of the wall, and for one minute I thought I felt the chi flowing freely (having just read a feng shui book).  I even made life miserable for the most recent victim of my semi-serious attempt at a relationship, trying to start things up again and just as easily ending it again too (which I should probably apologize to him for, but I’m not entirely sure that another peace overture from me would be welcome).

Yep, I always knew I was crazy.  I don’t think I ever realized just how crazy.

All in all, a rather full couple of weeks – I took irony past the point of its acceptable definition, and more.  Though I guess even moments of craziness expires at some point.  I’ve been going on and on about how I didn’t know what I was doing – and then all of a sudden I realized just exactly what it was that I was doing.  I was trying to escape.  Maybe I was even looking for an excuse to fail.

Well, that’s over now (at least, I can hope so).  What ultimately helped me out was (drum roll) – the internet.  There are hosts of articles and written material written by writers who have been there and who know the difficulties entailed – stuff I probably wouldn’t know if people didn’t have the platform to express themselves personally.  Writers writing about writing – it makes one feel relatively less alone.  There aren’t any short cuts, they say.  And there is a sense of catharsis to it, too – hearing the very same sentiments being echoed by people who’ve already taken those crucial steps and gotten their works published eventually. Ultimately, the advice is just to plod along.  Take time out, maybe even go back and do other stuff in the meantime while you let your current work settle.  But ultimately to go back and finish what you started, seeing it all the way through to its conclusion.

It occurred to me then that the difficulty I was having was my basic philosophy.  I must confess that I’ve always taken the easy way out whenever I could.  When I picked my college course, I chose a social science degree instead of economics simply because I didn’t want to do any math.  And even in relationships, when I learn that a girl friend is interested in the same guy I’m interested in, I simply move out of the way – though that probably has something to do with the fact that I wasn’t really ready for anything serious for a very long time.  (And then, of course, irony came back to bite me in the ass when, for the first time, I was ready for something serious, got hit back with the same lines I myself have been throwing out all my life.)

Yep, throw a rock into my path and you’ll not only derail me, I’ll look for a completely different track.  For the longest time I thought I was simply being smart.  The philosophy that “challenges can only make us better” simply didn’t exist in my world before.  I thought that if a challenge challenged me, I’d bow myself gracefully out and look for a less strenuous position I can hold with relative ease.  And now I’m being confronted with the opportunity to stick things out and to at least try to conquer.

I’m not really looking forward to the next couple of weeks, but what the hell… I guess I’ll try to see how far I can plod along.

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1685956/we_are_mr_thomas_gradgrind.html

See more at http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1669971/the_warrior_pose.html

But the rain came down today – again, barely lasting for an hour as summer rains go.  But it was a welcome respite.  Those momentary short bursts of rain are the only thing capable of inducing me to take similar breaks from work, and all I do is watch the falling drops of water clearing the air of the suspended heat; that and the cool, refreshing gusts of night air.  It works just as well to temporary clear my head.

God knows I need those breaks…

I’ve been followed (or as I should say, hounded) by my inability to say no to potential clients.  Hence, I’ve taken up a very limited legal practice once again.  Oddly enough, it’s not so bad.  Take away the constricting corporate environment and the necessity of office diplomacy (i.e., politics), and you are left with nothing other than clients who have come to you for help.  Here come vague memories of the reasons why I wanted to be a lawyer in the first place – to help people.  I guess it’s sort of fitting, to go into a big brouhaha about my leaving practice and then, in the end, to find myself right where I started.  Ironically fitting, that is.

And oddly, it’s the kind of practice I wanted.  Of course, since most of the work I’ve taken on involved litigation, there was the usual struggle to keep my own objectiveness about the matter at hand.  Say what you will about advocacy, everybody suffers more if you give too much of yourself away.  Some clients don’t appreciate that, thinking perhaps that once you’ve taken the cudgels up for them, then you’re supposed to throw yourself whole into the defense or prosecution of their interests.  It doesn’t do to get into those kinds of arguments right in the middle of a case.  The constant pressure to always be right is pressure enough.

What has not changed, though, is the constricting pressure of the courts, where everybody present has a beef to settle with everybody else.  An hour or two spent inside its environs inevitably leaves me exhausted enough that a day or two is spent in recovery.  That convinced me, more than ever, that my decision to leave full-time practice was correct.  I simply did not have the energy to do this round the clock.  A limited practice is all my energy can wisely afford.

On the other hand, though, I’m having a wonderful time stepping up my writing career.  Over the past weeks I’ve closeted myself with some of the masters, reading book after book, and then learning the basics of storytelling from their line-by-line, word-by-word techniques.  You appreciate them for their stories as much as for the intelligence and creativity that brought those stories out.  There comes that moment when you find yourself riding their train of thought, and you even begin to appreciate the emotional quality that drove those thoughts.  It is a challenge to find some coherence and clarity in my own mind.

It has been an uphill trudge for me though.  My background has never included learning the basics of writing, and this I am learning now.  The basics of storytelling (I didn’t even realize there was such a thing), is slowly transforming the quality of my work.  Already I could see the improvement (I would, since all my previous work has been driven mainly by the desire to write and nothing more).  It has been slow, painfully slow, deliberately slow, but gratifying nonetheless.  I’m sure the pace will pick up sooner or later, but for now, I’m content with filling those empty packets of cranial matter with necessary information guiding me to what I hope will be quality work.  I don’t think I ever realized just how much skill is required for even one simple story to turn out right.  The main challenge, though, has been finding clarity inside my head.  What story do I want to tell?  Why do I want to tell it?  How do I want my readers to hear it?  And clarity too, in my heart – for I’m beginning to see that literary activity is just as much emotionally-driven as it is mentally-driven.  And other such basic concerns.  Barring the answers to all of those, I have to literally restrain myself from writing the first word.  When I do write, each word and each line is the product of a lengthy process of internal comprehension.  Like I said, it’s been slow, but gratifying.

This mental clarity has rubbed off on everything else besides, though I am hard put to pinpoint where it started.  I even have the time for regular yoga and meditation now.  It’s all still up in the air of course, like a never-ending transition period that annoyingly pushes and prods till you get it right.  But at least I’m not complaining anymore.

He wanted criticism and feedback of his story – but I kept my opinions to myself.  As it was, the story itself was fairly well-written.  I just didn’t have patience for the plot – and I thought that the choice of plot was pretty much a personal choice – both for the writer and the reader.  So I kept quiet instead.

Let me explain.  Since our choices of literary sustenance are pretty much colored by our own personal experiences, whether or not we choose to read anything will depend to a large extent on why we’d want to read anything in the first place.  And personally, I’d been on the receiving end of that “walking away” often enough for me to be pleased with his choice of theme.  There’s not much fun in being the one left behind – especially when the only reason for it is a wry acceptance of a public perception, from a public whose importance and eventual necessity in a personal relationship is highly questionable.  So while the guy walking away is wallowing in morbid feelings of self-loathing, the girl who is left behind does not even have the mantle of anything remotely resembling “romance” to wrap around herself.  The only impression you can leave the girl with is of how self-centered the guy actually is.  Maybe that’s the real tragedy.

Needless to say, it’s not a story I’d care to read twice.

***

I usually do not write of what I consider “private matters” over a public medium.  More than one person has commented on my refusal to reveal much of my personal life to people.  Short of me asking, once again, why I would want to do so to begin with, I thought this might be a good time to explain.

For reasons I still could not comprehend, a number of my past relationships exploded into public gossip.  On one occasion, a person I considered to be a good friend took it upon herself to launch a “public awareness campaign” of a matter that involved me and a guy, which matter had nothing whatsoever to do with her.  She did so under the guise of being concerned about my welfare, and then went about telling everyone we knew how unfortunate it was for me that I’d become the victim of this unscrupulous character.

It was the lamest excuse for gossip mongering I’d ever heard.  In fact, the matter that the news was spreading so fast didn’t even reach me until months later, and then everybody was hell-bent on being nice (i.e., pitying) to me and being antagonistic towards the guy.  The guy, on the other hand, took it upon himself to make himself scarce to everyone – especially to me.

Like I said, it wasn’t much fun.  All in all it became pretty ugly.

Had anybody even bothered to ask me, I could have told them outright that everything that took place was based on a mutual understanding that was agreed upon way in advance by the only two parties who mattered.  And had anybody even bothered to ask, I could have told them that the guy with this unscrupulous reputation had been consistently decent and nice to me, up until that point when that “friend” pointedly told him he was “unscrupulous.”

Isn’t it funny how people’s usual characters change whenever relationships reach past a certain point?  Decent characters become catty, jealous and even downright demanding and rude, while erstwhile unprincipled personalities suddenly develop the capacity for uncharacteristic kindness.  And then these personalities can change again in the blink of an eye.  It could even be enjoyable, if one were solely focused on enjoying the game.

Strangely, almost the exact same pattern took place once more under different circumstances and involving different individuals before I decided it was time for me to exercise a greater degree of control over things.  Even the most well-meaning of friends have the potential to inflict great harm on unsuspecting individuals if they take their level of influence too much for granted and throw their weight around too indiscriminately.  I’ve gotten tired of always defending the guys I’ve been involved with – I always thought it would have been the reverse.  Oh well…

At any rate, those incidents rolled on towards the past, but not without leaving me with strong impressions of just how much of my personal life I should make public, and to whom.  These are lessons we all learn sooner or later, I suppose.  I just learned them a little too well.  It certainly enabled me to develop an inordinate knack of avoiding questions I don’t want to answer, and of keeping mum about even the most obvious things.  It also taught me to view public perception with suspicion – both its perception of others as well as of myself.  Nothing beats coming to your own conclusions.

All in all, it was a rather productive outcome.

Of course, that’s not to discount the numbers of the population who, for one reason or another, have taken their traveling shoes with them abroad.  I almost think we all have a pin that sticks in our bottoms every time we sit down that makes us restless enough to want to keep moving… and moving… and moving.

The Overseas Filipino Workers have become a class in themselves.  Doctors and nurses and caregivers and construction workers (among others), and those in the “entertainment” industry, all sought greener pastures elsewhere.  I seem to recall a passage in one of Jessica Zafra’s satirical book “Twisted” when she wryly predicted the gradual taking over of the globe by the Filipinos – since the OFWs are basically everywhere, sometimes so strategically located to make world domination plausible.  After all, even most domestic helpers are college degree holders.  I think she ended it with an evil laugh of some kind.

It’s funny because… well, it was just funny.

Anyway, I think I might have mentioned several times that I quite often forget that I actually am living in a tropical island.  Farther down to the south, traveling over water is more common since the islands are smaller and more numerous.  At one time when we were on a ferry on a return trip from Mindoro, one of my companions nudged me from a half-sleep, and with a slight motion of his head indicated another of our company, who was sitting beside him.  He was deep in sleep and had his head bent over the back of his seat and his mouth was fairly wide open.

“Take his picture,” the guy whispered to me.

I had to take several shots of him because my hands were shaking so much from my repressed laughter that the digital image always came out blurred.  By that time the rest of the passengers were watching us and smiling with tolerance at our antics.

I was able to get a reasonably good picture of him (I won’t post it here, though – I don’t want to get sued), and I passed the camera over to the instigator.  We were both laughing so hard in suppressed mirth that we were almost crying.  He nudged the object of our joke awake and showed him the picture.

“Uy!” the guy said in strangled whisper and hurriedly scrunched down in his seat to hide from view.  A fair number of the passengers were laughing by this time.

At any rate, most of my traveling experience is centered mostly around the buses that plied the various routes in the northern part of the country.  Luzon being the biggest island, scores of buses zigzag all around the highways 365 days every year.  (I think I remember someone saying 365 years a day.  This is a worthless interjection, I know.)

A friend recalled having to ride an ordinary bus from the lowlands up to Baguio – it was one of those non-airconditioned buses where there weren’t even any armrests on the seats.  By the time the bus made it to the winding highway heading up into the mountains, he was fast asleep.  Then the bus negotiated a fairly tricky curve, and he woke up to find himself splayed out smack right in the aisle of the bus.  He said he picked himself up hurriedly and finished the trip with his eyes large as saucers, while I laughed like an idiot at his impression of himself with really round eyes.

Once again, I’ve been exceedingly busy that I had to pull myself away for the moment from the addicting world of online blogging.  It’s kinda weird how things have turned out – I have less free time now than when I was actually working: hours that no longer revolve around the 9-5 of the working world (or more accurately, 8:30am-1am the following day).  I suppose it has to do with the increased productivity being so evident (and being so well-received) that one doesn’t really mind.  You get more done in an hour at home that if you take two hours to get there and another hour to “acclimatize” before actually working.

But don’t trust my math skills here.  A friend once joked, after watching me staring into space like a numbskull whenever he throws seemingly simple equations my way (I think that was the time we were paying for our dinner), that he said maybe the kind of questions I was supposed to be fielding would be like: “One plus one equals two.  Why?”

Yeah.  I vaguely recall perfecting a great number of math subjects consistently from grade school until college.  Where in the hell did those “skills” go?  Maybe they got derailed somewhere when some existentialist questions got thrown in their path.  “Why” questions tend to do that to my brain.

At any rate, here’s an announcement for you: the newest issue of the e-zine Liquid Imagination just came out on the first of February.  Here’s the link.

If you look a bit more closely, my name is stuck to a story somewhere in the second issue.  Though readers of this blog will probably notice that the same story is also posted somewhere around here.  I apologize for the lack of variety, but it is just a coincidence.  I do have other work out there, circulating (I hope), just not readily available to html links unfortunately.

Liquid Imagination is a free e-zine, of the fantasy genre, and some really heavyweight literary names are scattered all over those pages, including its “benefactor” Francis Ford Coppola.  By “free” means it’s really free.  At least, I didn’t get paid for what I sent in.  You would think that matters, and in a certain sense, it does.  A very small sense, though.  Just the fact that my name and story got there belies the process of having gotten there.  That is, there was the process when the story was written, then there was the internal battle of wills before actually clicking the “send” button.  And then came about two weeks of editing and proofreading upon the advice of the friendly and helpful Senior Editor Kevin Wallis.  Then there was the waiting.  And then the email came informing the writers of the date the issue is scheduled to come out.

And then February rolled right along after January and there it was.

The one good thing about it is that since its online and free for public viewing, I can invite just about anybody to visit the site (which I did), happy that friends and acquaintances can read my work from somewhere that isn’t on a printed out page straight from my computer, with notes on the edges and corrections scrolled in here and there.  Though, as I told friends, the picture of the Great Wall there took me a bit by surprise.

And that’s as far as my ambition goes at this point.  Of course, I do think about how a writing career might eventually turn out for me, if I had my way about everything, but as great as my imagination can go, it’s still reined in within the bounds of reason.  I’m just happy that it’s out there for people to read.  That’s really the initial (and what I considered plausible) goal I had for me when I started all this – I just wanted it to be read.

The thing about free art is that it gives you just that.  And a very good feeling besides.

I’ve been out of commission for quite some time.  Though honestly, it wasn’t quite so unexpected for me, it being a chronic pattern in my life after all.  Any time I went back home, no matter for how short a time, I always ended up inadvertently divorcing myself from the demands of work which I’ve come to associate with Metropolitan Manila.  Maybe it’s a Baguio thing – that home city of mine stuck high up on those mountain ranges, existing in a (foggy) world of its own.  Somebody once commented that Baguio City didn’t feel like the Philippines at all, one childhood friend said he was so glad he grew up in eclectic Baguio (he said this at the time we first found ourselves having to tough it out in Manila), and another who moved back home after more than ten years of Manila living told me how glad she was to be back, and how she kept asking herself “why on earth did I ever leave?!”

If it isn’t obvious by now, I love my home city…

Maybe it was because I knew this so well that I was a bit hesitant to go back home last December.  I was just starting to get my momentum on the work I’ve been doing, and I knew that I would lose that edge for the time I went home for the holiday break.  It technically did happen before, after all.  I flunked Constitutional Law I back in law school because of it – it was a subject scheduled for 8:30 in the morning every Monday, and because it was my first time away from home, I was horribly homesick and kept going home weekends.  I ended up cutting most of that Monday subject – sometimes I overextended my weekend stay, sometimes I would already be back in Manila but my mind would still be reeling from adjusting to the lowland heat.  The professor gave me a 4 and I had to take the removal exams.  It was the first time I ever flunked anything, and I was quite disgusted with myself.  Of course, by now I’ve gotten past that grade-consciousness thing – I must have if I laughed off that 3W in Transportation Law (of all subjects!) knowing fully well I ought to have deserved a 4…hehehe…

At any rate, it wasn’t like I had any other choice this holiday break though.  Christmas is spent with family, there was no question about that (though there was that time I had to spend a New Year alone when a particularly nasty case scheduled a hearing on the 29^th of December, and afterwards I got so sick it would have been unwise to travel.  All right – enough with the bitching.).

I think it was Dr. Seuss who said, “Nobody likes the waiting place.”  And that particular “motto” (so to speak) has been very true for me.  I have always been under the bane of my peculiar brand of impatience, which wants to see results just as soon as anything is begun.  Otherwise, I generally lose interest and move on to other things.  Patience being a virtue and all, it has never been one of mine.  Contrariwise, I found the ability to move on and forget a much greater virtue.  Leastways, it was an easier virtue for me to swallow.  On a very productive day, I could move like a whirlwind and jump from idea to idea, conversation to conversation, task to task and person to person.  Multitasking came almost naturally, perhaps a symptom of having grown up in this day and age of rapid change.

This, however, has changed of late, and it is a development that I have only recently begun to appreciate.  My relative “unavailability” in the blogging world is a direct result of my directing my attention to the appropriate groundwork for my writing (so apologies for my erratic postings).  Whenever that peculiar kind of inner turmoil (i.e., urge for creative expression) comes upon me, my old means of handling it was to sit down and write whatever comes to mind.  Unfortunately, this has resulted in a great volume of work that has always, to my critical eye, been wanting in one way or another.  Just the thought of the prospect of editing, revising and re-writing was nauseating.

F. Sionil Jose (that Ilocano writer who always appreciates it when young folk come and visit) once asked me how I go about the task of writing.  When I told him, he said to me I had to make changes, and that I first had to think about what I was writing.

Duh.  A self-evident truth I was too engrossed in my little conflagration of whirlwind activities to see.

So about a month ago, I finished sending off all the stories (which I was satisfied with) that I had in my portfolio to whatever publisher I could find who might be interested in publishing them.  Since they consisted of short stories, it wasn’t really hard to conduct that search since there were plenty of literary publications and journals who welcome contributions and who advertise for them online.  Depending on the genre they specialize in, they welcome contributions from whatever source.  As for the two novels I’d written, they remain where they still are.  I’ve never really been satisfied with them and how they turned out, and at the moment I did not have the energy to go about re-writing them.

That said, almost as soon as I’d sent the last short story off, I was impatient to get a response.  The difficulty with that was the reality that there is a waiting period of anywhere from two months to as long as six months, considering the number of contributions each publication gets.  So there I was, drinking coffee by the gallons, checking email several times a day, when I plunked down my coffee cup and decided I had to find something else to do.  I couldn’t go about doing that ceaselessly for the next 6 months!

And there you have it, the first secret to the ability to wait was to consciously shelve the things that need to be considered “pending” and direct your energy to activities other than waiting.

My next round of activities involved writing some new material to add to my portfolio.  Unfortunately, as any creative writer will tell you, writing is not as easy as it looks.  Once I had made up my mind that I was going to sit down and think about what I was going to write rather than simply sitting down and writing whatever comes to me (a not-so-good unconscious emulation of the expressionist movement perhaps), I found that that brand of thinking was not one that could revolve around a clock.  I couldn’t, for example, decide to “think” for 30 minutes and then write.  It wasn’t so simple; that kind of thinking could range anywhere from a day to several weeks or months.  Of course, you know, I realized I couldn’t just “wait” for email replies on the one hand (though one or two have already replied), and “sit and think” on the other.

Again, I had to find something else to do.