Steady Glide 02/21/2012
 
I haven't been blogging for a long time. I've been on a steady glide these days. There are so many publication news to share, so many rejections, so many ambitious works-in-progress, so many exciting developments in my personal life (for lack of a better term), so many highs and lows that they will exhaust me to even begin documenting them. I sit nine to ten hours a day in front of a computer, and things happen.

But this publication news is different. Fuselit's precious Contraption issue is released today. To say that it's awesome is like saying that the discovery in 1938 of a living specimen of the coelacanth (which was long thought to be extinct) is just another day for science nerds. 

This brainchild of Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone of Sidekick Books is exquisite down to the golden box. The last time my work was included in a publication that was as beautifully produced as this was in Dotdotdash's Jukebox issue. Yes, I'm a sucker for themed issues.
This issue of Fuselit contains the following prose poem of mine, plus loads of excellent stuff from other writers and artists. I can't remember how long ago this was written. I can't remember what I was thinking when I wrote it. Reading it again today felt good, really good, coelacanth-level good. I'm proud of it even if it sounded as if it were written by a stranger. A screenshot from the web content here. 
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Hello, February 02/01/2012
 
Hello, February. What nostalgic glow of sunlight you have today. You smell like coffee. You smell like hope. 

You be a good month -- don't fret, don't squeal, don't prattle about your abbreviated number of days, and don't muck up the lovely dredges of January. We come in peace -- the underpaid, the brilliant, and the gaudy alike. 

We are rooting for you. 
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During the past two weeks, I answered a lot of interview questions and mini Q&As for different magazines and blogs. I noticed a recurring question. The question was: "what advice do you have for aspiring writers?"   

You must understand that I'm not in the position to give any advice on how to run a writing career; what I've got going has none of the constructs of a career. I haven't even formally studied writing. I'm more of a marginally skilled hobbyist, a writer version of a bonsai-keeper. 

Training a bonsai tree to take on a certain styling specific to its species, to miniaturize it, to constrict its posture to reflect the extreme conditions of nature (drought, growing on a rock face, etc.) -- these designs take years to "inflict" on a bonsai tree. Thus, if you are a beginner, you must start with a banyan tree. That's the easiest to train. A beginner can air layer it with ease. And since we're incredibly off track here, let me start another paragraph. :)

Now, some highly-skilled bonsai experts have an eye for styling, and they produce little trees that preen on red-carpeted bonsai showrooms and simulated garden exhibits. Their training techniques are difficult to replicate because those take introspection and daring. On the other hand, there are people who are very interested in cultivating bonsai, but their stunted little trees are only meant to be displayed in their backyards (flaws like overgrown roots, over-watering leading to defoliation, wiring marks, etc. indicate amateurish techniques). 

I'm the bonsai-keeper who is between the backyard and the showroom. So, taking note of my qualifications and the lack thereof, I write my unsolicited advice as:

1. Remember your chemistry. From a saturated solution kept in the right conditions, you can either obtain a mass of many small crystals or one large crystal. But take note that when a lot of small crystals are present in the solution, they will prevent the formation of bigger crystals. This is a worn writing advice, but it's effective. Solitude will help your writing. I don't mean that in the physical sense (although I'm a poster girl for antisocial behavior), but mentally distancing yourself from norms (the today-I'll-write-some-YA-slapdash-pseudo-tale-because-that's-what-everyone-is-doing sort of thing) can help you produce good material. You write the best you can, then you find a legitimate publisher to stand by your every word. 

2. If you can help it, don't self-publish. I buy a lot of self-published books, but only from writers whose work I've already encountered in traditional outlets like magazines and journals. I count nineteen of the authors (whose writing I admire) who self-published at some point. For me, self-publishing is just too easy -- slap on a cover, buy an ISBN, then upload. My writing goals are different. 

3. Read a lot. Read what your contemporaries produce.

4. Eat a lot of vegetables, and never ever overcook them. 

5. If you have a librarian status in Goodreads, then you must help other writers to upload their books. You don't need the author's permission. I do this all the time. There are so many small press books and chapbooks that need to be listed. 

6. Learn from the Japanese. Think of that exquisite, intricately windswept, meticulously structured showroom bonsai you last saw on the foyer of a five-star hotel. Remember how you couldn't take your eyes off it. You couldn't begin to imagine how to recreate it. It took, first of all, an incredible eye for mimicking the contours of nature then followed by years of wiring, training, and retraining. In between, it had to undergo a scheduled watering regime. You just don't water a bonsai like a normal plant; it's not a normal plant. It's meant to thrive on suffering: zero fertilizer, minimal soil, minimal water, plenty of wires to hold it back, more suffering, etc. There's both a science and an art to achieve something that is truly worthy of respect. That showroom bonsai, my friend, is the best and the most satisfying writing goal. 
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The ever kind and generous Meg Tuite invented me to join a foursome (a writing foursome) at Used Furniture Review's Exquisite Quartet. I'm excited to pen my part of the story. 

I also have a story acceptance from Phantasmacore and a rewrite request from Every Day Poets, a rewrite that I don't know how to affect on the piece. It is part of a sequence like the ones published in Amethyst Arsenic and is difficult to tweak; I guess I will come up with something else to submit then. 

I got tickled by being called "an anthologized fictionalist" in an Anobium press release here. I'd love to be called an anthologized anything!

It's almost a Monday. Over the weekend, I've read some, written some... Life has been perfect. Good night.
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Dear World 01/07/2012
 
Dear World:

I now have a shiny Amazon author page. It is not yet completely updated. There's an anthology that I mistakenly added and a lot of publications that are yet to be included. It took me close to half a day to get all these done and for the books to be approved and added to my profile page. Amazon’s customer support is excellent. I also fixed my Goodreads author page. 

Writerly activities are fun. They make you believe that you are worth more than the sum of what you have achieved at this stage of your life. 
    
A lot of interesting things have happened to me these days. Interesting job-related things. I am the newest member of a team who does SEO-related tasks. The team is small and dedicated, and my coworkers (though I only see them in Skype) are very good at what they do. There’s my direct manager, some copywriters, and there's a web designer/all-around tech guy whom I need to send a text message to if I suddenly go offline in Skype. I have to be online for 8 hours, Mondays to Fridays, like a regular working girl. I will emphasize again that I am the newest member of the team. That’s why this project came crashing down on me because nobody wanted it.   

Now, this is the meat of the story:

On top of other promising projects, I was assigned an ongoing six-month to a year campaign for products and services that prevent premature ejaculation. I don’t know what to make of this new field of expertise. I may or may not have practical use for it in the future. I don’t even know that there’s a science to it until now. I only hope that someday during moments of desperation when you need guidance, and you come across something on the web, and you will pause to think -- that web copy is so convincing -- and you eventually end up ordering that lovely tube of lube because it all makes sense to simply clicky click the mouse button, buy your way out of your fears and anxieties for the fate of your unborn descendants, well… then you will know that it was I who wrote that beautiful, beautiful block of prose, those words that extol the virtues of men who practice self-restraint. 

If you should someday receive that exquisite autoresponder email message upon signing up to a members-only newsletter of a certain PE prevention manual (there's an acronym for it!), I tell you, I wrote that deathless piece of fine literature right there where it said: “you don’t know when you will need this.” One of my lowest moments in life occurred on January 5, 2012 when I seriously considered different synonyms for “squirt.” I realize now that all the respect I’ve earned from my contemporaries in the literary community, all the canoodling in various virtual social media junctions where I get to be tete-a-tete with some of the best writers in the world in some pro publications, all the elitism of the years as I looked down with utter disdain upon the Twilight-reading crowd – all these have gone down the drain as I subtly, ever gracefully sales-pitched: “there is no need to be embarrassed.”

This will be the first and last time that I will chronicle my long, arduous journey to the realm of the quick and the uncontrollable. I shall never speak of this again. So should you. Wish me luck. :)

Love,
KOM

P.S. I’m going to ask for a raise (pun not intended) sometime soon. I deserve it more than that person who gets to write for SEO niches involving quilting. And stop complaining about your jobs. Tata…


Now, for the advertisements:
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Bookish society 01/04/2012
 
I've been spending an inordinate amount of time in Goodreads these days. In between work, I troll back and forth to check if anything new has been added to the discussion threads. Before, I simply add and rate the books I've read. I've made "friends" with some Filipino book bloggers, too. One of them even invited me to Manila to join one their book-related activities, and because I live so far away, they'll make some sort of an arrangement so that we can all meet up. All of them are true book addicts, and they discuss about books so eloquently that they make me feel very proud to be a Filipino. I have the national pride of an unformatted microSD, empty and unreceptive to new data. Not until I "met" this bookish sector of the Filipino society. I also realized that I am now officially a geek. Lately, I have been wanting to harass the ones who give a rating of 1 to Ira Levin's books in Goodreads. Why oh why. A 1 is a statement of strong dislike. I take 1s seriously and only give them when I feel that the book is something that must never be opened/written/read. But not Ira Levin. He writes about the most sensational and lurid of topics, I get that, but he's got the guts to cut the meat from them and to charbroil. 

The all-around Osias couple released the full lineup of writers who have been accepted to the Philippine Speculative Fiction 7. Joseph Roque was also kind enough to invite me to submit something to his new editing venture, Desk Rage Poet.

Yesterday, I started to read the Chikiamco-edited anthology Alternative Alamat and Paul Jessup's book. I also wrote and submitted stories around midnight until I was already too dazed to move the mouse. 

Once again, I diluted the 1-Liter bottle of Coke with some water in the fridge last night; my mother is consuming too much sugar, and I can't make her stop. I can upend the contents of the bottle, but there's no use. We are the only supplier of  Coca Cola products (plus the country's popular beer products) to merchants in our area. The supply of toxic drinks are close to limitless in our household. So I now resort to surreptitious acts. 
 
Writing-wise, many life-changing things are happening. A North American publisher is interested to see a novel from me. So I will need 40,000+ words of lucid prose. There's this disorder called hypergraphia, and how I wish I can artificially induce it. 

And because I did not blog yesterday, the number of unique visitors dipped to this:
How I wish I can blog the Theodora Goss way. I love her writing, blog and otherwise.
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Because I blogged yesterday for the first time in my life, this is what happened to my site stats:
I never got that much traffic before. I hope I can keep this up. I figure that if nothing happens that's worth blogging about, then I'll talk about books (so that I'll appear smart) or maybe cooking-related (so that I'll sound like an all-around wholesome homemaker). I've been up and about all day, work-related stuffs and non-work issues, usually there's no difference between the two. I wrote for the dayjob and wrote for my other writing life -- the one that's fun, the one that will lead to my eventual poverty. 

The first nice word from an unbiased source regarding my Insomnia chapbook is here at the bottom. I see what Rise, the book blogger, reads in Goodreads. His reviews make me run for cover. Rise is clearly addicted to how-on-earth-can-I-keep-up Bolaño. I don't even get the hype about Murakami. But he liked Insomnia, luckily, and I am relieved.

Today, I also bought some genre digital lovelies and a book from The Book Depository. There's this stupid rule I follow on book/magazine buying. It is stupid, vindictive, and pointless, but I've stuck to it for many months now and have amassed a lot of very good books in the process (Matt Bell's, Michael Kimball's, Fictionwise/Weightless Books/Smashwords items, etc.). My rule of thumb is to prioritize buying the books written by people (or published by presses) who follow me back on Twitter.  I feel that if a certain writer/publisher does not find me worth following back, then why bother. My money is certainly limited so I have to cut corners somewhere. I will miss out on potentially great stuffs, but I'll take my chances. So today, I scrolled down the followers list and bought these:
Picture

Rhys Hughes, Flash in the Pantheon. I love the stories of Rhys Hughes. His stories have this witty and wise-assy (new word for the day) vibe that doesn't sound contrived. I first encountered his work in an old print pulp magazine that accepted an early story of mine. I've been a fan eversince.
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Walk with me... 01/01/2012
 
Today is the best day to start a blog. 2012 is the Year of the Black Water Dragon in the Chinese zodiac. I am born in 1980, the Monkey year. I'm a lucky primate who will have an extraordinary year ahead -- just ask Madam Ganesha, my favorite quack, psychic extraordinaire, charges 99 cents a minute. :)

I am typing this on an old CQ60 inside my bedroom, looking out through a wide tinted sliding glass window to a yard full of trees and vehicles (my parents have a small trucking business so I see mechanical behemoths everywhere that don't complement the fantastic view). I slept through most of the new year's eve celebration. We did not light any firecrackers. Last night's ruckus has agitated the birds and the dogs.  There are birds living inside the upper trunk of an old star apple tree. Birds really are birds; I will never understand the choices they make. Why live inside a cramped trunk when you can be comfortable while nestled within the branches?

Writing-wise, 2012 starts off fabulously for me. January will see the release of my chapbook Insomnia with Medulla Publishing. Such an honor to have a chap to be released alongside the last collection of Hugh Fox, an influential proponent of the small presses. Popcorn Press has not contacted me yet, but my Grim Series is also scheduled for a January release. Later on this year, my chapbook with Thunderclap Press will be out. In April, Queen's Ferry Press will publish my first fiction book, We Bury the Landscape (originally titled as Imagine). It's made up of 100 little stories about different paintings. Erin Knowles McKnight, the coolest editor this side of the universe, has agonized over the nitty-gritties to create a book that is pristine, carefully copy-edited, perfect. Rereading a manuscript for the back-and-forth edits has driven me close to catatonia, but I love every moment of it. I'm proud of that book and how it  evolved beautifully with the editorial direction of McKnight.

I will have many forthcoming stories and poems. Two horror stories in Anobium (with a magazine name like that, how can I resist). Discounted pre-orders here. And here's the awesome cover:
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