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. 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:
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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 stuff 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 kind word from an unbiased source regarding my Insomnia chapbook is here. I see what Rise, the book blogger, reads in Goodreads. His reviews make me run for cover. Rise is clearly addicted to 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: Rhys Hughes, Flash in the Pantheon. I love the stories of Rhys Hughes. His stories have this witty, wise-assy 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 ever since. |
My BooksThe Drone Outside
Black Arcadia Meditations of a Beast Butterfly Dream Age of Blight Lifeboat A Roomful of Machines Grim Series We Bury the Landscape InterviewsBellingham Review
SmokeLong Quarterly Weird Fiction Review The Collagist SmokeLong Quarterly Kitaab SF Signal The Mangozine Carpe Noctem Blog Friends of Chômu Press Her Kind One Writer's Journey Flash Fiction Chronicles JMWW One Buck Horror Every Day is an Adventure Five-Minute Fridays Lisa Haselton's Blog Prick of the Spindle Connotation Press Philistine Press |