Archive for writing
dear me.
i was the baby you left behind. you’ve heard it all around, always carry the child in you, and yet, you somehow forgot to put me in your pocket or wherever you keep idle stuff. i cried out but that never works out.
anyway, i’m writing to you.
i’m writing because there are some stuff you left with me, things that you cannot retrieve if you weren’t to take me as well. packaged deal. you’re all grown but what of that? if you were truly grown, than you wouldn’t mind showing off feet of clay, or whatever the hell they call it. (freewriting, eh? hahaha.) i know i’m not making sense but very few people do anyway, and the good thing about it is, sometimes, when you’re making the least sense, that’s when they’ll all look at you, oohhh and aahhh, and say, “oh, she’s so profound.” you know that, too, don’t you?
what are you saying?
what happened to “women who don’t drink 8 glasses of water a day”?
yeah, asking myself that, too. but clamshell first. i need to feed my inner OC.
i know.
i said i wouldn’t but i did.
i bought and paid for this ibook clamshell that looks really beautiful. *sigh* it’s coming from the U.S. and i don’t know how long it’s gonna take to get to me. i hope it gets to me intact. oh man. every instinct tells me i shouldn’t have done it. it’s a great risk.
there, but for a tangerine ibook clamshell, go I.
i hope it does my writing life a lot of good.
in transit.
in one bored moment, i signed up to receive a reading from an online psychic. she sent me an email writing up some vague lines about my personality (sometimes really true) and what i may expect to happen to me in the days to come. she said that i’m to enter a part of my life where i’m to experience something earth-moving (my term). she said i’d be “in transit”. note that it’s vague, though. how to undo the vagueness? pay some $65 dollars so she’d tell me the details to this “transit”. obviously, i ignored her emails. i only signed up for it because it was free. i deliberately googled “FREE”. what part of “FREE” isn’t clear to Jenna, the psychic?
earlier, i received a seemingly last-ditch effort from her. apparently my “transit” has begun. i don’t doubt that every moment of my life, i’m entering some new phase, but that doesn’t mean i should pay some quack to tell me what will happen, what i should do, etc. if it were intended to be this way, we’d have only the present. the future is unknown because it is intended to be unknown. last i heard, stores have run out of crystal balls. i’m still wait listed.
i must say though: the heads-on vague assertions about me got me curious and i almost daydreamed i was paying her $65.
tomorrow, another transit begins. in 7 hours, i’ll know if i’m destined to be the owner of a G3 ibook. not a clamshell yet and i’m still thinking about whether i should still bid for a clamshell one that’s really, really low-end but pretty, and that’s ending in a little more than an hour. (i’m under the delusion that an apple laptop will make me the writer that i’m destined to be. wait a minute! I AM A WRITER ALREADY. i’ve published a poem and that’s more than other “writers” can say for themselves. ahem!)
see you in a bit for the update on the ibook!
reading.
i’m reading Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo’s “Catch a Falling Star”, a collection of short stories. i read mostly foreign writers and i know i have to find the filipino in me. i must say i’m trying to find myself in the writing style. it’s so different from mine. i enrolled in Dr. Hidalgo’s CW Fiction I when i was in college and she said it seemed like my story was set in boston. not in a good way because it was not. lol.
writing-wise, i’m still in the stage i was in at the time i was in her class. no, not true. at least i was writing something then. now, i’m starting over again.
women who don’t drink 8 glasses of water a day.
my first post about the project. you should know i’ve also been working on a novel called “The Axis Archives” and a short story called “Call Me Princess”, both of which I haven’t completely abandoned. i won’t talk about them now.
i bought a book called A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty. it’s not as i expected, although it’s hard to tell at this point whether that unexpectedness is good or bad. i expected tips; i got mostly anecdotes. but there are exercises and the first exercise asks the reader to complete this sentence: ” The day after my eighth birthday, my father told me…” I honestly don’t remember anything my father told me, save for the long letter he mailed (!) to me when i wasn’t doing too well in college. while that is part of the topic today, i’ll save the tearful details for later. this beginning words made me remember how different the men in the lives of my 2 friends and me are. our fathers seem different. their husbands seem different. the men i get attracted to are different from their husbands. it seems like a worthy topic to pursue. a short story talking about fathers may be the starting point of my novel.
i’m calling it “Men Who Don’t” and it will be set long before we got to know each other. our paths should have already crossed at that time, a prelude to future friendship, but none of us knew it then. my starting point would be the trial of the person accused of killing the father of one of us. at this point, i’d have described woman #1 and her mother, someone she doesn’t want to be like. i’d have described her relationship with her father. good, then bad, then getting to be good again. it never got completely good because he was shot dead. she would be the main character in this story. woman #2 and woman #3 will be mentioned. i don’t know how yet.
my project for tomorrow is to freewrite about woman #1 and her father.
the day after tomorrow, i should write a plot for this short story.
i may have to talk to friend about her father but i won’t tell her i’m planning to write a story.
hello. hello.
currently trying to overhaul everything about me. no, wait. that’s not productive. i shd say i’m trying to be a better version of me. sounds better, not so psycho.
i’m the girl with the new desktop pc and i’m still looking out for a good bargain on an old ibook clamshell (fully functional) because it looks sooooo damned good. i’m buying a macbook pro near the end of the year (i told you that already) but fashionably (really depends on how you look at it), the speedy new apple notebook has nothing on the obsolete one. anyway, i’m still deciding on whether shelling out whatever amount is worth it in the face of faster cpu’s. maybe, if i wouldn’t be buying a laptop later on. isn’t that why i decided to buy a pc desktop instead of a pc notebook in the first place?
so, writing-wise. i’m toying with the idea of writing a series of short-stories that together will make a novel. the working title is “women who don’t drink 8 glasses of water a day”. if you google it and something exactly like it comes up, it may be because i’ve created a livejournal and/or blogspot and/or wordpress with that title. i wasn’t able to update any of those blogs anyway.
the stories will be about women, 3 of them in particular, and loosely based on experiences and observations. about some things that may (or may not) be uniquely female — health, family, children, lovers/husbands/other males, friendship, beauty, education, altruism, religion. i’m writing a portion called “the mystery of the odd number” which pertains to the friendship aspect of the female life. bonding, similarities/differences, jealousy. the odd number refers to the 3 main characters getting together at school. what happened and why did they gravitate towards each other when they are clearly of different temperaments?
my next post then may (or may not) contain something related to “the mystery of the odd number”.
new machine to be worried about.
My plan was to buy a PC laptop this month but since I’m gonna be buying a MacBook Pro near the end of the year and my mom has an office-issued laptop that we use in the house, my eyes turned on a PC desktop instead. For the same price as the laptop, you get better features. Here’s the Dell Inspiron 530s that I bought (not the actual picture, but mine looks exactly like this):
Granted, you don’t get the same portability, but here’s hoping this one finally makes me a real writer!
Writing forums.
When you write for yourself, you get lulled by the sonorous yet perhaps-superfluous words that you’ve woven. You can daydream yourself into the top of the New York Times Best-seller List without having created anything worth publishing. You may end up the most prolific creature in an imagined world. And you will never get any closer to becoming a writer.
Earlier, I signed up for two writing forums. I’d still be queasy about opening myself up to rejection, but c’est la vie. After all, what kind of writer doesn’t get rejected? That’s probably why I’m not a very prolific writer. That fear.
Anyway, I signed up with Critique Circle and Urbis. Thus far, I am navigating both sites and finding myself lost in them. I’ll make my comments when I’ve had more time to see what these sites offer. Meanwhile, I gotta get back to writing. Badly!
