Self-conscious Writer Finally Blogs - Writes ...err Blogs

Yes, friends, it has been a month, as Dudut has pointed out, since I last blogged. This is cliche but true: I have been so busy! How do you rest from writing, editing and translation? I do other things: I water the plants, I go to the mall and buy wheat bread, I check the latest at the National Book Store, I eat halo-halo, I watch HBO -- all sorts of things, except write. "Serious" writers need to somehow get down from their ivory towers (another cliche, and I'm using this out of context) so they will have things to write about. In my case, I should go up to that tower, leave all these mingling with text behind. By text, I mean, literal texts - words, phrases, sentences. When I open my computer, they stare at me the way a sampaguita vendor insists on selling all ten leighs by plastering her face on the window of a taxi. (Ok this is what happens when you think of a simile which echoes a local flavor - no this is only partly successful....trying too hard if you know what I mean.)


While I long more for the rain, all I get is a deluge of alphas and omegas of real thick manuscripts and some pages do sound greek to me. (They say don't mix your metaphors so I should stay with the rain issue here...) I plod through the flood (haha, is that a tongue twister or what?) of murky word order and bland diction (Can you think of an adjective which can describe flood and diction? Pardon my choice of words since this is being done in a hurry - bad for writing, hurrying)

By the way, I am working with three electric fans on. Everybody says I should buy air condition, but what do you know, it's June and then hopefully, the rain will fall, even a teeny, weeny bit please, then I can save on electricity. (In any essay writing, this one is poor transition, but give me a break, this is a blog.)

Some texts on my screen are intended for cutting, others are intended for scrutinizing, and some - I need to create from nothing. By eleven o'clock in the morning, too hot for comfort, I curse myself for dozing off while thinking about the next deadline, and meanwhile, I am gathering my thoughts to make that next proposal. (This is a long sentence; don't write this way -- the fog index according to Lindy Hope, my mentor in editing, allows you only 17 words maximum, note Reader's Digest articles, if you can't place the commas and the semi-colons and the dashes in the right places.)

All right. Between my yearnings ("when will all the yearnings end" as Barry Manilow asks in his ballad) and the actual non-events of my text-heavy days, I forget that I am, I insist, first and foremost, a writer. And thanks to Dudut, I am truly forced to blog. But now I am thinking of playing badminton with our Bible Study leader and his wife, lest I become pre-diabetic (That, my friends, is when your sugar index is more than a hundred and twenty - consult the Internet for details.) Yes, instead of blogging, I might get really physical (as opposed to mental?)

As I blog right now, I think about the unfinished manuscripts right here on my filing cabinet. Believe it or not, George Eliot (please don't tell me she's sooo 18th century. I happen to think that she's the best writer during her time) also had unfinished files. Before she sat down and really wrote long novels, she did one Bible translation and plenty of technical writing, she edited for various publications. It helped that her husband had the money to support her as she wrote -- he was an editor -- and he also shielded her from all those knit-picking (did I spell that right?) editors. Her novels were bestsellers during her time and they are considered classics today. A Biography on Eliot which I read is called "Voice of a Century". I'm being very ambitious if she is my model. Yet I do need a model and I can't find them in today's writers. Most of us are writers-on-demand nowadays. This is not always good.

But do readers today care how you write? Maybe not. They do care however about finding answers to their deep and shallow answer now na questions. They are mostly merely looking for that line of wisdom to cut and paste on to their memory for as long as they need it. They can actually just google it so now more writers write for websites. (Do you know that most e-zines pay a pithy $10 for an article you post on their sites? My! My! My! How they bully the writers!)

Anyway, I'm not really talking about writing-on-demand when I think about my own writing. What I should do is find a hotel (in Tagaytay) and stay there for a week, and finish some of what I have begun - a play, a collection of poems and short stories in Tagalog. To do this, I probably should go back to the texts I'm presently working on, ASAP, submit on deadline, and hopefully save for that yearned for Write-in-a-hotel treat. It'll take time, I tell you, if I follow this route. So in the meantime, I blog.

Blogging helps me to nurture a dream, to sustain a kind of high feeling. And now, I've blogged. Indeed, I've blogged.