The view from my daily workshop session.

So I landed in Reno tired, my eyes red from lack of sleep, lungs breathing in stale cabin air all the way, and I have the jitters. I’m anxious and my nerves are jangly, but it’s not because of the din and jingle of the slot machines by the luggage carousels. I’m not jittery because of the long roundabout trip, free courtesy of Southwest — Oakland to Los Angeles to Reno — or because of the even longer trip I did just 24 hours before (Oakland to Austin to Los Angeles and back to Oakland 12 hours later, just to drop off my daughter). I’m anxious because this is my very first writers’ workshop and I’m in the presence of real writers.

A bunch of us workshop participants are being picked up at the airport and so I click on the link in the email signature of one of the participants. (Let’s give her a pseudonym, like, uh, Janet.) Janet is already published all over the place: PANK! Storyglossia! Jitters, yes? I suppose it’s illustrative of my mindset — much of which I’ve already explored elsewhere — that my first nervous thought wasn’t “Wow, I’m in the company of these people!” but “Crap, what do I have to say to these writers?”

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Back in the early 2000s, one of my fonder blog-related memories was being part of an adobo blog-a-thon, back when I was getting my feet wet in blogging. The idea was that different bloggers would write something, anything, about adobo — a short essay, a recipe, even fiction or poetry if it moved them — with the different links to each other’s blogs. It was fun, even exciting, and I felt linked to this community somehow, imagining other writers I barely knew (and now I know some of them pretty well) at their keyboards, crafting their pieces and pressing the Send button simultaneously, our humble digital testaments to this culinary and ethnic connection.

Eight years later, in 2011, I can’t imagine myself being part of something like that anymore. It’s not because I’ve become indifferent to such communal endeavors; it’s mostly because I just don’t have much time. But it’s also because there’s been a shift, on my part, in the substance and mechanics of content creation and how people engage with this. In short, I think my “writing,” in all senses of the word, changed because these writing forums themselves changed as well.
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Popularity: 3% [?]

Not so long ago I was talking with some academics (or some writers, I can’t remember), and the conversation turned to another writer (or academic, I can’t remember) who was — make your choice:

• Getting invited everywhere
• Getting all the editing/teaching gigs
• Getting published everywhere
• Et cetera

And then someone said:

Well — that’s because she’s one of those.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

From the first draft of "Displaying Filipinos," summer 1992

There’s a pile of paper propped up next to my desk. They’re multiple copies of a chapter entitled “Arnold Schwarzenegger,” and it’s about a philandering businessman stuck in traffic as his long-suffering driver tries to navigate their SUV out of Manila and into the provinces. These copies are from my classmates, from a writing class that ended about a couple of months ago. Some of the feedback, like the ones from my teacher, are line-by-line edits, complete with single-spaced, typewritten advice, and those are invaluable. Some comments from my classmates are mere scribbles in the margins, checkmarks and instances of “not clear” and “nice!” but those are okay too.

I still haven’t incorporated any of the revisions into the draft in my desktop, and that’s not okay at all. I’ve read the comments, of course, but they lie there untransmuted, unconverted into kinetic energy. I have many excuses, ready to be fished out in case I have to answer to authority: work, the need to write a more workable ending first, work, tiredness in the evenings, work, my doubts whether the manuscript is any good, work, the nagging sense that I have to exercise which I don’t do anyway, work, and so on. But the only authority figure here is me.

And none of these are legitimate excuses, according to Steven Pressfield’s Do the Work. The book — until recently a free download from Amazon.com — is a great kick in the butt, with passages I simply had to highlight and read aloud to my girlfriend. But in certain ways the book also assumes a fairly level playing field, a sentiment I don’t always agree with, and its tough motivational advice won’t be new to folks who’ve read, say, Chris Baty’s No Plot? No Problem! Pressfield’s main argument is all in the title — one has to do the work — and anything that prevents you from doing that act of creation (the book is also both New Age-y and Chaos Magick-y), anything that holds you back is the enemy. (Pressfield, who refers to the enemy in blatantly martial terms, argues it’s almost always inside you.) It’s the dark side, the Jungian shadow, the dragon that you must slay. Do the Work also argues that the only real and right reason to do this work is not because of riches or fame or that one has to prove anything to friends and family; it’s because one has no choice.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

There’s no reason why R. Zamora Linmark shouldn’t shoot for the Great Philippine Novel in his ambitious and wide-ranging new book, Leche, even if it’s told from the perspective of a balikbayan, returning to the Philippines after 13 years. The fact that there may be anywhere from 8.2 to 11 million Filipinos overseas – about 10 percent of the Filipino population – surely makes it an “authentic” Filipino stance from which to write. Two of the greatest chroniclers of the Filipino experience, N.V.M. Gonzalez and Bienvenido Santos, wrote from this same vantage point of in-betweenness, after all. Part linear journey of discovery, part fractured travelogue and history lesson, Leche brilliantly milks (ahem) those forms. (Yes, I can get away with that pun because I’m Filipino — see more below.)

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Popularity: 5% [?]