hemingway

What I've been doing, it seems, with blog theme after blog theme, and tweak after tweak, is skinning. The ads were the first to go. I'd like to re-read my blog, to remember my attempts at sustained moments of thought, remembrance, lucidity, or lack thereof. But page elements get in the way - the author profile right beside the first post, one column is to eager to list the post categories (as though a reader who just got here is going to pick from that), and the background is plain white - like tons of other blogs and sites out there. This is a reading blog - for crying out loud - the posts should be lined up like pictures on a menu, ready to entice.

The theme prior to this one was no less impressive - one column of off-white with grey and black serif fonts, of the faded typeset variety, - looking like a page from an old newspaper that got rain-soaked, forgotten, dried up in time, and rediscovered.

The theme, now, it's just white and grey on sheer black. Easy on the eye and no links list on a side column to subconsciously baggage you with. It's not polished, yet, as some pruning needs to be done. But I'm relieved with this. Like a gardener at the end of the day, finally having patted the earth, the seeds grounded firmly under.

The categories are way below, which you'll find after - not before - you've scanned the four entries on the parent page - this page. I clicked on fiction in English and spent hours getting back into the grove and the absurdity of my own writing. It's like finding an old shoebox and gasping at the old toys still tucked in, unfound until now.

But the shark tips got me chuckling. It's good to be back. This blog theme, by they way, is called Hemingway.

Omit needless words

I write for other people. That's how I get paid, and the more I do it, the more it leans on me - like clothes you wear that tandem well, but you begin to tire of - that my sentences, they're long enough to try your patience. Just like that: a mouthful. Each and every time. Someone needs to clip his thoughts. Or take a lot more time clipping his sentences.

I'm home

There's something nice and warm about donuts hiding deep down in a crumpled paper bag of love. Shove them down a plastic sando bag that survives the whims of an indifferent rain, and they won't be the same. Paper means risk - you could put the bag down on a damp table and the contents might drop through the tear. (If you soak us do we not go limp?) Hence the love. My wife bought us donuts last night - only two - there's only two of us. And I brought home the crumpled paper bag - I must have done most of the crumpling - and fixed us coffee while I wondered if the donuts got bored on the taxi ride home at 5 in the morning. The sun had not risen and our other cat (we have two) hadn't come yet when we divided the first donut - more of a cupcake, really - between us. What is it about the sound of crumpling paper bags that allure me? A gift that takes time to open up. The sound of something coming out - a surprise. The possibility that the donuts smashed against each other, with only me to blame, on the way home. Coffee, donuts, all that crumpling, and the hmm of this goes so well with coffee. Makes me feel loved, hugs me in a way that makes me say.... (read the title.)

tightening the tale

I have a week to soak in comments and firm up my short story, which I had expected the class to crease their foreheads about and accuse me: what the fuck is this? Somehow I pulled through. My head-game scare story scared them.

I'd love to get slapped with a shining grade in this PhD subject.

Here's how it starts out. Bright and sunny. Such a nice day. But there's a doppelganger in the house.

When Did I lose the Knife?

by Irwin Allen B. Rivera

I CAN TELL, WITHOUT opening my eyes, that chirping birds mean half past nine in the morning. Into my comforter I cocoon myself some more, into the small sea of softness and the scent of fabric conditioner. I want to drift off till noon, when the birds are gone and all that pervades me is the empty house, still as a pond in a retirement home, and just as quiet. It's the Christmas break anyway, and with December this cold, I find no motive to swim out of bed, and fall, voluntarily, on the wooden floor, with a thud that would send Jeff, my housemate, mumbling about me over breakfast in three words: oversleeping lazy bastard.

But the birds won't go away, and Jeff isn't here to annoy me. Neither is the reason why the birds, on a December morning with nothing, supposedly, to do, irk me. Inside my cocoon I cover my ears, willing the birds to vanish by reason of my not hearing them. 'Bullshit,' I hear Jeff say in my head, with the same venom he reserves for when I sometimes think out loud. Maybe he's right. I bolt up, suddenly, still hugging a bundle of my foamy blanket. The world, despite what my professor says, is still there, here, even when I don't want to hear it.

The same premise holds for small square yellow post-its on a tact-board above my study table, a sock-throw from my bed. Four large strikingly yellow ones scream in red ink: Paper on Personal identity for Professor Perez due in two days. 'Fuck it,' Jeff says again in my head. 'Just get it over with.'

I don't want to hear it, Jeff. Get out of my head. Take the world with you.

JEFF DID LEAVE, YESTERDAY. But I go through the motions anyway. I crawl to the other side of the bed, away from the morning light, closer to the small clock under the lampshade, fail to reach it, and fall on the floor with a thud, still cocooned in the comforter. Verified: it's only 9:35 am. Jeff would be done showering by now. The shuffling I would hear downstairs would be him in the kitchen. And if I open the bedroom door a crack, I'd hear the whish of something being fried, the scent of brewed coffee, and the complaint of some guy about me using his shampoo again. Some kids were raised well.

Except that when I thud on the floor, there is a humming nothingness in the house. And I suddenly find the chirping of the birds eerie. Slowly, I peel off the comforter, bundle it up and throw it on the bed. I open the bedroom door a crack and hear a squeak that must have been always there, unnoticed, by me. No shuffling and no scents of morning breakfast joy.

In my shorts, I descend the stairs a deserted man. Mrs. Adoring's pots hang unmoving in the kitchen. The stove is as clean as Jeff left it. I smell Domex on the kitchen tiles. And, inspecting the shower room, I can't find Jeff's shampoo.

But I still have that paper to write.

the sudden clue sleeps

Ma'am Jing threw me a clue in class. I caught it in midair, like an afterthought. I shot my mind's hand up, absentmindedly, and cupped it. It's like when you're pushing your grocery cart down the isle, mentally squinting (what is it again that I need?) and you notice you've been holding something you picked up from the other isle: ahh! this is it! A clue. I hate my own writing, the clue said, because I listen for flight. For lyricism. Something I only mold in moments of downward plight. Or fleeting out-the-window gazes. Not a mood in the everyday. But if I hummed a metaphor and a rhythm for every articulation, I'm thinking I'd trip. Getting up, dusting my knees, I'd mumble and go for blunt and pedestrian. Like pulling out a branch from the mud, because I could shoo a stray dog away with it, just as I could with a sleek 9 iron golf club. The shame of the mundane! (When I read recent journals I etched in fatigue, I squirm at how wayward and pointless they sound.) 

To talk always in poetry. How else must I talk to myself so I'd listen? (Note to self: you're not even a poet.)

-----

A classmate, naturally I didn't ask for his name, because I thought I knew, and the way we talked, it's as if he knew that I knew, anyway, I've dropped hints in our talk that I'd show him my on going sudden novel. Sudden novel. I'm still reveling in the sound of that. Sudden. Novel. That's not a short story. It's got chapters. Maybe even an epilogue. A sequence of parts that long is not ordinarily sudden. It is not. But it is. Each chapter, composed of smaller scenes (episodes), are written like sudden fiction. Smallish, self-aware of a time limit, and they end in the moment following the moment they started. Put them all together and loop some scenes and symbols, and that's a sudden novel. But will it work? I'd have to put the chapters side by side and let another pair of ears listen to the short burst, for his mouth to sip the teaspoons of scenes. Since I'm inflicting this on him, I should know his name. 

-----

Turns out one of the short stories Ma'am Jing assigned is a chapter of a novel. Sly devil old woman. Fooled me into thinking we were into short short fiction (the other name of sudden fiction), not that I complained. If a chapter is that full and yet so short, how would the entire novel taste like? Anyway, what's important is that I skittered into class unprepared to talk about my assigned story. I could talk, yes, but it would have no shape. A chaos of rambles. Good thing she upped her chin in someone else's direction. The guillotine fell not on me. So I'm uploading my more refined, thought about, talk, to our eGroup, over the Christmas vacation. 

-----

One of the stories assigned is written like prose poetry. How can people write like that? (Translation: what the fuck? this is so great! i can't write like that even if i trained for a lifetime.) 

-----

One should stock up on sleep before running off, blinking silly, out of the house after a sudden toothbrush, so early in the morning. I had to catch the train to class two cities away. That's probably why I couldn't think straight about the story assigned to me. I had only read it twice, with no notes etched down. Just some confident private mumbles. But at the time those mumbles, my mumbles, about the story, seemed brilliant. Therefore I was brilliant. Sadly, no greatness survives when you articulate those mumbles. I hereby promise to sleep the night before. 

almost a week

The thing about completely freelancing at home? Even after you've marked your work hours, your mind is never really away from it. I'm ronin. Again. But I don't even see it as work anymore. It's been six days since I quit my affiliate marketing manager post in Makati. Never felt better. Wish I quit earlier.

I'm just resting a bit before I go back to cleaning manuscripts to submit to clients whose names I can't be sure are even real. But they do pay. And they're polite in their emails. And they like my writing. if only I had the patience to copyedit for them for long hours. I don't have a proofreader's eyes. But I am retraining myself. I get paid extra for that. I just don't want to edit my own blog entries. That would be depressing.

Been cleaning up wedding jewellery articles for some British websites since this morning. This one article I migrained through, its title had nothing to do with the first paragraph, and the rest of the article had nothing to do with anything else preceding it. Wow.

This is who I am now.

if you can write, then you can earn on the side

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flatline

Some days I hate my own words. They come off as lies. Even when they're true. This is why I've blogged nothing in months. I've quit a job I used to love. Took another in Ortigas. Left that and took another in Makati. I have all the memories right here. All the scenes, conflicts, drama, climaxes. Resolutions. How to weave them together. Not that I've been in the mood, in months, to do so. And there in lies why I haven't written anything, anything that amuses me, in months.

Fast, fast fiction!

Very Short Stories for Harried Readers, an anthology of very short fiction (edited by Vince Groyon) where I have one story tucked in, is now available at UP Press (inside Balay Kalinaw, UP Diliman) for only P290.00. By the end of the week, it will hit the shelves of National Bookstore and Powerbooks. To my friends, former classmates, online lurkers, and fellow bloggers, if you have any good memories of me in you, you are to going to sigh, be happy for me, and buy the book. :D


Here's the blurb on the back cover:

In these hectic times, who has the time to read? Fortunately for us, the short short story, sometimes called “sudden fiction” or “flash fiction”, is here. In one to three pages these stories render complete, complex and engaging worlds. They can be read in only a few minutes, but those minutes may linger in the reader’s mind forever.

i miss my friends

Camille is behind me. I am pulling her through the maze that is my Mother's house. I breathe in fabric softener as I wave aside hung shirts, blankets, and emerge in the sala. Mother's eyes meet mine and I stop, I pull Camille from behind, to my front, and she blinks under a spotlight. My classmate, Mother. But Mother is not new to this, her eyes swing back to the flowered curtain she is mending. I don't, her averted eyes say, have to meet every scrawny kid you drag back home. I tug at Camille to follow and the elevator shudders, like it suddenly remembered something, and opens into my room. My classcard is taped on the floor-to-ceiling mirror. 'Ok, we're ready!' I yell, and Camille yeheys with me, jumping up and down like a ten year old. I am jumping, too. Now I can enroll. Someone is hollering from behind us. I stop and stare at my classcard, all eight and a half inches by eleven inches of it. The paper is brownish-yellow, like my original birth certificate, and I see, highlighted in neon green, my grade in Charlson Ong's fiction class: 2.0. Dammit! I stop jumping, and I notice that whoever was hollering was saying exactly that. Dos. My grade. My bad. I turn around and see Siege on top of the Faculty Center, his hair dishelved by the wind, his legs in an upturned V, his arms crossed on his chest, like a lazy I-told-you-so pose. A photographer leans close and frames him, digitally. I wave my aging classcard at him and Camille resumes jumping up and down, waving at Siege, too. Siege says, 'Para,' and I suddenly remember my grade. Dammit. 'You know,' Abi says in the Ikot jeep I suddenly find myself in, 'I've screenplayed this.' She hands the manong driver a shining ten peso coin, and the driver rows faster, ignoring the other passengers outside, all floating in the debris of a flooded UP after an anonymous storm. 'You just have to say two lines, one to your Mother, and another to Camille.' At that I wish I had stopped Abi from giving the manong ten bucks. Because Camille is still in my room jumping up and down. And Siege is still on the faculty center rooftop, posing, still hollering 'Para!'. I jump out of the Ikot jeep. Airborne, I can hear Abi screaming, 'Don't do it, Dude!' And I wonder, before I hit the cold water, if my bond paper-sized classcard is waterproof.

of the pickiest kind

Nice to know that people out there, friends, they know who they are--all right, their names are Camille and Jea--are still writing. (So much for blind items.) Point is I'm relieved to hear from them, and to get to read their stuff; just so I could tell myself that my writing job is no excuse to freeze up my own tilted-world essaying and sudden fiction writing.

Camille sent me her re-envisioned short story, an earlier study of which she submitted to her fiction class, under Butch Dalisay. Her class must have scooped up her story like a handful of sand, and squeezed hard; later, they unclenched their hands to see what's left. I did my own squeezing: I emailed Camille my comments. She wanted it brutal and honest. Brutally honest. Good girl. That's the writing workshop spirit.

First person point of view narrative. Manipulative mother-protagonist. Work in progress, but the neurotic character of the mom and her world view is the twin allure ("is" because the two are properly one). That's my "unputdownable" back-of-the-book synopsis of Camille's story, which doesn't tell much, really. We like to keep things mysterious around here. Tends to keep the publishers guessing. (Har har.)

Jea is going through her pickiest-kind blogging phase again. Her current blog is the umpteenth reincarnation of her ADHD'd brain. That's Aversion to Dim-Hwitted Doodling. (I just made that up. But that explains things.) She has had so many blogs, which she edits and edits--resizing header text and margins now, changing titles and labels later, and finally settling on a backdrop color that doesn't redirect your eyes from the life-stuff on the webpage. In at least one previous blog, she told of her terrible tales of teaching tupid tudents. She has picked up on that theme in her current blog. Lucky me. I love those posts. A handful of sneers.

One should take lessons from these two. Camille and Jea, who both happen to be teachers.

Writing is a neurosis.

Of the pickiest kind.

the idle villager

I always have this impression that Ricci is constantly harassed by her teaching schedule. She told me once that you need some free time to imagine consequences, so you can write. Her use of the second person (you) is really some underlying "her" trying to tell herself, and me, about the need to rise to the surface and breathe. Her use of 'consequences' intrigues me. If you live on a weekly basis, there's that dual anxiety: you might not be hitting deadlines; your life is nothing but deadlines.

If you are always in the thick of things, life things, work that foots the bills, there's not much mental space and time to space out so you can write. A writer needs some amount of idleness to remain sane.

I'm starting to ditch some side jobs so I can sleep more, so I can be idler, so I can write. If you're routinely pressed by the four cubicle-walls of work, you're hemmed-in soul tends to whine, pant, and give up.

kemmon, talk to me

So, I say, talking to you, who obviously went here to read something. How do you, I begin, looking away, sighing, and glancing back at you before I look down; how do you recharge your fount? You know--regain the life, the enthusiasm, the wonder, the itch, the secret giggle, whatever. 

You lean back on your chair and sigh. You're about to confess uselessness in a mumble but I stop you with a raised palm.  

Say you're all worn out from thinking through a project--not just thinking of--thinking through: you came up with it, it was promising, you pulled off two-thirds, you're half-dead, and it's not yet perfect, but your boss wants more, ahh, refinements...and there is another project slated after this one. What do you do? So you won't get fired, so you'd keep the image of a go-getter creative. 

You're not answering. 

I don't need stares. 

I need ideas. 

I'm drying up here. 

bottles of beer on the wall

Saw Ricci go online a while ago. I immediately waved a hand. Told her I wasn't enrolled in the program [creative writing program], for a year now, come to think of it. So much raket writing that I haven't been able to breathe. Ricci is not enrolled, too; she told me. "Life and all that," she said. I miss our alcohol chatting sessions. We used to meet online and, beer with me and wine with her, we'd chat away on and about just whatever avenue of such we fancy.

When the alcohol sets in we'd notice we'd miss hitting the right keys, and the drinks take their revenge on our spelling. Too many exclamation marks. Laugh out louds. She loves poetry. I like the absurd. She'd post a link to an online sound file of a Neruda poetry reading. I'd touché with, maybe some tall tales I'd been practicing when I'm alone.

Sometimes I wonder if she and I tiptoe on the same soft soil.

Next time, she said, inuman na talaga.

Yeah. That's my cue: I'd definitely have to get back to the program.

moody, schmoody

I think I did. I think I told my wife that, at the rate I'm coughing out articles for my night job, I won't be able to write decent shit by the end of the year. Yeah. I think I did. I was whining then. I am whining now. The small window for working on and turning in those bursts of paragraphs, about four to five per article, and fifteen a night, has led me to devise ways of staying awake, and of talking care of that which allows me to write decent stuff--my mood.

Saw this study in some psychology website, a site filled with advice on just about anything; anyway, the study said that one has a finite fount for working on something, and then when the fount is empty shit comes out. Non-quality work. If you look at a donkey in the face, that's not it; you have turn the donkey around and look at its ass, that's the work I produce when I am not in the mood. So I sleep. Eat heaps of chocolate cookies. Drink Mountain Dew and coffee. Read blogs of people I don't know. Follow threads of stories I started to write and then dropped, due to emotional exhaustion. And I recount small victories in my writing life.

Like last week, just this Friday. I turned in six sudden fiction--500 to 700 words--to this upcoming flash fiction anthology. I am hoping that at least one of those I sent will make it. The deadline has since been moved to July 15, I think, and if I find strength by that time, I might polish a rough story and turn that in as well.

So, where were we? My mood. It's a constant battle to stay in the mood to be amused, to be whimsical, to be playful. Because the moment work becomes sour to the feel, it's definitely work. And I don't like to work. I like to be playful, and get paid for it. Good thing this job allows me room to write those small bursts of paragraphs with some wit. At least while my mood lasts.

Sleeping, of course, is part of the job. How else does one recharge the fount?

This, by the way, is just a blog, not a psychology website. There is no Freud, no dreams, no self-realization, no emotions to untangle. Just whining.

overcoming sisyphus

Color. You use colored post-its and polka-dot your worktable with them. Because your table is brown and your PC is black, the small reminder notes--smaller than my palm--call out to you eyes. You flick your eyes to them and boom: you are reminded of things to do, pencilled on a yellow list. You look around your worktable and the end-result is listlessness. You are swarmed with yellow. You let out a moan and then a sigh. Later on you moan again. You can't do all them to-do's at the same time, only a couple at a time, and in sequence. So you do the manageable. You make another list on another post-it but this time on a color that stands out from all that depressing yellow: neon orange.

Spiff. Spice. Maybe it's nice. You laugh out loud. And you return to the two basic questions your skewed self often finds useful: what do you want to do, and how badly do you want them done. You don't need a plan. You need to want something badly. All else, yellow and orange, the colors of the rainbow, will follow.

back issue

I just got a copy of People Asia's December 2006 - January 2007 issue, as well as the February and March issues for this year. No, the cover image you see on the left is not one of the covers of the issues mentioned; it's just an old image I got from the Internet. I have to post an image, right?

Right. Anyway, I remember doing a food slash restaurant review for the Dec-Jan issue, but I can never find a copy. Sam, who works for People Asia, and is a classmate in the MA Creative Writing program at UP Diliman, gave my wife these issues when she passed by Sam's office.

The photos inside the Dec-Jan issue were trademark portfolio shots. Neat. The article, mine, was, well, what it turned out to be. Whoever breathes over the shoulder of the layout artist gets to condense whatever articles any contributor turned in, because space is scarce and photos that visually define the page mood are priorities. And then there are other considerations. Ho-hum.

So, my main article, a food review, and three little sidebar stories, got mixed into one continuous piece. It lost the author's voice, as is expected. These things happen. I used to work for a publications office in UP Diliman, which used to condense my articles with space, image, and feature-worthiness in the editor's mind. That's a reality check for you. No blames being thrown here, just one big sigh. At least my reality (pay) check for that article has been snail-mailed. I wonder when the mailman will knock on my door. Meanwhile, I have these three glossy issues to browse through. So many pictures.

the first mover

Need to think. So cold in the room I have goosebumps on my legs. When my fingers move to type, it feels like they move in a thick fog of cold air. What is Baguio City temperature doing in my bedroom at 8:30 in the morning? Need to think. I have everything I need to revise a client's draft. One big folder filled to the brim with attached documents. Coffee fogging up half my PC monitor with its steam. My eyes wide awake. The windows half open to let in beams of sunlight. The sun doesn't help. I rub my hands on my jogging pants for some heat, too lazy to stand up and stretch, and maybe sweat a little. Ok. Open the folder. Open the documents on your PC. Let's do this. Before that coffee gets cold.

on behalf of me

"The professed motive of my solitude is to speak to loads of people." -- Edward Hoagland

I'm here because I'm trying to commit to the idea that writing is incremental. Like a pile of bricks that need some muscle and some patience and some spirit to cement together. Someone has to take the time to put one brick on top of the other. Rushing it ruins it. Your mind runs too fast with words you forget the moment you mumble them in your in head. The bricklaying is the way to pace it. Got that idea from Stephen King. Or maybe John Carpenter. I forget. (Writers of scary novels with suspense-thriller plots are disciplined. In that they are scary.) Me? I enjoy too much the fleeting sound of words I find myself mumbling. I pen them on paper and they look different, taste weird, did I really say those things and why.

Place one brick on top of the other, spoon soggy cement over one line of aligned bricks. Structures, plots, they don't work for me. So I worry about them later. The house, the story, will look whatever it will look when it takes form. I can tear it down later and start again later. I just don't want that oppressive idea of needing a plot before you can write a story. I usually have that vaguene idea of what I want tucked in my mind somewhere. Faith is what I have. Faith in a moody recluse in me who writes feverishly about things and images he loves. Nevermind the plot. I will provide the plot, after the moody one is exhausted with laying the bricks.

(But that is not entirely true. He, the moody one, doesn't align bricks like an engineer with a plan and a schedule. He's more like a potter running after a dream in his mind.)

Which brings me to the point. I am not the one really writing. I am just the cleaning lady. I pick up and clean up and dust off and chisel the rough edges. I am again, this morning, as I have years ago, giving up on the idea that I am a singular person, whole and unified, aware and conscious of all that goes down in my head. (I keep coming back to that mentally healthy whole peson idea just to feign 20th century lunacy.) Well, this is the last time. The "I" is a council.

This morning, the one committing to the idea of bricklaying as writing, is just the spokesperson. The others are vastly more poetic, but they are just oh so shy.