Fortune Smiles

August has been an extremely lucky month for me. I'm getting my second Palanca tomorrow night (Yippee!); have received confirmation that seven of my stories and one comics script have been accepted for publication in various, um, publications; am going off today to see if the publication I was in last year (Dean's Philippine Spec Fic vol. 1) will win a National Book Award (We're hoping for the best, but expecting the worst); Reme likes the project I've been working on for Our Own Voice; and another potential creative project has come up, to be discussed forthwith.

Of course, the cloudy lining to all this silver is that I've utterly used up my inventory of stories, and have not even begun to work on the story that's due in two weeks for my literary criticism gang, the Lit Critters. And I still have a website and something even longer to write on the corporate side (because Creative Expression, like crime, Does Not Pay).

It should also be noted that all this luck has not helped me at all in our ongoing Acquire board game tourney. Ah well, I guess you can only ask Lady Luck for so much in one month. She's been good to me.

That Spam-I-Am, that Spam-I-Am!

Received a stunning 36 incidences of spam today, all on the same topic.

Listen, spammers, there is nothing wrong with my erection, okay? Geez.


Speaking of Dr. Seuss (if you didn't get the title reference, you are clearly the victim of a deprived childhood), I splurged and got Sage the hardbound Seuss collection over at Fully Booked. It may seem pricey at around P1,700, but considering that your individual Seuss book runs to around P300, it's actually a steal for 13 stories.

It is a trifle heavy for bedtime storytelling, though. (And of course The Princess keeps trying to insist that it counts as only one story out of her maximum five stories a night, haha!)

Annoyingly Brief Update

Okay, one of the reasons I haven't been posting is that I'm no longer pleased with the look of the blog--it was designed to accommodate a side blog, but now it looks like the folks at sideblog.com have shut down, so now there's no point in the three-column layout, which irritates me, but I don't have enough time for a proper redesign. Urgh.

On a happier note, my short story, Heritage, has been published over in the current issue of Our Own Voice--do, please, check it out here. The good people at OOV have also seen fit to include me on the staff as one of their contributing fiction writers. (They seem, somehow, to have received the impression that I'm prolific or something--now I'll have to live up to it, despite the fact that I'm currently unable to even maintain a blog!)

Thanks, thanks, thanks to everyone who has shared my happiness about the Palanca. Look, now I'm a playwright! And I can legitimately go around calling myself a "multiple Palanca award winner", haha! I will publish an excerpt of the play here soon, I promise--it's called Life After Beth. (Can you believe I got away with submitting a pun?)

Hey, this wasn't so "brief" after all--which probably isn't too startling, given my tendency to babble on once I've gotten started. I do, actually, have a few blog entries currently published only in my head, so, seriously, expect me back on our regular programming schedule soon, okay? (After all, I've actually gotten onidcireuy to speak up in the chatterbox, which clearly indicates that it's high time.)


P.S. Reme, if you're reading this, help! I've been trying to email you The Project for weeks now, but my email refuses to speak to your Yahoo address. Alternatives, please?

Dear Everyone,

Yes, I know it's been a long while.

I'll be back eventually; but for now, Sage, at least, is blogging again.

Check out her latest entry here.