Nowhere. I should establish a routine of writing. Let me see. September is bookfair month. Maybe this is why I am agitated. Of course I envy those authors who are able to come up with books every year. My goal for next year is a YA novel. That’s it. If I’m not able to do this already, then really, shame on me.
But it is Holy Friday — My sister, her son Joseph, and myself, are in my brother’s resort in Batangas. I will have to baby sit today because my sister is going out to clean my mother’s house. That is a full day’s agenda which means that I probably won’t be able to write at all. However, I have windows like this hour, when she feeds her child breakfast. They both eat the Batangas tulingan (from the tuna family, I suppose) and rice, while I sip my coffee as I blog this. Seven fifty six and what can I do while my concentration suffers these domestic distractions. Later, I will be officially on my own taking care of Joseph and my best bet so he will not be hyperactive is to put him on permanent tablet mode, that is, let him play with the toddler apps for as long as he likes, the only way to keep him on his seat. Right now, the child is still playing a shapes app and I am free for a while to write this blog on my PC. However, I am completely in attention just in case he decides to run and bolt out the door. This house which my sister-in-law manages is a three story structure and we’re on the second floor.The stairs to the first floor is a winding, railed, twenty steps of cement. The house dog is permanently settled on the second step on the way down. Once my nephew Joseph runs, there won’t be anything to stop him from falling down those stairs. But after five minutes of his continued staring on the tablet screen, I thought he should be weaned for a while from his virtual world.
(continued today, April 19, 2017) So just to give him the real world for a while, I put his shoes on and then we went downstairs, to the view deck. He brought his toy car, and when he saw a bench, he rolled his car on the bench. But he ran too fast, and then…… just like that, his feet got caught on the bench’s leg, he fell face down, his jaw bled, he cried so hard, I picked him up and hugged him and kissed him so he would calm down as I panicked.
I made my way to the nearest faucet a fast as I could, washed his wound, carried him back upstairs and applied betadine on his cut. The wound was 3/4th inch long, and it was open, like a minute red lip. I could not see it properlybecause it was under the chin, and Joseph resisted my attempts of making him look up. I tried my best to make him feel better, and in fact, he was all right immediately. When he finally slept and I got the chance to view it fully, I got scared. However, he often scratched his chin so the wound would bleed over and over. I tried to dress it up with some gauze, but he kept removing my dressing because maybe, it felt itchy. In the end, I just kept vigilant watch on his hands to keep him from scratching his wound. All the time, I kept examinining it, because even as Joseph wasn’t anymore crying, I feared that he was in pain.
Joseph tripped on that bench around 10 AM. It took me until 4 PM before I was able to tell his mother who got the news on her way back to the site (traffic was very slow because there was a procession of the dead nazarene). When she finally arrived home, she was not satisfied with my first aid. She managed to buy some additional betadine on her way back, but she did not buy the anti-biotic ointment I asked her to buy.
The following day, she took him to St Patrick’s clinic and they injected him with anti-tetanus drug. I thought this was completely unnecessary; Joseph vomitted all the milk he had that morning as he was traumatized by the injection. I thought his mother was insane for making him go through with that, when all that his wound needed by that time was a fresh dressing.
The irony of it all is that in my intention to have the child enjoy the outdoors the exact opposite happened. He fell flat on his face, his chin was cut, he went through a painful injection. Maybe, next time, I will just have to be content with him playing apps on the tablet. His virtual world is definitely safer.
Ruminating on this unfortunate event, I thought about a controlling character. What could happen to a child raised by a hypochondriac and a paranoid Mother? And so now, I’m into my other necessary pre-occupation – research. After all, these are clinical and psychological conditions. I can only hope that my sister isn’t both. It’s heartbreaking to be merely an aunt, not being in control of the situation, and seeing the mother of my nephew mishandling her own child.
For four Sundays now, I have been going out and writing Tagalog poems. To log the places where I crafted those poems: a coffee shop at the fourth floor of Megamall, the garden at Shangri La in Shaw, a Bibingka shop at the basement of Estancia Mall, and the function room of the GWR condo. If my memory serves me right (because the poems are in three different notebooks) I have drafted seven new poems by now. Of course they have tentative titles, but the point is that I’m on schedule.
The schedule counts the number of Sundays from March till December. If I write even at least one poem every Sunday, by Christmas, I will have a minimum of around thirty poems. By the second term, I can enroll my dissertation proposal and maybe by that time, I will have a collection. The poems need some first readers to comment on them and help me revise. Critique can happen anytime there’s a writing workshop. Since I’m a member of a small writer’s group called Taftique, I may present some of my poems during our huddles.
Why do I insist on writing new poems for the dissertation instead of using the poetry I already have? Well, I need the exercise to observe more and get acute insights. There are too many bards and too many voices, but I’d like to write and compile new poems so I can persist as a poet.
The first Sunday poem (that is, first Sunday of March or Last Sunday of February) is about wandering. The last poem (last Sunday of March or first Sunday of April) is a love poem. The thing with these poems is that they have diverse themes that I couldn’t place them yet under one critical framework. But I will get there. Even if I’m not too passionate about getting a PHD (since I’m too old, and well, by the time I’m sixty, it will just be my 13th year here at the university), I need to persist and discipline myself so I can publish those poems in time for my sixtieth year (or thereabouts). That would be a wonderful way to celebrate the onset of my “senior years”. Then the next thirteen (by God’s grace) will have to be spent writing one novel every two years – for a total of 10 novels (If God will allow me to live past seventy). That’s the calendar.
In my thirteenth year here at the University, I will retire or resign. I hope that by then, I have at least one collection of poems. Not very ambitious, but it is still a fulfillment of a long-held dream.
Fridays should be non-negotiable days for writing. Last week, I was able to steal some precious hours and plot some of the possible chapters to develop for this “work order”. The official code for this is WrEng-YA (and the invoice number is 17032277).
In an apple green notebook with spring, I have jotted down B’s official time of writing her diary. The year is 2020 and in the diary, she is going back to the most difficult years of her young life — 2017. Also plotted were the milestone years of her relatives, but I have yet to finalize her family tree for easy recall.
The chapter I began drafting last Friday, March 18, is B overhearing the details of a memory which, in my plotline can serve as a frame for a kind of before and after scenario. The happy memory which, in the plot going through my head, will say something about the family’s congenial relationship before everything turned sour in 2017 for B specifically, and for the family in general — is going to be repeated in the form of a similar event, but in a later celebration where B will be a participant. (B was still a baby the first time this same event happened).
In other words, I have found my dramatic situation. There is that very real conflict which B is going to process in her diary, after everything has happened. In a sense, this can be a bildungsroman, albeit late for my young heroine because now, she just sees all the ruins and is trying to make sense of what she perceives as something unnatural or reversible.
The plan is to jot down the chapters that should be included using a main event of a month as setting or memory or situation or scene. So for example, the chapter called “First Niece” is a January entry because B points out that she’s watching the “Nazareno” on TV. This led the narrative to divulge her faith orientation which will be a major factor in the turn of events in this story.
So far so good.
But well, although I’m keen about tomorrow — I should block out the following:
I need to deliver the Bernardino manuscript to OMF – edited and finalized.
I need to deliver the module for Junior High featuring the play “Oedipus Rex”
I need to check student papers and quizzes, record them and finalize their grades.
In other words, I should stop this meandering on this blog and do some work already so I can have my Friday free for WrEng-YA.
PS
I can’t spell the plot out in this blog because it will still change, I think. And besides, everything is not yet that clear in my head. But I know that this YA novel is about family, and one can go back to “Tanging Yaman” and realize that Filipinos ought to write more about families because we have always boasted about it and yet, are we truly a nation of strong family relations?
Time spent earning extra income, (because reduced teaching load salary isn’t enough to pay the bills) takes up a huge chunk of my schedules. Using the desktop computer here at the faculty center, I am able to type these words now about writing because I don’t have an urgent email that requires me to translate, edit, proofread, or validate a translation ASAP. But last week, a series of small urgent job orders that totalled to about three hundred dollars gave me no time to write. Every job was “URGENT” as the subject line of client emails had always indicated. There was no way I could default at each step of the job, from acceptance of the PO to answering client feedback. Happy about the number of job orders, I set aside all writing agenda for the week. I spent zero moment in thinking about how Bianca’s Diary should proceed
(after the teenager and her mom watched a play).
A novelist friend (she has written two award-winning novels) tells me that when she writes, she needs “creative space”. This is a time to just be quiet and stare, observe and absorb evocations from the stir of people and events. To meet this need, she goes out of town, the farther and more isolated, the better. The trick she says is to just savor this creative moment, to sit down, and to write.
Right now, all alone at this spacious faculty center at the library, I can enjoy some creative time and space. So I sit down and write.
But the task of writing is really more than sitting down and writing. Writing is thinking clearly, logically, meticulously. Not a word should end up where it doesn’t need to be. Not a sentence longer for a thoroughly thought out idea.
I began this blog here at 11:00 AM. By this time, 11:31, it isn’t finished. There is no time to polish the final outcome of this in the next thirty minutes because I have to leave this desk and attend a writer’s meeting. I will come back to the blog later and edit it until it becomes useful for a target reader. Outside, the muted street sounds hardly inspire me to write. I am tempted right now to sleep on the sofa. It takes about twenty seconds before I am able to type the next sentence that will keep the focus of this blog to the thought of “creative space”. This paragraph meanders.
Bianca’s Diary can’t be put on hold any longer. It deserves its creative space. The best way to work this out I think is to impose a deadline on myself, to treat this YA novel like a job order, to work like Bianca’s Diary is a client that needs to be served with utmost professionalism. Then, once in the “pipeline” of my freelance job calendar, I should dive to the task with urgency, meticulousness, and diligence. I should deliver on deadline and expect a return on investment, so to speak. This is work. Writing.
