Breaking the Blogging Break

Yes, it's been two weeks since my last post, but academic responsibilities obliged me to take a break from blogging for two weeks. Here's what happened during that time:

The Cuts on Her Wrist, my first flash-fiction piece, finally saw print in this month's issue of Homelife Magazine. Much as I'm glad it got published, I can't help but be amused by the fact a magazine run by a religious order (Society of St. Paul) printed a story that places a priest in a not-so-flattering light.

The PHSA staged First Snow of November two weekends ago at the CCP, and I'm sooooo happy with the results. I'm very happy that my faith in director Herbie Go (and his teenage co-director) didn't fail me; the little changes he made in the text benefitted the play considerably. And the talented teenage actors who played the middle-aged Fil and Tony just blew me away.

And yesterday, I finally finished writing the first draft of my second short story for Chari's class. It's actually my first stab at writing speculative fiction, and it took me a month to form it in my head before I wrote it down in longhand. The actual writing took me more than a week. I won't tell what it's about, but what I can say is that Gregorio Brillantes' The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957 (the more I read this story, the more it impresses me; no wonder Butch Dalisay says it's his favorite Brillantes story), Lina Flor's Five Snapshots and Tara Sering's Reconaissance influenced me during the writing process. Now I have to encode the story for class on Thursday.

I'll be very, very happy once March is over.