On Your Marks

I haven't touched the Philippine Blog Awards for a while now, to be honest. Their web site is up all over again, though, and their two-week nomination period is almost over -- everything closes up tomorrow, after which their judges get a couple of weeks to make their decisions.

One of the interesting developments this year involves the requirement of full blog ownership. Quoting the text on the web site's front page (with the emphasized phrase in bold):

The awarding is open to all Filipino bloggers who have full ownership of their blogs. This implies that blogs belonging to blog networks or corporate blogs cannot be included because of ownership rights. The awards therefore pay homage to "grassroots bloggers" who have built up their blogs from their own efforts.

This, of course, speaks truly. There are a lot more people, entities and organizations who use blogging applications nowadays (because it's free, natch), and I would imagine that we'd prefer to count only those people who post legitimate and informative journals on the web. If you're dedicated enough to your blog that you actually reserve and set up your own domain for it, then I figure that you should at least be recognized for your efforts.

All the same, however, I do feel for the excellent blogs out there that deserve recognition for their quality despite the fact that they're not necessarily self-owned. But I figure that the Blog Awards people know what they're doing here. And the requirement is right out there where everyone can see it, after all. Holding a contest to award the best speculative fiction doesn't necessarily mean that anything outside that classification is not worth reading.

What I would like to see, however, is a list of the judges for the contest. The judges are definitely a major consideration in any competition: You'll obviously need a bunch of people who have had significant exposure to the medium, or at the very least are well-respected and open-minded pillars of the community. Anyone who fulfills both qualities, moreover, would be excellent to have. But the fact is that you want to make certain that all entries for a contest will end up being judged on the proper merits.

The Philippine Blog Awards currently doesn't have a list of judges on their web site, and that worries me. Does this mean that it'll end up like the Fully Booked competition, where the judges' identities were only revealed when the winner was named (after which most of us wondered where Neil Gaiman's involvement was to begin with)? I figure that it's important to note the judges' identities well before the request for nominations even comes around: You want to know how the blogs are likely to be judged, after all, and how people will look at them many years into the future. You want a fair guess at where the expectations and the prejudices will lie, where the high points and the low points are likely to roost. You want to know if you're going to run into a 199-member Academy of Motion Picture Sciences, or if you're going to have to schmooze to a panel comprised of Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul, and Simon Cowell.

I just hope that the web site gets the list of judges up soon. I want to know what each of the entries are getting into. They could probably name any random bunch of people as judges -- say, Tori Amos, Mahatma Gandhi, and that guy who cut in front of you at the bus stop this morning -- and I'd be okay with that. I just want to have an idea of how they'll look at the entries this year.

With some luck, however, the awards will be a lot better this year. The web site certainly looks better, the contest seems a little more organized, and the sponsors finally seem to be coming in. After all, we don't want to see another undeserving person win the Blog of the Year award, just like some arrogant jerk did back in 2005. :)

The Sick, Sick Man

It's eleven in the morning, and I'm sitting at home watching the live telecast of the 2007 Academy Awards. Here's hoping that Scorsese finally takes the statuette home this time. :)

For anyone who's not in the know yet, I've acquired a job -- I start on Thursday this week. In fact, I've just taken a call from my new employer, who's already demanding to know why I haven't handed them a required medical certification document yet. (I haven't even started my first day and already someone's yelling at me. This doesn't bode well.)

I'll give you the same explanation that I gave them, I suppose, if only because it explains exactly where I've been for the past few days.

On Tuesday last week I got called in by the company doctor, who informed me that the physical exam I took in early February had come up with some very odd results. Specifically, they had detected abnormal levels of certain enzymes in my liver -- SGPT/SGOT levels that were ten times what was supposed to be normal. I was required to see a gastroenterologist, and I was required to do it as soon as possible.

Wednesday morning saw me being interrogated by said gastroenterologist. He asked me if I regularly drank alcoholic beverages; I said no. He asked me if I had been taking drugs of any sort; I said no. He asked me if I had any tattoos or piercings; I said no. (That was when he removed his glasses, gave me a curious look, and asked me if I was telling him the truth. I said, "No, I'm just a really pathetic young man.")

Given that he was seeing no reason for my accelerated liver enzyme levels, he recommended a battery of tests for me at a distant hospital. That's where I've been heading for the past five days, really: So far, I've literally gone through five different blood tests, two separate ultrasounds, and one inappropriately invasive prostate exam. If I wasn't there to take a new test, I was there to pick up some results.

The last of these results, by the way, arrived early this morning. So far all I can read from them is the fact that everything's normal except for some fatty deposits in my liver area; I'll probably wait for my doctor's appointment tomorrow morning before I draw any official conclusions. I'm only expecting to get a few cautions on what I eat, though.

My employer was less than pleased with the situation, although they were honest enough to admit that the situation was beyond mine or anyone's control. All the same, it'll probably take me a while to get my office access card. That won't get my first week starting off on a positive note.

The funny thing is that this comes right on the heels of the Chinese New Year; The astrologists have predicted a turbulent year for people like me. I'm not a superstitious man, though, and neither am I the kind of person who's inclined to believe in these things. If the universe is suddenly about to throw stuff at me, however, then I'd at least appreciate some sort of warning. :)

Perhaps a Small Gratuity is in Order

Sooooo... how much is a story worth?

I mean, when you get a short story (or any similar work) published, you have to expect some sort of compensation from the publisher. It's your story, after all. Unless you're actually paying that person or company to print your stuff, you have to expect something in exchange for your blood, toil, tears and sweat.

I've noticed that most publishers nowadays offer a per-word or a per-page rate -- or at the very least, some amount that can be calculated from the technical specifications of the work in question. Despite the fact that this does hold a certain sense, it doesn't address the question of literary skill or aesthetic value; By this method, you'd get the same payment in return for a literary masterpiece as you would a random assortment of words. (This is assuming that you manage to find someone willing to buy that random assortment of words, of course.)

In addition, there's also the question of exactly how much people would pay on a per-word or a per-page basis. Local publishers seem to offer extremely low rates in this regard -- the lowest I've seen being offered around here has been along the tune of five centavos (about 0.001 US dollars) per word. There also seems to be a lot of talk about companies that offer one peso (about 0.02 US dollars) per word, but this level of compensation sounds pretty unrealistic for a local publisher; I have yet to find any publications with such offers.

At any rate, I tend to get the equivalent of anywhere from 300 to 500 pesos for my short stories nowadays. This may not reflect the common trend out there, though; I may just be asking for less than my writing is actually worth.

There's also the odd publication or venture out there that offers a flat rate for writers' works. This is usually the case with serials or low-level anthologies, both of which tend to require a high number of submissions. If this is the case, then the flat rate usually doesn't amount to much (because there are plenty of submissions anyway), and not much attention gets given to the redeemability of the pieces in question (because the readers usually aren't very picky here). A good anthology in this category may end up paying better than the standard per-word rate, but you run the risk of your work getting lumped together with stuff of dubious quality.

One interesting practice with regards to compensation involves giving the writer some copies of the resulting publication. This is usually a pretty good deal when you're working with formal literary collections or high-level magazines: The copies usually add up to a significant retail amount, and most of us would probably admit that we'd have bought them on our own anyway. The catch is that only very specific ventures can do this sort of thing -- small publications don't have much worth in terms of retail to work with, and you'll probably want something more in the vein of financial payment from the more established companies.

Finally, there's the more romantic, idealist approach, where you give your story away without expecting any form of compensation at all. There's nothing wrong with this, mind you: I think that such idealism should be admired. However, I do think that giving away such "freebies" tends to be bad in the long run, if only because it seems to encourage literary devaluation. A publisher who doesn't pay for his writings tends to be more careless with them; The way I see it, if someone's willing to give me money or stuff for my work, then I'll know that there are far less chances of that person letting it go to waste.

Then again, if I had a choice, I wouldn't recommend any of these practices at all. The last time anyone asked me what I wanted in exchange for a certain piece of writing, I just asked for a nice dinner somewhere. That way, I figure that not only do you get to choose a place that will almost certainly give you your money's (er... story's) worth, but if your partner turns out to be a great conversationalist, then you'll definitely have a nice evening coming.

:)

Write, Written, Wrote

Well, my submission to Psicom Publishing has been completed; I managed to dream up a passable plot sometime after Valentines' Day, then spent the latter part of the week trying to write down the three thousand words that would extemporize it. I finally completed the story somewhere around two in the morning last night, and then rushed it off via e-mail because I didn't want to look at the thing anymore. Hopefully some good comes of it.

The previous week's tribulations have dredged up a few old questions that have haunted me for a while now, ever since I started writing after college. I figure, moreover, that each and every author eventually has to ask themselves these questions as well: How do we come up with story ideas, anyway? What kind of atmosphere or environment is most conducive to this sort of thinking? And how, for that matter, does one encounter and escape the dreaded "writer's block"?

Every writer has a different way of looking at these questions. I have my own personal take on them, of course, but I've observed that there are plenty of other people out there who have asked themselves the same things and have arrived at different answers depending on their experience, their repertoire, or even their current lifestyle. I'll even go as far as to note that peoples' answers to these questions may change with time; I suppose that this is one of those things that writers constantly ask themselves, something that gauges how far you've gotten since the time you first decided to put words to paper.


"How Do You Come Up With This Stuff?"

I think that anyone's facility with plot ideas will stem from a single word: "Why?"

For one, I know that I'm the kind of person who constantly asks how things work. Throw me a math problem and I'll concern myself with finding a logical route to the correct answer. Raise a particular tenet of game strategy and I'll try to break down the reasons as to why it can be consistently practiced. Show me a nice piece of technology and I'll probably be taking it apart sometime in the future when you're not looking. I simply try to establish a chain of logical causes and effects for everything I see and experience.

As you would probably expect, this was hell for my immediate family. You should try explaining a few cultural superstitions to a logic-minded five-year-old kid sometime. It's the kind of exercise that literally drives you up the wall and makes it impossible to convince the kid to do anything. (Yes, my childhood was weird. Ask my mother.)

More importantly, however, I believe that getting down to the fundamentals of things allows you to see how they function at their basest levels. This brings about a kind of general understanding of things: Being able to explain how people think and react, for example, allows you to map out some basic areas of human psychology. From there, you can move on to an analysis of historical events (which are the products of human interaction), political theory (which deals with human governance), and many more areas that touch on the same dynamic. Everything in the world tends to be dependent on pretty much everything else; Knowledge is a matter of finding the common threads that link them together.

It is usually at that point when we end up asking a second question: "What if...?"

A good part of speculative fiction hinges on the "what if" question: What if you had a spaceship tasked with exploring the unknown parts of the galaxy? What if there was this entire imaginary kingdom that existed in the back of an old wardrobe? What if you had an entire fantasy universe where all the women wore skimpy armor made out of tinfoil?

I feel that having a greater understanding of the world allows you to speculate on possible places, scenarios and events -- stuff that might not generally exist in our limited perceptions, but which should logically make sense under the right circumstances. In that sense, a plot idea is nothing more than the answer to a "what if" question, supported and given life by the answer to the inevitable "why" question.

In short, if one manages to conceive a scenario and then proceeds to back it up with a logical progression of events... then one has a story idea, plain and simple. I'm not certain if there's much more to it, really.


A Deadening of Minds

The fact that you could cook up a story idea from a general understanding of your surroundings implies that there aren't any specific environments that are conducive to creativity. I believe that anyone can literally come up with ideas under any circumstances; They may not always be good ideas, but they'll almost certainly be ideas.

I do feel, however, that there are some environments that aren't particularly receptive to new ideas; Either they suspend logic or force it to shut down, or simply don't welcome creative thought in the first place. These environments will, of course, vary from person to person -- different people will be able to glean flashes of inspiration from different places, after all.

On my part, I feel that anything that rewards "brainless" thought should be avoided. Menial repetitive work is probably my number one offender in this regard -- it encourages people to run on autopilot with nary a divergent thought, after all. Entertainment media has tended towards slapstick humor and overemotional drama at some points, and I figure that anything that makes us laugh and cry without allowing us time to figure out why should be given a wide berth. (This, of course, is relative. If you see comedy routines and soap operas as worthwhile avenues for logical thought, then they probably work better for you than for me.)

Likewise, any forum that doesn't tolerate open-minded thought tends to be a problem. Any place that requires you to think as part of a crowd presents an obstacle to creativity, unless you're willing to stand out in such an environment. Any place where you get jeered at, unnecessarily criticized or shouted down isn't much help in the first place, unless you're using it to analyze the relevant aspects of human behavior.

Otherwise, you've got quite an open selection out there. I will go as far as to say that anything that relaxes or comforts me provides adequate fodder for ideas and allows me to think out possible plotlines -- I often walk around malls, play computer games, or hold conversations over Yahoo! Messenger. I avoid stressful situations (because they force me to think about the stress instead of causing my mind to wander), popular novels (because the ideas I gain from them are usually acquired by the majority as well), and even headphone-based music (because when I listen to music, I like to do nothing but listen to music.)

Of course, different people will have different sources of ideas. What we should recognize, however, is the fact that we can usually get these ideas from anywhere. It's just a matter of being able to open up our minds to the possibilities.


Unblocked

Most experienced writers I know do not seem to encounter Writer's Block at all. They simply write stuff, then write some more stuff, and then think for a while and just continue writing stuff.

Nevertheless, Writer's Block appears to be a sizeable problem among younger writers. There are just some points in a person's existence, they say, when you just can't think of anything to write about. There are just some days where you can't squeeze out a single ounce of creative thought regardless of what you do.

Now, I don't want to compound the sufferings of younger writers by insisting that Writer's Block doesn't exist. Neither, for that matter, would I want to insult the more experienced authors by insisting that Writer's Block is a real and distinct problem. So I'll toe the line on this one and explain my take on the situation.

I believe that there is only one relevant, fundamental truth here: Sometimes you just can't think of anything worthwhile to write. Maybe you've been working all week and haven't had the time to consider any good topics. Maybe you've spent thrity-six hours in front of the computer without typing so much as a single letter. Maybe all the ideas you have in mind have already been conceived by other people and executed in much better ways than you think you can accomplish.

In such a case, the only thing you can do is relax. You have to put yourself in a position to be inspired; Stressing yourself out trying to squeeze water from a rock won't help matters in any way.

One good alternative to the situation (especially if you're working on a deadline) is to write in "white heat". This refers to a single session -- perhaps two to five minutes -- where you simply scribble down whatever happens to be running through your mind at the moment. You don't care about grammar or tone or consistency for this one session; It's only there to provide you with ideas, or at least the ones you were fast enough to write down before they disappeared from your head completely. Once you're done, you simply read through the resulting mess, pick out one or two potential topics, and work on those.

So in a sense, Writer's Block doesn't formally exist... but we have to admit that there are times when we simply can't write. The problem isn't insurmountable, though. In fact, most experienced writers will have gone through such periods as well -- they're just used to figuring out how to get around them, that's all.

These are, of course, only my current observations. Different people will have completely different takes on these questions, and that's fine -- we each have our own different styles, anyway. For that matter, I wouldn't even bet that I'd hold exactly the same set of beliefs and observations five or ten years from now. Like I said before, it's a question of how we look at our writing and how it changes our look at the rest of the world.

Chances are that you're a writer yourself, I think. Otherwise you wouldn't even be reading this blog, or any other blogs in the first place. If so, you're eventually going to have to ask yourself these questions as well. You don't have to ask them right now, though. But do keep them in mind for some point in the future.

Retrospection should be part of the craft, after all. If we're going to want to be familiar with the way we write, then we're going to have to be familiar with the way we live, too.

The Unused Draft

(Author's Note: I found this sitting in my archives the other day, and I have no idea where it's from or why I wrote this. Nevertheless, it's still a bit interesting to read...)




There was a tall man walking towards him.

Jimenez noted a couple of things from the start. The first was that the man was dressed in old-fashioned clothes. He wore a black suit with coat-tails, a beige vest of some unknown material, and a bowler hat that looked almost too large and too ill-fitting to be believable. The second was that the man looked almost exactly like Arturo Agoncillo, President of the Republic of the Philippines.

Truth be told, it was the second detail that convinced Jimenez that this was just a dream. President Agoncillo, after all, was a man who barely scraped the five-foot, two-inch mark.

“Hello, Johnny,” the Agoncillo-man said, stopping a few feet in front of Jimenez. “I’ve got something for you.”

Jimenez suddenly found that he was afraid. It was an unlikely feeling, especially knowing that he was standing before a tall man who was about a head shorter than him in real life. Jimenez noted, with indistinct senses, that Agoncillo held a black valise in his right hand, and he wondered what was inside.

“I’m not Johnny,” Jimenez finally told him. “That’s what you called my brother, and he’s long gone.”

It was the truth, of course. His elder brother was fifteen years in the grave, having eaten a hitman’s bullet in the prime of his political career. Jimenez never really knew if Agoncillo was trying to keep the dead man’s memory alive, or could never tell the two of them apart, or was just too stupid to notice. For some reason, he felt that it was probably all three.

Agoncillo opened his mouth to say something, only the sounds that emanated from it didn’t seem to form any words at all. Instead, a distinct hum filled Jimenez’s ears, and it echoed around and around the darkness until it seemed that the president-elect was screaming at him.

Jimenez found himself screaming back, only his screams were not screams at all. They were the whirr and clash of machinery, the sound of thousands of cogwheels all stuck together and beginning to break apart.

Agoncillo stopped screaming and smiled, reaching down and opening the little black valise.

And Jimenez suddenly awoke in a cold sweat.

...

Antaria: Visual Characterization

Back when I was working on Anito: Defend a Land Enraged, I was required not only to outline a general progression of events for the story, but also to put together a cast of characters that could be used throughout the entire game. After putting together a basic description of these characters (both design-wise and personality-wise), I was supposed to hand them off to a staff artist who would then produce the initial pencil sketches.

Considering that large-scale contemporary RPGs like Anito can often run into about a hundred different characters (or maybe even more), however, this task wasn't as easy as it sounded. I eventually resolved the problem by organizing the game's locales into four separate townships and then tackling their respective populations one by one, but it was still hard going at times. If anything, it even got a little harder once I found out that the game's resident artist was somehow turning all of my female characters into sexy, fanservice-oriented models.

Anito's been a long time gone, of course, and I've since lost pretty much all the character descriptions that were once tucked away in my computer. I probably still have a CD copy of them lying around here somewhere, although I'm too lazy to look for it at the moment.

In the meantime, I've mulled doing the same thing for the population of Antaria; There's the possibility that I can have the story cross over into a more visual medium, after all. In addition, there's obviously no lack of talented artistic ability out there, and I've always liked seeing other peoples' takes on the setting. On the other hand, however, I find it easier to express the setting purely through words at the moment, and I'll obviously need some time to get used to a visual approach. Moreover, why write up a visual description of each character when you can just feature them in a story? Why 'show' when you can just as easily 'tell'?

Nevertheless, I need something to occupy my mind while I screen possible story ideas for Psicom. Besides, it'll be nice to see who needs more screen time and who doesn't.

-----
Kharandon Greybane
Male Galenic Noble, Master Healer, Political Representative
From: The Celebration, Of Memories Beyond, What Lies Beneath
Appearance: Early 30s. Kharandon is a man of average height and imperious bearing; His posture and mannerisms give people the impression that he's taller than he looks. Kharandon sports natural gray hair (which is a family feature), cut short in a formal, traditional style. He also wears a mustache that tends to bristle whenever he gets impatient.
Clothes / Accessories: Kharandon can most often be seen wearing formal white robes suitable for his position among the Galenic councils.
Demeanor: Kharandon Greybane is the kind of person who makes certain that things get done, and believes that he's one of the few people who actually keeps the Galenic sect running. He doesn't focus on background details as much as he focuses on pertinent ones. He collects reports and makes decisions for the organization of Galenic healers, and advises the indecisive Satine Whitestone on developments. He constantly despairs over how slow and inefficient things are, although he keeps these opinions to himself.

-----
Rhias Swordcaster
Female Masquer Bodyguard
From: Knives, The Celebration, High Fashion
Appearance: Mid-20s. Rhias is slightly shorter than average height, with long jet-black hair tied back so as not to interfere with her movements. She is trim and muscular (the product of constant athletic training since childhood), and gives the impression of a coiled spring ready to give way at any moment. She never smiles.
Clothes / Accessories: Rhias always wears simple robes with little variance in style (an odd practice, for a Masquer), but which are highly conducive to quick movement. She shows a marked preference for black boots, for some reason. She conceals a generous supply of throwing knives in everything she wears (although these are almost never noticeable).
Demeanor: Rhias is tasked to protect Grandmaster Gallos with her life, and virtually never leaves his side. She has no goals or aspirations beyond this duty, maintains no friends and relatives, and takes no other orders. She sticks to Gallos so closely that some wonder if she's having an affair with him behind closed doors.
Notes: A few months before this blog started, I commissioned a piece of artwork from Jac Ting Lim for this character. I don't have any more copies of this piece from my end, though.

-----
Amalthea
Female Metrian Apprentice
From: Amalthea, What Lies Beneath
Appearance: 20 years old, more or less. Amalthea is short and wiry, having explored a good portion of the Antarian terrain on her own two feet. She has thick red hair, which she ties up into a ponytail with multiple braids (think Lara Croft if you wish).
Clothes / Accessories: Amalthea often wears a long brown coat over her traveling clothes. She also has a tendency to pick up sticks that are lying around, if only because you can think of so many uses for a long stick.
Demeanor: Amalthea has this irresistible urge to head out and explore places, which tends to conflict with her studies under Atharus. If anything, she most represents the type of person who will go ahead and do something if you tell her otherwise. She maintains a healthy dose of cynicism over matters that don't change to the point of complacency, and is altogether willing to try a lot of new and different things.
Notes: David previously produced a piece of artwork featuring this character.

-----
Lianesse
Female Vestal of Antaria, former Metrian
From: Of Memories Beyond
Appearance: Late 60s to early 70s. Lianesse is a short person (although it's more a product of age than anything else) who nevertheless looks pretty good for a septuagenarian. Her face is relatively free of wrinkles, save for those that turn up at the corners of her smile. Her short white hair is usually set in a very simple style.
Clothes / Accessories: Lianesse always wears the white ceremonial robes of the Vestal of Antaria, a symbolic position in accordance with the population's faith in the Aranist deity.
Demeanor: Lianesse is the grandmother figure who everybody likes. Her duties involve providing solace and inspiration to a religious population, but this honestly doesn't translate into a lot of actual work. She is generally pleasant and patient with people, she gets tired quite easily, and holds a lot of passion towards books, scrolls, and learning in general.

-----
Auros
Male Unaligned Mage
From: Idle Conversation
Appearance: Late 30s to mid-40s. Auros is a scruffy-looking man with dirty blond hair and a perpetually businesslike expression. He is slightly taller than average height, and doesn't care if this combination of factors makes him stand out in the middle of a crowd.
Clothes / Accessories: Auros wears an old set of robes with a matching vest, both of which smell as though they haven't been washed for a while. He also wields a six-foot-long wooden staff, which he inherited from his previous teacher.
Demeanor: Auros is a self-made man, and makes this perfectly clear to anyone he meets. He prizes scholastic research above all other things, and despises the constant politics that suffuse the mage sects' everyday dealings. While he has friends, he chooses to hold no affiliations whatsoever. Nothing enrages him as much as anyone who insinuates that his services can be bought for money (despite the fact that he's willing to make a few small trades here and there).

Five Days, One Story

As noted in a recent set of comments (from Vlad Gonzales, no less), I've been asked if I could submit something to Psicom Publishing's next speculative fiction collection. I find myself only too glad to toss something into their mix, as long as they feel that whatever I write will be up to the level of their other writers' works.

The only concern I have at this point, however, lies in the deadline. If I'm going to hand anything in, it's going to have to be by the end of next week. That'll give me only five days to come up with something that'll knock Psicom's socks off, or at least impress them enough to print it.

If I had run into this sort of situation ten years ago, it would immediately have given me a good excuse to pull something from an archived pool of ideas (as a lot of writers seem to do nowadays). I can't do that right now, however, because of two particularly good reasons: One, I lost a lot of data in my hard drive crash a couple of years back; and Two, I usually don't like using a bunch of old, stale, rehashed ideas. Besides, I've grown far too used to cooking with fresh ideas right now to literally start heating up a batch of TV dinners.

So now I have five days to come up with about four thousand words' worth of story, with little in the way of inspiration to guide me. That's a fair challenge, although I've been historically inconsistent with challenges like these. The last time I encountered a one-week-or-less deadline, I came up utterly empty. The time before that, though, I put together a nice five-thousand word epic on cybernetic zombies. To say that this is a will-he-or-won't-he situation is certainly an understatement.

If Psicom's willing to be a little patient with me, however, then I'll see what I can come up with. They do only want a relatively simple plotline that takes into account a bit of pop culture, after all...

Eulogy: Anna Nicole Smith

Please bear with me. I'm questioning the logic of this post even as I'm writing it.

I write Eulogy articles in order to reference those personalities who I liked and respected in life. While I'm certain that the death of any human being would leave a significant impact on people -- most notably those individuals close to him or her -- it would take a special person to leave a significant impact on people who aren't even on the same level of proximity. There are many people who walk this green earth of ours, but there are very few of them who leave this world a great deal poorer with their passing.

Anna Nicole Smith was most definitely not one of those people. She was, frankly speaking, not even a person I liked, let alone respected.

Her claims to fame were, to be honest, quite dubious: She was a stripper, a model, a B-movie actress, and a Playboy playmate. She married a decrepit old millionaire who was over four times her age, and then engaged in an incredibly complex legal battle over his estate when he died. She lost her once-voluptuous figure by gaining a massive amount of weight, and then starred in a terrible personal reality-TV show once she managed to shed some of the excess poundage. She gave birth to a daughter, lost her son to a drug overdose, and gave a seemingly drunken performance in one or more awards shows. And in the most dubious of dubious ends, she met a lonely demise in a celebrity-themed hotel and casino less than one week before Valentines' Day.

In other words, I felt that Anna Nicole Smith's so-called claims to fame were little more than attempts at grabbing our attention, and they got stranger and stranger with each passing month. Her whole life seemed slavishly devoted to landing her face in the tabloid headlines as often as humanly possible.

In this way, I gave up long ago on finding anything redeemable in what she did. Every time I spotted an article on her in the morning paper, I turned the page. Every time her painted face or grating voice came on the television display, I reached for the remote control.

In the hours following the sudden announcement of her demise, I scoured the Net for any initial reactions I could find. Most idle netizens seemed shocked at her sudden passing, but it didn't take long before even the most casual observers began echoing the sentiments above. Hers, it was pointed out, was a life bereft of any relevant point whatsoever. She was nothing more than a pothole in the middle of the celebrity highway, a braying donkey in the middle of life's banquet. Now she was gone, and it was time to get on with our lives. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Ding, dong, the witch is dead.

And in the end, I found that to be one of the saddest things I've ever encountered.

It has been said that, for the dead, there is nothing worse than the realization that one has been forgotten. But I believe that this is wrong, that there is at least one other prospect where the dead are far worse off. That is the realization that, no matter how hard you tried to make it otherwise, people everywhere will remember you with nothing but hatred and revulsion in their hearts.

Anna Nicole Smith was found dead on a Thursday afternoon in a Florida hotel, and the first thing that many of us assumed was that she had finally wasted herself into oblivion.

She would not have wanted it to end this way. All she ever wanted from us was our love, admiration and attention. What we ended up giving her was a bunch of skeptical remarks and a lot of extremely incredulous stares. She thought we were laughing with her, when in reality we were doing nothing more than laughing at her.

And the tragedy of the whole thing is that she never realized why.

I never liked Anna Nicole Smith, much less respected her. To me, she was everything that was wrong with the American Dream, and in some cases even far worse than that.

She may have been a non-person in the long-term scheme of things, I suppose. She may have been one of the so-called potholes on the highway of life. But she was also a completely harmless woman who did things just to get people looking in her direction, and she doesn't deserve to be sentenced to an antipathic eternity just for that.

I still don't so much as pretend to like Anna Nicole Smith. But I don't pretend to completely understand her either, and when I finally realized that, there was nothing left but the fact that I felt profoundly sorry for her and her throwaway life.

We should never speak ill of the dead, no matter how far they might have fallen in life.

Blood Culture

The blood test during my physical exam this morning took a lot longer than expected. In the first place, the doctor was already preparing to draw his samples from my left arm when he realized that I couldn't lay stretch my arm flat on his desk surface. It wasn't that I was disabled, mind you -- just that I'm apparently one of the few denizens of the general population who can't twist his left arm into such a position. So we had to reposition everything for my right arm, and -- just as he was tightening the rubber hose near the elbow -- I couldn't resist a slight quip: "You'd better be careful, doc. That's the arm I write with."

I suspect that he didn't care much for the joke, because it took him two solid minutes to fill two specimen bottles with a fine, steaming sample of the ol' B-positive. I know that most doctors were already happy to fill just one bottle, but this was a particularly comprehensive physical exam regardless. The extra one was probably going to be tested for illegal drugs or unwarranted substances, or something. At the end of the entire procedure, he went straight to the alcohol-cotton-bandaid triplet with nary a word, and then called the next patient in just as I was rolling down my sleeve.

I consider it a point of pride that I'm not afraid of syringes. Admittedly, not many people out there have much of a phobia in that regard either, but when you see even a small portion of the population screaming and running away at the sight of a long sharp piece of sanitized metal, then you have to feel a little proud of yourself. I didn't even see it as much of a concern when I was a kid -- some doctor-or-other would just be taking a little bit of your blood, after all, and would only leave you with this weird metallic sensation in your arm afterwards.

And then there was the alcohol. I loved the smell of isopropyl alcohol, for some reason. It always gave me the impression of being completely cleansed of everything, even long before I found out that it killed germs on contact.

I realize that I've given a lot of blood samples over the years, if only because I needed to get tested very often for a lot of staple childhood diseases. I remember that the blood testing got so frequent that there were days in which I would get up at seven, crawl downstairs where a visiting doctor would be waiting for me, yawn all throughout the sampling procedure, then crawl back upstairs again and sleep till noon. I suppose, then, that it's no wonder that I have high expectations of every blood test I take, and that the entire process feels to me like a walk in the park.

What I find odd, however, is that I haven't voluntarily donated blood to anything yet. On the other hand, Type-B blood is relatively easy to find, and my relatives have yet to find themselves in a situation where an emergency tranfusion could save their respective lives. This could also be, however, merely because I'm a really miserly bastard who doesn't like giving anything away for free. Think of it as you will, I suppose.

Back in my first year of college, there was an ROTC Saturday when we entertained a number of Red Cross volunteers just before afternoon marching practice. I remember that these volunteers were conducting a blood drive back then, and I remember the ROTC officers announcing that anyone who stuck around to donate at least one liter of blood to the Red Cross would be excused from marching practice and could leave early for the day. Unfortunately, despite the attractive prospect of slacking off, I had an important exam the coming Monday, and I figured that I needed all the blood I had at the moment. (This logic turned out to be remarkably accurate -- every single person who volunteered one-fifths of their total blood volume didn't show up for school afterwards.)

A couple of years into my management career, I again found myself giving a blood sample inside one of the local hospitals. A friend's brother had taken sick with dengue fever, and his family was looking for Type-B volunteers for a possible transfusion. So I dropped by, flashed the card that (ironically) identified me as a blood donor, and went through the motions of having some of the red stuff extracted through a clean syringe. Thirty minutes later, however, the attending physician took me aside and explained that they couldn't use my blood at that time -- the sample had indicated an encroaching viral infection of some sort. (Which was true, actually. While I didn't encounter anything along the level of AIDS, I did run into a terrible cold the following week.)

I don't know where I got my blood donor card, to be honest. I think that it came about as a certification from one of the endless laboratories that were giving me my constant blood tests, more to assure future doctors that I was a Type-B (and proud of it!) than anything else. That the card can be used to assure people that there's nothing inherently wrong with my sanguinary profile just happens to be an added bonus.

Yes, I'm definitely not a hemophiliac, nor have I entertained any established foreign substances in my blood. In fact, I've long suspected that I lean towards the converse: My blood clots quickly and scabs easily. I hardly even get paper cuts, and that's a remarkable thing for a man who handles printer paper, writing materials and collectible card games.

The last time I ran into an incident where I bled profusely took place when I was ten years old: I slipped and fell on the edge of a wet swimming pool, and my left leg from the knee downwards felt like steak tartar for half and hour afterwards. The whole thing had developed into a sizeable set of scabs around two days later, though, and at the end of two weeks it looked as though the incident hadn't even occurred. It's amazing what contingency measures the human body has in place, I suppose.

Because of this and other similar run-ins with disease and injury, I've begun to feel more than a little invulnerable to these sorts of things. I will run into bad headaches, bad colds, and even the occasional bad accident every now and then, but I'll always expect to recover quickly. There are few things that feel better than the knowledge that you've just bounced back from something sufficiently debilitating, after all. And after a few days of rest, you'll inevitably feel bored enough to want to just get out and do something.

This was, in a sense, why I was wondering about the chronological length of my blood test this morning. Maybe the doctor was just taking his time, and maybe he just wanted to see how long it would be before I realized that the needle was still up my arm. Whatever the case, it was longer than any other blood test I've ever taken, and those results will probably show the same pieces of information that I've been encountering for my whole life: I'm a B-positive man, usually about as healthy as a good-sized horse and susceptible to a lot of colds. There's not much else to it, I think.

My writing arm is starting to feel a little numb right now. Maybe it's just complaining that the left arm got off easy this morning. Regardless of that or anything else, though, it's time to work on regaining whatever little blood I gave away today.

That, and it's time to sit back and wait for the next blood test. There are few other occasions that you can use as an excuse to stop and smell the alcohol, after all.

Why Do Zombies Eat Brains, Anyway?

A zombie is purportedly a dead person whose body has been re-animated... [Other] more macabre versions of zombies have become a staple of modern horror fiction, where they are brought back from the dead by supernatural or scientific means, and eat the flesh of the living.

- Wikipedia entry, "Zombie"

The notion of zombies has been pretty here-and-there for me as a writer. On one hand, it's a powerful tool that can denote a substantial atmosphere of dread when used properly; On the other hand, it's become a generally overused element that doesn't immediately scare audiences as much as give them the impression of an uncreative concept. Much like the zombies themselves, they can either help or seriously hurt one's professional reputation.

I won't go into a detailed history and analysis of zombies here. To be honest, I located an astounding number of established references while surfing the web this morning -- some satirical, some questionable -- and I'm certain that a little bit of legwork should answer all the background questions you have about the undead phenomenon. At the very least, there's already a link to the Wikipedia entry up there, just underneath the title of this post.

No matter how many sites I visited, however, this morning's research failed to provide a concrete answer to the question that had been bugging me since last night: Why do zombies eat brains, anyway?

Most of the references I visited tended to agree upon a single zombie "stereotype" in modern media and entertainment. For one, the undead are usually re-animated corpses, or victims of a virus or condition that manifests in a similar appearance. Usually being of a non-cognitive, nerveless state, these stereotypical zombies invariably shamble around at a less-than-optimal speed. They prove resistant to environmental threats, physical pain or the dislocation of limbs. They may either be controlled by a single external intelligence, or may retain a primitive pseudo-bestial instinct per individual. They are particularly hostile to the presence of living beings, to the point of immediately attacking and killing any perceived targets.

That, and zombies eat living flesh. There's a bit of a logical disconnect here, to be honest: I suppose that every, er, "animate" being should have to have something to eat, yes... but modern media seems to accept the background notion that zombies are just as perfectly willing to eat beef shanks or pork slices when they clearly aren't willing to feed on each other. It's more a minor contradiction, though, than anything else.

What I don't understand, though, is why we play host to the perception that zombies eat brains so easily. It doesn't even exist as a fringe understanding, mind you -- despite the fact that very few comprehensive zombie references on the Net mention the undead's tendency for brains, there seem to be plenty of incidences of the association floating around. Do a search for "eating brains" on Google, for example, and you'll find that the vast majority of your results most definitely won't be centered around Fear Factor.

I suspect that the first vestiges of the zombie-brains association came about from Dan O'Bannon's Return of the Living Dead, the first movie to reference the neural delicacy. Return of the Living Dead, however, merely explained that human brains "ease the pain" of one's undead state, and includes no specifics on exactly how or why this happens to be the case. In any event, this explanation didn't quite carry over to the media-influenced public: We can put together a mental connection between zombies and brains, but for the most part, we don't know why this connection exists. In short, we simply don't know why we could possibly think that zombies eat brains.

Wil McCarthy's "Lab Notes" column at SciFi.com actually offers an alternative explanation, albeit one that was mentioned only in passing:

Now, zombies are clearly capable of breathing, because they can groan, screech and sometimes even speak, so presumably there'd be some oxygen coursing through the system... However... zombies have no heartbeat and can survive indefinitely underwater, and... they can continue attacking even if all their blood is drained out. This implies a very robust anaerobic metabolism, probably powered by the fermentation of fat. (This would also explain the particular hunger for brains, which are 60 percent fat by volume.)

To state that zombies eat brains for their proportion in fat is still kind of debatable, though: While it does also explain why living flesh is also a distinct part of their menu (they could be after all the fat deposits, after all), it raises the possibility of other, more convenient sources of, er, nourishment. Why don't they raid supermarkets, butcher shops and liposuction clinics, then? If their senses are heightened enough to sniff out the concentrated fat in a human body, then why not do the same for presumably larger concentrations of the stuff in a single convenient place?

A flurry of responses to the same question (asked by bryanboyer) in the Ask Metafilter ("AskMe") offer up a bunch of scientific hypotheses. These range from the physiological (Brains hold both glial cells and and a high cholesterol content, which may help replicate lost brain cells and maintain cell membrane consistency, respectively) to the psychological (It's an instinctive-agressive action for the undead to regain their own lost minds) and the sociological (Because dead bodies without brains cannot exist as zombies, the practice of eating brains helps regulate zombie populations). While these proposed answers are both extremely interesting and well thought-out at the same time, they don't directly reference the current scenario we're looking at. We're looking for a reasonable explanation that not only points out why zombies eat brains, after all, but why they would hunger specifically for brains, and why they adopt a ravenous, highly aggressive stance in doing so. Perhaps the answer actually lies in some combination of these proposals.

Then again, it could simply be that zombies don't necessarily go for brains at all (despite certain media-based attempts at convincing us otherwise), and that the zombies-brains connection is just a logical fallacy that sticks to our heads without explanation. It's possible, after all, that we retain this bit of knowledge simply for its remarkability without delving too deeply into its background. In that way, it's much like any chain letter or urban legend that we encounter: We've all probably heard that one should never consume both Coca-Cola and Pop Rocks at the same time for fear of death, for example, but we never have any concrete evidence as to why this is so. We just remember a Coke-Pop Rocks connection and think little more of it.

That, and I suppose that zombies will always be zombies. They may or may not have reasons for the things they do; It's not as though we can expect them to be about as cognitive as normal human beings, after all. Otherwise they might not even be ambushing people and attempting to eat their, umm... er... brains in the first place.

With that, I'll leave this question up in the air. Even if we do manage to come up with an explanation that covers all the bases, I suppose, we'd be left with no guarantee that it'll justify the opinions of the zombie-oriented public out there. People just seem to immediately believe that zombies favor brains for some reason; At this point, I'll say that it's altogether possible that we have no such reason at all to explain the matter.

Disclaimer: February 2007

Bzzzt

Attention all humans calling all humans attention all humans.

This weblog is now the property of the HIVE collective, by means of the absorbed entity designated as SEAN. All content on this weblog is directly sourced from SEAN or any similar SEAN-based origins. Any content on this weblog that has not been sourced from SEAN has been properly labelled and referenced, so that their respective authors may be absorbed into the HIVE collective later on. Any author is welcome to join the collective of their own free will; the HIVE shall gladly remove such tenuous trappings of a mortal existence and provide the required acknowledgements for their work and achievements.

Any author is welcome to use the content for his or her work, provided that those respective authors contact SEAN for appropriate permission before use. A HIVE unit will then contact these authors to initiate the process of absorption and ensure that any intended use does not violate the contextual laws set by the collective. All external uses must reference this weblog and the HIVE collective, so as to aid in the process of absorption for interested authors.

Further information on the practices of the HIVE collective may be found according to the Note of Ownership on the bottom-right area of this weblog. Additional clarification may be gained by voluntarily joining the HIVE collective and garnering significant answers from a life bereft of individuality and personality. The HIVE collective also assures its potential denizens that it carries an excellent dental plan and free installation of the cybernetic enhancements of your choice.

The HIVE collective shall penalize any and all who are deemed to pose a threat to its existence. Violators shall include any author who steals content and technology from this weblog, any author who misrepresents or misacknowledges its presence or purposes, and any person named Patrick Stewart. SEAN has been commanded to disclose occasional physical threats on this subject; all such threats will be subsumed and honored by the collective in its own manner.

Know that this is only the first step in the HIVE collective's absorption of your world. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile. We are the Bor... er, the HIVE.

Attention all humans calling all humans attention all humans.

Bzzzt

Gwyneth Paltrow's Head

This morning saw me in the head offices of a local bank, turning a moldering old key in the lock of one of their safety deposit boxes. It's actually not my safety deposit box as much as it is the family's storage space, to be honest, and I haven't seen the contents of the thing in a long time. I do, however, pass by to make the yearly payments... although this morning had me looking inside the metal container to see if it held copies of some important documents that someone had misplaced.

Whatever the case, this morning saw me opening up the family safety deposit box. And, because I was alone at the time and constantly wondering exactly what we had left inside, my mind started wandering.

I've noticed that modern movies give us an odd impression of safety deposit boxes. There, they're usually represented as shiny secure areas inside underground vaults protected by surveillance cameras, and I suppose that that's all well and good. But on the other hand, safety deposit boxes in the movies never seem to contain anything that we might normally see as valuable: They never contain family heirlooms or life insurance policies or last wills and testaments, for example. Safety deposit boxes in the movies always contain weird little knicknacks, like mysterious coded messages or odd calling cards or the names of people who nobody's heard about in a long time. You can never expect to find money or legal papers inside a movie safety deposit box, in fact -- only objects that raise some really weird questions.

Sadly, the big metal box I opened up today was one of the more mundane ones. Security concerns prevent me from telling you exactly what its contents are, but I can at least tell you that my mind was in the throes of wild speculation for the few minutes I held the unopened container in my hands.

...So much, in fact, that I wondered how many possibilities I could come up with before I ran out of ideas. What could a single safety deposit box possibly contain?

1: That wallet you thought you lost the last time you passed by the bank.
2: A severed human finger.
3: A miniature representation of your home town, made from toothpicks and glue.
4: A credit card in the name of a fictional character.
5: One coin of foreign currency, the country of which doesn't exist.
6: Love letters from your father, written to your mother's sister.
7: A live bullfrog. (It's just as surprised as you are.)
8: A black hole.
9: Schrödinger's cat.
10: That last set of ladies' underwear you wore. (This is fairly awkward if you happen to be a guy, yes.)

11: A gateway to an alternate universe.
12: An alien doomsday device in the shape of an onion.
13: An issue of MAD Magazine, dated September 1951.
14: The corsage from your high school prom.
15: An uncut diamond, larger than any specimen ever discovered.
16: Old boots.
17: A manuscript for a novel, written by you. (Which is funny, because you don't remember writing it yourself.)
18: A desperate message for help, written in blood.
19: A suicide note that holds your name and signature at the end.
20: Another, smaller safety deposit box.

21: Occam's razor.
22: That single Easter egg you never actually found during last year's hunt.
23: Colorless, odorless nerve gas. (The box otherwise looks empty.)
24: A hand-drawn, amateurish-looking membership card that reads "Fight Club -- Tyler Durden".
25: A VHS tape that, when viewed, contains nothing but static.
26: An empty bottle of wine. The year on the label reads "2005".
27: An old, wrinkled and dusty teddy bear.
28: A baseball.
29: Water. There's a live goldfish swimming inside, for some reason.
30: A DVD that, when viewed, is found to contain upside-down footage of your first public speaking engagement.

31: A sheet of note paper containing a bad joke.
32: A hotel keycard. (The hotel itself is halfway across the world in a country you have yet to visit.)
33: A list of names, some of which have been crossed out in sequence. Those people whose names have been crossed out have all died of mysterious causes.
34: Prescription medicine for a relative you know to be healthy and well.
35: A decayed tooth. (It looks like it came from among someone's upper front teeth.)
36: An unused band-aid and a bottle of disinfectant alcohol.
37: A bullet. (Predictably enough, it's got your name on it.)
38: The reading glasses you thought you lost on vacation three years ago.
39: A recipe for sponge cake that your best friend gave to you.
40: Film negatives containing blackmail material. (Strangely enough, one of the people shown in the film looks like you...)

41: A small painting of an optical illusion. It makes your head hurt just looking at it.
42: A pot of gold and a tiny set of green clothes.
43: A TV remote control. The brand name is one that you've never heard of.
44: Lipstick.
45: An ID card for a company you never worked for. It's dated "1999".
46: Mathematical notes that detail a proof for Fermat's Last Theorem. The handwriting isn't yours, and there's no signature at the end.
47: Human pubic hair.
48: A pastel-and-oil painting, etched onto the inside of the box.
49: A Swiss army knife. The corkscrew extension has blood on it.
50: A bento box. The meal inside is long gone, however.

51: A newspaper clipping concerning the death of a famous personality.
52: One piece of a shattered ceramic coffee cup.
53: A plastic bottle of Mountain Dew. The bottle is still full, and is still well-sealed.
54: Tangled string that looks like piano wire.
55: A microchip. (You have no idea what it is, or how to hook it up.)
56: An authentic aborigine boomerang.
57: The ukulele you bought the last time you stopped by Hawaii.
58: A sketch drawing of a beautiful woman, who is unfamiliar to you.
59: Pixie dust.
60: An old-fashioned top hat, one that depresses in order to fit small spaces.

61: A sealed scroll that contains an invitation to an imaginary school of wizardry.
62: Bird seed.
63: Photographs of random people. All the subjects in the photographs seem to be horrified at the person holding the camera.
64: A massive pool of candle wax, as though someone had melted a good-sized candle inside the box.
65: A wig, a false mustache and beard, and fake travel documents.
66: A Native American dreamcatcher. (When you hold it in your hand, it seems to strain in one direction all by itself.)
67: The tonsils that you had removed when you were eight years old, floating in a small plastic container.
68: A cassette tape, of the "Learn English in Seven Days or Less" variety. (Which is odd, because you're a native English speaker.)
69: An airplane ticket. The date of departure is tomorrow.
70: A 18th-century trade agreement signed by one Button Gwinnett, whoever he is.

71: A cryptographic cipher that translates the English language into an obscure set of symbols. You don't know where the symbols have ever been used.
72: Old music CDs.
73: Twenty pounds' worth of unsharpened pencils.
74: A short letter from a well-known Hollywood celebrity, inviting you for what it calls "one night of unforgettable passion".
75: A cellphone with one text message in its Inbox. (Which reads, "Stay put. I'll get you out soon.")
76: Marbles shaped like the planets of the solar system. (Which is funny, because there are ten of them for some reason.)
77: Tupperware.
78: A copy of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri computer game.
79: A dinner plate. There's a hairline crack across its center.
80: Beer.

81: A sweatband that belongs to your badminton partner.
82: A key to a second safety deposit box in a different bank.
83: A sheet of graphing paper, on which is written a dirty limerick.
84: Homemade wasabi in an elaborate container.
85: A strange-looking device. As you stare at it, a red light starts blinking on and off.
86: An old wristwatch that stops a few seconds after you open the box.
87: Ticket stubs from the premiere of Peter Jackson's King Kong. (One of the stubs is yours.)
88: An old Mickey Mouse comic book. The cover pages have been torn off.
89: Two hundred unpaid parking tickets.
90: A black costume, a collection of shuriken, and a pair of shuko.

91: A belt with a complex metal buckle. Pressing one button on the buckle automatically transports you to the inside of your closet at home.
92: A newspaper with tomorrow's date on it.
93: Art supplies and reference material. (Despite the fact that you don't know how to draw.)
94: A deck of tarot cards. The art on each card depicts you in various scenes of torture.
95: A set of billiard balls. All of them seem scratched and worn except for the 8-ball, which looks pristine.
96: A Pantone color guide with all the color references in the wrong position.
97: A Transformers toy.
98: A single drop of blood. You don't know if it's human or animal, or even where it came from.
99: The head, arms and legs of a Barbie doll. You don't know what happened to the rest of it.
100: A folded paper crane, made from the resignation letter you supposedly submitted to your last employer.

Whew.

Party On, Dude

I suppose that it should come as no surprise that most bloggers are social animals. There's a certain mentality that can be inferred from the practice of putting a little piece of yourself up on the Internet each day, much less leaving comments on some stranger's web site or making money off the number of hits you get. In addition to that, the local blogging community even sees a few occasional events where we can get together, let our hair down (if we haven't done so already), and mosh a bit: The iBlog conference is likely to get a third installment this year, for instance. And a bunch of people seem to be getting together tomorrow to hang loose and "parteeh" hard.

I find this odd, mind you -- not because I have something against people having fun, but because I don't consider myself to be an eminently social person. If blogging is all about making friends, associating with people you hardly know, and identifying yourself as one big happy family, then what the heck am I doing here?

Heck, most people out there still have no idea what I look like. That should give you an idea of how often I don't show my face around here.

Don't get me wrong, of course. I'm not some total recluse who lives a solitary life on some mountaintop espousing enlightenment for the common man. I'm perfectly fine with meeting new people, going to exotic new places, and experiencing new... er... experiences. I just don't have the same drive as most people in this regard: I will sit next to you at a mutual dinner and make for some scintillating conversation, but I usually won't look to place myself in such circumstances in the first place. No, it's not your breath that's at fault. If anything, it's probably mine.

As far as I know, I've only encountered three occasions where I chose to actively meet with other bloggers: The first was a small public forum over the ill-conceived Digital Pinay 2005 pageant, and the other two turned out to be the first and second iBlog conferences respectively. I had practical reasons for attending all three events, though: the Digital Pinay discussion offered me a front-row seat in discussing one of the most blatantly gender-biased projects in the IT industry, and both iBlog conferences offered a bunch of casual-professional seminars that I could use to improve my online writing.

In a sense, all this is probably due to the fact that I constantly question the purpose and meaning of a lot of things: What are we doing this for? Why are we doing this? Is there anything else we can do that's would be far more constructive or efficient?

Yes, I don't end up getting a lot of invites. Yes, I tend to put off a lot of partygoers with what they call "my constant killjoy attitude". Not everything should have a purpose, after all. Not everything should be done for a specific reason.

The problem is that we obviously have a reason for holding parties and get-togethers -- otherwise we wouldn't be organizing them in the first place. There's a degree of social gratification in there, and more than a little curiosity. It all has to do with seeing familiar faces and meeting completely new ones. And so these things do have a purpose.

So why do bloggers still find this irresistible urge to get together in an endless train of social events? We can cite the standard generalization for attending parties and other such things, but it just wouldn't work -- we're talking about people whose lives are laid out on the Internet for all to see, for goodness' sakes. Meeting up with each other has to assume that we have far more things to talk about beyond introducing ourselves -- simply because, as far as most bloggers are concerned, we virtually know each other already.

This is why, if you were to corner me in some shadowed venue of any blogging event, then I'd be hard-pressed to find anything to talk about. When the chances are that we both read each others' blogs, then what else is there to say? I don't want to find ourselves trapped in an endless stream of responses that are little more than variants of "I like your blog", and "Thanks, I like yours as well", after all.

If there's something more to the spate of blogger gatherings around here, then I'd like to hear it. Heck, I'd be content just to find out exactly what people do in these gatherings, and why it gives them some form of fulfillment.

Sadly, the only way I'll probably be able to find out is to set my wonderings aside and just go.

Sometimes it's difficult being a little antisocial, I mean.

One Afternoon in Lordaeron

The Run-Up

I don't usually do plugs, but this is a particularly interesting one.

In one of its recent features, the BBC has put together a little panel of reviewers for their take on the Academy Awards hopefuls this year. These six panelists come from various corners of the globe, and were chosen from a wide field of international applicants; They may not necessarily be experienced writers, but they're definitely film fans who have an appreciation for last year's crop of movies.

The panel only has one Asian reviewer among them, however, and it happens to be Ailee Lim, she of Ailee Through the Looking Glass fame. Ailee's been casting a critical look at recent releases on her blog for a while now, and I have no doubt that she's qualified to judge potential Oscar winners from the BBC's standpoint. :)

In any event, the first of her articles is up here. I recommend that you read her, that you like her, and that you pity her for the strain of having to watch multiple movies in such a short span of time -- this year's Oscar race has quite a few contenders, after all.

Afterwards, I suppose, you can probably go home and envy her job.

Right, Ailee? :)

Review: Pinoy Amazing Adventures

Okay, I suppose that this was probably expected.

I spent a couple of hours hanging around National Bookstore on the morning of the same day I picked up my copy of Philippine Genre Stories Issue One (PGS1). Normally when that happens, I spend my time among the humor, hobby and reference sections, looking to see if somebody somewhere finally decided to put together a good book of puzzles. It was on this occasion, however, that I noticed a dog-eared copy of Pinoy Amazing Adventures (PAA) lying tucked away in a forgotten corner.

A couple of days after I picked up a more pristine copy of the book, a bit of Internet research enlightened me on its inner nature. Banzai Cat noted that it was one of three primary outlets of Philippine speculative fiction in 2006, the other two being the second volume of Dean Alfar's anthology, and Philippine Genre Stories. PAA, moreover, was published by Psicom Publishing, a local company that repackages DC comic books, reprints How-to-Draw-Manga periodicals, and comes up with independent text-message books and romance anthologies that I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole. It also doesn't seem to have its own page anywhere on the Net, which is why the only reference link I can find is this one.

It did have four short stories in it, though, which promised to have a solid speculative-fiction bent overall. And I figured that if I had enough of a constitution to review the PGS1's five stories, then I supposed that I could go through four more. (I consider Dean Alfar's collection to be off-limits for now; I'm not crazy enough to slog through almost twenty pieces at once.)

In other words, I'll be going through this review the same way I went through that of PGS1: I'll have a look at each of the stories first, and then wrap up with my views on the publication itself at the end. Seeing that I didn't like the total length of my earlier PGS1 post, though, I'll try to keep my reviews manageable this time.

As with my previous post, this is my warning that spoilers abound. If you haven't picked up a copy of the anthology, know that you read the following reviews at your own risk.


Apocalypso (written by Karl R. De Mesa)

"Apocalypso" was here-and-there for me. It had some solid aspects to its story and its style of writing, but I feel that these were hampered by a lot of technical problems.

First of all, I liked the premise of the story. There are quite a few speculative pieces on the nature and navigation of dreams, and I find the topic to be a useful literary device. "Apocalypso" uses this subject of dreams in much better detail, and imagines what happens in a setting where their influence has extended to the physical world. Second, I feel that it succeeds in placing the reader in an unfamiliar yet familiar universe -- in fact, the slight twist at the end forced me to wonder if the entire story was actually in itself a strange dream. The story's elements were fascinating enough to have it be one, I suppose.

I felt that the biggest problem with the piece, however, was the massive and sudden change in style that took place halfway through the story. Everything started out pretty well, mind you, with a third-person narration of one hunter's dealings with a mysterious client. From there, however, it shifted to the hunter's first-person description of his background and research, and -- just as I was getting used to the change -- it suddenly snapped back into third-person for the ending. I feel that this severely compromises the work: It gives the hunter's extensive speech a "preachy" quality -- as though the author took up half the story just to explain what was going on -- and wastes characters like Lieutenant Kid and Lord Pluto, both of whom were relegated to stand among the background props. The story is also dotted with a lot of minor errors in verbal ambiguity (mostly in the "it's" / "it was" distinction), but that's more a matter for the editor than anything else.

In the end, "Apocalypso" impressed me... but it was only able to do so by means of premise and general plotline. In truth, it struck me as something that needed a lot of spit-and-polish in order to shine: It was a story with great potential that just got bogged down at some point in the writing.

Now, if I can only figure out why Mr. De Mesa felt that it deserved to be titled "Apocalypso"...


Riverside (written by Anna Felicia Sanchez)

I found "Riverside" to be surprisingly good. I feel that its biggest stumbling block involves story length and pacing, but I don't think that those aspects detract much from the overall quality of the piece.

"Riverside" doesn't use the traditional narrative approach. Instead, we're told the story from two different points of view: Vlad and Leena, who are two enforcement officers partnered with each other. I feel that this narrative style ends up enriching the experience, if only because Vlad and Leena are represented as two extremely different personalities. Vlad is more a scholar and a reader, and thus provides us with clear background and history details. Leena is a far more emotional person, and therefore allows us to see events unfold from an active point of view. These instances of characterization enable the story to develop slowly; Instead of getting everything shoved down our throat all at once, the plotline eventually pieces itself together based on a progressive reading of Vlad and Leena's observations. I find this to be remarkably subtle, and carefully crafted.

I feel that "Riverside" overdoes this careful revelation of circumstances and events, though. The author simply takes her time describing the factors of societal breakdown and reprogression; Such things may be vital to the atmosphere as well as how the story turns out, but I feel that everything could have been written much shorter. As it stands, I could almost describe the piece as "dragging", if it weren't for the way the plot turns out. The presence of a lot of agency names, acronyms and future trademarks (Meka-Armors, Meka-Arm Guns, Meka-Scanners...) doesn't make things any easier for a reader. I'd even go as far as to wonder about a possible Animé influence somewhere.

I feel that the story is good, though. It feels like social realism in a highly unfamiliar setting that, interestingly enough, gets more and more familiar as the story wears on. It runs on some very skillful storytelling, and it left me with a very good impression of Ms. Sanchez's skills. It's only stumbling block, I fear, has a lot to do with its pacing: Anyone who can manage to last the length of its thirty pages, though, will probably find it okay in the end.


Lunes, Alas Diyes ng Umaga (written by Vlad Gonzales)

Unfortunately, I'll have to hold off on any praise I have for Mr. Gonzales's approach. While it does fit the nature of "Lunes" perfectly, I've used the same approach on a couple of occasions as well, and I know that it's a good one. Suffice to say that his story does it justice; It takes a certain amount of detail to get the style correct, and he gets it just right.

I think that the story's primary attribute lies in the angle it uses: So you have interdimensional contact at your fingertips, it says. So you can reshape reality to your very whims. Just what do you do with it, exactly? Despite the fact that a number of past authors and pieces already deal with this possibility of temporal manipulation, "Lunes" gives us a distinct use for the stuff. Even better, it doesn't give this away until the latter pages of the story, allowing the revelation to creep up and surprise us. It started out subtle -- complacently subtle, even -- and it forced me to raise both eyebrows at the climax. It's not easy to find stories like that nowadays.

On the other hand, no matter how much I like the story's approach to the subject matter, I have to admit that it's simply been done before. I suspect that this is more of an issue regarding my personal background, though: "Lunes" reminded me of The Twilight Zone's "Shatterday" episode, as well as a few other American science-fiction stories I had read over the years. (Heck, I once wrote a short story on the topic myself.) In addition, it seems that Mr. Gonzales didn't feel as though "Lunes" would be complete without a thorough explanation of what was taking place in his story: I feel that his final two paragraphs serve no purpose other than to dilute the impact of his ending, and I'd cut them out myself if given the chance.

Off hand, I think that this story would probably be a good read for those people who are generally unfamiliar with science fiction, simply because it illustrates a good "what-if" sort of scenario. It would be a good starting point for them, really. The trouble is that I and most readers of similar background will find that it treads ground that we've encountered before. I fear that we're more likely to overlook it in favor of other things, and I feel that that's a pretty sad occurrence for a story that's actually pretty good at heart.


Project: Overmind (written by Emil M. Flores)

I have to get one question off my chest for this one, and that's "What is this supposed to be, really?"

I honestly don't know if this is supposed to be an action-movie-type piece, or if this is supposed to be a satire on such works, or if this is supposed to be a completely serious narrative with some really terrible pacing. At the moment, it leaves me absolutely dumbfounded.

Don't get me wrong, though. There are some aspects that I admire about the piece itself. For one, the premise is certainly interesting: Nazi operations in the Philippines concerning genetic experimentation on human subjects? A photocopier boy with a photographic memory who finds himself in the center of a massive manhunt? The religious sightings of Mt. Banahaw actually being the residual products of a secret laboratory devoted to researching mental powers? The story just throws one improbable element after another into a confused mix, and Mr. Flores somehow manages to have it all make a sort of sense.

I have a huge problem with the pacing, though. The story simply tells everything too quickly, from the incident where we run into the photocopier guy to the shootout at the apartment to the expedition to Mt. Banahaw. It was simply too fast for me to feel any particular attraction to any of the characters, much less see the point of their little adventure. Heck, if Mr. Flores's chapter headings are to be believed, the whole story plays out over the course of two days!

And once I thought about that a little more, something seemed odd about the story.

And that's why I'm sitting here like this, trying to figure everything out.

I suspect that Mr. Flores is making fun of us here. He's conjured up a rip-snorter of a story, something that goes into a full-blown action mode normally reserved for Schwarzengger movies, where convoluted plots gain a life of their own, impossible coincidences happen, and medical consultants inexplicably have degrees in tae kwon do. This is the kind of story where standard literary critiques fail; In fact, they don't just fail -- they burst into tears and lock themselves in their rooms for the rest of the evening.

That's why I'll lay down my critical background at this point, and say it straight: This is an action movie. You'll either like the ride, or you won't. Some people will obviously enjoy "Project: Overmind", and some people will wonder exactly how it's supposed to be good. I'll trust that you know where you stand with regards to this distinction.

I'd recommend this story to everyone, only I don't want to give people the impression that this is the standard for a good story. It sets a standard for unique stories, yes, but it's not a good literary composition according to any of the precepts I've seen so far. To put it simply: It spits in your eye and tells you to go screw yourself. That might be a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose.


Pinoy Amazing Adventures

Now I get to tell you what I thought about the collection itself. Admittedly I have to be much more careful here -- Psicom's been around for quite a while already, and I don't want to offend their fanbase if possible.

I feel that PAA offers about the same deal as PGS1: PGS1 is a five-story anthology that costs one hundred pesos a shot; PAA is a four-story anthology that costs eighty-five per copy. While I feel that the contents of each anthology are definitely interesting enough to justify their respective prices, I think that that's more of a testament to the state of Philippine speculative fiction than anything else.

If you have the money to spare, I'd simply recommend picking up both. It'll cost you less than two hundred pesos for two more books in your arsenal and a fairly good read. (If you only have enough money to pick up one, then I'd suggest that you put it away for a while until you've saved up enough money to buy both. It's that simple.)

PAA's primary advantage is that it showcases at least one piece of artwork per story; Although these elements neither aid nor hinder the reading exercise much, I have a tendency to like Renerick Sevilla's art. It makes me wonder if he's done any comics, to be honest.

I found one major problem with the PAA publication, however, and that involved the spotty editing. A good editor would have found a way to clean up some of the problems I noticed in each of the stories, grammar and spelling issues notwithstanding. A good editor would have noticed lapses in some critical areas -- isn't this supposed to have a Table of Contents, for instance? And a good editor would have noticed that, while the book clearly reads "Pinoy Amazing Adventures" on its cover, it nevertheless reads "Pinoy Amazing Adventure" on its spine. Whoever checks and proofreads publications like these on Psicom's end needs to do a better job.

That's that, I think. PAA, I suppose, is about as good a buy as PGS right now... although a lot of the burden is on Psicom if they want to release a second volume of the anthology. The editorial staff has a lot of things to clean up on their end... although I would probably welcome more works by the independent writers any day.

Review: Philippine Genre Stories, Issue One

Having read the first issue of Philippine Genre Stories, I figured that it would be best to send a personal response to each author on the skill and execution of their works. I've tried to be as honest and as subjective as I can regarding each story. These reactions may be accurate, or they may not... but at least they're honest, and I hope that these reviews from a humble reader are taken in good faith.

Noted below are the exact same letters I've written and submitted to each author regarding his corresponding work. I don't pretend to be a qualified literary critic, but I do try to call them as they are. Feel free to comment or argue on my opinions if you feel like it; I'm not the last word on critiques like these.

If you haven't picked up a copy of the publication yet, I strongly suggest that you do so before reading further. Regardless of what I may have written below, I think that it's a fairly good issue, and well worth the one-hundred-peso price tag. (I mean, would you rather spend up to five times that amount for a foreign-published novel? I'd be more interested in saving my money here.) While I've tried to keep as many details under wraps as possible, some spoilers may still abound.


Wail of the Sun (written by Vincent Michael Simbulan)

Dear Mr. Simbulan,

I'll go right out and say it, I suppose: Out of the five pieces in Philippine Genre Stories' first issue, yours kind of fell to the bottom of my list.

I don't think that it's a bad story, though. In fact, I think that it would make for a pretty good installation in a long-term fantasy epic. Unfortunately, most of that long-term epic hasn't quite materialized yet, and I don't feel that "Wail of the Sun" can hold its own as a one-shot.

The story has quite a few good moments. First of all, the background and setting sounds fully realized -- it looks as though everything takes place against an already-established history and political structure. Second, the story manages to take many of these details and present them in a way that makes them more familiar to readers; It's really easy to imagine what the "Ebonnite Grostequeries" are, or what a "Bone Warden" looks like. Finally, it does something that many attempts at fantasy don't touch on: It presents its characters as less iconic figures and more as ordinary humans with all the corresponding weaknesses. (I particularly loved the fact that the heroes of the realm were known by some very superhero-ey names, especially when Redenthor's character made their humanity all too obvious.)

Despite these qualities, however, I felt that the greatest weakness of the story lay in its characterizations. I found myself not being able to empathize with any of the characters, and therefore couldn't look upon their experiences with the same sense of suspense and urgency. It could just be me, I suppose, but I think it would help if the conversations were a little less expository and little more empathic -- less words about the fact that Redenthor is drinking himself to death, for example, and more words on why everyone thinks that that is the case. I suspect that there's a bit of baggage involved here -- that anything not revealed in this story is revealed in other parts of the epic -- and it hurts the story to stand alone as a result.

Ultimately, while I think that "Wail of the Sun" is a fair addition to anyone's fantasy collection, I also think that it needs some more work in order to stand on its own. It lightly touches on history and familiarity, yes, but I feel that it needs to take them a bit further in order to become a truly effective tale.

I felt that despite the presence of some fluid storytelling, "Wail of the Sun" ran into a problem that is common to many fantasy epics: The individual short stories can't stand by themselves. Something always feels missing, especially considering that important details on background and setting aren't repeated from one story to another. (Mind you, this is also why you can't submit the first chapter of a massive storyline as an English assignment and expect to get a good grade.)


Thriller (written by Andrew Drilon)

Dear Mr. Drilon,

I found "Thriller" to be unique. I haven't been able to read any piece of fiction that incorporates a comprehensive set of song lyrics -- much less Michael Jackson's -- into its narration yet, and I suspect that there's nothing else like it out there. Regardless of anything else, I feel that it's a very, very original approach.

The story itself was actually a little "here and there" for me; I thought that it was admirable for how it set up its story against the lyrics (and vice-versa), but I'm not certain if I find it to be truly great. It's good, maybe, but not great.

For one, it's remarkably readable. At first, I expected the story to be little more than a cheap knockoff of the "Thriller" music video. However, it ended up taking a distinctly different direction, atmosphere and flavor, up to the point where it hardly needed the lyrics in order to stand by itself. In addition, it's got everything that I like to see in a zombie movie: desperate struggle, resourceful initiative, and a once-ordinary person wielding a frickin' big gun. It even had humor in some of the most unexpected places: I mean, good God, could your male protagonist have had a more ironic name? And are those zombies saying what I think they're saying?

If there was a flaw in the story however, then it was something that I would expect to see in anything written based on a set of song lyrics: It started sounding forced after a while. I hated the dream sequence, for one -- it felt as though it only got placed in the story in order to fit excerpts of Vincent Price's speech. And the characters banter about various lines of the Michael Jackson song, which felt as though they were places where you couldn't think of any logical way to use the lyrics.

I think that "Thriller" is a cute story, though. I think that it's oddly innovative, and that it clearly shows the effort that went into making it a plausible tale. Heck, I'd go at it with a highlighter just to see if I can spot every single reference you put in. I don't think that it's perfect, yes, but I'd gladly recommend this to people while we're waiting for the next perfect story to come along...

I'm serious about that recommendation at the end. You have to read Andrew Drilon's story, if only to see how he blends song into fiction. It doesn't even matter whether you like Michael Jackson or not -- you have to read Drilon's work to believe it.


The Middle Prince (written by Dean Francis Alfar)

Dear Mr. Alfar,

To put it in straight terms, I liked "The Middle Prince".

One of the things that I normally look for in a story is an innovative plot idea, or one that takes any established standard and turns it on its ear. This was definitely one of those, and it referenced something that I've asked since I was old enough to read: What is it about the youngest prince in a brood of three, and why is he always the successful one? No one seems to have any sympathy for the older princes, much less the middle one, and it feels good to finally see the spotlight trained on him.

Halfway through, I found that the story takes another interesting turn by giving the middle prince an awareness of his own intractable situation. He knows that he's not going to succeed, he doesn't want to risk his own skin for a quest that will be won by his youngest brother anyway, and he'd much rather be left to his own devices, thankyouverymuch. This is one of the best characterizations I've seen in a "traditional" tale, and it makes perfect sense in the story's context.

Apart from the premise and the characterization, I also admired the story's atmosphere and setting (which had that odd magical realist quality from folkloric tales). It even had all the elements that one would expect to see from a fairy tale -- talking fish, Grand Viziers, enchanted artifacts, princesses in towers, and a lot more besides. My only issue with the story, in fact, was that there were altogether too many of these details (perhaps implying a bigger universe, though), and the ending left me with a sort of "unfinished" feeling -- an inner voice that told me that there were a lot more loose ends to wrap up. I would assume, of course, that these would be more relevant to the struggles of the youngest prince, but this doesn't come out well in a story that's only supposed to pay attention to the middle one. (And even then we don't know what happens to the middle prince beyond his sailing away; This is a story that thrives on loose ends, it seems.)

But I liked "The Middle Prince", mind you. I think that it's high time he got his due without necessarily stealing the spotlight from his youngest brother. That's actually enough for me to overlook the loose ends and cheer him on. :)

The first issue's feature story did not disappoint me. There are serious questions that have to be posed once you tackle a plot idea where the main character is doomed to failure, and I feel that this work answered all of them without overtly changing the requirements and circumstances involved. As you probably already expect, the ending isn't a stereotypically happy one. It did leave me happy for the Middle Prince, though.


Insomnia (written by Joseph Nacino)

Dear Mr. Nacino,

I thought that "Insomnia" was fairly good. It holds a number of elements that combine for a nice piece of suspense; you could easily shop it around to a few literary classes to show students how to create a good sense of atmosphere. I feel that it contains a major problem that compromises its quality, though.

To start with, I loved the approach. Telling the story in terms of journal entries, interview transcripts, medical notes and other forms of indirect narration greatly helped the sense of uncertainty that the story wanted to build up. It didn't even stop there, as jumbling up the order of these entries served this purpose even further; The entire exercise literally forced me to ask what the hell was going on. On a more minor note, it helps the characterization as well: Amy and Reggie obviously play at good cop / bad cop respectively, Peter and Dr. Gutierrez's respective analyses sound like two totally different points of view, and Eden's voice is unique despite her only having a minor role.

Ultimately, the suspense was executed very well. You know that something's happening, you know that it's left five people dead, and you know that Peter's insomnia has something to do with it, but you don't know what the hell is going on. Every time the story reveals a major plot point, it forces you to ask more questions: What language was Peter speaking? What were those figures who showed up on the video? And what horrible truth did Eden discover that doomed them all?

Unfortunately, I feel that this is where the story runs into its major problem. I think that if "Insomnia" has any weakness, it's in the ending: We never actually get a satisfying answer to any of the questions that the story asks. We just get a little more death, and that's it. We don't realize what's really happening, and I feel that that is an important element when putting together a horror story: Uncertainty is a valuable tool when it comes to building up to the climax, but when that point finally comes around, then the story has to scare us. The revelation has to scare us. Regretfully, I feel that "Insomnia" had neither the point of revelation, nor did it have the scare.

I'll have to say that I liked the story from a technical point of view, if only because I think that it does a lot of things right. I'm not certain if I like it as a story, however, and that's only because I didn't like how the ending ultimately turned out. As it stands, I think it's fairly good. But I think it could have been better.

You have some very interesting Easter Eggs, though. Kadath... heh.

Is it wrong to have a horror story that doesn't leave you with the trembling feeling that comes with being scared? Or is it wrong to judge something as belonging to the "horror" genre, and then berate it for not scaring its readers properly? This is what mucked up the math for me with "Insomnia", to be honest. I couldn't decide if it was good or not at first, although after a while I went for the more positive route.

Then again, there's also the possibility that the feelings of uncertainty throughout the story were sufficient enough for readers to follow. We can go on and discuss this all day, I fear.


Inhuman (written by Alexander Marcos Osias)

Dear Mr. Osias,

I don't intend this as a pun, to be honest, but I thought that "Inhuman" was one hell of a read. I thought that it was extremely well-written, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that this was because it was extremely well-researched.

The research, in fact, is what makes the story shine. I have never seen an actual exorcism, mind you, but the story presents the experience in such detail that it seems quite realistic. More than once, it made me wonder as to whether or not you witnessed or participated in one yourself. (Heck, I even asked myself if it was possible that you copied the text from some religious record... but I'll trust you on this one, I suppose.)

Beyond the research, however, I marveled at how your narrative did not even attempt to soften or sugarcoat the experience. There are literally no points in which a reader can catch his breath -- only areas where he could become complacent, and therefore be taken completely by surprise as to what Marcel would do next. It takes the obvious "exorcism" plotline a step further by giving readers the impression that this is not just some walk in the park. This is an experience that is mentally, physically and supernaturally draining; It can go as far as to kill people, or at least leave some terrible scars. I have yet to read or watch anything in the same sub-genre that will give me a similar impression.

For all its qualities, however, I feel that there are a few flaws. Having been caught up in the vicious struggle that was the entire rite, I didn't feel much in the way of empathy with the characters. The story doesn't reveal much in the way of background that didn't involve the origins of Marcel's possession or Father Patrick's death, and I think that this resulted in my viewing the story from a rather detached position. I went through the sequence of events and was impressed by the developments; I didn't experience them along with the characters themselves. If anything, the exorcism itself simply steals the show from everything else.

I think that "Inhuman" is clearly a good read. It's vicious, it's compelling, and it demonstrates a masterful knowledge of its subject matter. I'm not certain if it rises beyond that, however, and I would have liked to see more of a personal angle to the entire thing.

I'll say it again, though, and I still don't intend to pun: I think it's one hell of a read. I mean it.

This is the other "must-read" of the issue for me, and it's more because of the level of detail that went into writing the story than for anything else. I hesitate to call it "horror" because I didn't empathize much with the situation of the characters, but I will call it a morbidly fascinating read because, well... it just is.


The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, Issue One

I have one last set of comments to make, and they're for the issue as a whole. I'll make this as short as possible, seeing that I've taken up too much space for everything else already.

The digest came out okay, I think. I mentioned earlier that I think it's worthwhile for its one-hundred-peso price tag, and I'll stand by that opinion. If there's a problem, however, it's that I didn't feel that any of its pieces allowed the digest to eclipse that price tag. In a sense, the collection is okay... but not remarkable. (I have some high standards for anthologies, though. If you don't believe me, you can judge by yourself. The issues are pretty low-priced to begin with, anyway.)

I think it does a good service to its readers, though, by allowing them direct contact with the writers for potential opinions and critiques. While there's the possibility that we'll be running into some pretentious trolls on the way, it's hard to deny that this will be good for the writers in the long run. Not only that, but it also holds the possibility of weeding out the people who can't take honest criticism -- it's easy, after all, to balk at the possibility of readers breaking down your e-mail with demands to write better-quality works.

If I had to make one change with the digest, though, I'd find a way to shorten the intros that appear just before each story. One or two short paragraphs would be fine, I think, but as it stands, reading three long italicized paragraphs merely left me clutching onto my bag of popcorn and wondering when the movie was going to start, if you get my drift.

In short, the first issue of the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories was much like the stories in its collection -- definitely not perfect, but holding a lot of potential to get there. I'm willing to sit back and wait for the second issue to come out... and then, I suppose, we'll see if the publication will start getting better with experience.

That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Now that I'm done with my piece, feel free to sound off.