The Tale of the Tooth

Warning: This post is not for people with weak stomachs. So all of you who may be susceptible to nausea or slight queasiness... well, go have lunch first, or something. It'll make for an interesting experience while reading this.


When I woke up last Sunday morning, the first thing I felt was something rolling around near the back of my mouth. I reached in there, expecting to pull out a hair or a piece of lint or something like that, but I was amply rewarded with what looked like a tiny fragment of black stone. After I probed around the area a little more, I noted what felt like a gaping hole in one of my molars, and I was forced to conclude that one of my fillings had somehow shaken loose from its foundations.

This was bad news. I've been genetically blessed with weak teeth, to the point that my dentist constantly despairs over my condition. And, seeing that I had somehow degenerated to the point where my fillings were falling out, that pretty much indicated that something was rotten in the state of Dentistry.

So this afternoon, I left work early for an emergency appointment with my long-suffering dentist. She listened patiently to my story, critically inspected the fragment of filling that I had brought along (wrapped in Kleenex, for its luxurious benefit), and prodded at the gaping enamel hole with a variety of instruments.

It wasn't too bad, she said. I had apparently done what I could to keep it clean for the past two days, which included abstention from bite-worthy foods and a paranoid obsession towards chewing on my left side. The culprit was most likely a stone from a dinner long past, which shattered the filling and impacted certain shards into its own dental crevice. My estimate was that it had been a month or so before the largest piece -- which still sat in all its Kleenex-wrapped glory -- finally worked its way loose.

That, however, was where the good news ended. The filling was one of my oldest ones, from way back in 1992, and it had apparently shattered because the inside of the tooth had decayed significantly. In short, it had plugged its respective cavity for a good sixteen years... but nevertheless, the tooth had continued to rot away from the inside, which left a good-sized hole into which the pieces of the filling could get stuck.

Things took a turn for the worse when she asked if I could feel any pain. When I told her that I couldn't, she gave me a curious look and tapped the tooth about once or twice.

"Did you feel that?" she asked.

I shrugged. I hadn't felt a thing.

She tapped it again, and gave me the same questioning look.

I shook my head.

She played Jingle Bells on the enamel with one of her metal picks.

I still didn't feel anything.

That was bad, she said, because it meant that the dentine part had almost fully gone. This apparently severed the tooth's connection to its corresponding nerve, which was why I couldn't feel anything. This also brought about the possibility that every other piece of dental work in my mouth actually concealed a slew of dead teeth... and I had a lot of fillings in there.

Fifteen minutes later, though, she was breathing a sigh of relief at my x-ray results. It looked like the sole offending tooth was the only one of its kind, which got her to breathe easy. There was a huge gaping hole sitting to the left of that tooth, yes, but at least that was the only thing we could worry about for the moment.

She strongly recommended that I sit through a root canal for the tooth -- five consecutive sessions to take place over one or two months -- in order to restore the tooth to workable condition. That is to say, we both wanted to significantly arrest the possibility that the tooth itself would break apart the next time I used it. Moreover, she suggested that I look into the possibility of capping it with a porcelain crown, which would strengthen the tooth further. The catch with the latter option, though, was the fact that it would require regular maintenance for the rest of my natural life. (The fact that my teeth degenerate extremely fast did not sit comfortably with either of us.)

As for the gaping hole itself, she plugged it with a temporary filling and told me to make an appointment as soon as possible. I think I'm going to have to make some arrangements at work in order to go through with this.

So now I'm sitting here, typing about my little dental experience. The temporary filling feels a little strange, as though it were merely half-finished... but then again, my dentist will probably be drilling through it in a few days. It tastes a little like dried plaster, with a hint of whatever medicine she used to dull the (nonexistent) pain.

I asked to bring the fragment of filling home, and she gave me a strange look about the matter. Nevertheless, she did allow me to wrap it up in the Kleenex again, and drop it into my shirt pocket. It's sitting in my room now, perhaps waiting for the day when I'll have it bronzed and preserved to show my grandchildren.

Then again, maybe not. I suppose that the removable dentures will have to do...

Thus Spake Zarathusra...

Dean's notice finally arrived in the mail today, and it was actually a little heartening:

Dear Sean,

While Nikki and I enjoyed elements of “The Whispering” , we regretfully need to pass on it.

Ultimately, it was not a fit for this year’s anthology.

Though we’ve passed on your story, we encourage you to polish and submit it to other markets, such as the Philippines Free Press, Story Philippines and the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories.

Thank you for your interest in Philippine Speculative Fiction. We hope to read something from you next year.

Best regards,
Dean Francis Alfar
Nikki Alfar

The short story in question was a piece of almost three thousand words, written dangerously close to this year's deadline and featured on this little ditty of a blog post. I feared that I got some elements of the story right -- tone and atmosphere, if you must ask -- but that the plot and progression itself was a little sparse.

At first I felt a little defeated by seeing this e-mail message in my inbox. Then, just for reference, I went back to the rejection notice that I received last year for the same publication and noted a few interesting things that immediately piqued my interest (and generally woke me up better then the usually cup of coffee).

In an effort to replicate my thought processes, I'll break down Dean's letter below. Hopefully no one accuses me of being anal-retentive as a result.

Dear Sean,
No, this doesn't mean anything. Dean's rejection letters are simply a lot more personal than other publications', which means that his addressing me by name doesn't automatically imply that the story stood out for him. It probably just means that he knows my name, but that's it.

While Nikki and I enjoyed elements of “The Whispering” , we regretfully need to pass on it.
That's what the story is called, by the way -- "The Whispering". Mentioning that certain elements of the story were enjoyed doesn't imply that much; it could be anything from a sincere expression to a standard boilerplate.

The real find here, however, is the fact that the story got mentioned by name. I find this remarkable, assuming that the anthology gets at least a hundred submissions each year. This, I think, implies that the story must have been interesting in some way, or that Dean decided to become very detailed with at least some of his letters. :)

Ultimately, it was not a fit for this year’s anthology.
This I find interesting, however. Does this mean that there was a certain theme to this year's anthology that I somehow missed? Then again, it could just mean that there were already about twenty other far better stories in their estimation...

Though we’ve passed on your story, we encourage you to polish and submit it to other markets, such as the Philippines Free Press, Story Philippines and the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories.
Still very interesting, mind you. Did the story get their attention to the point where it could be a worthy contender for these publications after a little spit-and-polish? Or was this a standard template that just mentioned the other major venues for local spec fic? If it's the latter, then this was a great way to build awareness for the literary community -- sort of like a "hey, there are three other places to which I can send my works!" realization.

Thank you for your interest in Philippine Speculative Fiction. We hope to read something from you next year.
Just a standard template. The placement of implied timings indicates that Dean has recently resolved a few life-related concerns, though. The complete mention of the anthology's title notes that he is starting to settle back into work from these concerns, and the use of the word "we" punctuates a close spousal relationship at this point. Moreover, the curve of the capital "S" and the deliberate decimal spacing reveals that he likes steak (medium-rare), prefers vodka over gin, and patronizes the Dockers clothing label. :)

And who was Zarathusra, anyway?

Fiction: Fortress

The little brick house was starting to feel a little stuffy towards late afternoon. Pieter woke from his traditional nap, stretched for a few minutes, and then decided that he would get an early start on the night's dinner.

He kicked his slippers out from underneath the bed, yawning as he slipped them on. All things considered, he was looking at a rather good lifestyle. The days were quiet and secluded, the lot provided almost everything that he and his brothers would have needed, and the security was top-notch.

He opened a dresser drawer, reached in among the tins of grease, and pulled out a clean white shirt. It was Hamnet's turn to make dinner tonight, he realized, and the thought left a sour expression on his face. His youngest brother was certainly the bright and inventive sort, especially in his pensive moments, but he couldn't boil water without leaving a burnt smell. Jolyon was probably the best cook of the three, and Pieter wasn't too far behind (if he could say so himself), but Hamnet... well, Hamnet was probably best left to his machines.

Pieter pulled on a pair of trousers and found a pair of suspenders after a good search; they were tangled among the telescopic sights he had cleaned the previous day. After a while, he decided that he looked presentable enough despite the fact that he was only half-dressed; what was he worrying about, really, when it was only him and his two brothers hanging around?

He made sure that the emergency handgun was still in its case, opened the door to his room, and began to descend the two flights of stairs that led to the ground floor. The fifth step down held a pressure-sensitive detonation trigger; he remembered to hop over that. Moreover, the second-floor landing concealed a trap door that opened to an acid vat in the basement; he disabled it with a hidden switch and re-armed it once he had safely crossed.

There was a bright green mat just in front of the first step; that meant that the external security system was on manual mode. Hamnet immediately came to mind -- Jolyon, after all, was not the sort who was given over to random perimeter checks. Given that his favorite rifle was sitting on top of the mantel at the moment, however, Hamnet was probably outside playing with bigger toys.

Pieter crossed into the kitchen and its checkerboard floor, carefully stepping on the black tiles so that he would not release the tranquilizer-tipped darts. He opened one oversized cabinet and felt among the items there -- crockery, wineglasses, flamethrower, cleaning solution -- before wondering exactly where he had left his gardening basket. After a long search, he eventually found it next to the gun rack -- apparently one of his brothers had seen fit to use it to hold a collection of shotgun shells. He sighed.

Despite how much he liked his current arrangements, there was something to be said about living in close quarters. Nevertheless, it was Hamnet's house -- his youngest brother had laid the foundations himself -- and Pieter figured that, the less ingredients that Hamnet would have to make dinner with, the lower the chances that he and Jolyon would end up with upset stomachs the next day.

He pushed back each of the five deadbolts on the front door, retracted the five-inch spikes, and made certain to avoid touching the doorknob, lest it burn his skin off. Instead, he pulled on a handle that Hamnet had screwed to the inside of the door for that very purpose, and emerged into the bright sunlight.

Jolyon waved at him from the rose bushes, and Pieter waved back. The flowers were coming in very nicely this year, and the blooms were so thick that Pieter could barely notice the machine-gun nests hidden behind them. He glanced around, noting the freshly-manicured lawn, the barbed-wire hedges, the vegetable garden, the double-layer titanium fencing, and his eldest brother's puzzled look, but didn't see what he was looking for.

Then the light bulb came on in Jolyon's head, and he pointed upwards. "He's on the roof," he said.

Pieter looked upwards, careful to screen his eyes, and nodded. "Hamnet!" he called.

His youngest brother leaned out from the cockpit of their anti-aircraft cannon. Hamnet almost never smiled; it was as though the gesture had never been built into his genes. Instead of saying anything, he grunted acknowledgment and returned to watching the horizon.

"It's your turn to make dinner," Pieter called.

Hamnet waved him away, almost irritably. This was to be expected, although Pieter did hope that he would be more conversational at the dinner table later.

"Got enough shells up there?" Jolyon asked, in jest.

Hamnet glared down at his eldest brother. "Got enough," he finally said.

Pieter took a few steps back, careful not to fall into any of the lawn's pit traps. "What are you doing up there, anyway? There's nothing around for miles!"

The weight of his youngest brother's gaze was suddenly upon him. "Had a hunch," Hamnet said. "You gotta feed hunches."

Pieter knew better than to argue. If he and Jolyon only had Hamnet's finely-tuned senses, their own homes would have still been intact. And yet, this was a fine arrangement regardless.

"What're you planning to make for dinner?" Pieter asked.

Hamnet merely grunted, which was not surprising. Hamnet barely cared about what he ate.

Beside him, Jolyon sighed. "Check if the tomatoes are ripe, will ya? I think that the potatoes should also be ready by now. And for goodness' sakes, don't bring in any cabbage -- you remember what happened the last time he decided to make a casserole."

Pieter agreed, and started walking down the little stone path in the direction of the backyard.

"And if the apples are ripe," Jolyon said, "let me know. We could do with a bit of pie this week."

Pieter nodded, skipping over the stone plug that would trigger the spring trap. Between his misappropriated basket and Jolyon's requests, he was finding it difficult to keep track of things. The tomato patch sat in the rear end of the garden, right next to the cache of automatic weapons, and it turned out that his eldest brother was right -- the tomatoes were good for the picking. There was only the question of how he was expected to trot them back to the house.

Above him, he could hear Hamnet announce that he was turning the automated system back on. Pieter selected a few ripe red specimens amidst the sound of whirring machinery, then proceeded to make his way back to Jolyon.

Between the living arrangements and the good-looking harvest, Pieter had to admit that life was better than he would have expected for himself. It was enough to get his tail wagging.

Hopefully, the big bad wolf would never come around. But until that happened, the three of them were going to make the best of things. Even with Hamnet's cooking.

The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes

Remember those shoes that I mentioned in this blog post? The comfortable ones with the really thick soles that I mentioned would likely last for a really long time?

Well, five months after I picked them up at the local mega-market, the in-soles wore out on me. Such sweet irony.

I suppose that it was probably something about me that did it. I walk around a lot -- enough, I assume, for the sweat to collect in my socks and leech into the padding at the inside bottom of my shoes. Around Tuesday, I imagined that something felt wrong whenever I so much as took a step. On Wednesday morning, the in-sole of my right shoe finally wrenched free of the glue binding just as I was on my way to work... and I was in constant discomfort for the rest of the day.

Having only had the shoes for a few months (and unwilling to give up the thick soles), I elected to get them repaired. There's a leatherworker near my office, you see, so I figured that it would be convenient to bring them to work in a paper bag, drop them off during lunchtime, and pick them up in time for the weekend. Hypothetically, a good glue job would have fixed everything.

Unfortunately, the only other wearable pair of shoes that I owned were a pair of ratty five-year-old rubber shoes. They were ancient, crumbling, and practically falling apart themselves, but they were at least vaguely serviceable. Besides, my only other option was to trot out my fine leather shoes (the ones I reserve for weddings, golden anniversaries, champagne wishes and caviar dreams) and scuff them about for an entire day. The former option was infinitely preferable.

My co-workers, however, thought otherwise. First, the shoes looked as though wild mongrels had dragged them out of the local landfill. Second, I was wearing standard office casual, which most definitely did not go well with shoes that had been dragged by wild mongrels out of the local landfill. Third, the office dress code apparently did not like rubber shoes, landfills or otherwise.

Needless to say, I had to do a bit of explaining by the time I managed to drop off my shoes at the local leatherworker. The woman at the counter was quite helpful, at least -- she noted that my in-soles were actually multiple layers of cloth and leather all stuck to each other, suggested that I get another layer stitched on to make them last longer, and charged me P300 for the whole mess. By that time, I wished that I had just gotten some new shoes.

Of course, there was one thing that could have made the day any worse, and that was the possibility that my rubber shoes would finally, inexorably fall apart and die. But they saved me the embarrassment and decided to hold together for one more day, despite what more than a few readers may have possibly thought.

I still have to wear the ratty pair tomorrow, though, because I still have to pick up the repaired shoes sometime in the afternoon. I guess this means that I'll be sitting stationary for most of the day, hiding behind my desk lest the sight of my deteriorating footwear disgust anyone.

On the other hand, I did mention that I'd bend over backwards for good shoes. If this doesn't demonstrate that, then it's at least a good backache-inducer that'll keep me bedridden for weeks. Now if only that leatherworker would only do a good job...

The Five Drafts

I just barely finished a story in time for Dean Alfar's deadline (for the 4th Spec Fic Anthology), so it's been a hard day. I'm beginning to suspect that, between my workload and my sister hogging the computer at night, I'm finding it more and more difficult to delve into fiction. I'll need to factor this into my calculations next time, I think.

What complicates matters every time I put together a new work is the fact that I will slog through multiple drafts before settling on one to develop. I'm a wastebasket kind of person -- if I feel that a draft doesn't seem to be working out, even for the slightest instant, I'm liable to crunch it up and toss it in the garbage. This wastes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and more than a few plots, but it usually ensures that my attention is riveted only to those stories that are capable of holding my interest.

So far, my record lies at eleven separate drafts (I think), waaaay back when the first Spec Fic Anthology was accepting submissions. This particular one clocks in at only five drafts, fortunately, although I'm not counting the occasional attempt at story from months in the past. I was all but willing to give up after the fourth draft, but sometime in the middle of the afternoon today, I decided to give it one final go.

Here, then, are the rakings from my wastebasket this year. In case this fails to satisfy morbid curiosity, I'm pretty sure that I'll have even more unsuccessful attempts before the month is out.

First draft, circa September 5th: I start writing out the foremost plot in my mind, which involves murder in a bookstore. It's written from a first-person point of view, with the main persona being a local criminal psychologist. Because I'm out of town without access to a computer during this time, I scrawl out the story in longhand. I get as far as eight or nine paragraphs before I decide to call it a night.

Two or three days later, I get to a computer and begin transcribing the story. Eight or nine paragraphs later, I'm ready to continue writing the plot... except that I don't seem to know what comes next. After half an hour's worth of thought, I conclude that the story doesn't seem to be as workable as I originally assumed, so into the wastebasket it goes.

Second draft, circa September 13th: With only two days to go before the deadline, I convince myself that the previous version of the story was actually workable, and that I was just taking the wrong approach. So I start writing the tale again, only from the point of view of a bookstore worker this time. I get as far as five hundred words before I start telling myself that the narrative is getting more and more implausible by the second. Three minutes later, I'm crumpling it up.

Third draft, circa September 14th: I start working on a plot that's been spinning in my head for the past year, which involves a rock guitarist and his deal with the devil. I particularly like the characterization -- the devil manifests in the form of an agent named Harvey with blow-dried hair and a clip-on tie -- but the narrative eventually starts to slow down with all the exposition. Soon enough, it begins wandering around while I struggle to inject some order into the chain of events, but it ends up a barely incomprehensible mess. I pull the plug on this effort shortly after it hits eight hundred words.

Fourth draft, circa September 14th: At around eleven in the evening, I decide to try the "white heat" approach. I write whatever description comes to mind at the time, which turns out to be a cosmopolitan sci-fi setting that involves deactivated robots and people in white lab coats. Thinking that I may just have something here, I invest in some definite names for the characters and begin plotting out a pattern of events for them. It's slow going, though, and at three in the morning, I'm too tired to continue. As a result, I zip up my results, e-mail it to my work address, and tell myself that I'll fix up the rest of it the next morning. I write a short blog entry to mark my current spot in this development phase, and drift off to sleep.

The next morning, I open up my plans for the story at work, and immediately hate whatever I've written. It's unfocused, it's derivative, and it's unoriginal. I trash it without further word, and resign myself to the fact that I won't make the deadline this year.

Fifth draft, circa September 15th: Sometime in the afternoon, I get the idea of combining elements from all four previous drafts into a single story. I have no idea what to write at this point, so I try the "white heat" approach again. Thirty minutes later, I have an even six hundred words, which is impressive for something that was only spun out of thin air. By the time I exit the office, I've got one thousand words under my arm, which puts me on the threshold to a workable story.

After dinner and some interesting conversation, I move back to the office by 9:00pm to try and hash out the rest of the piece within three hours. Progress is fairly quick this time; I'm racking up the wordcount due to the extensive metaphorical descriptions that the story needs. By 10:30pm, I'm on the last section of text, which I finish and put on cleanup by about 11:00pm.

By 11:10, I've got a document formatted and on its way to the editor via e-mail. He shoots, he scores. I still have yet to see if I get to win the game as well, but that'll just be an afterthought now. At least I managed to hit the deadline today.

Now if only the story were readable. I'll probably go over it within the next couple of days to see what I should expect from it. Either it'll get in the anthology and I can relax, or it won't get in and I'll have to fix it up for submission to other venues, or it'll stink up the joint so bad that I'll have to put it to sleep.

Such is the life of a writer / fictionist / corporate lackey. No one said it was easy, I suppose.

Backs to the Wall

Nope, no posts this weekend. I've been working on a couple of things.

First, the deadline for Dean Alfar's anthology happens to be at midnight on the 15th. I've got three drafts in the wastebasket so far, and I'm 700 words into a fourth draft at three in the morning. I'm going to get some sleep right now and see if I can sneak some further writing before the clock strikes twelve tomorrow night.

Second, I've had to make some edits to "Tech Support", which is expected to come out sometime within the next few months. The result involves what is hopefully a more streamlined story; I've had to add half a page worth of exposition in order to smooth out the plot, and I'm discussing a name change for one of the characters on top of that. But the story is coming out in print, and that's what's important. Let's hope that it lives up to the hype.

Third, there's the Fully Booked deadline on September 30th. But that's at least a couple more weeks away, and I'll worry about it after I finish worrying about the first two.

Yes, September is a bad month for us people who like to cram. Too bad this sort of thing only happens once a year.

Reading List

I'm stealing this from Ailee's blog. It's a meme, and I usually don't do memes, but I'm curious as to exactly how extensive my historical reading habits have been.

Basically, what you have down there is a list of one hundred books. Given these titles, I will do the following:

• Any title in bold represents a book that I have read.
• Any underlined title represents a book that I have read and loved.
• Any title in italics represents a book that's "on my list", i.e. something that I aim to read in the future.

In addition to that, because this is still a blog, I'll be writing a few unbidden thoughts and side comments here and there. I will not make this a venue for formal criticism, so I'm likely to have propriety fly out the window at some point.

Ready? Set? Go.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
I remember reading this, although I can't seem to remember most of the passages. I do recall that Tolkien had a tendency to drone, though.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
What, no middle ground? I've read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, but I haven't picked up any of the other volumes. I have no plans to do so, either -- it just doesn't strike me as my cup of tea just yet.

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
I first read this in 1992 as part of a requirement for English class. Since then, I've read it at least two more times, and I've seen the Gregory Peck movie for good measure. This is very nice stuff -- I especially like how the book places its socially-relevant theme off to the side in favor of showing us a more personal side of the characters.

6 The Bible
Yes, I've read this from cover to cover. The version that I went through did not include the Apocryphal books, though, so I didn't technically complete this. While I do respect the lessons nestled within its pages, I confess that I'm still confused over how the ultra-religious will treat every word as though it were some fragile antique.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
I've started reading this, but I find it difficult to finish, for some reason.

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
Obviously I haven't read every single Shakespearean work... but then again, who has? Again, I curse the lack of middle ground on this list, but not before pointing out that I've gone through Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Merchant of Venice, with Hamlet racing desperately to catch up.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
That's odd... why would this book merit a separate entry from the Lord of the Rings trilogy? I mean, it's not like you would be motivated to read one without the other...

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
It's quite an American novel. Every time I think of this book, however, I'm immediately reminded of Masamune Shirow. (One bonus point to anyone who can make the connection.)

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy is another of those really long-winded authors. I prefer his short stories, to be honest.

25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
I've avoided the movie for the sole purpose of being able to read the book right.

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I have a copy sitting somewhere in the pile of books at the back of my closet. Maybe someday I'll get back to reading this.

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
I hear good things about this book. If anything, it might be an interesting shift to read about poverty in an American context.

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
I read practically every Lewis Carroll work that I can find, which makes this one particularly strange. I haven't been able to track down a good copy of this yet; if I can find something with illustrations by Teniel, then I can probably die happy.

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
I've read excerpts of this book, as well as the Disney condensed version. Regardless of what Grahame meant to write, I feel that Mr. Toad completely steals the show here.

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Another one with no middle ground. The only book that I really liked was The Last Battle, though. There's a marked difference between introducing a world to your readers and writing an end for it.

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
Didn't I see this a few numbers ago?

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
I didn't have much of a good experience with James Clavell's Shogun, and as such, I tend to avoid Orient-centered novels written by Western writers. This one, unfortunately, is not an exception... although I did like the movie.

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
As with others above, I've read excerpts. The cartoons have made this far more accessible to the modern audience, though, and I have good memories of the Disney movie and serial.

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
Now this one, I love. Orwell crafts a story that starts out in a very subtle manner, then slowly scratches away at the very same subtlety until you can see the terrible reflection inside. There are so many good scenes in this book that I'm hard-pressed to enumerate them all.

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
Just because it was popular doesn't mean that I'll want to read it.

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I think that Marquez uses magical realism very well here, but would it have killed him to divide the book into logical chapters, much less paragraphs, at some point?

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
I've always thought of Piggy as an unjust -- though realistic -- metaphor. Poor Piggy.

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
I still have no idea what kind of story this book is trying to tell. Regardless, the idea of being stuck on a boat with a tiger is an odd hook.

52 Dune - Frank Herbert
Yes, I made a few promises that I'd read this at some point. Stop pestering me.

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
I picked this up in Singapore a couple of years ago, and I liked it enough to finish it within two days. I thought that the narrative was genius, and that the chapter numbering was highly creative. The only complaint I had was that the discovery of the murderer was a bit of a letdown, but I felt that the book made up for it by its nasty, world-spanning twist.

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
I thought that the movie was good, which made me want to read the book.

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's plotline has been done a great many times since his novel, which I think testifies to the strength of the idea. Hopefully the characterization turns out to be as good as I expect.

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dickens's character interaction is a little too "serendipitous" for me. You could slice the book into clumps of pages and make a soap opera out of the pieces.

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
This book is a good mix of foreboding fear and subtle sexual themes, but I don't find it too memorable for some reason. Modern vampire tales have obviously played up either the angst or the erotica, and rather than suggest that they were better than this eminent patriarch, I would rather see something in between.

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
It's funny, how I can see variations on this story all the time, and never have any contact with the book at all.

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
One thing I never really understood is how one can spare a pig merely for the web that is spun above its head. Maybe I need to read the book.

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
I must have something against popular novels, or something like that. I don't have any compulsion to read this at all.

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
More missing middle ground. I've read all the novels and a majority of the short stories, and Holmes never ceases to amaze me. If it weren't for their circumstances, they might make for a great comedy team-up.

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Ironically, I don't have this as a favorite because, frankly, I wanted to read more of the Little Prince.

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
More inconsistency. Weren't the works of Shakespeare further up the list?

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
I love Roald Dahl. He has a very distinct narrative style where he describes events and situations with an almost childlike glee. I suspect that this is why his line of books aimed at younger readers are so popular -- it makes a good combination with whatever his imagination can cook up.

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I like what I've seen of the story from movies and the stage, and I'd like to see how Hugo originally wrote this.


That's a grand total of fifteen books read, out of the one hundred on the list. I did mention that I wasn't much of a reader, mind you. That, and I probably consume a higher proportion of short stories than most.

One thing that I notice is the fact that I seem to go against the crowd. The modern bestsellers among the items above mostly don't seem to register with me; I suspect that I like reading whatever people aren't looking at, as opposed to whatever flies off the shelves. It's like a residual version of my "road less traveled" viewpoint.

There are, of course, some things not on this list that I feel should really have a place in there. Where's Neil Gaiman, for example? I also wouldn't mind Terry Pratchett, Stephen King or Isaac Asimov in there. For that matter, where's Love Story? Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Siddhartha? Fahrenheit 451? The God of Small Things? Watchmen?

Aw, heck... I'll just get back to work now. Better to try and write something that might someday make this list, than to complain about the selection itself.

Go Forth and Multiply

Most of the Blogger-based blogs that I read have been seeing fewer and fewer comments as of late. After a while I figured that this wasn't because those blogs were losing a certain degree of popularity; rather, these blogs had simply moved to an alternate presence in Multiply, and they were getting their comments there as a result.

So I began posting a few comments on Multiply. Nothing fancy, of course... just a few things here and there to involve myself in some public discussion. After a while, however, I started to get a little apprehensive about my site there. As it stood until a few days ago, if somebody wanted to look up who I was, they would have found an empty Multiply site with only a single link to this blog.

I mean, I've obviously resisted the urge to move this blog for a while now. I simply have too much history here (in the form of over six hundred posts, as well as a lot of custom sidebar links) for me to change at the drop of a hat. In addition, I don't take a lot of photographs, which doesn't give me much incentive for moving to the more distinctly image-based Multiply.com. However, I feel that if I'm to continue posting comments on the Multiply network, I've got to have some form of content waiting for people who pass by my site. It's embarrassing to have nothing but an empty profile to offer people -- in fact, it might even imply that I don't have any legitimate background behind me.

So as of tonight, I've started importing my blog articles onto my Multiply site. I've already run into issues with my six hundred blog posts (of which Multiply only seems to capture the last five hundred), and I've already spent a good thirty minutes clicking and unclicking article selections to make sure that some of the more frivolous articles wouldn't necessarily show up. As people are not likely to read my stuff from two or three whole years ago, I'll just leave the older articles where they lie.

I'll still be posting my entries here for the foreseeable future, of course; I'm just more comfortable with the Blogger interface right now. I'll need to double-check Multiply to make sure that my page layouts don't suddenly go all wonky on me, but I think I can take that. If anything, my biggest job probably involves "fixing" all those old posts that didn't take the transition very well. That, and I've got to find a better layout for the site -- the aesthetics over there aren't exactly the best in the world.

In the meantime, I've adjusted my welcome message on Multiply. Visitors should now know that my home over there is under renovation, and should hopefully look habitable after a couple of months.

Defending Player Wins All Ties

When I unpacked my box of Word Factory during the first evening of our company offsite, there was an understandable amount of consternation that went around. Word Factory, you see, is a variation of Parker Brothers' Boggle played on a 5-by-5 grid... and it's slightly more difficult than the original, by virtue of the fact that it disallows three-letter words. Seeing that I was both a wordsmith by trade (and the owner of the game, besides that), there was little in the way of encouragement for potential players.

I had come prepared for such a reaction, though: At that point, I offered to give myself a handicap. While everyone could busy themselves trying to find words of four or more letters within the three-minute time limit, I would hobble myself with a five-letter minimum. Fortunately, this sounded like a welcome enough prospect to people -- at least, enough so that four of us could play a tentative first round.

By the time we got back on the bus the next day, word of the strange handicap had spread. I was actually still winning a few games despite the vocabulary limitations, so much that my opponents had tacked on an extra five-point penalty to weigh me down further. In the meantime, I was having fun -- the heightened difficulty level made the game more interesting for me, and the fact that I wasn't rushing to write down a lot of four-letter words meant that I could hunt for eight-letter specimens across the grid.

It strikes me that a lot of board games can be handicapped in this way; in a sense, this can open the possibility of some very nice evenings between kids and adults. My Word Factory experience particularly noted that there are multiple ways to handicap stronger players. Apart from allowing more people to get into the game, it also made for a few spectators who cheered at every seven-letter word that I was able to find.

Any game that relies on winning a certain amount of points, for example, can be adjusted to give weaker players a head start. This could have involved, say, three "free" points to all my Word Factory opponents. Similarly, a two-on-two basketball game can easily start from a 5-0 score to benefit the weaker team, and novice Scrabble players would probably rejoice at a 20-point windfall. I can't imagine a better beneficiary than Texas Hold'em Poker here, though, seeing that its chips are actually a fixed number of points distributed across an even number of players. Anyone willing to grant the smaller people a few more chips at the expense of the card sharks should be able to adjust the game to their liking.

Alternatively, there's also the possibility of kneecapping the strongest player on the table. This was how we executed the Word Factory experiment, and we apparently went about it in two different ways. The first approach was to alter or restrict a gameplay rule for higher difficulty; the second was to force a starting penalty in points. "Kneecapping" probably works best in multiplayer games where one dominant player often faces down a group of weaker opponents, and prevents everybody from having to train their guns on him just to get a decent chance at winning.

I find resource denial to be one of the best ways to force a disadvantage. Many games use or track currency of some sort, and reducing this amount at the start of a game will force experienced players to think differently. An expert Monopoly player with only $1200 out of his expected $1500 would have to adjust her style of play, for example, while a Risk player who has five less armies may have to create a whole new strategy just to survive. While chess would normally be difficult to handicap in this regard, you can impose handicaps in competitive play by limiting the amount of time on a particular contestant's clock.

Finally, there's also the question of adding new rules or conditions to accommodate different skill levels. Quite a few Magic: the Gathering handicaps, for example, involve imposing additional "standards" on more powerful players during deck contruction. Maybe they can't play with cards beyond a certain rarity or expansion set. Maybe they can't play with more than one or two copies of each card. Maybe they maintain a reduced hand size or a larger deck. This, as you can imagine, is probably the only logical option for games with a high degree of customizability, or multiple ways to win -- it would normally be too complex to cover all the possible avenues of advantage otherwise.

This is not to say that any game can be handicapped, though. Tic-Tac-Toe is probably the simplest example that I can think of -- the closest we can get involves allowing weaker players to go first, and even then, that's not much of a handicap to the highly skilled people. Clue (Cluedo) is a more subtle example, seeing as any effort to grant weaker players an advantage might severely throw off the pace and balance of the game. I feel that games that reward personal skills without being based on points (endurance running and Pictionary, for example) are extremely difficult to handicap without compromising the skills involved -- a good handicap should play to the advantages of the stranger player/s.

On my side, I'll probably try to negotiate something for our Word Factory sessions. I'm thinking that the five-point penalty is a little restrictive -- three points may be just about right, considering that I should need only the equivalent of one or two more words in order to catch up. Maybe that way, I can convince them to offer me a three-point head start the next time we stop by the nearest badminton court. :)

Disclaimer: September 2008

Men who work the nameless word
Seek to rise above the herd
Carving stone in precious rune
Silent by the stoic moon

Eyes that see the twists in time
Unveil songs in verse and rhyme
Struggled madness well too met
Blood and tears awash in sweat

Surveyed landscapes of the mind
Written here among their kind
Lost loves of creation's might
Guarded well by copyright

Making guests of other's ken
Questions of where, what and when
Spoken peace with godhead's hand
Patience lies in grains of sand

Taken words not left to bear
Granted names to drink and wear
Should their presence breed dislike
Swiftly falls the hammer's strike

Men whose cloaks hide thieves' intent
Greater falsehood's detriment
Seek to steal the breath from lungs
Watch these words with jealous tongues

Lies to scream and gladly speak
Chosen to incite the weak
Bring about the sordid next
Heedless of the right context

Grinning teeth of tainted charm
Scatters only fateful harm
Pray refuse temptation's tryst
Lest thou be a plagiarist

Wrath unchecked to howls of rage
Traps thee in a golden cage
Fires doused in ancient awe
Wither well at rule of law

Reason falls to one's own skill
Faced with strength and force of will
Should your greatest work be sought
By your hand must this be wrought

Shortlist

Do you see that "Search Blog" function on the upper left corner of this website? The one on the Blogger toolbar? Well, I was using it a few minutes ago to try and track down a couple of old posts that I had written. The search results page gave me one of the articles I was looking for, sure enough, but it didn't give me anything older than that.

Because I wanted to investigate the issue further, I tracked down the older piece and checked to see if it would show up under a more refined search. It did, and I concluded that the problem was with the system's capabilities. Apparently Blogger returns only the first twenty results when you do a search in this way.

Now, I'm not complaining about this. A twenty-item limit makes perfect sense, of course, because you don't want your system to be overloaded with too many results. You don't want to enter the word "the", for example, only to be deluged with almost every single post you've ever written. That would defeat the purpose of your original search, and it would make the server cry.

The catch, however, is that I've got over five hundred posts on this blog. I can refine my searches right now, sure enough... but will this still be workable after a couple of years? If I continue writing at this rate, I'll have about a thousand posts in the bank after three more years or so. Considering my verbosity and my penchant for revisiting certain topics, this might mean trouble for me before the decade is out.

The first thing that came to mind, then, was the possibility of establishing a shortlist of articles. I mean, I currently maintain a set of running posts on the right-hand sidebar: These represent certain common themes or series of posts that I wanted to highlight for visitors. If I can do this for subsets of articles, why can't I do this for prominent posts?

By "prominent posts", of course, I refer to the most readable items that I've penned here. These range from arguments on literary issues to various analyses and denunciations. Think of it as a little anthology of sorts -- with over five hundred posts in the archives, I'd like to have a handy guide to the pieces I'd like to reference. Moreover, if a visitor is interested in browsing these, then the feature gets a little added value.

There is a downside to this idea, though, and that's the fact that I'll need to do quite a bit of browsing. The "Archives" section on the sidebar is already intimidatingly long, and I have no desire to click on each and every monthly link there. My plan, therefore, is to start off with the ones that immediately come to mind, and then keep adding links as I remember them.

You're welcome to give me a hand, of course. Those articles that I think are memorable and those articles that you think are memorable may very well be completely different. If you feel that something I've previously written should probably go on this shortlist, then do let me know. Otherwise, well, I'll be putting it together myself, in any case.

In the end, if this exercise does make this blog a little readable for everyone who passes by, then that'll be the gravy on top of my mashed potatoes. At the very least, I won't have to refine my searches as often...

Office Games

My office has been on a bit of a nostalgic kick lately. Over the last few days, we've been discussing the possibility of setting up a regular board-gaming session; I figure that we're probably just itching for something fun to do in between the endless series of meetings and forecast reports. The fact that we all seem to have memories of old games that we used to play only encourages us, although I confess that most of us don't seem to have an idea on what's popular nowadays.

Last week I offered to bring copies of the only two workable board games that I have lying around. One of them is the ubiquitous Word Factory, that higher-level form of Boggle that disallows three-letter words on a five-by-five board. The other is a much simpler game called Guillotine, which I've demoed to a lot of kids in my short tenure as a huckster salesperson.

The trouble with the two games is that I don't think they're built for long-term play. Guillotine, for example, strikes me as a little too simple -- it doesn't involve much strategy beyond playing for the highest possible number of points each turn. Word Factory, on the other hand, might end up giving me an unfair advantage over the others -- because I come from a background that involves both writing and puzzle-solving.

So now the question on my end was, what sort of game would be best for an occasional office group? I obviously want something strategy-based, for one... but I also want something with long long-term value, because the game will probably be sitting in the office for a while. Moreover, the fun factor has to be a given.

Strolling through the local game store earlier this evening, I made a mental note of the possibilities. I sort them into two basic categories below, for your convenience:


STUFF I'VE PLAYED

Monopoly. This was the first game that came to mind, I'll admit. It's an extremely familiar name for everybody, and it plays very differently when all of your opponents are business-savvy twenty- or thirty-year-olds. The problem is that I find it quite random compared to the slate of contemporary board games. Apart from the fact that player advantage is determined by the die rolls, there's also the fact that games can take an extremely long time to finish -- which is not a good quality when most of us have to scramble for meetings in an hour or so.

Pictionary. I find that this makes for a very convenient office game, and it's virtually guaranteed to be entertaining. The fact that we have whiteboards and markers available to us makes this choice a lot more viable. However, I'm concerned about the advantage that part-time artists will have over the non-artistically-inclined. In addition, the game is practically devoid of strategy -- this is really a party game at its core.

Cluedo. In contrast, Cluedo is a childhood game that has an essential strategic component. It's a lot like Monopoly in that our strategic senses are more finely-honed as adults. I expect that Cluedo will fit perfectly into a one-hour timeslot, and it's great for those people who love deductive thinking (i.e. my office). However, I also find it to be a very sedate game -- the excitement value gets lowered a notch when people put a lot of their energy into their thoughts.

Texas Hold'em Poker. I can argue that this game blends excitement and logic fairly well, but management will almost certainly see this for its gambling element. Unfortunately, that's enough for me to eliminate this from my list of possibilities. (Mah-jongg suffers from the same issues.)

Chess. It's a classic, but it's a boring classic. On top of that, only two people can play at a time.

Magic: the Gathering. As much as I like the game, it introduces an element of card-buying into the mix... and I don't want to bring it that far. In addition, the game does have a certain stigma among my generation -- people either have fond memories of it, or they'll avoid it like the plague. I'd rather not go for something hit-or-miss when there are plenty of other options for us to choose from.


STUFF I HAVEN'T PLAYED

Settlers of Catan. This, I hear, is one of the board games to end all board games. It's supposed to have a very deep strategic element, and at the same time holds enough details to keep people's attention focused on the game board. I not only want to try this game out, but I'd also like to bring others into the session as well. The problem is that it's extremely difficult to find copies around here, and I'm not about to go to great lengths just to score one.

Kill Doctor Lucky. This game sits squarely at the top of my "must-find" list. It has one of the nastiest premises ever conceived in gaming memory -- you must successfully kill a doddering old man without having any of the other players witness the act -- and I've only had a total of two tantalizing glimpses of the game itself. It's a reverse-Cluedo of sorts that involves a lot of cheating and backstabbing, which means that it'll make for some really good sessions. Until I manage to find a copy, though, it'll have to remain on my dream list.

Acquire. Dean Alfar swears by this game, and I'm curious enough to give it a try. It's widely available enough for me to know where I can pick up a copy... but beyond that, I have no idea how well the game plays or what dynamics are involved. That means that I have no idea how my officemates are going to receive the game, so if there's any "wild card" on this list, it's this one.

Cranium (or any similar trivia game). I'm a huge fan of Trivial Pursuit, but Cranium seems to be the closest item on the shelves nowadays. The catch with games like these is that the resident know-it-all as a pronounced advantage over the rest of the players. I don't want to pick up a game that rewards intellectualism, mind you, when it might make more than a few people feel as though they don't know anything.


I'm still looking around, of course, and I'll probably make up a shortlist to present to my office as of next week. The more viable games above will most likely be on this list, but if anyone's willing to suggest anything, then I'm all ears.

Of course, there's always the easy way out, which involves installing Counterstrike on everybody's laptops and spending our evenings blowing each other away. But that would hardly count for nostalgia, wouldn't it? :)

I Just Get These Headaches

After some four hours of number-crunching last Thursday, the side of my head felt as though a jackhammer was trying to bore into it. The psychological impact was so strong that I could feel the pain through my teeth; in the end, however, I slept on it and hoped that it would be gone in the morning.

My headaches aren't the benign ones. They're usually huge, high-impact heavyweights that compress my head into ten pounds of sawdust and try to wring out all the enclosed fluids at the same time. In fact, I get enough headaches nowadays (normally at the tune of at least one per month) that I can describe each and every one of them; my family has since learned not to ask me silly questions like "How does it feel?".

The smallest ones feel like acupuncture needles, to be honest. These usually come around after I assault my senses once too often -- maybe I spent too much time figuring out a complex probability equation, or analyzing a software configuration, or working a new first-person shooter. Whatever the case, I've found that they indicate that a bigger migraine's going to arrive soon if I don't drop what I'm doing at that very second, and I listen to their advice around half the time. At this point, the headache isn't big enough to be inconvenient -- but it has the potential to grow.

Most of my headaches involve a sensation of daggers. These feel as though a pair of knives somehow got inserted into the sides of my head, around the region of the temples. The resulting dull pain is usually enough to get me to stop working and spend the next few minutes applying pressure to the trouble spots. Sometimes I go for an ice pack -- I get a bit of brainfreeze, but it has the added effect of numbing everything long enough to let me sleep. On top of that, I try to doze off with a bit of weight pressing down on the sore area. Headaches like these usually last no more than a few hours.

Until this morning rolled around, the worst headache that I usually get involves a sledgehammer-like pounding somewhere in the region of my frontal lobes. Why the sensation doesn't take place in the same area as the daggers is a mystery. I just know that, if I ever feel as though the spot just behind my forehead has started throbbing, then a massive headache has gone underway. Occasions like these are enough for me to pack up, bury myself under a tower of pillows, and try to get the sounds to stop. Make no mistake -- these are the really bad ones. It's as though any new thought that comes to mind only exacerbates the problem... and by my nature, I get a lot of thoughts.

Last Thursday and this morning, however, was a completely new experience. This was most likely the strangest headache I had on record -- for one, all the pain was concentrated on a spot just above my right ear, near my temples. Another strange thing was that it seemed to be of the "pounding sensation" type, although it ended up a little weaker than the sledgehammers I was used to. It started off strong, but then it petered out after a bit of sleep.

What surprised me was the utter impact of it, really. I likened it to having a pulsating organism attached to the side of my head, as though it was applying pressure directly to my bloodstream and threatening to burst at any second. Needless to say, I got a few strange looks when I tried to describe this to my officemates.

I actually still have the headache right now. By this time, however, it's reduced itself to a dull pain inside my head, much like a car fender that's been turned inside-out. It'll most likely be gone by tomorrow, which'll be just in time for the weekend.

I'm not quite sure where the headaches come from. I feel that it would be absurd to say that they come around whenever I think too hard; it's as though we're implying that a bunch of conscious mental processes can have some sort of physical effect. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that trying to think in the middle of a headache usually makes things a little more painful... so I'm sure that the effort of thought has something to do with it.

If it's all the same to anyone, though, I'd rather not stop thinking all the time. Having these things happen once a month is a poor tradeoff for the ability to consistently look at the universe from a personal point of view. That, and it does give me a possible excuse to slog off work and bury myself in bed for the rest of the day.

Clothes Make the Man

Shirt: You'll see me wearing a polo shirt most of the time, particularly because it's my personal standard for the workplace. Half my shirts are either plaid or checkered; these fashion nightmares are mostly leftovers from the mid-90s, or hand-me-downs from older relatives. As a result, I prefer solid-color shirts; three of the ones hanging in my closet happen to come from the same brand, mostly because there's a girl I like who works at the company. I always tuck in, because it happens to be an irritating little habit that I can't break.

Undershirt: My collection of sleeveless undershirts dates back to my high school days. After almost fifteen years, the rough fabrics have developed more than a few loose threads and moth-eaten holes... but I figure that no one will notice them as long as I keep my shirt on.

Pants: I picked up four pairs of slacks as part of the uniform from my previous workplace -- they're pleated, wrinkle-free, and mostly resistant to water damage. As you can expect, these are the pairs that I wear practically all the time. Apart from those, I own two pairs of faded blue jeans; there are rumors that I never wear them, but I like to think that I put them on about as often as any other person. I just don't wear them on weekdays (owing to workplace requirements), and I don't buy new ones (seeing that I can only wear them twice a week).

Underwear: Marks & Spencer briefs. The less of that image you get in your mind, the better.

Socks: I have no idea where my brother buys our socks. We share a common sock drawer, you see, and everything we own is in either black or white. I do know that he manages to pick out some comfortable pairs, though, so I don't question his expertise. We do fight over the black ones, though, seeing that we will put on a pair regardless of where we go.

Shoes: I constantly wage a silent war over the acquisition of good shoes. I want my shoes to be as comfortable as any other person would; however, I demand durability in addition to such comfort -- a pair would have to last at least a couple of years in order to satisfy me. I'm very happy with the shoes that I own at the moment, though -- they're padded to ensure a high level of foot comfort, and they have thick soles built in so that I can wade through puddles without destroying the leather. I picked the pair up from a Gibi stall in the Landmark mall some months ago, and you can be certain that I'll be back after they wear out.

Belt: I bought a new belt early this year to replace an old one that was near the point of breaking. After I picked up the new one, however, I went on a bit of a diet that caused me to shave one or two inches off my waist. As a result, the only belt that I own now hangs in a lopsided manner; I'm too forgetful to have another hole stamped into it, and I'm too cheap to get another new one.

Wallet: I used to own a Marithé François Girbaud wallet made out of stiff leather, and after I few years I got to hating it -- the leather would crack, become brittle, and break away in sharp points. On my birthday this year, however, a friend of mine with impeccable taste decided to get me a soft-leather wallet of the same brand... and I've been loving it ever since.

Cellphone: I got my current cellphone almost two years ago, as a hand-me-down from an uncle who was upgrading models. It's a Sony Ericsson, if you must know, and while I like the advanced features, I'm a little leery on a few things. (Does this infernal contraption always save its messages regardless of importance, for example?) The simcard is a holdover from my previous phone, however, and it's lasted me for all of nine years.

Pencil: I'm on my fifth mechanical pencil since college. The previous pencils suffered more than a few indignities -- a couple of them lost their eraser caps, one had its handle break off, and the last one got trampled by a mob of rambunctious kids. I carry one around because I get struck by the urge to write or doodle at the strangest times; if I'm not wearing anything with a breast pocket, you'll usually see the pencil pinned to the buttons down the front of my shirt.

Where is Everybody?

Quite a few friends of mine are getting married this year. I attended a provincial wedding for two college friends last May, a previous relationship of mine is having her wedding next month, and another college friend has gotten a commitment from me for this December. On top of that, there was a wedding last weekend that I unfortunately missed; to this day, I have no idea how it slipped my mind.

I mean, did everybody suddenly decide to tie the knot this year? There must be something about the local planetary alignments right now...

What galls me, however, is the possibility that I've remained out of touch. I've had my nose buried in work for the past few months, much to the point that I haven't seen anything of my circle of friends. On top of that, I've had some looming writing deadlines for August and September, and, well... you get the idea. It's the same old excuses, really.

Maybe I just need to get out more often. I mean, I've concerned myself with the prospect of maintaining a life outside my work for years and years now. Despite that, however, I don't seem to have much to show for it. Even worse, I seem to have missed out on a few monumental events that have occurred -- say, that wedding last Sunday. (I do wish you all the best, Diane and Mark.)

I suspect that my non-sociable side is popping up again. This is actually rather ironic, as I've been attending a couple of events -- a few conventions, a couple of tournaments, an open gaming meet -- recently, all of which were in the company of relative strangers. On the other hand, these weren't personal gatherings, and were more like get-togethers for a bunch of like-minded enthusiasts. They don't exactly compare to an afternoon where you hang out and shoot the breeze with the people you know and love.

The phone's right next to me, I suppose. I need to set up more junkets, or at least find reasons to get a few people together. This current lifestyle isn't as healthy as it looks.

Antaria: Rogue Business (Part 2)

Imogen Stormbane was indeed good-looking, as far as old ladies went. She had been a well-known beauty in her youth, although she had spurned countless suitors and marriage proposals in favor of her scholarly work. She was far from the oldest member of the guild (especially where Atharus was concerned), but she was definitely one of its most approachable teachers.

And at the moment, she was lending her one and only student a handkerchief.

To say that Celestine was disconsolate would have been the understatement of the year. Cerise had never seen anyone cry the way she did -- it was like watching a dam burst.

Gharen sighed. "And then what happened?" he asked.

"He ran away," Celestine sniffed. The hankie was quite sodden already.

"Yes, yes," Gharen said. "You mentioned that. What I mean is, what did you do once you saw that he was running away?"

"She mentioned that too, Gharen," Imogen interrupted. "She didn't do anything. Just picture yourself in that situation and consider how you would react."

Gharen rubbed at his temples. "Yes, Lady Imogen," he said in a weary voice. "I'm not accusing her of anything. Aran's teeth, I'm not trying to accuse her of anything. But we need to find out as much as we can about what happened."

Celestine sobbed again, inundating the sorry piece of cloth with a fresh flood of tears. Imogen wrapped one comforting arm around her apprentice, who continued sobbing into the front of her robes. "She's scared, Gharen," she said. "You can't just fire questions at her like this."

Gharen shrugged. "I wasn't being nasty," he said.

"No one said that you were being nasty, dear. Celestine just needs some rest. It's been a long day for her, and for all of us."

"It's not even evening yet," Cerise groaned.

"That only gives us more time to talk," Imogen said, patiently. Then, taking her apprentice's head into her hands, she whispered into Celestine's ear. "Go back to your room, little one. Take some sleep -- you've been through a lot today -- and I'll wake you when it's time for dinner."

Celestine sniffed one more time, and nodded. She held up the unfortunate piece of white cloth.

"You can keep the handkerchief," Imogen said.

Celestine nodded, and slowly slipped out of the room. Gharen closed the door behind her.

"We didn't handle that very well," Cerise observed.

Gharen threw up his hands. "How are we supposed to handle these sorts of incidents? I mean... who steals from one of us? In broad daylight, even? It's just like asking for trouble!"

"If you're thinking of burning the entire peasant district to the ground," Imogen cautioned, "I'll have you know that that's definitely against guild precepts."

"It's tempting, though."

Cerise thought for a moment. "Do we know what's in the book that was stolen?" she asked.

"Of course," Imogen said. "It's an old treatise on weather control. Celestine and I were moving up to more advanced studies, and I felt that it would be prudent to look up some of the likely outcomes. You can't expect an apprentice to summon stormclouds without anticipating how that's going to affect the harvest season."

Cerise raised an eyebrow. "Zaphod's Meteorology, you mean?"

"Yes, dear. You seem to know your books."

"All too well. I think we're definitely going to have to get this one back, Lady Imogen."

Gharen gave her a curious stare. "I'm not sure if I follow you, Cerise. If it's just a book on weather patterns and whatnot, then wouldn't it be dispensable? I'm rather certain that we have another copy somewhere... we always have another copy somewhere."

"Not this one, dear," Imogen said. "Zaphod was adamant about protecting the results of his studies. The guild promised that no further copies of the book would ever be made, and Zaphod himself sealed it with an arcane lock. It took me a good three weeks just to get the key from Zerah the librarian."

"That doesn't change the fact that the thieves have a locked book in their hands. I fail to see how this is an urgent situation."

"I don't think you deserve to underestimate their resourcefulness, Gharen," Imogen warned. "Sooner or later, someone's going to find a way to get that book open."

"I still don't get it," Gharen said. "I'm sure that weather patterns may be important enough, but what relevance would they have to anyone but us? We could practically look for the book at our leisure."

"It's not the book," Cerise said.

Gharen raised an eyebrow. "So what's so urgent about getting it back?"

Imogen answered a moment before Cerise could say anything. "I mentioned an arcane lock," she said.

"Er... one of those things?"

"Zaphod was a little... overprotective of his research. He didn't make that lock to protect the book; he was of a far more retributive mindset."

Gharen felt his stomach sink a bit. "That doesn't sound good," he said.

"I got a long lecture from Atharus before I could even attempt to open it," Cerise said. "Zaphod left only two specific keys by which the book could be properly unlocked and opened."

"Otherwise...?"

"Otherwise we get a storm on our hands," Imogen said.

"A storm?"

"Did you ever hear about the hurricane eight years ago? The one that hit the outskirts of Lorendheim and continued for six straight days?"

Gharen paled. "That was the book?"

"Well, it wasn't just a light drizzle."

Gharen blinked. "That definitely doesn't sound good."

Imogen sighed. "Yes, dear," she said. "I would much rather not have to trudge through seven feet of water at my age. It would ruin my robes."

"That's why we need to find it right now," Cerise concluded. "Any ideas?"

*

"This is a funny-looking lock," Pick observed.

"Yeah," Chance said. "But I wouldn't be asking you if I didn't think that you were up to the challenge."

The two thieves sat along the walls of a blind cul-de-sac, bantering over their latest acquisition. The one called Chance was a young man, muscular and slim, wearing a dirty white shirt concealed under layers of old leather. The one called Pick was reed-thin with a distinctive hooked nose; he wore a stained cloth apron over an old tunic and looked as though he had been in the thievery business for far too long.

"Where'd you get a hold of this one, Chance?"

Chance gave him a sardonic smile. "Wouldn't you like to know," he said.

"It's got 'mage' written all over it, Chance. If you yanked it off one of the spellcasters, then you know that I won't have truck with that."

"Why don't you live a bit, Pick. They're not going to be able to find us -- we're too good for those stuck-up nobles. Besides, it was fun... and the girl was just as cute as she was stupid."

Pick pulled a couple of mangled-looking wires from his pocket. "Are you sure it's not trapped or anything?" he asked in a suspicious tone.

"I carried it here. If it was supposed to blast me to pieces, then it hasn't done that yet."

Pick glared at him. "That makes me feel a whole lot better," he said.

"I aim to please," Chance said dryly.

Pick inserted both wires into the ancient lock, then carefully moved the two about. Sweat began to form on his brow. His fingers, wrinkled as they looked, remained steady.

Chance waited for a while before the older man spoke.

"Hard to concentrate," Pick said, pulling his wires out. "I keep feeling like something's going to fry me or turn my guts into warm mash."

"You've done worse locks," Chance mentioned.

"This one's old," Pick said, "and it doesn't use the usual gear mechanism that you see nowadays. In fact, I don't know where the leather ends and the rust begins. No, the picks aren't good for this kind of thing... I'll need my skeleton keys, and right now they're in my workshop."

"How long do you need?" Chance asked.

Pick rubbed his chin for a while, and inspected the book from a few more angles. "One day," he said. "Maybe two, if the keys don't work. You know, Chance, this lock isn't directly attached to the cover. You can take a sharp knife and just cut it away."

Chance took the grimoire from Pick's outstretched hands. "I don't know," he said, "but I think it's got some nostalgic value. Maybe someone'll pay more for it as long as it still has the lock."

"You could just sell it without having to open it," Pick pointed out. "That way, I save about a day's worth of labor for someone who won't even pay me a fair cut."

Chance laughed. "You don't know about mages and books," he said. "The way I see it, they're curious. They'd die to find out what's inside. If we can do that for them, it'll be like offering a service... and they'd pay more in that case."

"Speaking of which... just how are you going to fence it? You probably have a whole sect looking for it right now. They're not going to take very kindly to your walking around with their property."

"Trade secret," Chance said.

"We're in the same line of work, you know."

"Well... I've got my people, and you've got yours. You just get your tools ready."

"You'd better know what you're doing," Pick warned. "I'm just a simple thief. I'm not about to put my life on the line just because you had the bad sense to steal from a mage."

"No one's asking you to put your life on the line, Pick. Just as long as you shut up and play along, you'll have a good share of the reward coming."

The two thieves exchanged their last bit of banter, and then split up. Pick took the wider exit from the alley, into a cobblestoned road that bypassed the city marketplace. Chance, who was by far the more suspicious-looking of the two, wrapped the book in its original cloth coverings and struggled over a tall fence to land on a stack of barrels on the other side. The younger man walked for a few more feet, climbed over a rough stone wall, and finally emerged in one of the more disreputable parts of the city, where he lost himself among the squalor.

Behind him, hidden on one of the rooftops, a cloaked figure shifted slightly. It grunted, as though making sense of what it had heard and observed, and then seemed to make up its mind.

After a few minutes, it drew its slate-gray cloak tighter about itself, and then began climbing down off the roof.

The situation, it had to admit, was proving to be quite interesting.

The Lost Work

Waaaaay back in February of last year -- just before I started working at my current job -- I put together a short story for release via Psicom Publishing. I remember it quite clearly because I was given a mere week to come up with a work of speculative fiction, and I just barely beat the deadline in this case. In fact, I actually noted the experience in an introduction to one of my blog posts around that time.

"Automata" ended up being a sci-fi effort from my end, clocking in at seven pages in Times New Roman 12, double-spaced, with a total of just over thirteen thousand words to its credit. I don't remember if I was to be paid for the work, but the target publication in question was a follow-up to the company's Pinoy Amazing Adventures, and at that time I was eager to find possible outlets for my writing.

It took the company three months to send me a contract, after which I noted some nasty irregularities and sent it back for change. I also received a manuscript proof around that time, where I noted that the typesetter had put most of my paragraph indentations out of whack. After an hour's worth of corrections, I sent that file back as well.

Then... nothing.

We're now approaching the middle of August 2008, and it seems that I haven't heard anything about the status of the story for over a year now. I'll confess that I scour the bookstores every now and then to see if the publication ever came out... but it looks like it hasn't. Sometimes I wonder if they're ever going to get back to me with a revised contract, and sometimes I wonder if they're just going to screw me over and use the story without getting so much as an okay from me.

But that's all moot, though, because I've seen neither hide nor hair of my one-week wonder. It's quite weird.

To be honest, I'm not looking forward to the story coming out. This is because I don't think that it's representative of my best work, although I think that it's fairly readable on its own merits. For that matter, I've also moved on... which pretty much lowers the significance of this one little work in my book. In short, it's old hat.

That said, though, I don't know what my jurisdiction is with regards to this one. Usually, whenever I submit a short story to a publisher, I do so with the understanding that said publisher is "leasing" it for use within a certain period of time. Psicom, however, was different -- for a company that's been around for a while now, I have yet to see them take the lead on any formal arrangements. In my case, I handed them the story without knowing how long they were going to hang on to it... or for that matter, whether or not they were going to hold onto the rights in the first place.

And now, over one year later, I'm wondering if it's legal for me to put the story up on this blog... or submit it to another publication... or even so much as put up excerpts of it to see what other people think. As you can see, I'm confused.

I'll probably end up writing a short e-mail to Psicom Publishing in order to find out the fate of my story. (Or, failing that, I can also contact our go-between to see if he's still involved.) Hopefully they've done something rash, such as tossing it into the shredder or feeding it to the German Shepherd next door or something like that; those scenarios seem a lot better than just filing the work away for fifteen straight months.

And in any event, it looks like Psicom's spec fic effort is dead on the vine. There are better outlets for these pieces right now -- Philippine Genre Stories is still accepting works, as is Story Philippines. A number of local magazines have begun to feature short stories by the new generation of speculative fiction writers, and Dean Alfar's yearly anthology still sits at the top of many lists. The fact that the Fully Booked competition looks more and more sustainable as it goes on is merely icing on the cake. The main thing is, there are a ton of avenues available to people now -- why wait for a publisher who hasn't put out their planned collection in more than a year?

I'd still like to get some closure on my story, though. I mean, it can't just stay in my hard drive forever...

This Mortal Coil

The father of one of my best friends died suddenly last Saturday, and I passed by late Monday afternoon for the wake. Despite the fact that everyone at the funeral parlor appeared calm and almost... normal, I could feel a heavy sense of sadness that blanketed the entire room. There's a human trait that encourages us to put our best faces forward in any situation, and this was a prime example.

As you may recall, my own father passed on almost eight years ago, so I've seen these circumstances before. I don't think I've ever really seen it from this point of view, though, and sometimes the sadness felt as though it was going to suffocate everyone in tears.

There was a small shrine set up by the family in one corner of their little room, and sitting on the table was an assortment of remembrances: A pair of shoes. A favorite book. An old bowling ball. A group of old photos. A uniform, pressed and cleaned. I spent a few minutes going over the various mass cards and everyday items, and wondered why we never came up with anything like that for my dad.

But then I realized that I didn't know the deceased about as well as I hoped, and this family did. Maybe the little shrine was a way for them to tell us who he was, and what memories they would carry for the rest of their lives.

And that made me wonder further, about myself. For a moment, I wondered how anyone would remember me when I passed on.

I trudged outside to think for a few minutes, and perhaps get some fresh air. Outside the room, just beyond the entrance doors, was a massive construct of paper and wood -- a mansion made of glue and Japanese paper, with a few similar wood-frame sculptures nearby. There was a luxury car made out of paper, there was a yacht made out of paper, and there was even a sleek-looking airplane made out of paper. After experiencing the heavy atmosphere inside the room, the latter amused me somewhat.

I had seen the tradition before. You see, when the funeral takes place, the paper constructs are taken from their display and burned. This is done so that, when the deceased's spirit moves on to the afterlife, the sculptures will have somehow become what they were meant to be. In this case, the constructs were there to guarantee a mansion to live in, a car to get around and go places, perhaps a ship and a jet for longer journeys. Little human-size cutouts in the sculptures ensured that more than a few servants would be waiting in the afterlife as well.

I spent a few more minutes inside the room before I left. This time, I busied myself folding pieces upon pieces of ghost money -- bundled scraps of paper stamped with gold or silver foil that had to be curled and folded in a certain way. These would be burned along with the paper constructs to ensure that the deceased would have some wealth to use in the otherworld.

I was a little surprised that I remembered how to fold the scraps of paper in the right fashion, although eight years had dulled most of my skills in that regard. The family had already collected about an entire sackful of ghost money by that Monday afternoon, and I was sure that more would be completed by the time the funeral came around.

Putting about twenty of the bills together left me with a certain urge, however. Somewhere in the middle of the proceedings, I pulled the remains of a lunch receipt from my wallet and began making a few folds. After a few minutes I unfurled a tiny origami peacock in my right hand, to the smiles of a few onlookers.

And I remembered my father again, considering that he was the one who taught me the hobby in the first place. He was a collector of curiosities himself, and I wondered again as to why we never put together a little shrine to eulogize him during his wake.

I left the origami peacock leaning against a stainless steel thermos in the back room, then hitched up my knapsack and stepped out the door. Chinese tradition dictates a lot of things -- among them was the fact that one never says goodbye to the hosts during a wake. There was a strange metaphorical logic there, and I didn't question the practice.

Three floors down, I found that it was raining heavily outside. I was fortunate enough to have brought my umbrella, however, and as I passed more than a few pedestrians on my way to the car, I thought a little about the light at the end of life, our passing on, and the ones who we inevitably leave behind. Then I thought about how we are right now, we lone survivors on this gray earth, who carry the memories of those who have gone.

And finally, as with any being with a human heart would do, I moved on, leaving my ghosts behind.

Disclaimer: August 2008

Here. Everything. Me. Author. Originator. Writer.

Ideas. Here. Mine. Original. Completely. / Others. Ideas. Used. Sometimes. Others. Writers. Artists. / Acknowledgments. Enclosed. Whenever. Used. / If. Others. Refuse. Use. Contact. Me. Negotiate. Agreement.

Here. Plagiarism. Not. Condoned. / If. Wish. Use. Works. Here. Must. Place. Request. Ask. Me. Permission. / Should. Use. Not. Outside. Original. Context. / Should. Use. Not. Pretense. Place. Own. Name. / These. Works. Writer. Me. / Works. Exist. Not. Profit. Uncreative. Thieves.

Wish. You. Use. Works. Here. Contact. Me. / May. Choose. Not. Compensation. Ask. / Only. Correct. Attribution. / Maybe. Link. Aside.

Creative. Commons. License. Lower. Right. Side. Sidebar. Bottom. / Read. Understand. Know. / Writers. All. Rights. Have. / Respect. Please.

Threats. Needed. Should. Not. / Though. Fun. Still. / Bear. Traps. / Rusty. Razor. Blades. / Mutant. Rottweilers. / Giant. Fly. Swatters. / Mother. Insults. / You. Know. Drill.

Testing, One-Two-Three...

Don't mind these last few posts. I'm just testing the new scheduling feature over here.

If you haven't heard of this one yet, it's a feature that allows you to set up a blog post that will remain hidden until a specific date and time of your choice, after which it will presumably appear as your most recent post. Or maybe not; Blogger has been remarkably murky on the subject. I haven't exactly found much assistance in their "Help" area.

So what I'm doing here is the most logically intuitive (how's that for an oxymoron?) setup that I can think of -- I'm just going to set a specific time and date for this post, and see exactly when it's going to show up. If this piece shows up on the blog at precisely 11:59am on July 30, then I'll know that I did something right. If not, then either I've screwed up somewhere, or the Blogger technicians don't know what they're talking about. (That, or they really need to update their Helpfiles.)

Of course, you're probably wondering what use I could possibly have for such a feature. I mean, I normally don't plan my posts straight out -- I usually just sit down, log in, and write about whatever catches my fancy. (The little fiction pieces are probably the only exceptions here, as I usually spend up to three or four sessions writing them.)

There is one thing one this blog that comes out on a regular basis, though -- and those are the monthly disclaimers. As of late, I haven't been posting them on exactly the first day of each month... but if I could do so, then that would make things a little more convenient for me. No longer would I run into flashes of inspiration in the middle of the month, only to discard the idea because the next disclaimer post is quite a ways off.

Of course, this assumes that I could somehow find the time to write posts well in advance. That remains to be seen, I'll admit...