Tag: writing

Excerpts

Jolens2 Comments

A couple years back I wrote a draft for a post called “If Fonts Were People.” I wanted to personify the fonts that I use, but the task turned out to be a little too ambitious for my skills. Here’s a snippet:

It’s the font. My productivity relies heavily on pretty fonts.

Cochin has been my go-to recently. Cochin is pretty and petite, like a quiet chinita with perfect posture and who clips her bangs to the side. She dresses sharply like she’s always en route to a corporate meeting. And if you say the right things, you will see the stern sweetness in her smile. That’s what I long for when I write: I want the words to smile.

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Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow

Jolens15 Comments
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Once again, I have nothing.

And while most of my favorite bloggers would rather keep to themselves these annoying and now-repetitive admissions of failure, here I am nurturing the frustration and feeding it fat for everyone to read.

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What makes a “good post”?

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I was searching for blogger tags the other day when I stumbled upon this post from pensitivity101. It isn’t a tag, technically, but it does pose questions that I find worth pondering over.

So, what do you think makes a good post on your blog?

Hmm, that’s a tough question (char). My blog is a personal blog with no measurable clout, so I don’t really have the numbers to prove which posts are good or not. Maybe this question is better answered by bloggers with a bigger audience or with billable influence, so to speak. Otherwise I just write what I write and if the shitpiece is still up on this blog, then it’s good enough for me.

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For the Love of Short Stories

Jolens24 Comments

Here’s a cringe-worthy disclosure: I wrote a short story collection way back in high school. It was part of my senior year thesis, a requirement for graduation. Our school had its own publishing arm that printed anthologies and literary titles. To my knowledge, mine was the only one they never released.

The admin at that time held a strictly conservative view on art. They questioned many aspects of my collection. Why write in colloquial Filipino? Why center the theme on something so bleak like poverty and political unrest? My biggest influences then were the prose of Jun Cruz Reyes and Lualhati Bautista, and the poetry of Emman Lacaba.

The school decided that my language was too vulgar and the theme was too mature for my age. They had a point. But I was a typical teenager with a penchant for romanticizing identity and selfhood. Ultimately I felt defeated and, ah, misunderstood.

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First Draft Poetry

Jolens22 Comments

The following poems are all serious attempts at poetry. Unlike “I Missed Supper”, “You Alone”, and the shitbits that I post on Twitter, these drafts were written to hopefully create something that would resemble even just a skeleton of a semi-decent piece.

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Just Write

Jolens28 Comments

I’ve been telling myself to write more often. Just write. Even if it’s terrible, even if it’s incoherent, even if there’s nothing interesting to write about. I remind myself to write with an audience in mind. This way I will at least try to make my thoughts readable. Never mind the correctness; we all make mistakes anyway. Just write.

But when do I write? I work eight hours a week, five times a day, and my boss has been compelling me to explore the town more often. Sometimes I go out with people, sometimes I watch movies in my room, and sometimes I trek along the coulees to keep my lungs and heart healthy (feelingera lang). I’ve also been reading a lot. Many kinds, from Terry Eagleton to Filipino short fiction to one cheesy romance that reminds me of my own voice — which isn’t really a compliment, unfortunately.

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