Last Post of the Year

I feel that Facebook is too crammed with end-of-year nostalgic statuses, so I'll post mine here. Much of my life for the past 365 days, anyway, had something to do with writing and Kulaman Plateau.

Let's start with the best thing that happened to me. I think it's coming back home and writing a draft of a novel. Yes, that's right. I'm stating it publicly for the first time. I'm writing a novel. I know I'm supposed to be humble about it. I'm supposed to put the word novel in quotation marks or use the word attempt somewhere in the sentence. But what the heck. Wringing out one hundred thousand words from my brain was a difficult thing to do, regardless of the quality of those words, so allow me to congratulate myself.

The novel is primarily set in Cotabato City and about the sultanate of Maguindanao, but because there's a dearth of research materials about the subject and I have to use whatever I have, a significant part of the story has something to do with Kulaman Plateau. I still need a lot of revisions and polishing to do, and where the manuscript will go (hopefully not in a recycle bin or at the bottom of a slush pile) is something I look forward to in 2015.

Update: This post was not finished because the power went out. The local electric cooperative has been behaving badly after Christmas. Perhaps it already got its present from Santa and no longer cares about the naughty-or-nice list. But of course I'm not surprised that this is happening. Here in the boondocks, you're supposed to endure a lot of hardships.