More Fiction Here

Note: I wrote this in May, and I’ve changed my mind about a few things here. For one, I’m no longer posting my newly written short stories on this blog because the publication venues for them turned out to be not too few after all. I’m thinking, though, of trying my hand at flash fiction and sharing my outputs here. They will be set in Kulaman or have Manobo characters! Though some parts of this post no longer holds true, I decided to push on with its publication because much of it is about my views on writing and what I want to do for my region. This is perhaps the most personal of my posts in this blog, too hard to discard, too taxing to revise, so please bear with me.

At least once a month for the next few months, I’m posting in this blog some of my unpublished short stories. No, I’m not doing it because I can’t wait for them to appear in legitimate venues, so to speak, such as magazines, journals, and websites that are dedicated to literature or have a literary section. I’m doing it simply because I’ve written several stories recently and there has been no enough publication venues for them.

One of my lifelong writing goals is to write at least one hundred stories, set mostly in Cotabato Region. Being published (in the traditional sense), getting paid, or winning awards for them is not my primary concern, though I wouldn’t complain if I happened to achieve any or all of those three along the way. In fact, I always do my best whenever I write so that the story would be worthy of any or all of those three, but if none of them happens, I don’t get discouraged—not anymore, anyway. (I believe I know now how to handle rejections and criticisms, but this topic requires another post.) I enjoy the process, the journey, including the not-so-enjoyable parts of it, so I no longer give so much attention to what happens to the output. If you want to, you may read it, publish it (if you’re an editor), pay me for it, or flatter me for it. If you don’t want to, or if you feel the story or me doesn’t deserve it, it’s fine. You don’t owe me anything. I prefer to write a new story rather than wait on an old story to get some recognition.

In connection to my goal to write a hundred stories, I’ve made a change to the page about me in this blog. The list of my fiction works now contains all the stories that I’ve made available to the public, by means of traditional publications and otherwise. I’ve written at least thirty stories so far. They’ve helped me get into five writers workshops, win a minor literary award, and earn almost nothing. It’s not a bad record, I believe, considering that I started to be serious about writing fiction just five years ago. An average of six stories per year isn’t prolific, but those five years included a year of working full-time and not writing any new story, a year and a half of writing drafts of two novels, days of writing updates for this blog, and months of dabbling in projects and ventures that are too trivial to specify. Anyway, back to the short stories: while I don’t care much how far or high the individual stories go, I hope to be judged by the lifelong effort I would give to Cotabato Region and its literature. I aim not only for quality but also for quantity, so do count with me.