Book-Wrangling Walkabout

My plans were today were simple really: after work, after dropping by the house for a quick lunch (and a loan of a thousand pesos from my father), I’d head straight to the closest bookstores in the Makati area to look for any published screenplays they had available, pick two to buy, then head back home so I can spend the rest of the day (and likely most of tomorrow) reading them so I can finally start on that comparative essay (due next week, by the way). It was a good plan, and simple too. Unfortunately, like many plans cooked up by yours truly, it was doomed. Why? Well, all the bookstores I visited didn’t seem to have any in stock.

What a bloody surprise. On the bright side, the customer service people said that they can just order me what I needed. All they have to do is to go online, order on Amazon, and have me wait for at least three weeks before I can get the volume I ordered… Which is funny, since I can do that myself right here in the comfort of my family’s home, and likely get the darned things much faster too.

So this meant I had to resort to Plan B: heading to the university library and trying my luck there. Unlike yesterday, it was open this time (but that was expected, since there was no typhoon to force the school closed), and with a bit of research I was able to find two I could use in the assignment, and what’s more they’re local screenplays too. While I would like to have had a foreign one to use, if only for contrast, but all of those were sequestered either in the school Archives, in the private collections of specific professors, or both, and what’s more they’re room-use only. That means ‘no taking home to read at one’s own leisure’. So as one might gather, I’ll just have to work with what I found.

On the bright side though, since I didn’t have to spend the one thousand pesos, I was able to return that to my father. Money is still money after all.

All this book-hunting though meant that I wasn’t able to do any jogging, and add that to the fact that we had very delicious champorado as merienda this afternoon and, hmm, I don’t want to even thing about how much I gained over the week. Ugh. Maybe I can  sneak out tomorrow and on Saturday, yeah. As for my hobbies? Well, let’s just say that I didn’t use my judgement again, and went out and used my card to buy myself some Fallout: New Vegas DLCs on Steam…

Nothing really much to share today aside from that. Yeah, even the last day of my workweek was pretty slow and humdrum. Who would have thought, eh?

In the Shadow of Giants

After a somewhat-restful afternoon siesta (somewhat, since I kept fading in and out of sleep), I was finally able to find time to flip open Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman’s anthology of short stories. Although my initial intent was to mine it for something to use in my translation project for this term’s class, the book is in itself a fascinating read. While it would be too much to say that Mr. Gaiman’s prose is electric, there’s this certain… flavor, I suppose, to the stories he writes. The proverbial British wit? I can’t really say.

While there are lot of interesting entries in the anthology, I’m thinking of using The Wedding Present, the short story that was included in the introduction of the collection. The issue of localization immediately comes into play of course, and there are some aspects of the story that have direct equivalents in the Philippine setting, but one could just see that as a challenge I suppose.

That said…

I have to say that I’m feeling a little daunted. Then again, I’m just a no-name playing at becoming a writer, trying to translate the work of a best-selling fiction author after all.

Taking Samples

Another weekend, another personal Pixiv art project.  After scanning some pictures for my father, I was able to scan the little sketch I did this morning after we got back from Church (it was an important mass, as it was the last mass our trio of parish priests were to oversee before they were transferred to another parish in Santa Mesa).  As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s obviously going to be an Evangelion parody, and it’s going surprisingly well.  I’ve been able to finish the base color, the main highlight, and the shading in just a few hours.  What follows next is going to be much harder though, so I think I’ll just save my work for now and technically call it a night.

One of the problems I might be facing with this one is, err, adding feathers to the existing line-art.  The reason being I’d like to differentiate it a little from the picture I’m parodying (Giant Naked Rei, who has translucent fairy-like Sephirotic wings). It’s why I’ve been looking through Danbooru (account block aside) for pictures that have them and, more importantly, colored using water colors, acrylics, or pastels, as I’d like to duplicate the effect on SAI.  It’ll probably slow my progress tremendously, but eh, it’s something I’d always wanted to try, so I might as well do so now.

Speaking of painting, I really have to start on that squad of Tactical Terminators.  The deadline for the Librarium Painting Challenge is on the 31st of March, and it’s already the end of February, and I haven’t even posted a single progress thread yet.  I’ll see if I can work on that this week, providing the Customer-service cross-training doesn’t play havoc with my sleep schedule again.

As for non-hobby details…. I was able to take a jog in Makati, and was surprised to see that most of the Ayala triangle area was cordoned off for a fiesta celebration (the Caracol to be precise).  There were people in costume in parade and everything.  I didn’t stay long enough to watch the proceedings though, since as soon as  finished my fifteen-minute circuit of the Triangle area, I headed straight home.  And here I am.

Overall a surprisingly fruitful Sunday, I think, though it probably owes that to the fact that I didn’t have any work in the morning.

Suspenseful

One of the assignments I’m expected to submit this week is a very short (at most, 3 pages) suspense story.  As I’ve never even tried writing anything related to suspense (or mystery for that matter), I feel a little anxious at the whole prospect.

In either case, it’s not something I could avoid though; since my late submission of the second writing exercise, my grades in Fiction Techniques are in peril, so submitting the suspense-writing assignment on time is important.  It’s going to be difficult, but at least I have some research material on the subject I could read on… specifically the essay by John Lutz entitled How To Generate Suspense in Fiction.

Geez, I’ve got the Writer’s Handbook (New Millennium Edition), so I might as well use it right?

Busy, Busy, Busy?

I’ve managed to start early for once, but I can’t really say that I feel better than usual.  I guess waking up with a stiff neck can do that to a person, but at least I was able to have a walk and brief jog at the breakwater beside the Mall of Asia.  It’s something I haven’t been able to do in a while, given the disruption of my sleep schedule, and I think it’s a little bit too early to call it a return to a less sedentary lifestyle, but it’s a start I guess.  At the very least, it’ll help in reducing the bulge I’ve been accruing due to more than two weeks without any kind of strenuous physical activity.

So with that aside, what do I have in store for myself today?  Since I wasn’t able to pass by the bank yesterday, I might as well do that this morning, and get the business of updating my account’s personal information over with.  After that, it’s back home to continue reading for my class on Saturday, and maybe some hobby-related stuff during breaks.  I hate to say, Recettear has made me draw line-art again, but who knows when I’ll be able to finish coloring those, ahaha.  Then there’s reading King Lear and finding a copy of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran for watching…

Not exactly a full day, but an unemployed, full-time student must keep herself busy somehow.

Time-Bound

Well, it’s past noon already, and I have to say that my search so far has been mostly fruitful.

I’m currently at the Filipinas Heritage Library in Makati looking through their collection, but while the quality (in terms of preservation) of the books they have is admirable (even the more venerable books look almost-new), they don’t exactly have what I need: although the books I was so helpfully given by the librarian (Our People’s Story: Philippine Literature in English by Gemino H. Abad and Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Philippine Short Stories 1925-1940 selected and edited by Leopoldo Y. Yabes, Philippine Literatures: texts, themes, approaches by Augusto Antonio A. Aguila, Joyce L. Arriola and John Jack G. Wigley) contained stories by Francisco Arguilla (The Mats, Benediction, A Marriage is Made) they’re not what I need (Divide by Two).  Indeed, only Storymasters 5: 15 Stories by Francisco Arcellana had it, but it was something I already learned from my visit to the DLSU Taft Library yesterday afternoon.

Luckily the place I visited before this was the University of the Philippines Diliman Main Library.  In contrast to the well-preserved volumes that I was provided at the Filipinas Heritage Library, the books I perused there were, in many ways, falling apart, however I was able to find what I needed — printings of the story dating from the early sixties, to a relatively more recent edition printed around 2004.  I did felt bad about having them photocopied though; the pages in one book in particular seemed like it would disintegrate if I looked at it in a bad way!

Since I’m strapped for time, I think I’ll pass on the visit to the National Library for now, and focus on the material I’ve collected.  I’m not sure what Dr. Baytan meant, but it looks like the story has two versions — one that seems to be like an early draft, shorter and much impersonal in tone, and a second one that seems to have been cleaned-up (and much more personal in tone) and formatted.  It is the second version that seems to show more in anthologies, particularly those from the seventies onwards, and as such is the version that has seen more cases of (slight) editorial revisions.

I think I’m going to have to give each of my photocopied research materials a look, but I don’t expect to see much variation outside of the formatting used with each publishing of the story.  Hopefully I won’t take more than an hour or two, so I could actually write the paper.  Then, after that, I should be able to focus on the other requirement that I have to post today: ten questions for Dr. Charlson Ong on Banyaga.  Ah, fun times.

Not so easy

Despite starting at the middle of the week, I think I’m doing far better on my assignments now, compared to how harried I was last week.  I still haven’t found that article written by Daniel Simon for World Literature Today, but I have already posted my first writing project for my poetry class.  Again, it’s not a work of art by any means, but I do hope it fits the ‘close up view of things small and seemingly insignificant‘ criteria for it.  And I hope that I haven’t completely missed the point.

I still have to do at least two papers for my Literature Research class of course, but they’re relatively easier to accomplish, compared to tracking down a required reading (Almost Home and other poems by Myrna Pena Reyes).  There’s a small chance that the book is available at Power Books, so I think I’ll drop by the Greenbelt branch to see if they have it in stock.