The order of things

In my spare time I'm writing a novel about a printer called Valentine Cats who finds himself stranded in a castle in Slovakia, hostage to a mad count with a fascination for puzzles and his crippled daughter, who is a bibliomaniac. When I get tired of thinking up ways to describe Chinese cryptograms, I turn to a half-finished treatise on Filipino sociological thought, which I might or might not submit for my masteral thesis. 

My aunts tell me I should get all these things published. I might, but I probably won't.  When I die, my family will find my writing in untidy heaps of papers and messily encoded text, crammed into the drawers of my study table or lurking in random folders on my computer. My only ambition is to live nicely day by day and the only talent I have ever really tried to cultivate is the ability to fulfill this ambition. It amazes my cousin Mark that I seem to know so many useless things and choose to do so little with it. 

But then I think education is something that enriches your life, not something you do things with. 

I hope that didn't sound too condescending. 

*

Last night I met with Dr. Rhod Nuncio of De La Salle University. He has written a book on digital media and technology in Filipino. While there are a lot of books about the Internet and the WWW, I don't think there has ever been a book written on the subject in Filipino, so this should be an interesting publication. It is a little dated by now and I ought to ask Dr. Nuncio to update it with more information on the social web and semantic search since we are the de facto publishers of the manuscript, which however technically belongs to De La Salle University Press.

(After DLSU Press went bankrupt due to unsound business management, Dr. Isagani Cruz took over to dissolve the properties of the Press, including manuscripts pending publication. He had the brilliant idea of farming out these manuscripts to different commercial publishers to ensure that they will still get published. I'm not sure if Vibal was simply given a selection of manuscripts or if we had a hand in choosing the titles we were assigned to publish, since I wasn't connected with the company at that time. But it probably doesn't matter, happy accidents--evidenced by the case of Dr. Nuncio--being the order of the day). 

Comments

[Charles Tan]

I want to publish it!

[Amanda]

It would be nice to see you published, though - I love your fic (*stalks obakesan*) and I have this blog on RSS because it's fun to read and because... well, you *do* know so much and it makes me wish I were half as well-rounded.

[Varon]

This sounds really interesting -- both your novel and Dr. Nuncio's book. You really should get published; I love your fanfiction and if you were to publish your first novel, I'd be the first to fall in line in your book signing gig. ^.^ Good luck with your masteral thesis!