A Book Club of One

Though I’ve started a book club with a couple of friends on Facebook, I’ve recently decided to finish my own personal list which has been put off far too long (there is a shelf on my book shelf specifically for books I still need to read — that bad!).

I’ve realized that while writing I need to return my voracious appetite for consuming literature, regain my appreciation and love for writing the seamless dream of fiction and non-fiction, gritty and surreal, across multiple genres.

My first book:

American Son — a novel by Brian Ascalon Roley (by recommendation of my sister)

217 pages, a fast read, I finished the novel in two days. The story of two Filipino brothers, Tomas and Gabe, who live in a seedy area of 1993 LA with their single Filipina mother trying desperately to make ends meet while raising two boys.

Tomas, the older brother, has fallen in line with a gang of Mexicans and raising prize attack dogs for people who find them trendy. Gabe, somewhat of a mama’s boy, does what he can to get by while trying to understand his Filipino-American identity during his tumultuous teenage years in caste-zoned LA.

I found this novel to be a sincere story that resonates with my own experiences as a Filipino immigrant. A great deal of the scenes are hauntingly familiar to my own memories and I found myself easily identifying with the main protagonist (Gabe) and his “ne’er-do-well sibling”, Tomas. The interactions between the immigrant, Americanized children, and people in privileged positions, is as surprising and heartbreaking as I know it to be in life.

A note on the writing, the author uses no quotations (in the same fashion as Cormac McCarthy) and allows the story and characters to speak for themselves without the traditionally tagging the speaker. It’s a difficult and noteworthy feat to accomplish successfully as the author does here.

My wife has also recently finished reading the book and I am eager to hear her thoughts (I suppose it’s not a book club of one then…)

Next up is the much acclaimed surreal novel by Nobel Prize winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez –

One Hundred Years of Solitude

P.S. I know a handful of you out there who have read this so I guess it’s about time I caught up — I swear I will return this book to you when you get back to the country, Lucas. 

Weekly Update

This week has been a blur, a great deal of things going on. Some good, some bad, mostly interesting.

I’ve had a couple of interviews (one for a Copy Editor position even) and have been volunteering with the San Francisco Paramedic Association to work on my acting. Nothing beats getting into character and yelling at various firemen and paramedics like a drunkard. It was a very fun and informative experience, definitely worthwhile. It’s inspired me to volunteer for further community service with my time.

Beyond that, family has kept my hands full. A sick wife and visiting siblings in town have kept me bouncing in and out of the household.

But fear not, I have been writing. I’ve not finished editing Pork, in fact I’ve not touched it. This week’s late night hours have been occupied with outlining my next short, Debussy and my cat keeping me company. It is science-fiction, my first. Working title:

Generation 1.5

I’ve most of the story fleshed out on my notebook, I’ll be transcribing the material shortly into script format for my official outline before filling it with meat. As soon as the first draft is complete, I’ll be contacting various of my regular readers to look it over and suggest edits.

Until next time…

PDFs and other updates

Site Update

Check out the Writing Samples section and view or download a PDF copy of some of my previous works. A brief synopsis is given with the links.

Reading Update

Currently reading Otherland by Tad Williams upon the recommendation of a fellow writer, Justin Boese, student of Creative Writing at SFSU.

Following that will be my first attempt at reading The Odyssey as translated by Robert Fitzgerald. I found his interpretation of The Illiad superior to those of his peers as he maintains a very graceful poetic narrative that stays true to the Greek oral tradition without sounding melodramatic.

Writing Update

Finished editing prior short story works and converting them to PDF format for the Writing Sample section (see above). Next in line is Pork, among the oldest of my short stories that requires a heavier hand, possibly complete revision. I hope to have it available some time next week.

As a side note, I’ve considered attempting a spec. screenplay utilizing a demo of Final Draft 8. I’ve downloaded scripts to some of my favorite titles (Insomnia and Up in the Air) with superb writing as a means of edification. I have enough friends interested in film to warrant a project.

Life’s (con)junctions

And now I find myself unemployed.

Or, as I have dubbed it, a life junction.

But with junctions comes the freedom

And opportunity to explore new avenues.

But what to explore?

65 million years in the making

From a very young age I loved to tell stories (my parents called it lying). I found writing to be the best form of story telling. And while I work on various lengths of fiction (short, novella, novel), I also wish to write and catalog the days of my own story as I write them.

My love affair with literature began as most things do — with dinosaurs. The year was 1993 and a revolutionary film was released throughout theaters worldwide, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. I laughed, I cried, but mostly I cried (I was young and velociraptors were scary). Yet, despite the fantastic adaptation Steven Spielberg produced, I was not satisfied.

I wanted to learn more about the characters, the story, the island, all in greater detail. Details that the movie could not give me. I was quick to purchase a junior novelization of the movie. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind (sorry Gail Herman).

By happy chance, the local Mountain View Public Library deployed a wonderful mobile proxy, dubbed appropriately the Bookmobile, to my middle school. It was, in fact, a converted short bus whose seats had been replaced with shelves of books. One lunch a week, the Bookmobile would arrive, rainbow colors and all. And, with it’s rainbow conspicuousness, how could a fifth grader resist?

Within the tight corridor of books inside, I fumbled through the spines, looking for something that caught my interest. After what seemed a very long time (likely five minutes), my search brought me to a dusty white book in the rear of the bus. Packed tightly between countless mundane looking spines of equal thickness, was this book — Jurassic Park, Crichton’s Jurassic Park.

It took me a very long time reading that book. Week after week I renewed the check-out, prolonging my stewardship. After a grueling journey through adult words, I at last finished the book. And then I read it two more times.

By the end of the year I finished all of Crichton’s novels and I found myself reading other books of equal complexity and length. The following year I wrote a thirteen page short story for my sixth grade English teacher who, unknown to me, submitted it for a Governor’s Young Writer’s contest. It won and to this day remains laminated and bound on my bookshelf.

My love for reading and writing never dwindled. And someday I’ll return that copy of Jurassic Park to the Mountain View Public Library (I think the driver just stopped caring after I borrowed it into three months).

Please visit your local library to learn about and support the wonderful services they provide for your community.