A happy, hopeful new year to all!…even though it’s past mid-January already.
I pretty much disappeared after mid-November–from my writing log, anyway–mostly due to a lot of things happening at the same time. Some of them are personal, but most of them were work-related and season-related. I flew home to the Philippines on December 20, flew […]

I hadn’t written more than 700 words the two previous days, but as Singapore is on a holiday today, I tried to catch up. I did pretty well, I think:
NaNoWriMo 2007words: 20,299 / 50,000 (41%)
That’s almost half of the goal by the eighth day, which isn’t bad at all (this might still grow within the […]

So today I think I overreached myself a bit; my Excel report card told me I would finish by November 13 if I kept this speed up. That’s because I’m now at:
NaNoWriMo 2007words: 10,466 / 50,000 (21%)
I stopped myself from writing more this afternoon mostly because I don’t want to suddenly inexplicably burn out, and […]

The second day of NanoWriMo has come and gone. I’m off to retire, but I wanted to write a bit before I did. I’m going along rather splendidly in terms of the word count goal. I stopped as I hit some faintly problematic stuff in memoir-writing: that is, research into the exact sequence of events […]

It’s that time of the year again — it’s National Novel Writing Month, otherwise known as NaNoWriMo. If you don’t know what it is… where are you been, seriously?
It’s also that time of the month where I always set myself up to fail, apparently. I’ve joined almost every year, but after writing about a few […]

Why does it seem like a lot of my favorite YA authors seem to be leaving Earth this year? I just found out that Madeleine L’Engle died last September 6, at the age of 88. Of the books she wrote, the ones I read and loved were her Kairos books, principally the ones with the Murrys. (Of the O’Keefes, I’ve only been able to read An Acceptable Time).

Lenneth posted a wonderful interview with her: Allegorical Fantasy: Mortal Dealings with Cosmic Questions. I practically couldn’t tear my eyes away from the interview — I felt it had great meaning to me personally, both as a writer and a Catholic.

I’d like to highlight some lines that I felt were very meaningful for me:

I was shocked when I opened my email a few days ago and read that Lloyd Alexander died last May 17 in his home in Drexel Hill, just two weeks after his wife Janine died. He was eighty-three.

He was one of my favorite authors as an adolescent, and his Chronicles of Prydain continue to be an important part of my bookshelf. I find myself always going back and reading them, for the adventure and the sheer wonder of it, and for the thought-provoking themes and quotes one can gather from the rich writing.

I found this article by Lorelle VanFossen on Digg a while ago, about blogging being about writing. I couldn’t agree more, although blogging and creative writing have different goals and different means of getting to those goals. As I read through her 30-item list, a good number of them called out to me, having been victim/champion of those items previously.

So now I give you my top three blogging and writing similarities, as well as my top three blogging and writing differences, given her list.

I feel this redesign of Seasonal Plume is better because frankly, I feel that it’s more conducive to writing—that I feel like the layout itself is something I’d enjoy writing on. A kind of environment to surround myself in; in addition to an actual, real-life environment, the website itself then provides an atmosphere that inspires writing.

Phew, seasonalplume.net (the domain) is finally back! It propagated sometime last night while I was sleeping, but I’d been too swamped in the office to comment about it. You can still see this website via the indisguise.org address, but now my real domain is back in action. I’m happy. Those two days were absolutely nerve-wracking.

But naturally those two days isn’t a complete waste: it spurred me on to re-evaluate Seasonal Plume,…