Leng Times Width

I brushed up my profile today over at the NaNoWriMo website, but I don't think I will participate fully this year. I've received feedback for King Eyes from a development editor and a critique partner (and I'm also expecting to receive more feedback from a couple of beta readers), and my hope is to use NaNo to consolidate all of these to finalize a third draft for the story. So I won't be doing a traditional NaNo with a 50K word goal. Basically my goal is to end up with a draft that can be proofread and be ready to ship off to my website.

All in all, it feels so strange to be at this point in the year. October has crept along, and parts of it felt slow, and other parts felt like a blink. These past two days I was so absorbed with work even after office hours, that I just couldn't focus on prepping for NaNo. Initially I had planned to use the last week of October to look over the feedback I've received so far, but now I figure I might as well wait for the others to come.

Asking for feedback from others has never been an easy process, but I'm especially having a trying time with one of my beta-readers this time around. She hasn't been the best in communicating delays, and while I understand that freelancers have a lot of other commitments, I wish that she could at least be a little more communicative. As it happened, I have had to check-in consistently every due date and extend the deadline. I would even appreciate it more if she had just set better deadlines herself, but every message I received were along the lines of, "I'd have it for you this week," or "I'd have it for you today," or "I'd have it for you this weekend for sure." And lo and behold, still nothing after a week, after a day, after the weekend. It's just been very frustrating working with this freelancer.

In other news, I have this numb feeling whenever I think about the year ending. I feel like this year threw so much at me, like I had to take three steps back, and I'm now just getting back to the spot where I'd been a year or so ago. On one hand, perhaps I ought to think of it as an achievement to be recovering those three steps, but on the other hand I feel very frustrated that I'm still, overall, in the same spot as I've been a few years now without making more progress in my life.

Once again, I feel the same inner conflict as I did when my cousin died a year ago. Although I'm unhappy where I am at life, I feel like I can't complain, because other people have it worse (or no longer have a life at all). Especially during the past few weeks, it has been virtually impossible to escape news of people suffering around the globe, and I feel like a wretchedly spoiled brat that I could complain about my life when there are people who are literally being tortured and killed out there. I feel ungrateful that I should want more out of my life when there are others who would probably be very content with the life I'm leading now. Still, I can't shake off the yearning. I can't shake off the desire to want more, or if not more, just something different than what I have now.

I don't know how the year is going to end, how we're going to celebrate the holidays. This time of the year has been very difficult the last few years, and I don't know if I'm going to face the same thing again. If the past years are anything to go by, perhaps I at least have the reassurance that I can make it through, but to be honest, I'm just not looking forward to it.

Welp, it's been a little over a month since I decided to step away from Tumblr and explore my other options. Since then, I've opened an account here on Dreamwidth and luckily got an invitation code for BlueSky. That said, I haven't totally been absent from Tumblr. I added some of my mutuals' feeds on Inoreader so I'm still able to keep tabs on them without actually logging onto the site. From time to time, I did log on, and I'm still quite torn about whether I need to permanently find a new platform.

In terms of being able to write and express what I want, I am starting to get a sense that Dreamwidth is currently the place for that for me. I don't know if it's just because there's just less people here, so I'm braver in tackling topics I would have never broached on Tumblr. Like religion and mental health. I think I shot myself in the foot with the way I curated my Tumblr accounts, the main blog being all about writing and Filipino culture. And what used to be my fandom account is now a general dump of other things I find interesting. I used to want a streamlined and writing-focused main account, but now I feel like I can never talk about other things without losing followers. I know that I've built so much of my writing brand on my Filipino identity, and while yes, that's a big part of who I am, there are other parts of my identity too, but I just don't feel like they fit into that blog.

Before stepping away from Tumblr, I was mostly reblogging posts to keep my accounts seeming active, but I find very little joy in what I was actually doing. The likes and reblogs feel so impersonal. Nobody really comments on the posts that I do put a lot of thought and work in. I find very little incentive to comment on other people's posts that I'm sure they put a lot of thought and work in as well. What would my comments matter anyway? What would the tags on my reblog matter?

In a way, I think this is why I'm really attracted to Dreamwidth, even though a lot of times it feels like a ghost town here. Every post seems personal. Every comment I leave feels intentional. It's not just a way for me to "seem active." It does take a lot more time to discover engaging content, though. In the month I've been here, I've only followed 4 accounts. And I was lucky to discover the latter 2, who are SFF writers that seem to have made DW their main blogging platform. I'm hoping I can find more; after all, "writing" seems to be the most active interest on here.

I also went ahead and tried BlueSky. My profile is here if you're interested in friending me there. BlueSky is basically the new Twitter. I've never had a Twitter account before, because I found the character limit very restrictive at first, and then it just seemed too much of a hostile and rage-triggered platform for me to be comfortable there. BlueSky does have a character limit too, which I'm already struggling with. I'm the kind of person who always has to add "probably," "maybe," "perhaps," to quantify my opinions, otherwise I feel like I'm going to come across harsh. And seeing how Twitter became how it is, I do think comprehension gets affected when you're trying to fit things in such short messages. Yesterday I wanted to post something funny like, "Being an ML engineer and a fantasy writer feels like being a double agent." Then I decided that people might get upset at me for comparing myself to a double agent. Or they might jump to conclusions about what it is I do as an ML engineer. (I am not in the business of generative AI -- but see how easily I clarified that when there's no character limit?)

That said, despite BlueSky being a new platform, it already seems to have a lot of notable people on it. It was easier for me to find my favourite authors on there and follow them. I also think that because it is new, people there feel more comfortable, and they are posting more fun things again. I still get lots of political posts recommended to me, but I'm hoping that the more I engage with the website, the less I will ever look at recommended posts. I don't find social media to be the best place to discuss politics, since people can get so self-righteous and hard-hearted, and my own values don't fall neatly in the current buckets of political parties. I think it's quite telling that one of the things I miss most about Tumblr is its Side B community; I'm not Side B myself, but in terms of values and approach to thorny subjects, I find that this community has been the most gracious so far.

Funny enough, it wasn't actually in Dreamwidth nor BlueSky where I socialized the most the last week. In my last post I talked about looking for a critique partner, and I was able to find one on CritiqueMatch! This past week, we've been exchanging chapters and providing each other with comments. It's been so much fun! I was lucky that I found someone whose work I resonated with; it has themes similar to my own WIP, and she's at a level that I can comfortably read her work but still provide meaningful feedback. The experience just left me wondering what it really is I want out of social media. What am I looking for when I say I want to move away from Tumblr? If I want something more engaging and involved, maybe social media isn't the place for that? Maybe I need to find other ways to be a meaningful presence in the writing community.

I think what's really tricky about being interested in precolonial Philippine culture is that I feel like many people, especially in the online community, idolize it too much. Don't get me wrong, I think there's so much about our precolonial heritage that deserves pride, so much about it that we would consider "progressive" today, and so much about it that doesn't deserve all the shame we've been taught to harbour towards it.

However, I also think that many of these practices go against what we would consider human rights now. It doesn't make precolonial Filipinos abhorrent or shameful or evil. Even with these practices in mind, I don't think ancient Filipinos were any better or worse than any other civilization that had existed. (And from a more spiritual angle, these people were still created by God, and they tried to eke out a living and develop a culture in an environment that was also created by God.)

What makes me uncomfortable is when other people act as if every aspect of our old tradition was good and was only slandered by colonizers. They treat our ancestors' culture like something frozen in time, paralyzed, believing that if we strip away all foreign influences, we'll be able to go back to this perfect unsullied pearl. And like, I understand that disposition, I understand that longing to hold something and say, "This is mine. It is mine, and I don't owe anybody for putting it in my hands." I get that. But I also think that to respect a culture means to acknowledge that it grows and changes and develops. And yes, I wish we had gotten the opportunity to do that, the opportunity to grow with autonomy and self-ownership, without half-a-dozen countries inserting themselves in our history, trying to make it about them. But even without colonization, I honestly think that we just won't be living the same culture as our ancestors did. I honestly think there will be practices we'd have viewed and said, "Oh huh, maybe this isn't nice after all. Maybe we would be better off without it." In fact, I think it's actually insulting to believe we weren't capable of change or growth without outside influence.

Hi everyone! I've finally decided to try out Dreamwidth. Recently, there has been a lot of instability with many social media platforms, and I couldn't help but reminisce about my time on LiveJournal. I think it's unfortunate that there aren't any popular platforms anymore that still cater to long-text blogging and community discussions. Although LJ wasn't perfect, I think it suited my interaction style the best. That said, because of who owns LJ now, I don't actually plan to be active on that platform again. Good thing Dreamwidth is still up and running!

Another thing I miss is just having the space to really flesh out my thoughts. Tumblr has been a good home for me and it allowed me to gain some exposure as a writer, but I also feel like I can't be very vocal about a lot of things there. My page feels very curated, and it feels risky to break out of that. Also, the privacy controls are limited, and I always run the risk of having one of my posts go viral for the wrong reason. I do run a self-hosted blog on my website, but I reserve that for writing-related posts. I want that website to showcase the positive, creative side of me, and I don't want to muddy the waters by bringing some random braindump into it.

And so, here I am, hoping that DW can be the place for all my braindump. Expect thoughts on life, culture, religion (maybe? sometimes? rarely?), and whatever else might strike my fancy.

Also, I'm pretty excited to explore the communities here. If you know some good communities for book discussions (especially fantasy books) and writing, send them my way!