Category : Blogs

Sub Category : LifeStyle

Last night, after the stroke of midnight, after the fireworks display brightening up the midnight sky, after all the cheers of "Happy New Year" booming all around, after all the New Year hooha ended, I logged into my Facebook account to have a look at my memory box. The first thing that popped up in there was a post I wrote exactly a year ago on 1st January 2017 about a project I was working on with my writing partner; my big brother from another father and mother. It was a book project, a collaboration of writings by both of us.

He and I have been playing around with words, writing pieces and dropping them on our individual Facebook walls when one day he came up with the idea of writing a book together. I laughed at the idea at first because even though he and I have been doing our fair share of writing over the years - he, while in prison and I, in my little notebooks and journals - we are both amateurs when it comes to the writing world. He told me to think about it and somehow the idea sort of stuck in my head. And so, I agreed and we decided to work on two titles - "Midnight, Moonlight & Magic" and "Visible Transparency". Ambitious? Maybe. But I figured if we were going to do this then we might as well go all out and push ourselves. And we did. We started working on the books in October 2016 and we worked steadily on them daily. Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances cropped up which slowed down our momentum. He had to deal with some personal matters and I had to deal with some personal matters. By the time we got those matters sorted out and were ready to jump back into the game, we found we had lost our mojo. I tried to come up with new pieces but they all turned out to be crappy in my opinion. He wasn't doing any better either and so, we decided to take a break from the books and try to find a different way to get our mojo back. I created a page in Facebook, adding him as a contributor so that we can both still write on the same platform. But the way the pages work in Facebook is if you're willing to pay them to help boost your page then you will get a higher chance at being noticed. Carl and I discussed about it and he was game with the boost but I wasn't. I wanted to get noticed on my own and not because I paid someone to blow my horn for me. The page is still going, slow, but still going. Carl was getting a bit frustrated at the numbers - we have to date 220 followers within the span of four months and the numbers doesn't seem to be increasing. Again, that kind of puts a damper on our spirit but hey, you can't exactly force people to read your stuff, can you?

And then last month, out of sheer luck, I stumbled upon this app while I was surfing the Play Store. It piqued my curiosity and I decided to check it out. I installed it on my phone and dropped my first piece. I didn't have any expectations, just a feeling of being at home among all the other writers here. I told Carl about the app and insisted that he install it too. He did. I have been having a lot of fun writing and dropping my pieces in here and humbled by the read count, comments and ratings. My spirit soared again and I want to take the opportunity to thank all of you who had taken the time to read my words and also for the kind words you have said to me. A special thanks goes out to Jared for coming up with an outlet where I can be free to be me without judgment.

Since it's a brand new year, I'm thinking of doing yet another new experiment and this time I'm choosing to do it in here. I have a story in my head which I haven't found a place for until I found this outlet. The story is about a girl named Reina Leona and with the options of many categories and subcategories in here, I am going to use most of them to drive my story through. Not sure how it's going to pan out, but I am definitely going to give it a whirl very soon.