MY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
There is a military-grey filing cabinet in my room. It used to belong to my mom. It was placed in my room back when we moved to our house in La Vista in the mid-80s. Since it was in my room, I decided to remove all of my mom’s stuff and put in my stuff.
It has seen become the time capsule of a whole lot of Alamat works.
I opened up that clunky filing cabinet the other night and was looking for one of David’s stories, thinking of submitting it to Adarna.
Instead, I found one of my sketch books, containing sketches and doodles, during the time I fooled myself that I could draw.
One page contained a poster / pin-up for a comic book that was supposed to be called: BLASCO, Psychic Investigator. The page contained all sorts of creatures from Filipino folklore.
BLASCO was a character I created for a scriptwriting contest for ABS-CBN during the early 90s. Blasco was a college professor who served as a consultant to the police whenever they were too stumped with a particular crime. (I now suspect Trese is Blasco reincarnated.) His sidekick was his Amboy, balik-bayan nephew who also happened to be a martial artist. (hehehe… I just had to put in some karate-chop-action-sequences in it.)
In the pilot episode that I wrote, they had to hunt down an assassin who killed his targets by making them see their greatest fear.
The grand prize for that contest was P10,000 and the chance for your script to be turned into a TV series.
Needless to say, I didn’t win.
I remember that I wrote that script on yellow pad with a Kilometrico blue ballpen that skipped. I handed that pad to my mom and asked her to type it using her electric typewriter.
She edited my typos as she transcribed my horrible handwriting. She laughed as she typed the words: “At namatay sa takot ang biktima.”
Without turning away from the typewriter, she asked me, “Where do you get these ideas?”
That wasn’t the first time I made her edit my work.
There was the time I wrote my first novel. (Well, it has lots of chapters, so I’d consider it a novel, okay?) I wrote it using WordStar and printed out the manuscript in a very noisy dot-matrix printer that seemed to cough out the words.
It was called “The Wizard’s Keep” and it was my homage / rip-off of the Dragonlance novels and was influenced by playing too much “Wizardry”. (I can’t believe how much fun we had playing that PC game, with it’s black-and-white graphics and text-based game-play. I bet, if we showed that to the Ragnarok kids today, they’d think we were insane and super-boring to play such a game.)
I think “The Wizard’s Keep” was over a hundred pages long and had over 20 chapters. My mom had to read that twice and edit it, despite the fact she wasn’t the sword-and-sorcery type.
I’ve lost the floppy discs that contained those files, but I still have the manuscript (with my mom’s corrections) which has now turned yellow.
More than correcting my grammatical and spelling errors, my mom has guided me in editing my life. She’s offered many a curial advice on how to progress with my own personal life story. To this very day, she continues to be my very dependable editor-in-chief.
Thanks Mom. Thanks for everything!
Happy 61st Birthday!!!