Mark as Unread

The animals were imperfect, long-tailed, unfortunate in their heads. Little by little they put themselves together, making themselves a landscape, acquiring spots, grace, flight. The cat, only the cat appeared complete and proud: he was born completely finished, walking alone and knowing what he wanted. Man wants to be fish or fowl, the snake would like to have wings the dog is a disoriented lion, the engineer would like to be a poet, the fly studies to be a swift, the poet tries to imitate the fly, but the cat only wants to be a cat and any cat is a cat from his whiskers to his tail, from his hopeful vision of a rat to the real thing, from the night to his golden eyes. There is no unity like him, the moon and the flower do not have such context: he is just one thing like the sun or the topaz, and the elastic line of his contours is firm and subtle like the line of a ship's prow. His yellow eyes have just one g...

I swiped this image off someone else's post on Facebook. The gist: most of the time we can't really make money off our passions. I used to write fiction when I was a kid. It started in sixth grade, all the way through high school, and sporadically in college. I even joined the Palanca Awards once, submitted a short story. But I knew early on that I couldn't make money writing fiction. After dabbling for a couple of years as a journalist -- which, at the very least, paid more than fiction but still not much -- I "sold out" and became a copywriter. Almost 20 years later I'm still "selling out." But at least I'm still writing for a living. At least I can actually earn a living doing my thing. I still love fiction, although now I enjoy it by reading stories, not by writing them. Who knows? Maybe I'll start writing short stories again -- just for fun. Maybe I can even post them in this blog. Sometimes you discover that what you really want to be w...