Hello, and Perhaps Soon, Goodbye (to This Blog)

EDIT: This post was originally titled Hello, and Perhaps Soon, Goodbye, and that sounded terrible. I apologize for the five-minute existence of that ugly clickbait. I repaired it now. Please go on.

This is one of the few last posts I’ll be making here.

I must have left hints here and there about how 2020 changed my life, thankfully for the better, minus the existence of the pandemic and the many typhoons that bombarded our country every forth-week. For a good while, it felt like a dream, until it became real, until it became something I could feel and hold. It wasn’t a daydream. It wasn’t a joke. They didn’t say, “Oops, we made a mistake, we’re taking it back,” like it was in my head. It was true. It’s happening.

After many years of sitting on this side of my room, imagining how my life would be if I finally had a book deal. if I’d ever had a book deal after that ugly, stupid, but very much beloved book I wrote, I now know partly how it feels. It’s this. This strange feeling of latching into place, like my heart, which was swerving all over my chest for the past decade, finally found its spot, like the fitting shape of a puzzle, and locked itself in. Here we are. In the place where we’re truly supposed to be.

In my senior year in high school, I handwrote a novel about a girl who was so stupid, she’d always fail at everything. And then, by some stroke of luck, life flipped itself and she got to do everything she wanted. EVERYTHING. I wrote it all.

I think I wrote that story for myself.

In 2021, I will finally have what every traditionally-published writer anticipates: deadlines. In 2022, a debut. With that, I’m seeing less of myself blogging, more of myself revising my beloved little tale into something that will fit my publisher’s wants. And probably tweeting. Lots and lots of tweeting. Tweeting is a writer’s only joy. Blogging? Not so much. At least for me.

HELLOCARIS.COM was my favorite corner. It’s the notebook I’ll dump all my thoughts in. It’s my disorganized mess, and I did not care whether it had no theme. Its theme was me. My poetry. My prose. My scribbles. And my mess. The mess was me. But in the coming years, I won’t have the leisure of making messes and posting them here. The messes I’ll be making will be written in long chapter dumps in a Word file stuck in a folder named WIPs. And hopefully, in the future, books.

Your girl is going to be an author.

I will still be writing to you, though not as frequent as before. If you’d still like to hear from me, what I’m up to, how things happened, and what else will happen, you can subscribe to my newsletter, Marikit Mail. It’s a quarterly newsletter featuring my publishing journey with Marikit Wears the Map to the Engkantos, and the rest of the books I will write. I will also write about my inspirations, my current works, and links to my favorite Filipino creatives.