Maybe this will last, maybe not...

 ...but there's only one way to find out. 

A bit less than six months ago, I and author, lawyer, and writing teacher, Christine V. Lao, tried a small experiment. Tinlao--as she is nicknamed--would select stories from among her students for potential publication on the Philippine Genre Stories website, essentially playing the role of editor, while I would hide backstage and play the more technical and logistical role of publisher. We had a mutual goal: she would like to encourage and see her students get their tales out there to be found and read, while I have always stayed true to the PGS goal of encouraging people to read more, and you can't do that if you don't have new content to read. 

Since then, we have published six of her students' stories, in order: 

"The Operation" by Andrea Mae Camacho

"Taste" by Joan Mary Floredeliz L. Rayos 

"What We Leave Behind" by Mika Soria

"Hypnos" by Monica Felizardo

"The Way" by Jamie Alec Yap

"The Fire At Dawn" by Jose Guerra Sison. 

Overall, I'd say this little experiment of ours was a small-scale success. For six months, PGS was active again at a story per month. I do hope readers will find their way to the site to get their fix of stories, especially those written by young Pinoys. 

Needless to say, I'm very grateful to Tinlao. The PGS site has long been dormant, and if she didn't take up the cudgels of editorship, I don't think I would have ever again found the time and energy to play the role of both publisher and editor. Looking back, I can't believe that I was able to sustain it for as long as I did, both in digital form and when it was published as a physical copy. Splitting the roles has definitely made it easier. Of course, there were moments in the past when I did have guest editors (Yvette Tan and F.H. Batacan come to mind, for the horror issue and the crime issue, respectively), but these were seen as one-time moments, and afterwards, I went back to regular programming. Then, when the website came around, I had writer and teacher friends like Exie Abola and others also help put up their and their students' stories, but eventually, the extremely limited resource of time got consumed by other matters, and the site became dormant. 

Much has happened since then: blogs have fallen by the wayside in terms of netizen consumption, replaced by social media. Cellphones have become the dominant way of consuming digital content, overtaking computers. There is a preference, especially among younger digital users, to be "always on", that is, always online and connected. But I would like to think that for the segment of netizens out there who are readers, especially genre readers, there is a place still for short tales like those pushed by PGS for them to find. 

I'm publicly expressing here my gratitude to Tinlao, because it has actually led to another positive development. After Tinlao's six month stint, I'm happy to say that writer/editor Mia Tijam and I have come to a similar agreement, and for double the length of time. Mia will be the editor of PGS throughout 2023, also at a story per month. She is already actively soliciting submissions. So for at least another year, PGS will continue to provide genre tales by Pinoy authors. 

I am quite pleased with this, because as a reader, I, too, benefit. 

Will it last beyond 2023? Well, like I said at the beginning of this blog entry, there's only one way to find out, and that's by completing 2023 and seeing what happens next. 

I did mention above that blogs have fallen by the wayside in favor of social media. So, just like the website, this blog has also been dormant for a long time. I doubt if anyone will be visiting here, but I figure I will make this blog semi-active again and post on rare occasions. It will still carry somewhat the same type of content as I had posted before, but probably not exactly the same. After all, time has changed me; I'm not the same writer/reader/person I was years ago (if I was the same, then whoa, that would mean I have not grown in any way, and all those years would have been wasted), so what I put here will probably reflect those changes. In the same way that I am excited to read the PGS website's coming content and how those new stories will reflect what is relevant for today's young writers, to a lesser extent, I am also eager to see what will come out on this semi-revived blog, to see what may be newly relevant to me. Whether people will visit here to read these entries, or not, doesn't seem to matter to me so much.