To my shame and embarrassment, I was clueless about this advocacy. I didn't realize that that there are almost 200 youth advocates for...

As scheduled, this 3rd book in the Happy Home series was launched at the Manila International Book Fair on September 16, a Friday. However,...

Back story: The title of my latest book (a children’s devotional-cum-novelette) was chosen from about 20 others. The original title was D...

Since the year 2000, when my first book (The Boy Who Had Five Lolas) was published, about this time of the year I hold my breath waiting for...

There aren't too many celebrities in this world. That's why we lionize them. They are a select breed of people who have done somethi...

In one big room (usually the ballroom of Manila Peninsula Hotel), every first week of September, lovers of literature get together for the P...

With practically everyone in the world wired to technology, there is no information, name, person, book, idea, disease, item, foreign word, ...

Boxing/wrestling aficionados or not, we all know what low blow means. It is an illegal strike below the opponent’s waist—unsportsmanlike and...

Tattoos go back thousands of years. Humans have marked their bodies since ancient times. Tattoos then served many purposes: amulets, statu...

Have you met a nonagenarian? I haven’t. The octogenarians I knew went to glory before they could reach the awesome age of 90. But one da...

Hurrying to one book-signing event, I bumped into an old friend, Conrad. He was on a short break from a writing workshop. "I want to ...

Patience: a word derived from the Latin verb patior that means, to suffer. Ergo, patience is the inner strength to bear what gets our goat w...

The dirt, grime, and filth are so real you can feel them on your skin and in your soul. On the other side of the world that we, the educat...

Before sending any children’s book manuscript to my publisher for finalization, I usually request four to five kids to read and critique it....

Uncle Bob passed on as he moved in life—quickly.    After a massive heart attack, he was cremated and buried before the beginning of what C...

“I am an advocate for short paragraphs,” I told my class in Business English, after reviewing their term papers. My obvious rationale:  ...

Day and night. Light and darkness. There are two sides to everything. But the dark side seems to be winning out lately. If you read the ne...

Has the world of children turned dark while I was sleeping? I recently conducted another Creative Writing Workshop for kids ages 8-12. Th...

“We are going paperless this term,” announced our department Chair during our faculty meeting. I broke out in cold sweat and hives. I also s...

I thought the first workshop was going to be a one-off event . But to accommodate friends’ requests for a creative writing workshop for th...

This is my sixth and last blog post on our delightful twins, Maika and Nikka. They have graduated from grade school! I intended to write and...

Escalators are pretty safe for adults; they are slow moving and have hand rails. How could anyone possibly meet an accident there? Well, T...

On the first day of my English for Business class, I assigned my students to research on writing business emails. “Apply what you have learn...

Patience was what I tried to summon for two weeks, but miserably failed. Within those dates, I had alternately cajoled, instructed, and warn...

My mother was an active member of the women’s group in our church. I grew up often seeing her excitedly packing her bag for conferences here...

Teachers today mourn the fact that students do not read anymore. These digital netizens simply skim over internet soundbites, FB messages, w...