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About The Author
His first love was writing, not a girl. Frank A Hilario began writing –
and reading and memorizing the Reader’s Digest, Time, and English
and American authors, including William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan
Poe, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman, Earl
Stanley Gardner, and verses of the Bible – when he was still in high school.
He has never stopped since. Now that he is out of school, while he has
finished reading word-for-word all the 7 books on Harry Potter by JK Rowling,
he isn’t finished reading the Internet English pages checking facts, searching
for information, waiting for insights to enter his open mind.
Four books that changed his writing life were those of Rudolf Flesch (on
how to write and think more effectively), Edward de Bono (on how to think creatively), Marshall McLuhan (on how
to think about technology and media), the Epistles of St Paul (on how to think of oneself and others, his favorite
quote being Romans 12).
He is the first writer in the Hilario Family, unless you consider Marcelo Hilario y Del Pilar (the correct name),
considered by many as the foremost Filipino journalist. Marcelo was writing against the Spanish friars; He is
writing for the Filipinos. You don’t have to be against to be for.
He has read and edited so many theses that he can read your dissertation manuscript in 5 minutes and tell you
what’s basically wrong with it. He jots down thoughts wherever he is, and then sometimes he cannot read his own
writing. He writes in drafts, very rough drafts, random sentences, or non-sentences – because he thinks fast while
he’s at it. Like a baby, he plays with his food – always, his is food for thought.
He writes – edits, desktop-publishes – in Word 2003; even his blogs begin in this program. His essays are written
in what today he calls My Franciscan Order, that is, no order at all, random, helter-skelter – in the beginning.
(Franciscan? His first name is Francisco.) That follows the biblical story, right? In the beginning there was chaos.
After the creation, God saw that it was good. My Franciscan Order is a delirious cocktail of Ernest Hemingway,
George Bernard Shaw, Ray Bradbury, Rudolf Flesch, Ogden Nash, New York Times, National Geographic, Nick
Joaquin. The describing in verbs is Flesch; the zest for language is Bradbury; the storytelling is Geographic and
Times; the inventing of words is Nash; the way of the ending returning to the beginning as well as local color is
Joaquin; the humor is often Reader’s Digest, occasionally The New Yorker.
He keeps learning. Recently, he discovered that Google Docs creates automatic HTML codes for Word 2003 files
that, with a little more Wording, is perfect for submitting to American Chronicle manuscripts as if they were formatted
in Word.