Snacking with Adel

Adel Gabot is a Philippine-based writer and editor.

He is currently Copy Chief for ABS-CBN Publications, which makes him de facto Grammar and Style Police for nearly a couple of dozen major magazines, copyediting almost a thousand pages a month. He writes a regular column called Beware of Buyer every Wednesday on the ABS-CBN news website about consumer issues and concerns, and is also a regular tech/lifestyle contributor for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. Adel also teaches writing, and used to teach a post-graduate course on Magazine Writing & Publishing at the De La Salle-College of St. Benilde’s School of Professional & Continuing Education. Adel writes fiction when he can.

He was recently a Public Relations Writing Consultant for Geiser Maclang Communications. He’s been Editor-in-Chief for a diverse set of magazines, including Manual Magazine (men’s lifestyle), Images (photography), Mobile Philippines/mPH (portable technology and consumer gadgets) and Pinoy Rider Extreme (motorcycling). He has also been Guest Editor-in-Chief for the local editions of PC Magazine (Ziff Davis), Golf Digest (Conde Nast), Maxim (Dennis Publishing) and several other titles.

He wrote several weekly OpEd and entertainment columns for The Manila Times newspaper for a couple of years (1994-1995) and contributed to other publications on and off. He was Group Editor for the magazine arm of the Philippine Daily Inquirer under Hinge Inquirer Publications from 2004 to 2008, editorially supervising all their titles.

Online, Adel founded Philippine Week In Tech (PWiT), a group blog for technology editors and journalists and acted as Head PWIT. He also created and wrote the Apple/Mac blog Mac-A-Doodle for Inquirer.Net. He has also been a forum administrator and moderator for several large tech forums based in the Philippines, notably The Philippine Mac Users Group (of which he was also chairman for two years).

Journalism is actually Adel’s second career. Previously he was in FM radio for nearly two decades, as a talent, an on-air personality, a producer and a broadcasting executive.

From 1995 to 2002, he used to be President and General Manager of Advanced Media Broadcasting System, and Station Manager of its flagship station DWKX-FM (103.5 K-Lite). Adel created and programmed his K-Lite from scratch, created and hosted several music and talk shows on the station, including a 3-hour midnight radio advice show called NiteLite, and occasionally pinch-hit for TalkBack and several others. Adel also co-hosted the popular Twisted on A Sunday with Jessica Zafra for over seven years, up to the time the show moved homes to DWNU-FM (NU 107).

Previous to K-Lite, Adel was Regional Manager for the Quest Broadcasting Network set of provincial stations in the Philippines, establishing radio stations in Lucena, Cebu, Davao, Cagayan de Oro, Bacolod and other cities in the south. He was Production Manager and Senior Announcer for Magic 89.9 from 1987 to 1995. Prior to Magic, he was Station Manager for DWRK-FM (WRock 96.3) from 1984 until 1987. Adel retired from broadcasting in 2002 and began writing and editing full time.

For those of you who might remember, Adel is actually The FM DJ Formerly Known As Little David, and was on the air for the better part of his career in radio. But his first job after college was as part of the writing team for former Philippine Vice-President Salvador Laurel.

In creative writing, Adel’s fiction has won him accolades, including a Carlos Palanca Award for Literature for Short Fiction in 2000. His workshop fiction project won first prize at the University of The Philippines’ Creative Writing Center (UP-CWC) Writing Fellowship Program in 1985. In music, he was a finalist for the Metro Manila Popular Musicfest (Metropop) songwriting competition in 1996, and he still gets a big kick out of hearing his song played on the radio.

Adel studied Journalism at the Institute of Mass Communications at the University of The Philippines in Diliman. In fact, having finished his primary and secondary schooling in U.P., Adel is one of the few people who can sing UP Naming Mahal from memory, and is from the first batch to graduate with a diploma under the U.P. Integrated School name.

Adel is a Mac addict and Apple evangelist, an inveterate gamer, a ravenous reader, avowed videophile and an amateur photographer. His great loves in life are his Apple products, photography, Lego, horror and sci-fi movies, the old Sean Connery OO7 films, The Empire Strikes Back, Alan Moore comic books, old Stephen King novels, racing and FPS video games, RC cars, anything about zombies, Bach, green tea ice cream from FIC, African Sunrise Tea Latte from Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, mami and siopao from Ma Mon Luk and a good Merlot.

Adel says the most surreal moment of his life was finding himself with his idol, author Neil Gaiman, momentarily alone in an empty hotel conference room in Makati, together looking out the window watching a political rally down on Ayala Avenue, and being asked by Gaiman to “kindly explain to me how politics here work. From what I’ve heard, it seems bloody fascinating. And odd. No offense.”

Adel fervently hopes that his bumbling explanation would eventually become the seed for a future Gaiman novel.

Adel is forty-something and lives in Quezon City in the Philippines with his Japanese wife Mano, their two big Golden Retrievers Bobby and Rico, and their two rescued mutts Domino and Lost N. Found.