Story Portal Blog

Website Relaunch

2026-07-01T17:09:00-04:00

Happy Canada Day! A year and a half since my last update, I am finally slowly coming out of the woodwork to try and re-establish a presence here again. I can't promise it will be as regular as it was before my health did a nosedive &mbsp; and to be honest, my presence had never done numbers on social media, so that should give you a good gauge of how visible I intend to be now. But! At least I am finally working on my original projects once again, albeit on a more sustainable pace.

As you can probably see if you've visited my site pre-2025, I have tweaked the UI once again. What can I say? I will always have the millenial urge to customize my website themes. Remember themes? Once upon a time, you can apply a coating of CSS on social media sites and truly make them your own!

But changes to my website is more than skin-deep. I've performed a pretty heavy overhaul of the back-end, from switching webhosts (I'm with a Canadian host now, yay!), switching code version control platforms, and refactoring the code to make development faster and easier. I also trimmed down my blog posts to the ones that are more focused on craft.

The biggest cause for celebration, however, is the huge rewrite I did for The King's Eyes. It's so huge, in fact, that the title even changed! (It's mostly because I couldn't translate "King Eyes" properly in Tagalog without it sounding super awkward.) About 40-45% of the story is different, as I tried to anchor Dalon and Kari's motivations to something more concrete and believable. I don't know whether people will like this version better than the first, but I think it's just a bit more cohesive. I have a lot more thoughts and feelings about my journey writing this novella, but I'll save that for a future blog post.

You might also notice, I hope, the brand new book covers for Metalmade and The King's Eyes! I absolutely loved working with Maria over at Maria Spada Book Cover Design. It's almost like she can tell exactly how I envision the story, and she's able to translate that to a very accurate image. What a talent! And of course I'm elated that she's a Filipino designer &mbsp; I always strive to work with fellow Filipino creatives on my projects.

All right, I think this is a good place to wrap up. I have an idea for a new story, which right now looks like it would probably be a serialized webnovel, but I'll share more information on that when the project is more developed. At first I thought I would work on The Crocodiles of Ring Lake, which you might remember was posted in a "Coming Soon" section of my homepage, but the timing isn't right for that project at the moment. So, to stop myself from announcing something that I might renege on later, I'll just share more news when things are further along.

It's nice to be back!

Extended Hiatus

2025-01-05T17:14:00-05:00

Happy New Year, fellows! At least, I hope that this new year will indeed be a little happier than the last, for all of us just hanging on.

I'm well aware that it has been almost 1 year since I last posted. Unfortunately I don't expect to become more active any time soon. Last year I came down with a Mystery Illness, just two weeks after posting The King's Eyes. I've seen about half a dozen doctors and they don't know what's going on. I think it's so ironic that my body broke down just when I had decided to take a break from writing and focus more on health and life. I suppose by that time it had been just a little too late.

In my last blog post, I remember saying that I was very burnt out, and that's the reason I've decided to take a step back from producing more original writing. Now that I look back on that time, I think what I was feeling was my body slowly slipping into a state that made me vulnerable to the Mystery Illness. But I had misinterpreted it as a mix of stress, anxiety, and a bit of depression. 2022 all the way to early 2024 had been a rollercoaster ride of instability in my home and family life, and very dear relatives passing away suddenly. Then in January 2024, when we learned that one of my cousins had a brain tumour, I felt so so down about everything. The sluggishness and lethargy and unenthusiasm I felt about my life seemed to stem from all of these events. And perhaps it did. But I also think that I had been terribly negligent of my physical health since I started working from home in 2020, and perhaps that, more than anything, was what was contributing to my overall unwellness the most.

The rest of the year wasn't much better, sadly. The cousin passed away within two months. My grandfather also passed away in September. My own illness is quite relentless, making even my comfortable software development job feel like a chore. Every day I'm afraid I'm never going to get better, or that this is a very serious disease, or I will forever be in medical limbo. Or perhaps all three.

I don't want to be a downer at the beginning of the year, but I think it's safe to say that so many of us are greeting 2025 with something like a worn-down, desperate hope. It's one of those times when denying the challenges I'm facing just feels like toxic positivity.

So where does that leave me? Well, I'm focusing this year on getting my health back on track. I don't know how long that's going to take. Maybe another full year. Maybe more. I don't know. One sliver of hope I've been hanging onto is that despite the ineffectiveness of the medical community, my symptoms seem to be improving on their own, albeit very slowly. Thank God for that -- and I mean that, because there's really no one else to thank.

In the meantime, whenever I feel well enough to channel my creative juices somewhere, I've resorted to going back to my roots: writing fanfiction. I'm hoping it will help exercise my creative muscles so they don't go stale, give me a way to spend time doing something I love in the midst of this dreariness, all the while not being very demanding or mentally exhausting.

I can't make any promises, but if I do beat the Mystery Illness, the first thing I'm planning to do is to rewrite The King's Eyes. I think I was rushing to release it because I was feeling my body start to give out, but the quality of the writing could be better. It also didn't help that I used ProWriting Aid to do the copyedits, which might be why so many of my sentences feel stilted. Alas.

Well, that's all for now. I hope you're all doing well. And if not, I wish you strength and hope in your own journey of getting better.

The King's Eyes is here! What's Next?

2024-02-04T11:05:00-05:00

Hey everyone! If you subscribe to my newsletter, you would have received a notice this past Monday that The King's Eyes is now live on my website and available for download through Bookfunnel! I'm so excited to be able to share this story with everyone. Dalon and Kari, and the challenges they face, are quite different from any I've written before. But I'm hoping that their story resonates with you.

This is a lengthy post, so I'll give you the TL;DR here: I'm going on a year-long break from original writing.

It's been almost two years since I first started tending the seeds of this novel. It's a little funny to read that I intended this project to be a series of novellas I can release every year. Yet The King's Eyes is a 50k word story, which puts it squarely out of the novella category, and it took me two years to produce. Hah! Even when I tried to downsize my projects, I still ended up taking longer than I expected.

That said, I didn't anticipate many of the life events that took attention and energy away from my writing. I lost a couple of relatives shortly after I started writing the first draft of The King's Eyes. During the winter that followed, I experienced a new low in my mental health, and at the cusp of spring of 2023, my mother herself got a cancer scare. Thankfully, it turned out to be pre-cancer, so there were no malignant cells in her body yet, but she still underwent some treatment for it in the latter half of 2023. And then there was that Philippines trip we had in the middle of last year, the preparation for which took up a lot of my free time and spare energy.

In a way, I found the last two years even harder than 2020-2021. During the pandemic, there was a sense of stasis to my life, like the world stopped moving and I could catch up. I was able to focus quite well on writing, because there was little else to do outside of my job. But while I was working on The King's Eyes, half the time it felt like I was trying to dredge water from a dry well with a broken bucket. Maybe all the anxiety and stress that everyone else felt during the lockdowns caught up to me late. I once thought I did comparatively better than other people in handling the lockdown (admittedly, I have a few advantages like being able to work from home and living in a comfortable house), but maybe I didn't cope as well as I thought. Maybe I covered up a lot of that stress, and it manifested as something else down the line.

I'm truly thankful for the little bursts of energy that allowed me to write The King's Eyes slowly but surely. Because every time I would read a bit of what I wrote, I could feel a sense of warmth and lightness, and I knew I was writing the story that I had set out to write, the story I really needed.

I'm hoping that The King's Eyes would be this story for you too. I don't know much about my readers, about what you might be going through in life, but if my little novel can bring you a bit of joy, that's enough for me.

What's next?

I'm doing a bit better now than I was at this time last year, and there are a few things that spark hope in me for 2024. However, I think I still need to continue my get-well journey.

I'm burned out. I can't believe I am, because if I tally up the number of days I spent writing last year, they would sum up to about four months. That's a third of a year. I can't wrap my head around the fact that I spent only a third of the year writing, and I still barely have any creative energy.

But the physical signs are there. When I was applying the final edits to The King's Eyes last month, I still felt like fetching water from a broken bucket. I don't know how burn out feels to others, but to me I feel a hollowness at the bottom part of my chest, near my diaphragm. Normally when I'm creative and energetic, this part feels full. In fact, I'm not even aware of that part of my body usually. It's just there. It's just a part of me. But lately, any time I need to be creative, my body tries to muster some energy from there, and... nothing. It's hard to explain, I'm not really good at describing bodies, haha! I don't even know if there are real physiological reasons for what I'm feeling.

I used to think I was the type of writer who can push through in times of crises. I remember back in 2015 -- which is still the worst year of my life -- I regularly updated a fanfiction that had a pretty complex storyline, studied for the GRE exams, applied to a Master's program in three different Universities, and kept up a full-time job. I did all this while my entire life was basically falling apart around me.

I thought writing was my bulwark, what I needed to do to keep sane. And there are so many writers out there who tell you not to wait around for inspiration to strike -- you have to write even when you don't feel like it. That used to be me.

Maybe I changed. Or maybe my circumstances are different enough that the coping strategies I used before just aren't working now. After all, I have been diligently working on some writing project during all of my conceivable free time since 2016. It's been eight years. Maybe I've been running on my backup generator, and even that has gone out. Anytime life throws a new challenge at me now, I feel too overwhelmed.

So, this is a really long-winded way to say that I'm going to go on a hiatus from original fiction. I'm not entirely sure how long, but I'm prepared to give it up to a year. I say "original" writing, because I still plan to translate The King's Eyes this year.

That's not to say that I would no longer be around in cyberspace. On the contrary, I'm hoping this will free up time and energy for me to be a little more engaged in the writing community. One of the funnest things I got to do last year was participate in the October Inklings Challenge. Unfortunately, as soon as I posted my entry, I went right back to working on The King's Eyes. I didn't give myself time to check out what other people wrote, which is a great shame, since so many supported my entry!

In fact, a lot of the things that have brought me a sense of fulfillment the last couple of years are building connections with other writers. I joined two writing discord servers and I became someone's critique partner. I made a couple of new writer friends on Tumblr and BlueSky. And I really cherish these relationships, no matter how new and unexplored.

And then there are all the other things I've tossed to the backburner: making my website more legible, figuring out what to do with my newsletter, writing all my blog post ideas, improving my art skills, reading more indie author works, etc.

There was a time when I felt like these things didn't matter so much, because they wouldn't serve any purpose if I couldn't deliver my own stories. I was afraid to delve into the writing community, because unless I could show that I've written something, people might think I'm a poser. Or I would be envious of those who were ahead of me on the writer's journey, and I would feel discouraged.

I regret that now. I wish I had been more sociable, been more curious about others, been more helpful.

To be fair, I think the presence I managed to establish helped me form many of the connections I made recently, so... I don't know, perhaps there's no use dwelling on the past.

In the present, however, I sense a perfectly good time to pause. And breathe. And celebrate my accomplishments. Yes, I think this year will be about recharging and making friends. It's time I apply Dalon's lesson from The King's Eyes to myself: for now, I am all right, and it's okay to let go a little bit.

2023 Inklings Challenge

2023-10-08T11:38:00-04:00

Hey folks! This year I had the opportunity to participate in the Inkling's Challenge over on Tumblr. If you don't know what this is, it's an annual challenge to write a Christian fantasy story. Participants get split into three teams, and based on those teams, they have a choice of two pre-assigned genres. I got sorted into Team Chesterton, and I decided to write an Intrustive Fantasy.

I have a lot to say about my thoughts on this story, but this is going to be a hefty post, so I'll leave those musings for another day. I hope you enjoy my entry!

Let the Sun Set, Let the Day End

Paolo's parents rarely ever talked about the Catindig family, but when they did, it was always with a touch of soft pity. He could detect it in the, "Of course we must be kind to them," and the "Your grandfather never forgave himself for what happened to Edgar Catindig."

There was also an undercurrent of wry humour in the ways Paolo's parents whispered of sumpa. It meant curse or oath, if one used the ratty old Tagalog-English dictionary they brought along from Caloocan five years ago, but from his parents' tone he was sure it wasn't the latter. And while it was a word one could freely ponder in the streets of the Philippines, even among crowds in front of San Roque Cathedral, it wasn't a concept that sat comfortably in his mind as his family rode down the neat, disciplined streets of North York, Ontario.

The apartment building they stopped at was a few minutes' drive from the intersection of Don Mills and Eglinton, not too far from the Science Centre that Paolo visited once on a school trip. The apartment building had seen better days. Dark smudges trailed beneath the balconies, paint chipped in patches the way the skin on his fingers did during winter, and rust bloomed on the railing of the stairs up to the entrance.

Paolo and his family filed inside the building and into the rickety elevator, dim yellow light pulsing with the threat of going out. His ten-year-old sister, Marielle, sidled up to him, nervous despite her neon green shirt emblazoned with Buttercup from Powerpuff Girls shouting, "Fearless!" Paolo's older sister, Ate Hannah, was poised in a blue dress that he thought was too formal for a friendly visit. But all of her older, more casual dresses had been packed away in a box last week for the Catindigs' daughter, part of a welcoming donation to ease the Catindig family's adjustment to their new home.

What if they found that same daughter wearing one of Hannah's dresses today? That would be awkward.

The elevator pinged on the seventh floor and the doors shabbily slid open. Paolo's mother, holding an aluminum tray of homemade pancit, turned to the children before exiting. "Don't forget to mano," she said. "Mr. and Mrs. Catindig won't be the only adults there. Some of our church friends are coming, and a few other acquaintances."

The three of them nodded, and they followed their parents down the hallway. Paolo's father wore a light-coloured dress shirt, which seemed to be a mistake, as sweat was already darkening its collars. Still, he held his chin up, and his shoulders were relaxed even as he gripped a large watermelon between his hands. His beard was neatly clipped, his hair cropped close to the scalp. Paolo brushed back his own floppy hair, second-guessing whether he ought to have made the trip to the barber's.

It didn't matter. Who were the Catindigs, anyway? Just distant family friends, and although his father may harbour some charity towards them due to unfortunate events a generation ago, it was clear they weren't here to impress. If that were so, Paolo's mother would have worn her pearl necklace and her high-heels, the way she did when she went to work.

Hannah knocked on door 704. Two blinks later, the door swung open, and a short woman with a round face and chin-length hair grinned at them. "Oh, you're here!" she said in Tagalog. "Come in, come in. I'm so glad you made it."

"Welcome to Canada, Joyce!" Paolo's mom laughed with excited glee, and leaned in for a hug, awkward though it was with the tray of pancit between the two women. "I can't believe you made it here! Kids, greet your Tita Joyce."

Obedient to their mother's reminder, Hannah reached for Joyce Catindig's hand and gently lowered her forehead to it. Paolo followed her example, and then Marielle, all three of them greeting the woman with demure, respectful hellos. Their father stepped inside the apartment last, just as a broad-shouldered man not much taller than Paolo appeared behind Joyce, smiling gently. Light bounced off his shiny, bald head.

"Long time no see," the man said, taking the watermelon from Paolo's father. "Rahul, you're looking good! Life in Canada is treating you well, I see. Hello there, Nora, it's very nice to see you again."

Pleasantries were exchanged, along with more mano, until Joyce stepped aside to let a young woman through. This must be the Catindigs' daughter. She grasped Paolo's parents' hands to her forehead to mano, and it wasn't until she straightened that he realized she wasn't wearing Hannah's clothes after all.

No, she was wearing his.

It was one of Paolo's old Dragonball Z shirts. His mother had told him he might as well donate it even if the Catindig had a daughter, not a son, because he'd grown out of it, and surely she could still wear it as home-clothes. Now, Piccolo's scowling face stared back at him.

"This is our daughter, Sharmaine," Joyce said. "I don't think you've met before, we already moved towns by the time she was born. But I believe she's the same age as your son. Fifteen."

"Hello, po." The girl, Sharmaine, gave them a wide, contagious smile. She had straight hair that fell to her waist, wide dark eyes, and her mother's rounded face. She was pretty, but not in the artistahin way of Filipino celebrities. Not with the low nose bridge and deeply tanned skin.

"Sharmaine, why don't you and the kids talk for a bit, while I go set the table for lunch?" Joyce stated, taking the tray from Paolo's mother, and ushering the adults to the dining area. Paolo only now noticed that Aunt Evangeline, a woman in her sixties who often volunteered at church, was already there, as well as another middle-aged woman whose name he couldn't quite recall, but whom he knew his mother gossiped with.

"Come along," Sharmaine waved, and Paolo and his siblings tailed her down the hallway, past the sparsely furnished living room. The section of it closest to the kitchen was taken up by a black foldable table, and the plain ceramic plates already set out on it used to belong to Paolo's family. They had also sent those as part of the welcoming donation.

The adults had dissolved into chatter about work, with Paolo's father proudly announcing that he worked for Deloitte and that his wife was a receptionist at a fancy event hall. Aunt Joyce congratulated them with sincerity, though her voice was a little less energetic when she said, "I got hired as a cashier at Tim Hortons. And Martin here is a security guard at Pearson. We're grateful, of course, they're excellent starting points."

The room Sharmaine led them to was small and windowless. A low twin mattress crouched in a corner, no box or frame beneath it yet. Luggage and backpacks lined the walls, as well as boxes with broad masking tapes securing their sides.

"Well, as you can see, we're still settling in," Sharmaine waved about the room. Her smile remained steady and friendly. "But once everything is cleared up, this would be my room."

"You're wearing Kuya Paolo's shirt!" Marielle pointed at the hard-faced Piccolo, as if noticing Sharmaine's clothes for the first time.

"Am I, now?" Sharmaine narrowed her eyes playfully. "I thought this was yours!"

"No!" Marielle gave a hearty shake of her head, looking horrified to have been accused of the crime.

Sharmaine only laughed and turned to Paolo. "Thanks for the shirt. I do love Piccolo."

Paolo didn't know what he was expecting her to say about his clothes. He figured she'd be embarrassed to be seen wearing it, or perhaps she'd think it was beneath someone of their age to still be wearing anime shirts. He made a series of stutters, uncertain how to reply, until he managed to grip one comment and rolled with it. "Piccolo's all right. I prefer Vegeta."

Sharmaine's brows raised. "Oh, well, of course you do. All the boys love Vegeta."

Heat seared Paolo's neck, though he didn't know why. Only that, she made him sound so... so... predictable.

"What are these?" Marielle asked. They turned their attention to her, and Paolo was both relieved and peeved that he didn't get to respond. His little sister had pushed aside the flaps of one of the boxes and was peering inside. In her left hand was a wooden crucifix, and in the other a statue of Mama Mary. Inside the box, Paolo could glimpse more religious statues: baby Jesus in his straw cradle, San Pedro with a rooster tucked into his elbow, another crucifix, and even a poorly constructed miniature replica of the Black Nazarene.

"Why do you have so many of these things?" his sister chirped again. "Is it to ward off that curse your family has?"

Hannah gasped and pulled Marielle away from the box. She grabbed the artifacts from her sister's hands and stowed them back inside. "Careful with these!" she reprimanded. "These are all blessed. Show them some respect." Over Marielle's head, Hannah mouthed "I'm so sorry" to Sharmaine, before saying out loud, "You know what? I think you and I need to help get lunch ready. Come on."

The silence in the room after they left was palpable. Paolo grasped for something to say, but once again, proved to be the slower one in the race.

"Do you no longer speak Tagalog?" Sharmaine asked, almost as if the last minute hadn't transpired. "I'm still getting used to conversing only in English, so things might get a bit awkward." She sat on the mattress, and Paolo felt a compulsion to join her. He settled at the edge of it.

"Your English is fine," he reassured her. At the very least, she wasn't the source of the awkwardness in their conversations. "Ate Hannah and I can still speak it, but we're not really supposed to anymore. It's for Marielle. She was only five when we came here, and Mama and Papa don't want her to develop an accent."

They were quiet for a few more moments. Paolo wished his mother would announce that lunch was ready.

"So you heard about the curse, huh?" Sharmaine's voice was low, as if testing the waters. As if testing him.

"What curse?" Paolo decided to play dumb. "I don't believe in curses."

Her eyes lit up as if he'd said something amusing, not truthful. She reached for one of the backpacks and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. "Here, why don't we play a game? Let's write a story together, one line by you, and the next line by me, until we fill up this page."

Paolo watched as she etched in the first line, unsure whether this had anything to do with the curse, or if they were switching subjects yet again. When she handed him the pad of paper, he read, "Once upon a time, there lived a witch in the middle of the woods" inked at the top. He glanced back at her, gauging what she was trying to do, but her face gave nothing away. Just that small consistent smile, as if this was just normal things that friends did. As if they were already friends.

By the time Aunt Joyce called everybody out to the dining area, Sharmaine was just finishing off the last sentence on the page. She ripped the paper from the pad, and folded it into a small square. She leaned over to him and tucked the piece of paper into the breast pocket of his shirt.

"Don't look at this until later tonight. Maybe 7 or 8." She stood and offered him a hand up from the mattress. "Then see what you think of our little story."

Returning back to his family's apartment, Paolo couldn't help but compare how much cozier their space is. They were lucky to have secured a unit in a larger building, one that came with three bedrooms. Apparently it was illegal in Ontario to have siblings of different genders to share a single room, and so he ended up with his own. It was the smallest, but it was still his own.

He'd spent the afternoon slumped in the chair in front of his desk, feet propped up on his bed. He'd shuffled endlessly through the forms scattered on his table. He would be entering Grade 10 in a few weeks and his high school offered several different programs tailored to certain interests. Hannah never applied for a program, but she had taken lots of AB courses. Paolo's grades were good, but AB courses would deflate them, so his parents told him to enter a program instead.

There was a music program, an art program, a multimedia program, social sciences, robotics, and math. Each program had a list of compulsory courses that supposedly gave you the fundamentals, which would somehow impress upon the Universities how serious you were about your passion.

But Paolo didn't know which one he wanted to apply to. The deadline for the application was August 31, so that those who were accepted in the programs could be slotted into the right courses before non-participants.

Music was a no-go. Despite the rampant stereotype that all Filipinos could sing, the only rhythm Paolo could produce came from the knuckles he could crack. Perhaps the art program? He did like to draw from time to time. But he also knew his parents would be less impressed by that choice, and he didn't like art theory; only art for specific cases. Multimedia then. Though he wasn't sure how he'd fare in the web programming course.

Paolo hung his head over the back of his chair, then caught the time on the wall clock. 7:45. He rushed from his seat and grabbed the dress shirt he'd worn to the Catindigs. He slipped his fingers into the pocket and pulled out the sheet. He unfolded it with hurried fingers, then laid it on top of his desk.

The bottom half of the page faded into nothing. While the ink was crisp and clear in the first half, it began to seemingly evaporate until the last quarter of the story was completely gone. Paolo lifted the sheet and inspected the page. This must be a trick. There must have been something on the paper, some substance Sharmaine wiped on it. Or perhaps it was the pen. Some kind of invisibility ink, like those in the books that Marielle loved to read.

Paolo huffed, adrenline whooshing out of his muscles. Had he actually believed her for a moment there? That this was related to a curse? No, she was just pulling his leg!

All the work he did coming up with those stupid lines, too. The witch turning out to be a good one and meeting the princess who turned out to be evil. They had switched roles, only for the witch to... to go to... where did she go again? What did she do?

Cold spread over Paolo's hands. What happened to the witch? Why couldn't he remember what they'd written? He could clearly see in his mind's eye sitting on Sharmaine's mattress, chuckling over something she wrote. He could still feel the energy that coursed through him after coming up with an idea just as funny. He was sure it had been funny. He recalled the feel of the pen in his fingers, the way they formed the letters, but what words did he spell? What sentences did he write?

Paolo almost jumped out of his skin when Hannah banged on his door. "Dinner's ready!" He didn't know how he made it to their large wooden table, but he was suddenly facing a plate full of rice and a piece of juicy, roasted chicken. The clack of silverware and eager conversation rang in his ears. He took a bite of the food, but didn't taste anything.

"Who was Edgar Catindig?" he asked, and the talk around him halted. "What happened to him?"

His parents blinked at each other for a moment, before his father shrugged. "He passed away in the 80s." He drank a bit of water, before continuing. "He was Martin's father, and your Lolo Olivares was good friends with him. Always humoured him when he said he believed he'd inherited a family curse."

"What did he believe it was?"

Paolo's father smiled a little as if embarrassed to be parting such information. "Edgar Catindig believed he was unable to send or receive letters."

"Why?"

His father shrugged eloquently. "A series of coincidences that followed him his entire life. Letters he attempted to send always got lost somehow, or ripped, or sent to the wrong address. Same with the ones that people send him. Apparently the only way to get a message to him was to either call or meet him face to face."

Paolo blinked at the rice on his plate. "So why would Lolo feel guilty over that?"

"Well, one day your Lolo got annoyed with Edgar going on and on about the curse. He convinced Edgar to simply write a letter to someone down the block, deliver it himself to the house, and prove once and for all that the curse isn't true. But on the way there, a reckless driver sped through the corner they were turning into, and hit Edgar."

Marielle gasped. "And he died?"

Their father nodded sagely. "And he died, the letter still clutched in his hand. Father couldn't shake off the feeling that perhaps the curse was true after all, and forcing Edgar to go against it cost him his life."

A somber silence blanketed the dinner table, until their mother waved her hand as if shooing away a persistent fly. "But it could have all been just a coincidence. Filipinos love a good story about witches and dark magic, because it's more interesting than the reality."

Their father nodded. "That's right, don't let old superstitions rule your life. Your have more control over your future than these types of stories would have you believe. The only thing they're good for is excusing personal responsibility. That's why our country never makes progress. Filipinos always like to blame something else."

Paolo's parents probably wanted to lift the gloomy mood from the dinner table, so they doubled down on their usual admonitions about the importance of having good discipline and education.

"Focus on your goals and don't get distracted," the mother pressed. "Especially you, Hannah. You're entering University, and there will be all sorts of new freedoms and distractions."

Paolo didn't know why it was Hannah she picked on. Hannah had never done a single wrong in her life. Even now, she didn't even have the audacity to look annoyed, as she obediently nodded her head along with their mother's reminders. Hannah, the straight A student. Hannah, the kindly sister who had taken the sword for Paolo and Marielle, by granting their parents the one wish all Asian parents had: a child becoming a doctor. And not just any doctor. Hannah had chosen the route to being an anesthesiologist, one of the highest paid profession in the industry.

"So don't think about boys and dating until you've finished undergrad," their mother went on, as if Hannah had shown any kind of propensity towards boys or dating. "Boys just like to play around at your age. Wait until you're older and you find someone serious. Be like your Aunt Gabriella. She finished dentistry and found an American husband. Oh!" their mother clapped her hands at this, and turned to their father with eagerness. "Wouldn't it be just nice if Hannah marries a white man? Their kids will look imported! Imagine what our families back home would say!"

Paolo couldn't get Edgar's story out of his head even as he got ready for bed. He stared at the bathroom mirror, dabbing away stray toothpaste bubbles from the side of his lips.

For a moment, his mind ground to a halt. He looked closely at his face. The dark eyes, the flared nostrils, the thick lips. Skin so tanned neither Likas soap nor Bello Essentials lotion made him any paler. Were there other Filipino parents in the city tonight who had advised their daughter over dinner not to marry anyone who looked anything like him? Were there other Filipino parents for whom he would be a disappointing son-in-law, unable to give them grandchildren who looked imported?

He snapped out of the sudden thought, embarrassed and annoyed that he was even ruminating over this. No, that wasn't what he should be thinking about, wasn't what was important right now.

Paolo went to his room and grabbed the hand-me-down Nokia phone that once belonged to Hannah. He'd gotten Sharmaine's number before leaving, biting down the surprise that her family had managed to get her a cell phone already.

Can u meet me tmrw? Library @10? He texted.

If the Catindig family curse truly manifested in Sharmaine, he'd need more proof.

Paolo told his parents before they left for work that he would show Sharmaine the library and get her a card. Afraid they'd be suspicious why he wanted to take a girl out alone, he threw in that he would be taking his friend, Sean, with them.

Initially, Paolo wanted to reach out to Andy, but remembered that Andy was in math camp until the end of the week. (Andy loved to remind him he wasn't in math camp because he was any good at it, but because he was actually in desperate need of improvement. Defying stereotypes, and all that.)

Paolo hadn't been in contact with Sean for two weeks ever since they ran into each other at the afternoon sacrament of reconciliation in St. Edith Stein. It wasn't even their home parish. In fact, it was a thirty minute walk from their neighbourhood, which showed how both boys had desperately wanted to avoid anyone they knew. But just as Paolo had exited the confessional, he found Sean standing just outside, pale and sweating profusely. They had shared an awkward greeting, before Sean had launched himself into the cabinet, as if he couldn't repent fast enough.

The good thing about picking Sean, however, was that Paolo's mother really liked him. Hailing from an Irish immigrant family, Sean's parents had worked two jobs each when he was young, and they had hired a Filipina nanny to look after him. He'd grown up eating adobo and sinigang, and whenever he came over for dinner, he could say salamat and masarap to thank Paolo's mother for the delicious cooking.

A little after Paolo's parents went to work, he met Sean at the park, and they walked towards the library. The zealous sun blasted its full August heat upon them, but there was a slight breeze that tugged at Sean's brown hair every now and then. The tension from their last meeting hung heavy in the air between them, an elephant doubling in size in a shrinking room.

"It was an accident!" Sean blurted at the same time that Paolo said, "I was stealing!"

Paolo stared at Sean's wide, gray eyes, and motioned for him to go first. His friend buried his face in his hands, the skin on his neck turning bright pink.

"Ugh, so I was on this website, right?" Sean said, his voice pained. "It was a game website, and it had, like, a bazillion 'Play Now' buttons. I don't know what happened, I must have clicked on the wrong one, because the next thing I knew, all these pictures popped up on the screen. Bad pictures!" In an agonized whisper, "Dirty pictures."

"Oh, heck no."

"Then my Mom walked in!" Sean's voice went one octave higher, and Paolo couldn't help but burst out laughing.

"Sean! The way you looked, I thought you must have killed somebody!"

"No, no!" Sean tapped his chest. "I was the one getting killed."

Paolo rubbed away a tear leaking from his eye. "What did the priest say?"

"Three Hail Mary's and an anti-virus software." Sean shrugged, but he must have been eager to get the focus off of him. "And you? You were stealing? You don't even like switching price stickers at Dollar Tree."

Paolo sighed. "I pirated Freddy vs. Jason."

"Oh, was it good?"

"It was all right. But, see, I also taught Ma how to use Limewire for her Filipino dramas."

"Ha! How come she wasn't with you to confess, then?"

"She doesn't think it's a crime. The shows were too low budget to feel bad about it, she says."

They reached the library and relished the cool airconditioned environment they walked in. It was easy to spot Sharmaine, as she was simply sitting by the row of tables in front of the Information Centre. She noticed him quickly too and waved.

"Wait, you're meeting with a girl?" Sean leaned in to whisper. "You told me you're after the new Naruto volumes."

"Those too," Paolo said.

"Why do I feel like I just got cheated on?"

Paolo sent him a flat look as they approached Sharmaine. He gave brisk introductions, and was quite relieved that Sean gave Sharmaine a perky smile and handshake. His expression only turned mockingly put-off when he swiveled back to Paolo.

"All right, I can take a hint. Why don't I grab us some iced caps and timbits, and you two quickly do whatever you met here to do. But!" he raised an accusing finger at Paolo. "Behave yourself, young man! I better not see you at confession again this week."

"Then don't be there yourself!" But Sean was already ambling away, and Paolo's raised tone earned him a disapproving frown from the woman sitting at the Information Centre.

Sharmaine was holding back an amused smile as Paolo slid into the seat beside her. A heavy-looking backpack was tucked underneath her chair. "What's that?"

"I figured you wanted to meet about the story," she said. She pulled the bag up to her lap and opened it, revealing about a dozen notebooks and folders. "You probably have lots of questions, so I came with answers."

Paolo looked around, but the other tables were empty, and the only people nearby were young kids browsing through picture books. Still, he pitched his voice even lower. "What happened to the story we wrote yesterday? You're not playing any tricks on me, are you?"

"Do you remember the ending we wrote?" He didn't. She accepted his silence as an answer and took several notebooks from her bag. She flipped through them, hundreds of pages covered in ink and pencil. "Ever since I can remember, I loved to write stories, but I can never seem to finish any of them. When I was young, I just assumed that I lost interest or that I forgot to write the ending. But six or seven years ago, I started paying more attention, and I know that no matter how hard I try to write endings, they just disappear."

Paolo slid one of the notebooks towards himself. The stories across the pages were clearly demarcated with breaks, so it was easy to see when a new one started. Except the preceding stories were always abruptly cut off. Sentences faded away. Letters halted mid-curl. Words were sliced three quarters of the way through. It happened consistently. Even if Sharmaine happened to be one of the many writers who just didn't have the stamina to finish a story, why break it off like this?

"At one point I thought I was going crazy," she continued. "But the experiment we did yesterday? I tried those on my parents, on my cousins, on my friends. None of them remember how we ended the stories either. I can't even ask other people to help me."

Sharmaine opened up a small pocket on the bag and lifted a bundle of floppy disks tied with elastic. "It's not just pen and paper. It's digital too. All of these contain files of stories that I tried to write and finish. If you want, you can check out how they ended up too."

Paolo didn't need to hop over to one of the computer stations to know what Sharmaine meant. He could guess. Corrupted files perhaps, ascii turning into binary code like she had used the funky Webdings font.

"How about essays and term papers? How are you able to write your assignments?" he asked.

"Those seem to be fine," Sharmaine admitted with a helplessly confused shrug. "It's any form of fictional writing that seems to affect me."

"I heard about your grandfather," Paolo stated. "He believed he was also cursed. Except it wasn't like yours."

Sharmaine nodded, her dark eyes hooded in somber recollection. "The family curse manifests differently for those who are affected. It doesn't affect everyone, but we don't know why some people get it while others don't. Lolo Edgar had problems with letters. I have a great uncle whose voice gives out before he can finish singing a song. And it's not just a matter of getting tired or being unable to go past a certain time. He can't finish Happy Birthday, but he can sing up until the fifth verse of Don McLean's American Pie."

Paolo frowned, unable to wrap his head around the phenomena she was describing. Surely if Sharmaine was making this up, she would choose a more effective curse, a more sinister curse. But what kind of curses are these? They were ludicrously specific.

"Why is your family cursed? Who cursed you?"

Sharmaine sighed, this time pulling out a thin binder. She opened it to news clippings and photographs. "My grandfather's youngest uncle tried his luck in the burgeoning archeological movement of the Philippines in the mid-twentieth century. A lot of the most successful archeological projects at that time were headed by Americans. But Alberto Catindig believed that Filipinos deserved to participate in the discovery of our heritage too. I mean, it's our heritage."

She pushed towards him a faded black-and-white picture of a middle-aged man garbed in soiled work clothes, standing by a shabby stilt hut. He was flanked with younger men and women, all Filipinos, each holding shovels or pick-axes. There was a wide hole on the other side of the hut, falling off the frame of the picture.

"His projects mostly failed for lack of both funding and interest among fellow Filipinos. But he did make one discovery." Sharmaine showed a photograph of several large jars filled with gold jewellery and precious stones, finely crafted knives and combs, bundles of textiles, and...

"Are those bones?" Paolo was hardly able to keep his voice low.

"In pre-colonial times, the bones of the deceased, especially those of high status, were exhumed and stored in jars with their precious possessions, before being buried. These aren't simply 'bones.' They make up an entire skeleton."

Although the air-conditioned interior of the library had been refreshing when he and Sean had first stepped in, Paolo now found it to be uncomfortably cold. Goosebumps rose on his arms and neck. "Are you saying whoever this person was, that they were the one who cursed your family?"

"It's very likely, though not definitive. Great-uncle Alberto disappeared soon after. Nobody knows what happened to him. But," she leaned closer to Paolo and softened her voice even more. "There's a story in my family that Lolo Edgar's wife, Lola Honora, went to an albularyo. You know what that is?"

Paolo did, as he'd been to one himself. Back when he was a kid and had suffered consistent nightmares for unknown reasons, his parents had sent him to a traditional faith healer. He remembered most the darkened room he sat in, the myriad of crucifixes attached to the walls, the low-burning candles, the jar filled with hot oil, and the whites of the egg swimming in it. The older woman, the albularyo, had stared at the jar and deduced a reason for his nightmares by the shape of the slowly cooking egg.

Religiosity may be widespread in the Philippines, but even though the Catholic church deemed divination a heresy, these practices continued to proliferate. Not even Paolo's own father, a smart and educated accountant, had fully suspended his belief in these traditional modes of healing despite deriding old "superstitions" and "magic" just the previous night. When push came to shove, many Filipinos still turned to folk healing as a last -- or oftentimes, the more affordable -- resort.

"Lola Honora asked her what was wrong with her husband's letters. The albularyo had a vision of a great, ancient entity. It was wailing with sorrow and agitation, and kept saying something. In English, it's like, 'You who disturbed me, let the sun set, let the day end.'"

Sharmaine sat back again in her chair, while Paolo crossed his arms and allowed the words to sink into his mind. It was easy to make a connection between this entity and the person that had been uncovered by the archeological dig. Supposing they were one and the same, the words the albularyo heard very likely meant that the spirit wanted to have the lid back over their burial jar, to have the soil cover their remains once again. It wanted to be laid back to rest.

Then Paolo's mind offered a new realization, a stark pattern. What he once assumed were strange, unrelated phenomena, the curses resolved themselves into a single, overarching theme of punishment. Discontinuity. Endings perpetually lost to space and time, closures forever withheld. Nobody knew of Alberto's fate. Letters to and from Edgar never reached their destinations. Sharmaine's uncle never hit the final notes of his songs, and Sharmaine herself could never write 'the end.'

Paolo heaved a weighty exhale. Sumpa, a curse. A real one, present here in modern day Canada. He could hardly believe it.

"What are you gonna do?"

Of all the near-impossible questions he had asked the past few minutes, this one seemed to take Sharmaine by surprise.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"How will you break the curse?"

She waved her hand as if that possibility didn't even exist. As if it, too, had been lost to the curse. "There's nothing we can do. The box that stored the skeleton fell in the Pasig River during transportation. Those bones must be at the bottom of the ocean by now. And the rest of the artifacts were sold off to a wealthy family who owned a steel manufacturing company in Manila."

Sharmaine brought out a scan of a pamphlet from the 60s and pointed to a surname there. "The Viray family used to fancy themselves as private collectors. Their fortunes crashed during the Marcos dictatorship and there's no way to contact them anymore. They have likely sold off their private collections too."

"So... what about your stories?"

"It doesn't really matter much to me," Sharmaine admitted, though Paolo wasn't sure she was all that convinced. She gave him a small smile. "There are so many things that are unattainable for so many people. I can hardly complain about not being able to pursue a... what, middling career in fiction? There are other futures for me. I'm thinking about being a chef, maybe starting my own restaurant chain here."

Her words held truth, but Paolo couldn't shrug the feeling that this couldn't be it. Surely there was something more to be done. But just as he was settling in for some good, deep thinking, Sean walked through the doors of the library, a tray of iced cappucinos in one hand, and a basket of timbits in the other.

Paolo was occupied by the thought of the curse for the next few days, though he wasn't sure why. Sharmaine and her family seemed inured to it, taking it in stride and finding a way to live their lives around it. If she wasn't bothered, why should he be?

And yet he was. Paolo couldn't deny that. Especially when he stared at the mess of unfilled application forms on his desk that seemed to taunt him. They posed a question, and the fact that he didn't have an answer made him feel as if his fate too was suspended by the Catindig curse, as if it had rubbed off on him when he met Sharmaine. The days passed with the promise of a thousand possibilities, but with an omen that none of them would change his life for the better.

One day, Paolo found himself rummaging through the basket of junk mail his family stored, trying to find coupons for Pizza Hut. His fingers hit a stack of hard paper, thicker than the others, and he pulled out a bound collection of passes for downtown Toronto attractions. They were family passes for the summer, and included free entrances for children, and discounted tickets for those above the age of 12. CN Tower, Casa Loma, The Art Gallery of Ontario, The Royal Ontario Museum, and Toronto Zoo.

Tossed in the basket just below where he found the passes were glossy pamphlets detailing each of the attractions. Paolo was about to toss the bundle of papers back, when something caught his eye. A word. A name.

He lifted one of the pamphlets, and there, written in small font for the ad for the ROM was the line, "The new Southeast Asian exhibition features one-of-a-kind 15th century Philippine artifacts from the personal collection of Juanita Viray."

Viray. Wasn't that the name of the family who bought Alberto Catindig's archeological findings? But there were plenty of Virays from the Philippines. How was he sure this Juanita was even related to them?

Paolo browsed through the pamphlet and landed on a section that displayed some of the artifacts one could find in the new Southeast Asian exhibition. His stomach fell away when he recognized one of the jars sitting in a glass case in the photograph. It was of the same shape, held the same swirls near its mouth as the one he'd seen from Sharmaine's picture. It was possible that 15th-century burials jars were all the same, but the other thing that he recognized was the bejewelled knife sitting beside the jar. It was also the same one as he saw in her picture.

There were three coincidences now: the name of the collector, the burial jar, and the knife. What were the chances that some other unrelated Viray was able to get a hold of a jar and a knife that looked the same as the ones Alberto Catindig had dug up?

Paolo rushed back to his room and called Sharmaine. He explained what he'd discovered, and the discounted passes that could lead them there.

"But what are we going to do in the museum?" she asked.

"I... I don't know," he admitted. His brain hadn't absorbed the situation enough to actually form a plan. "Pray over them?"

She agreed it was worth a try. Paolo asked his sisters if they wanted to go to the museum and, relieved that neither did, he tore out two passes for The ROM for himself and Sharmaine. Once again uneasy that his parents might be suspicious that he was going out alone with a girl, he pulled out a third pass and called his friend, Andy, who had now finished with math camp.

The three of them hopped onto a southbound bus that took them down to Pape Station, which was along the Bloor-Danforth subway line. From there, it was just a matter of switching subways a few times until they came up from Museum station, and the old, gothic style architecture of The ROM was just outside.

"What's the sudden interest?" Andy asked. He was a tall boy with the kind of presence that took up the breathable air in a room. He probably knew that and used it to his advantage, which was why the debate team in their junior high school loved him so much. It had left him so little time for math, however, that it made his parents, in turn, not love him as much. Or so he joked. But although he was willing to humour his parents' over-zealousness for the subject, it was baffling to Andy why they seemed intent to pit him against the other Chinese boys in the neighbourhood, when most of them were recent immigrants, while his family had arrived from Shanghai in the late 1800s.

"I just thought it would be good to see the Southeast Asian exhibit. You know, get in touch with my roots and all that," Paolo equivocated. He wished he could share what he knew about the Catindig curse with Andy and Sean, but it wasn't his secret to tell. And he wasn't sure if they would even believe him.

Andy turned to Sharmaine, "If you miss the Philippines, Little Manila is a bit northwest of here. And I hear you can now get The Filipino Channel on satellite, if that's your thing. How are you adjusting, anyway?"

Sharmaine gave a shy smile. "They say it's hot here in August, but I wear long-sleeves when I go to sleep."

"No way! It's been 25 the past few nights!"

"That's typically what we consider cold weather in my hometown," she chuckled.

Andy barked a laugh. "I can't wait to hear what you think when it dips below 10."

The three of them entered The ROM. The building was actually under construction, huge swaths of it being renovated to have a more modern look, but the remaining parts in the old building were still open for visitors. They approached the counter where a young man waited, looking bored. It didn't take long for Paolo to find out why. As they exchanged their passes for tickets inside, he discovered that the ROM was probably the least visited attraction in the family pass bundle. Hardly anyone was there with them.

They wandered around the museum at a leisurely pace, although there was an itch beneath Paolo's feet that was hurrying him along to the Philippine exhibit. Still, he tamped it down, and allowed Andy ample of time to browse through the indigenous clothes and boats and household items, and then the western European paraphernalia of the early pioneers, and then on the next level, a plethora of fossils of prehistoric animals.

Sharmaine seemed to be enjoying herself too. She read the printed texts on every wall and counter with rapt attention. And while Paolo tried to do the same, he knew he would hardly remember any of it by the time they exited the building.

It was some time later when they arrived at the world section of the museum, and they found the Southeast Asian exhibit tucked into a little corner. It reminded Paolo, ironically, of the national bookstores in the Philippines that would display Filipino material in a little shelf, surrounded by larger shelves filled with books that hailed from other corners of the world.

Paolo and Sharmaine gravitated towards the glass case enshrining the burial jar. With her wide-eyed stare and lips slightly apart, he knew that she recognized the artifacts too. She leaned her face close to the glass, then pulled out the same picture she showed him the other day from a pocket on her sling bag.

"It's the same, isn't it?" Paolo asked.

She nodded.

"What are the chances that all burial jars looked the same back then?"

Sharmaine's head snapped up. "Very, very slim. They didn't mass produce those jars, you know. Each one had to be sculpted by hand, and if the person being buried is nobility, it will likely have symbols that represented the kind of life this person lived." She tapped the glass case close to the knife. "And the knife is exactly the same too. Not even a missing pearl from the handle."

Paolo looked about him, but other than Andy, there was nobody else in this section. He slid his backpack off his shoulders, and took out a bottle of Holy Water and two rosaries. The Holy Water was from a house blessing kit provided by St. John's parish. With only an apartment to bless, his family had never finished a single bottle, much less the five they now owned. The kit also came with little tea candles, but Paolo had figured it would be much too dangerous to light one in a museum, so he brought along a battery-operated one.

"Here," he passed Sharmaine one of the rosaries. "Maybe one full round?"

She nodded, and he flicked open the tea candle. He twisted the cap off of the Holy Water bottle, and before he could second-guess himself too much, he sprinkled a few drops on top of the case.

"What the heck are you guys doing?" Andy squeaked, suddenly appearing beside Paolo, when just a few moments ago, he was checking out the Japanese swords at the opposite side of the section. "Wh-what is this?"

"We're praying," Paolo said, showing the rosary. "We... well, this is actually a burial jar, so we thought it was fitting."

Andy's eyes narrowed, squinting at the bottle of Holy Water, the fake candle, and the rosaries. "Hey, you brought those along with you. You were intending to do this all along. What's the deal? Why didn't you tell me? And what is it for?"

Paolo was saved from answering, when Sharmaine herself handed Andy the pictures from Alberto Catindig's dig. "My great grand-uncle was actually the first one to dig these artifacts up, see?" Andy took the pictures and his eyes grew round. "Paolo's just helping me to pay my respects, so to speak."

"Oh crap, your ancestor was a tomb raider," Andy said. He glanced at the drops of water on the glass case and grimaced. "That's not gonna melt the glass, is it?"

"Only if the glass was crafted by the devil," Paolo said.

"Okay, okay, do your cross-thingy. I'll go stand watch before anyone interrupts your exorcism. But hurry up! This might be more fun than math camp, but I don't wanna get into trouble!"

Paolo exchanged a glance with Sharmaine, and with an almost imperceptible nod from her, they crossed themselves and began their prayers silently.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. I believe in God, the Father Almighty...

Then the Lord's Prayer. Three Hail Mary's. Glory Be. The Lord's Prayer again. The first decade. And on and on they went, following the beads on the rosary, until they circled back to the crucifix, and ended with the Hail Holy Queen.

After crossing themselves again, they stood there in the stillness. Paolo waited for some sign, some intuition that something had changed. But nothing felt different. Slowly, he pulled from his bag the story that he and Sharmaine worked on the first time they met. He unfolded the piece of paper, and he couldn't help the stab of disappointment when he saw that half the page was still faded away. Had he truly expected for the ending to return? Perhaps the old stories would never get their endings back, but the new ones wouldn't disappear.

Paolo looked up at Sharmaine and found her wiping away the beads of Holy Water on the case with her handkerchief. "We'll see if anything changes," she said, handing him back his bottle, candle and rosary. "It was worth a try anyway. Thanks for helping me."

He turned around only to find Andy squatting at the very end of the rectangular case, peering at a plaque.

"Juanita Viray," he mumbled. "Where have I heard of that?"

Paolo ambled over to him. "She's the private collector who donated these."

"Well, yes, of course, but I feel like I've heard of it somewhere else."

"Not math camp, though, right? That would be weird."

"No, no, not there. I think--" he gasped and snapped his fingers. His eyes gleamed when he looked at Paolo and Sharmaine. "Want a detour at Chapters?"

The closest Chapters Indigo was only a few blocks away, and the three teens headed there after finishing their circuit of the museum. It was a little past 1pm, and the sun was shining fiercely. Paolo and Andy treated Sharmaine to hotdogs from a little stall on the sidewalk and a large styrofoam container of poutine from a bright orange food truck parked just at the corner of Bloor.

"What wizardry is this?" Sharmaine gasped as she gobbled down strands of french fries oozing with melted cheese curds and hot gravy.

"Lo and behold, the pride and joy of French Canadians," Andy said, twisting his own fork with a healthy helping of fries.

By the time they entered the large two-floored bookstore, all three were full and satiated and could fully appreciate the blast of cold air-conditioning inside the building. Andy wove through the shelves, leading Paolo and Sharmaine to the non-fiction section. On one of the display tables was a stack of books. The cover was shiny, and Paolo could tell that the interior would be filled with glossy, expensive pages.

"Juanita Viray," Andy declared, pointing to the name written near the bottom. "I knew it was familiar! The author was doing a signing for her book in Scarborough Town Center a couple of months ago."

Paolo browsed through the topmost book on the stack. The interior was formatted like a magazine, with every other page featuring stunning full-paged images of lakes and mountains, while the opposite only had small sections of texts with lots of negative space. "She's a photographer," he noted.

"Even better," Andy said, flipping to the back page where a short author biography was written. "She's a Canadian. Has been for some time, it seems."

Paolo looked at the back page too. There was a picture of Juanita Viray, an old woman with only white in her hair. Wrinkles crowded the edges of her eyes and her smile. She came to Canada in the early 90s and spent the last decade traveling and photographing Canadian nature. Now, she lived in quiet retirement in Liberty Village, Toronto.

"It's not far from here, maybe 30, 40 minutes if you ride the streetcar," Andy said. "Just in case, you know, you want to ask her about what you saw in the museum."

Going to a museum was one thing, trying to meet a retired photographer an entirely different thing. Paolo was on the fence about pursuing the lead with Juanita Viray, but after a few days of checking to see if the curse had lifted after their prayer at the museum, Paolo and Sharmaine discovered that it was still very much in tact.

He didn't know why, but he was also besieged with the irrational fear that because Juanita Viray was old, there was a chance she might pass away before they could meet her. Although she lived just downtown, it didn't seem likely that they would have the opportunity to visit her once school started next week. And a lot could happen in ten months.

Paolo found the perfect excuse to visit Juanita when his older sister, Hannah, decided she wanted to spend a day exploring the University of Toronto downtown campus. She wanted to see how far her classes were from each other, where she could get lunch, which subway stations and streetcar stops were closest, and knowing her, she probably wanted to bask in the smell of higher education.

But he told his parents he wanted to go with her. He broached the idea that he could bring Sharmaine along, bracing himself for a certain reprimand that he was hanging out too much with this new girl, but Hannah actually approved of the idea and said she also wanted to spend some time with Sharmaine.

In typical Hannah fashion, spending time meant doing their own thing together. She generously paid for a grande-sized frapuccino for each of them, and she spent their downtown commute reading a new manga called Tsubasa. She did, however, scribble down in a notepad when they got on and off each bus and subway transfer.

"I was thinking Sharmaine and I could explore a bit on our own too," Paolo said as they climbed up the stairs of St. George subway station, and found themselves at the southern edge of the bustling UofT campus.

"Sure, just keep your phone open," Hannah said, already unfolding her map. "Let's meet up back here at, say... 1:30 for a late lunch?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Thanks so much for taking us downtown, Ate Hannah," Sharmaine said. Hannah smiled, and waved farewell to them, before cutting through the yard between two large buildings.

Paolo and Sharmaine couldn't use the public transit transfers to re-enter the same station they got the transfers from, so they walked a bit to Spadina, took the streetcar south to Queen Street, switched to a westbound streetcar and remained there until it curved around Roncesvalles.

Juanita Viray lived in an old, narrow townhouse with vines creeping up the walls. But the front yard was well swept and potted plants with colourful blooms brightened up the space.

Before they had set the date for the visit, Paolo had managed to find Juanita's phone number from the Yellow Pages, as it seemed she still offered photography services from time to time. They had conversed on the phone, with Paolo being quite upfront that he wanted to speak about the artifacts she had donated to the ROM specifically. Juanita had seemed reluctant at first, but as soon as Paolo mentioned he had a friend named Sharmaine Catindig, she had a change of heart and agreed to meet with them.

Paolo knocked on the door, and a few moments later it opened. A short woman, less than five feet tall, peered up at them through round thick-lensed glasses. Her white hair was swooped up into a bun. She was garbed in a loose plaid blouse and a matching knee-length pants. She had the slight bearing someone could expect of a person nearing 70, but her clear and direct approach to them gave her an air of someone younger.

"Paolo and Sharmaine, I take it?" she asked. Her voice held the softened Tagalog accent of Filipinos still fluent in the language, but now mostly spoke English. At their nods, she widened the door and waved them inside. "It's so nice to meet you, please come inside!"

"Good day po, Mrs. Viray," Paolo greeted, reaching for her hand.

But she laughed and fluttered her hands. "Oh, no need for mano. How polite of you both. In any case, you already have my blessing to come, that's good enough for me."

Her house was dim, given the narrow space for sunlight to filter in, but somehow it didn't lack coziness. The walls were painted a warm beige, and the curtains were a jolly floral pattern. The scent of pastry permeated the air, only mildly masking the scent of cheap drug-store perfume, which only made the house feel even more lived in.

Paolo and Sharmaine took their shoes off at the foyer, and he couldn't help noticing that there were only two pairs of footwear on the rack. One pair of sandals and one pair of loafers, both the same size.

"You live by yourself, Mrs. Viray?" he asked.

"Yes, I prefer the quiet. But no need to worry, my son and his family live just an hour away in Ajax, and they come by every weekend." Juanita ushered them into the living room, inviting them to take a seat. "I'm warming up some apple turnovers for us. What would you like to drink? Coke? Water?"

"Water's fine for me," Sharmaine answered, and Paolo said the same, the sweetness of the frapuccino he'd ordered still lingering on his tongue.

Juanita came back with a plate of apple turnovers and some paper towels, then made another trip to the kitchen for a couple glasses of water. Once she'd settled herself on the seat opposite the couch, she began, "Sharmaine Catindig, I'm assuming that you're related to Alberto Catindig? The man who led the dig for the artifacts that ended up in my family's possession?"

"That's correct," Sharmaine said, politely taking one of the turnovers. "Paolo and I wanted to ask for more information about them."

"Ah, I'm happy to share what I know, but I'm afraid that it isn't much," Juanita admitted. "I married into the family, you see, and my husband was only a distant cousin of the main Viray branch who bought the artifacts. I only inherited them quite recently, and only what was left in the family's possessions. I heard that they pawned off much of the gold and other jewelleries during hard times." She heaved a sigh, as if reluctant to continue. "To be honest, I was unsure whether I wanted to accept. I've heard that bad luck falls upon the family who keeps the artifacts."

"Bad luck?" Sharmaine echoed.

Juanita nodded. "Thieves breaking into houses and stealing. Someone's bank account got accessed by a conman and their lifesavings were withdrawn. And of course, there was the case of poor Felipe. After being a bachelor for so long, he finally secured an engagement, only for someone to reveal that he was secretly... what's the word young ones use these days, 'gay'?" Juanita shook her head. "You might see a lot of gay celebrities now in the Philippines, but back then it was such a scandal. And I say, even now, although Filipino society is more tolerant of them, they're still not quite accepted."

The circumstances she described wasn't quite the same as the curses that the Catindigs experienced, but it dawned on Paolo that the nature of this bad luck still reflected what happened to the disturbed soul. These misfortunes were all about breaches in privacy. The Virays' personal lives were unearthed for somebody else to take advantage of.

"My family has endured a lot of misfortune too," Sharmaine shared. "I'm curious if you know of a way to stop this from continuing."

"Honestly, the family has thought of destroying the artifacts, but a lot of us have had misgivings about it. It seemed like the wrong solution. Or not a solution at all. And, of course, some of them held enough value to keep the family afloat after being pawned off."

Sharmaine glanced at Paolo, before venturing on. "Actually, I think you're correct. Destroying them might be the wrong move. See, my grandmother consulted an albularyo once." She proceeded to tell Juanita about the vision of the albularyo, and the instructions of the entity to 'let the sun set, let the day end.' "I was actually thinking if you had ever tried to re-bury the artifacts."

"Re-bury them..." Juanita mused. She seemed a bit disturbed by the morbid news, but didn't appear to disbelieve Sharmaine. "I have not tried that, though I admit that this is the first time I've heard about the spirit and that message. A few months after I received the artifacts, I decided to donate them to the ROM. I figured, I'm in a new country, a country that's advanced and secular. Surely, if there was something supernatural about those artifacts, it wouldn't work here."

"Did you donate all the pieces?" Paolo asked. "Perhaps we can just try Sharmaine's idea. See if it works."

Juanita lifted a finger. "I do have something that the ROM declined. Wait a moment." She shuffled off upstairs to her room, but returned not even a minute later with a bundle wrapped in fine, shiny abaca. She placed it on the chair and unwrapped the abaca slowly. Inside was something gray and tattered, and it took a while for Paolo to guess that it must have been one of the textiles he'd seen from Sharmaine's pictures of the contents of the jars.

"This wasn't well-maintained," Juanita said. "The ROM told me that it wouldn't look good in the display shelves, and they could use the space for something else."

"Would it be all right with you to bury it?" Sharmaine asked.

Juanita tilted her head, pondering. "I don't know if any cemetery will accept this. But there is a shallow pit in my backyard. The previous owners probably wanted to install a fairy pond of some sort, but the only thing they placed in there was a steel basin of water. By the time I came, it only attracted flies. We could use that."

Much like her frontyard, Juanita's backyard was also small but neat. It was bordered on all three sides with a tall wooden fence. Along the eastern fence, a line of pink and purple flowers grew, the names of which Paolo didn't know. There was a maple tree on the far corner, and a little off to its side was the pit that Juanita was talking about.

"There's a bag of gardening soil in the closet just beside the door to the backyard," Juanita informed them. Paolo went to fetch it, and by the time he joined Juanita and Sharmaine by the pit, they had already lowered the abaca wrapper and the old textile it contained into it. The only thing left for him to do was cover the hole with soil.

They stood back, watching the makeshift grave. Leaves rustled in the late summer wind, and playful shrieks and shouts emanated from the other townhouse units further down.

"Maybe we should say a prayer?" Juanita suggested. "Give me a moment, I have a prayer book in my room."

She returned with a little book the size of her palm, and Paolo recognized it as one of those bound collections women usually sold near churches in the Philippines. Juanita rifled through it until she found the prayer she was looking for.

"Lord Jesus Christ, by your own three days in the tomb, you hallowed the graves of all who believe in you and so made the grave a sign of hope that promises resurrection even as it claims our mortal bodies. Grant that our sibling may sleep here in peace until you awake them to glory, for you are the resurrection and the life. Then they will see you face-to-face and in your light will see light and know the splendor of God, for you live and reign for ever and ever."

The three of them finished with "Amen."

There was no sudden rush of wind, no clapping lightning or thunder, but the void stillness Paolo had felt back in the museum was not the same atmosphere that greeted him this time. There was... something. Like a tickle at the back of his awareness, a subtle shifting of the ground that he couldn't quite put into words. He patted his pants pocket and pulled out the same story he and Sharmaine had worked on.

With trembling fingers, he unfolded the paper, and his breath rushed out of him.

The story was still not complete, not yet anyway, but it was beginning to. Ink was bleeding back into the lines that a few days ago were completely blank. Seeing those words, the ending bloomed back into his mind, as if it had always been there and had been merely covered by a veil.

"I think it's working," he whispered, voice wobbly with awe.

Sharmaine sidled up to him, watching as the words slowly, but surely, appeared on the page. Her eyes were misty, her voice hoarse when she replied, "I should go check all my other notebooks. I think I... I think I'm remembering all the endings I wrote."

Juanita hadn't known about the curse, but seeing what was happening on the piece of paper, she probably concluded that their burial triggered an end to some long struggle. Her face settled into a peaceful understanding.

"I think your hunch about re-burying the artifacts is right all along," she said. "I can apply to retrieve the others from the museum, and I'll see to it that they get properly buried as well. I don't know if we'll ever be able to gather all of the other items from the burial jars, but I'll talk to my son and see what we can do."

"Mrs. Viray, I can't thank you enough." Sharmaine reached for the old woman's hands and clasped them tight. "Thank you for granting us this opportunity. Thank you for holding on to at least one of the artifacts. At least we got our answer."

Their departure from Juanita's home was a heartfelt one, and as Paolo and Sharmaine rode back up to campus, she repeated the same words to him.

"You didn't have to get yourself involved," she told him. "And that's why I'm doubly thankful to you. Because you didn't have to do anything, but you did. Thanks, Paolo."

And just like the first time she ever thanked him, Paolo could only shyly mumble a stupid response. "It's nothing."

It wasn't nothing, as the passing days proved. Every day, he would get a short text from Sharmaine, updating him which of her stories' endings re-appeared. True, they were illegible, since the stories in her notebooks were packed so close together, that the space where the endings reappeared overlapped the beginnings of the newer ones. But Sharmaine didn't particularly care about a single story she had written when she was 11 or 12. The fact that she could now finish writing any story was the real triumph.

Paolo couldn't help but marvel at how the curse had unraveled here, of all places. This little Toronto district didn't feel like the kind of place where magical things happened, where people discovered and broke curses several generations old. He couldn't believe he even had a hand in it at all, him who was listless and lacking in curiosity.

"I suppose you're going to take a creative writing class this year," Paolo said, talking on the phone with Sharmaine.

"Is it strange to say I'm scared?" Sharmaine chuckled. "What if I still can't finish stories, and I don't have the curse to blame this time?"

Paolo laughed, and just for the fun of it, he switched to Tagalog. "You'll learn. You've had more practice writing endings than most writers, I imagine."

She seemed taken aback by his switch. "Not worried about Marielle anymore?"

Paolo considered, and found that he truly wasn't. After a couple of weeks preoccupied with a curse that engendered loss and incapabilities, it seemed laughable to him that he would purposely degrade a skill that so many other people spent hours and money just to learn.

"No, not worried at all."

"How about you? Have you thought of which electives you're going to take?"

Paolo glanced at his tidy desk, a single application form sitting on it. It was all filled out now, and he would be submitting it to the office tomorrow. "Actually, I won't have any electives. I've applied to the multimedia program, so my timetable will be pretty much set for me."

"Look at you! Multimedia program, huh? Perhaps I'll take one of the graphics courses then. We could be partners for a project, or something."

"Yeah, we could be." He smiled. "Recent experience tells me we'll be good at it."

The End

Cultural Thoughts From my Philippines Trip

2023-08-12T20:34:00-04:00

Sometimes going back to the Philippines can feel very wistful to me. Life is so different in Canada, and having spent two-thirds of my life here, sometimes returning home can feel like discovering an old pair of beloved shoes and finding that they don't quite fit you anymore. It makes me want to work harder to keep my connections with the country alive.

For a recap of my trip to the Philippines earlier this year, take a gander at my Philippines Trip Travelogue where I outlined the places we went to and some of the activities we did. This post is a follow-up where I talk a bit more about my experience regarding certain aspects of the society there, experiencing "reverse" culture shock at things that used to be familiar to me but not anymore, and things that I'm experiencing for the first time as a balik-bayan visiting the country.

I'd like to state upfront though that for the most part, I'm not going to be passing any value judgment. Each society and culture offers different types of experiences, and unless I can see a lot of harm in something, how one resonates with specific cultural practices is for the most part a matter of taste and familiarity.

Society is very communal

My childhood home sits on a corner lot, adjacent to a gated neighbourhood. The house across the street has a large sari-sari store before its sidewalk, and on its roof is a wide ad for phone data top-ups. The house across the other street bordering ours opens its garage doors at 5am in the morning and sells breakfast and lunch dishes until 3pm. Our next-door neighbours used to be an internet cafe back when we visited in 2011; this time, I'm not entirely sure what service they're running, but they still seem to be selling something. Old ladies sit in front of the house conversing all day, and they greet us whenever we exit. Finally, the house diagonal from us offers ulam for lunch and dinner, as well as halo-halo for dessert.

A man leans his motorcycle on the street branching out from the lot. Throughout the day, others stop by to get their motorcycles checked-out and fixed. A fruit peddler with a cart full of mangoes would park in the same street near the motorcycles, hoping that passersby would buy a bag full of his offerings.

Every morning, around 5:30 to 6, my parents listened for the distinct pot-pot-poott of pandesal peddlers making their rounds in the neighbourhood. They would set aside coins of 20 to 40 pesos the night before, so they could hail the peddler on time. That's how we would get our breakfast. A bag of freshly baked pandesal.

This is just our little spot in the neighbourhood. It's not even the busiest spot in the area, not by a mile. It's a residential area. And unlike the residential neighbourhoods here in Canada with their orderly roads, swept-up driveways, trimmed lawns, and wide sidewalks on which perhaps you might spot half-a-dozen people strolling along on a warm summer day, neighbourhoods in the Philippines are also business zones. Most families own some kind of micro-business, arteries of communal life.

Perhaps it's the heat and the dust; most folks there don't like to go out because of the weather and the pollution, so having small stores and eateries right across their homes become a convenience that the savvy-minded learn to monetize. Peddlers save money from paying rent in a market or a mall or a plaza, and their hard work of cycling around in the heat and dust become just part of the labour they incur in running their business.

Sometimes I sat in the living room and just enjoyed watching the pulse of the neighbourhood. Everyone seemed so at ease, so connected. You want something to eat but you're too lazy to cook? You don't need to call for delivery. You don't need to drive for take-out. You simply walk the dozen steps to your neighbours' garage and buy whatever they already cooked. And it's fresh and hot and hearty.

One time my parents worried about when the garbage was going to get collected. I suggested we look it up online, and they laughed. Things like that aren't written on government websites, they said, not like in Canada. We'd have to ask the neighbours. Which we did. We asked our neighbours a lot of things. Sometimes strangers come up to my parents too and ask them questions.

I know that there are downsides to this type of community as well. People are quick to talk and gossip, and things that would otherwise remain quite private in a Canadian neighbourhood (like your coming and going from your house), become public knowledge. But during my time there, things were quite good and now I sometimes catch myself wishing for a bread peddler at 6 in the morning.

Bathrooms

3-piece private bathrooms in the Philippines usually come without a bathtub, unlike your typical 3-piece Canadian bathroom. They might not even come with a shower, and instead, the spigot is used to fill up buckets with water, and people use a tabo to pour water over themselves. Likelier than not, the entire floor is also meant to withstand water, sloping down neatly to a large drainage, which is why bathrooms can also easily serve as laundry rooms (handwashing, of course).

This type of bathroom was so second-nature to me when I was young, that when I first immigrated to Canada, I actually found the tub & shower combo kind of impractical. What if water spills over the side? What if the toilet overflows? How will you get the water to drain? Turns out, you just have to mop it all up. And you'll be lucky if the tiles don't end up with some kind of water damage.

It's so interesting that during my trip, encountering our old bathrooms kind of put me for a spin. Wait, I have to change into a different set of slippers? Waterproof slippers? What if the soap slips out of my hand while I'm washing and falls into the toilet? Why aren't there curtains anywhere? There's no hot water?

I mean, to be fair, it's so hot in the Philippines, taking a bath with cold water is exactly the kind of refreshing activity people need to beat the heat. But even in summer in Canada, I can't imagine taking a shower with only cold water.

Things get more interesting in public bathrooms. They don't provide toilet paper. At least not for free. If you're lucky, there might be a container that will spit out a pack of tissues if you give it a few coins. If you're in the higher-end bathrooms that charge P5 or P10 to use, the stalls might even have their own bidet or hand-held sprinkler. But for the most part, you either have to do without toilet paper or bring your own.

My mother once said it was because people would steal toilet paper if they were provided for free. But other times she also said it was because the common Filipino practice in bathrooms is to just wash yourself with soap and water. Which is true in private, but it's a practice that is nearly impossible to do in public washrooms.

Varying School Start and End Dates

When I was a child going to school in the Philippines, school years began in June and ended in March. April and May are the hottest months there, so people prefer to stay home. Not to mention, Holy Week was a major holiday, so most schools tended to end their semesters before then.

Now, apparently, start and end dates differ from school to school! That's... that's so bemusing to me. One of my aunts said it was because of the pandemic. Schedules got thrown out of whack, so now different schools decided to just start and end whenever they wanted. My family was there from end of May until early June, and in that time, we saw students still going to school, others just starting, while some were graduating and having end-of-year ceremonies. It was madness!

Lack of Credit Card Usage

I already noticed during my last visit in 2019 that cash still reigns king in the Philippines. However, I thought that with the pandemic and with many businesses moving online, that perhaps the uptake for credit cards would increase. It didn't really, which surprised me. It's true that online shopping has become a little more ubiquitous than a few years ago, but there's still an expectation that you'll be paying for cash.

On our second day there, we decided to have take-out delivered to our home. I was speaking to someone on the phone, and she asked me how much I would like to pay. I was extremely confused, because of course I would pay the total -- it's not like I have the choice to pay less, and I wouldn't offer to pay more. After a bit of hemming and hawwing, the person on the phone explained they needed to know how much change the delivery man needed to bring. I was gobsmacked.

In contrast, most delivery men here in Canada would bring a credit/debit card machine with them. If paying by cash, it's pretty much expected that they will pocket the change as a tip. But it's also rare now to pay at your door. Most of the time, online services will accept credit cards right at check-out. (I did try to use the restaurant's online website, but it was so buggy, I ended up just calling. It was still a buggy experience, because the line disconnected two times.)

Most types of service exchange in the Philippines still prefer cash. If you're going to ride on the most common forms of transportation (tricycle, jeep, vans, buses, etc.) they'll charge you in cash. If you're going to buy in the wet markets, the fruit stalls, family-owned eateries, they'll only accept cash. I went to a grocery store that accepted credit cards, and they had to ask for my ID! You might get lucky in SM and find some stores accepting credit cards, but many don't.

That said, if I had the choice, and if the recent pandemic didn't make it unhygienic to use cash, I do actually prefer cash for in-person purchases. I think there's something about the physicality of it that makes you all that much more aware of how much you're actually spending. And with cash you have the advantage of never overspending.

Lack of Books and Bookstores

Okay, this is the part where I might get a little judgmental, but as someone who loves to read and write, I'm so so disheartened by the lack of books, bookstores, and publicly accessible libraries in the Philippines. It's very ironic for a people that owes their colonial liberation partly to literature. And I'm not the only one who notices this. Historian Ambeth Ocampo said in his book Rizal Without the Overcoat, which was published back in 1990:

Filipinos are not a reading people, and despite the compulsory course on the life and works of Rizal today, from the elementary to the university levels, it is accepted that the Noli me tángere and El Filibusterismo are highly regarded but seldom read (if not totally ignored). Therefore one asks, how can unread novels exert any influence?

More than 30 years later, literature has not boomed even in the slightest in our culture. The National Bookstore is predominantly a school supply store. And more than half of the shelves there contain books imported from the West and manga imported from East Asia. The singular shelf proclaiming Filipiniana works contains a sad array of books not even sorted by genre. (Another pet peeve of mine is how the majority of the Filipiniana books are in English. Tagalog might get the pitiful second place, but what about the dozens of other major regional languages in the Philippines? I went to a National Bookstore in Pampanga, and there weren't even Kapampangan books.)

And this is if you're lucky to even come across a bookstore in a mall. Unlike here in Canada where Chapters Indigo is a steady presence in all malls, and even smaller malls might get a cozy Coles store, bookstores in the Philippines are almost like specialty businesses. It's as if you're shopping for an antique. I hate to say it, but I saw more books in the Taipei airport during our layover.

About a decade ago, back when Wattpad was Toronto's darling startup, and screen producers in the Philippines were combing the writing platform for their next movie or TV show ideas, I hoped that perhaps books and writing will now see a wider cultural resurgence. Unfortunately not much has come out of that, aside from a dedicated "Wattpad Books" shelf tucked alongside the "Filipiniana" shelf. And as someone who uses a digital platform to share my works, I'm in no position to laugh at Wattpad, but I must admit that the range of genres and types of stories it offers is very, very limited.

My Aunt told me that people just don't read physical books. She said that most people could get an epub for P10 from a sari-sari store. And because we also had a difficult time finding vendors who sold newspapers while we stayed there, I was quite ready to accept that perhaps Philippine literature has simply gone overwhelmingly digital.

But if that were true, where's the marketing? Where are the ads for the ecommerce sites? Where are the authors churning out these P10 epubs and how does one discover their books? Basically, where is the Kobo Store of the Philippines?

Perhaps I'm just making a big deal out of this. Is it really that bad if Filipinos don't like to read? We have such a long history of oral storytelling, thus is it so difficult to believe that Filipinos might resonate more with a visual and auditory medium? I mean, there are lots of podcasts narrating short stories. There are lots of Filipino YouTubers.

But to answer my first question, yes, I do think it's disadvantageous for a people to not have a solid body of literature to represent them and their experiences. I do think it's unhealthy to always read about those outside your home and rarely have a chance to reflect on what's happening inside. And even though I am part of the diaspora, I don't think Filipinos in the diaspora should be disproportionately represented in our literature. Local voices matter. Regional languages matter.

And to say that Filipinos can simply access and proliferate our own stories via films or shows is to discount the power of the written word. There are so many things that are easier to demonstrate with text than screenplay. (I have a lot of respect for the production team of Maria Clara at Ibarra, I mean those costumes were banging, but I still cringe every time I remember the cartoony CGI of the ship by the docks.) There are so many concepts you can convey through text that are literally not going to be any more expensive than their mundane counterparts.

Now, I do admit that perhaps a 2-week trip to the Philippines and hearsay from my relatives may not be the best way to learn about the health of the literary industry in the country. Perhaps if I had my foot in the right doors, if I had the right connections, if I belonged in the more bookish circles, I would have a better understanding of writing, publishing, and literary access there. But already, all these "ifs" show that literature might be an exclusive resource for most Filipinos.

Philippines Trip Travelogue

2023-07-22T19:48:00-04:00

Hey everyone! It's been about two months since my family and I left for our two-week trip to the Philippines, and things have settled down quite a bit. I really wanted to write this blog post as soon as we arrived back in Canada so the memories are still fresh, but I'm only now finding the time and energy to do so. Perhaps I'm just out of practice travelling, but hoo boy, I was exhausted coming back! I don't know how those of you who travel multiple times a year survive the stress!

This post is the first of a two-part account of my trip to the Philippines. In this post, I'll outline where I went and what we did, and in the second post, I will do a deeper dive on some of my thoughts about the culture there and how I perceive it as someone who's spent the majority of her life in the diaspora.

Pre-trip

To be completely honest, I was kind of dreading this trip for a number of reasons. First, my family has not yet gone out of lockdown-mode completely. Even though the restrictions have all been lifted where we live, my father still worries about our risk of catching covid. Both my parents are now 60 or over, and they are in the bracket of those most at risk. It isn't just a matter of catching it; they're also more likely to suffer complications as a result, and given that my father doesn't have the sturdiest of health to begin with, I can understand his wariness. My mother, who falls under the "essential worker" category, continued to work at her store even through the lockdowns, and my father believed that we shouldn't be adding any more risk than that if we can help it.

Hence, since I started working from home when the pandemic began, I've mostly stayed home. In fact, other than grocery and church, there really isn't any other public place we go to regularly. Even in those spaces, we are fully equipped with masks, rubber gloves, and hand sanitizers. Anything we buy, any package that comes to us, are thoroughly cleansed with soap and water or alcohol wipes. Any takeout food we order get immediately transferred to our own plates and bowls, and none of the restaurants' utensils get touched.

Going from being mostly house-bound, to riding a plane for almost 24 hours, and living in a more clustered neighbourhood, and riding tricycles and jeeps and vans? Of course I was worried how we were going to deal with all of those!

Secondly, there were also emotional aspects of the trip that I wasn't entirely ready to face yet. I mentioned last year that a couple of my relatives passed away. My cousin, in particular, was always someone I had looked forward to meeting again every time we visited the Philippines. I just didn't know how her passing has changed the dynamics of my family back there. I didn't know if there were issues about her that would come up and perhaps cause painful memories to surface again.

Travelogue

That said, all of that worrying seems to have been mostly for naught. Although we did experience a few hiccups, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the Philippines! I am so glad I took the opportunity to return home, experience the culture and the climate and its nature again, and of course, to spend some much needed time with my extended family.

Here's an overview of our agenda and some of my thoughts about each place. The main purpose of the trip was really to reunite with relatives, so outings or pasyalan remained relatively few and far between.

Clark Airport

One of the unique things we did in this trip was to use Clark International Airport in Pampanga instead of NAIA. The flight prices were a little bit cheaper at Clark (about $200 per person), and since my father's home province is Pampanga, we thought it would also motivate us to spend more time in Pampanga and maybe explore Clark and Angeles a little bit.

Unfortunately the setup wasn't as ideal as we first imagined. Our home is in Laguna, and we realized too late that there aren't very many ways to commute privately from province to province. Since my parents still wanted to avoid as much risk in catching covid as possible, they didn't want to ride in public buses and shuttles. And it turns out that Grab and other taxis operate only regionally. We ended up paying one of my aunts who lived about an hour away from the airport to pick us up and drop us off in Laguna.

Clark Airport has a lot of potential though. It is large, clean, and very organized. Perhaps it has the advantage of being not as busy as NAIA, and that's why it's so well-maintained. But I think if it starts to operate at capacity, it might help alleviate the over-crowding at NAIA, and maybe more inter-provincial transportation will become available.

Home in Laguna

My childhood house is in Laguna, and to be perfectly honest, it's no longer in good shape. It hasn't been for a while now. Back when we visited home for the first time in 2011 since immigrating, there had been drastic changes to it already. The sinks in the bathrooms don't work, the roof leaks, the toilets can only be manually flushed, and the washing machine broke a long time ago. There wasn't much we could do, as it had only been my grandmother maintaining the house since we left. And ever since the pandemic began, my grandmother started to live with other relatives in Pampanga who would be able to take better care of her, as should be. So for three years, the house hasn't been maintained at all.

My parents and I anticipated that our stay won't exactly be a hotel experience, so we tried to prepare as best we can. We brought air mattresses from Canada, and budgeted for drinking water and cooked meals. We found several old batsa, in which we were able to launder our clothes by hand.

We also underestimated the heat! Even though all of our relatives already warned us about how hot it was there, we assumed it wouldn't really hold us back. But our house possessed a meagre collection of only two electric fans, both of which held the power of a whisper at full strength. The first night we arrived there, my father was quite distressed. He kept asking, "How are we going to make it through two weeks here? Perhaps we should find a hotel."

Not to worry though. After a nice cold bath, all three of us were much comforted. I don't even remember suffering any jet lag. As soon as I lay down on my air mattress, I was out!

I'm quite proud that we managed to stay at that house almost the entire trip, just as planned (we did rent a hotel at Clark for the last two nights of the trip so we won't miss our flight). The things that seemed like they were going to be major inconveniences at the beginning turned out to be bearable. I quite enjoyed being able to launder my clothes by hand! And there were rainy days when we didn't even turn on the fans anymore because we were actually quite cool.

I noticed a lot of developments in my neighbourhood. So many people ride motorcycles now. Several of my neighbours' houses have expanded. The majority of households have some type of microbusiness at their porch or driveway. And while there are more traffic lights installed, the traffic has gotten worse around a commercial complex that has become exponentially bigger since I was last there in 2019.

We didn't have internet either in the house, so I spent a lot of time just sitting and observing the area. I wasn't bored at all. I often thought about how the vibe just felt completely different there. Noisier, crowded, but so full of life.

Metro Manila

Another place we frequented was my mother's hometown at the outskirts of NCR. Many of my mother's relatives live in a compound with multiple apartments, so it's very convenient that we see so many of them at just one location.

Our reception there was very warm and welcoming. I was relieved to see that folks seem to be handling their grief well, especially my aunt who was very close to her daughter who passed away. She seemed to be taking good care of herself. Everyone else in her family also seem to be getting along all right, which is such a huge relief to me.

My mother celebrated her 60th birthday at a Max's restaurant near there. Her birthday was actually a few weeks before the trip, but she and a few other relatives whose birthdays were all in May pooled together resources to throw a nice lunch for everyone. That celebration was one of the highlights of the trip for me. The food at Max's was delicious, and made even better by such good company.

Metro Manila didn't seem like it changed much to me, but perhaps that's just the way things are in big cities. It's harder to detect changes or improvements. The only thing I noticed for certain is that my mother's family's compound seems to be getting more and more narrow every time.

Tagaytay

For the first time ever, I was finally able to visit Tagaytay and Taal volcano! This was one of the places I specifically requested to visit back when we were just thinking of even planning a trip. Even though I grew up in Laguna as a child, I didn't have many opportunities to go on nature trips back then, even to the ones nearby.

The interesting part here was our commute to Tagaytay. Like I said earlier, my parents were still wary about catching covid, so my father looked for ways we can get there in a more private setting. We tried to book a Grab car, but the app kept telling us that there were no drivers who could make the trip there. In the end, my father rented an 18-seater van, with just the three of us. We paid for the remaining fifteen spots. I felt a little conflicted about it. On one hand, I'm surprised that there just aren't taxis you can call to take you to a popular tourist spots, like we have here in Canada. On the other hand, I felt like we came off as special snowflakes. But we did pay for the other spots, and based on the Canadian dollar conversion, it seemed like a fair rate, so perhaps I don't have anything to feel bad about. And if it reduces the health risk for my parents, then it's ultimately the better option.

The van dropped us off at Sky Ranch, which we spent about two hours roaming. It was cool and windy at the high balcony, although to be honest, I had assumed it would be cooler based on the way people talked about Tagaytay. Unfortunately the day was a little foggy, so we couldn't really see the Taal island at our vantage point since it was occluded by the mists. We stayed so long at the balcony hoping the wind would drive the fog away, but eventually we got tired of waiting, and decided to get lunch.

We chose a bulalo restaurant situated on a hill with an open dining area. We were very excited to taste their bulalo, because we heard that Tagaytay is the bulalo capital of the Philippines. For those who don't know, bulalo is a type of beef-bone soup with tender pieces of beef, sliced cobs of corn, and other types of vegetables like petchay, cabbage, and string beans. It's served with rice, and is a perfect treat on cooler days. Which is probably why so many restaurants serve it in Tagaytay. My parents and I thoroughly enjoyed the bulalo! The broth was hot and refreshing, the meat just perfectly tender. My parents also bought a side dish of pork chop, which was crispy and salty and so filling.

After lunch, we headed down to Taal lake and paid for a boat tour of the volcano. This was one of the absolute highlights of my trip! It turns out that the volcano was the entire island and there are 47 craters where lava had shot out from. I had always thought there was only one exit point, because when you search for Taal volcano, they always show the same picture. But this picture actually only shows one of the craters.

It took about 2.5 hours to go around the entire volcano-island. We weren't allowed to land on the island itself, because there was still a safety warning against it. Taal volcano last erupted only in 2020. The waves of the lake got larger as we rounded the back of the island. It almost felt like we were at sea. It also started to rain a little bit. At one point I even saw a flash of lightning streak down from the sky right onto the horizon. The wind was strong and cool, and I felt like I was in the presence of something big and ancient. During those few hours, all my anxieties about this trip receded and I was fully in the moment, savouring a nature experience I don't often get to have.

SM & Other Malls

Throughout our two weeks there, we periodically tried to stave off the heat by going to malls. SM is probably the most common mall in the Philippines, and there's a branch of it only a tricyle ride from our house.

It seems to be common practice to drop by malls to just relax in an airconditioned environment, because by far the most common type of store in SM is restaurants. And I'm not talking about the simple food courts you find here in the malls in Canada (although there are food courts as well), but dozens of restaurants with indoor seating right inside the mall. They are clustered right after another, often filling at least two wings of the building. And they are packed! Malls here in Canada are usually filled with teenagers and young adults. In the Philippines, they are filled with entire clans. Families and extended families with grandparents, little babies, younger children, aunts, uncles, parents, siblings, everyone. They all tend to go out together. So then you start to understand why a typical food court isn't enough.

The Friday of our first week there, we shopped at SM for souvenirs to bring back to Canada. It's actually funny because that was the first time I've shopped at a mall since 2020. It took travelling to the other side of the world for me to experience mall-shopping again.

Pagsanjan Falls

Another nature trip we went on was a boat ride to Pagsanjan Falls. This is another popular destination in Laguna that I haven't gone to before.

The setup for the boat ride was very interesting. The boaters seem to be part of one big tourist outfit, but they don't manage the tours themselves. Instead, the river that leads to the falls is lined with restaurants that double as resorts, and you go to one of these restaurants to pay for the boat ride. They provide you with a life vest, a helmet, and plastic bags for your things. We were also warned by the restaurant owner not to give tips to the boaters, which I found curious.

They hailed the boat for us, and we went on a two hour journey to the falls. Some sections of the river are dotted by boulders and rocky patches called rapids, and the boaters navigate these by kicking at the rocks and manually hauling the boat along. It's pretty tiring, so they have to rest at some points of the journey. It was also hot, and I kind of felt bad that they do this for a living just to entertain tourists.

We passed by really beautiful sceneries. The river is in between two cliffs. The water was clear and filled with goldfish. Bright blue dragonflies flitted in the air. Trees and plants covered the high hills that penned us in. Just like in the boat ride in Tagaytay, I felt my anxieties ebbing away.

There was a falls partway through the journey, and the boaters took us to splash a bit beneath it. They told us that when the water of the river is high during rainy season, that was usually the farthest they take the tourists, because getting to the second falls becomes dangerous.

However since we were still in the dry season, we were able to go to the second falls. We landed on a rocky patch, and a bamboo raft was waiting there to take us into the falls and the cave behind it. Believe it or not, taking the bamboo raft was one of the things I looked forward to, because in my current writing project, bamboo rafts are ubiquitous in the story's world. So it was nice that I got to experience it, no matter how short the trip was.

The falls wasn't that high or strong, definitely not anywhere near Niagara levels. We did get thoroughly soaked when we went underneath it. The cave behind it was not very large, and we stayed there maybe for only a few minutes, before going back.

I didn't take many pictures during the return trip, because I just wanted to enjoy the view and the experience. When we got back to the restaurant, we ordered a meal just in time for lunch. We had Chinese-style fried rice, beef with ampalaya, and pancit canton. Every single dish was delicious. The dining area was also in a roofed patio, and partway through our meal, heavy rain started to pour. I know the term hygge is more often attributed to European and North American experiences, but I felt like eating on a patio in a tropical rain beside a river was such a hygge experience.

Clark, Pampanga

The last two days of our trip, my parents and I stayed at a hotel in Clark, so we won't have a hard time catching our flight all the way from Laguna. Clark has a really interesting history. It used to be a US military base in the Philippines, that's why it has an English name, and the streets there also have English names. Nowadays, it is considered its own "economic zone." I'm not entirely sure what that means, but it appears to be a hub for foreign businesses. While we drove around the area, there were lots of Korean restaurants and shops, some Chinese casinos, and business from other parts of the world. I also noticed that the area in general is a lot cleaner and neater, the traffic much more well-managed, than Manila or Laguna. There were large parks, and the architecture of the buildings are fancier and sturdier. It really screams, "Hey, the Philippines can be modern. Please invest in us!"

I am glad to see this type of development in the Philippines. My only wish is for this type of development to happen to other parts of the country too, because our people deserve it, not only because we want impress or invite foreign investment.

Initially, we were planning to go up to Baguio on our very last day. From Clark, the trip would have only been two hours or so, compared to almost double that if we were starting from Laguna. However, the tour we were booking fell through because of a mistake with my remittance back in Canada. It's okay, though. I think it was nice to spend our last day resting and making sure we had enough energy for the almost 24-hours trip back home.

All right, that hopefully gives a good overview of how we spent our time in the Philippines. We may not have done many activities, but the purpose of the trip really was to reconnect with relatives, so most of the time we spent in Laguna was dedicated to that. Stay tuned for the follow-up post with more in-depth thoughts on aspects of the country and culture that intrigued me.

Romantic Tropes I Like and Dislike

2022-10-08T11:50:00-04:00

I rarely read books that are squarely in the romance genre, so the tropes that I will be talking about today are ones that typically appear in fantasy books with romantic subplots. Even though the books I pick up usually don't have that much romance, the way the romance is executed has a pretty big impact on my reading experience. If the romance is good, I enjoy the book a lot more; but if the romance is poorly done, my entire reading experience kind of suffers.

TL;DR: I am incredibly nitpicky about romantic subplots.

Romantic Tropes I Dislike

Let's start with the ones that aren't my cup of tea. Actually, that's putting it mildly. Some of these I would not touch with a ten-foot pole. Buckle up, because I can get a little opinionated.

That said, just because I don't like these tropes, it doesn't mean that I think people are terrible for liking these themselves. I also don't judge people who are involved in these types of relationships in real life. I hope that goes without saying, but at a time when people believe that what we read strongly reflects our values, I want to be clear about that. Yes, it's true that my opinions are shaped largely by my own life experiences, but I would never meddle in romantic affairs of real people if they don't concern me. When I talk about why I don't like these tropes, it's only in the context of reading.

Love Triangles

I know many people don't like love triangles, but my dislike for love triangles is on the edge of the spectrum. No matter how much other people rant about love triangles, I always find that they will have exceptions in which love triangles are acceptable to them. (In fact, one thing that drives me bonkers are those blog posts titled "Books that don't have love triangles," yet half of those books do have love triangles, but the blogger considers them excusable.)

That's not the case with me. I hate love triangles, period. No exceptions. Some of my favourite authors whose storytelling skills render me on my knees in stunned adoration have written love triangles that diminished my enjoyment of their works. Do I still like those books? Sure. But I would love them even more had the love triangles not been there.

Some people might say love triangles can be good depending on its execution. Still not the case for me. There are generally two types of love triangles. The first, which I feel is the one most people tend to hate, is when the endgame is obvious, and there's just one character thrown into the mix to spice things up. I hate this type of love triangle, because I feel that it's unnecessary. Even when the author uses it to symbolize a bigger theme in the book (ie. the protagonist choosing between two ideals, two communities, two ways of life, etc.), I feel like there are better ways to execute that than having two romantic rivals.

I also hate the opposite type of love triangle, in which I don't know whom the character will choose. When I want to feel engaged in a romantic subplot, I want to be invested. And for some reason, I'm as risk-averse with the romantic option I'm supposed to root for as I am in my real-life finances. By the end of the book, I want to feel like my investment paid off.

That's not to say I'm incapable of not engaging in a romantic subplot -- I've read many books where I wasn't invested at all in the romance. But I feel like that expectation has to be presented upfront. I have to pick up the book knowing that the romance isn't going to play much part in my reading experience. Otherwise, it's a bit disappointing to have a book recommended to me because I'd enjoy its romance, only for me to have to disengage.

The reason I dislike love triangles so much boils down to this: authors often use love triangles to inspire unhealthy emotions and actions in the characters, and then pretend these are romantic. The character caught between two rivals would often engage in power play, pitting their two rivals against each other. Even if the character themselves aren't aware they're doing it, that's what the narrative is doing. The love triangle ends when one rival gets chosen or the other one dies, and usually none of the ugly power play gets addressed.

I admit that this is perhaps where my own experiences affect my reading a little too strongly. I've never been involved in a love triangle myself, but I have been an affected fourth-party to one. And I've seen how the resulting jealousy has rotted relationships and turned generous people into senseless oafs. So when I encounter a love triangle in a book, I can't suspend disbelief enough to feel like these characters are involved in anything resembling a romance.

Also, love triangles often involve cheating and infidelity, but this section has gotten so long already, so I'll just move on. (You get the point though: I don't find cheating/infidelity fun to read.)

Temporary / No HEA

This one is less of a trope and more of a mis-marketing. I think one of the most well-known conventions of the romance genre is "happily ever after." When characters are involved in a romance, there is a silent promise that they will end up together. When this doesn't happen, I believe we move away from the realm of romance and into a more general type of love story (think Nicholas Sparks).

For me, when a book has a strong enough romantic subplot, I am expecting that it will adhere to genre conventions. So it does get a little frustrating when a romantic interest gets killed, or if the characters don't actually end up together. Or even worse -- when you can tell that the author thinks a genre convention is silly, makes it a point to break that particular convention, so they can secretly laugh at their readers who were expecting it. That always feels patronizing.

Large Age Gaps

I probably wouldn't be as irked by this trope if we had more Kida/Milo type of relationships out there. But the fact that the vast majority of fantasy stories that employ this trope pair up girls barely out of their teens with immortal men or men hundreds of years old suggests that people find the creepiness factor titillating. I don't.

It's also strange that these immortal men always happen to look like they're in their 20s. (Even stranger when the authors themselves call these men "boys.")

Once again, my inability to suspend disbelief is a major reason why I can't enjoy this trope. When an immortal man or fantasy creature "falls in love" with seventeen-year-old Sally, there's usually this strange, utterly unconvincing declaration of love that goes something like, "You're so special. I've never met anyone like you before. I've never felt like this with another woman."

Why are you lying?

I just honestly cannot believe that someone could live eons and not once have felt the same intense attraction to someone else. My disbelief is also partly due to the protagonist not being all that special in the grand scheme of things. Look, I love ordinary protagonists. I love characters that exude girl-next-door vibes. But don't lie and say you've never met another ordinary girl. If anything, I would appreciate it more if the immortal man (creature/vampire/fae/what-have-you) simply flat out says, "I've had another girl exactly like you two years ago, and I can't even remember her name. There's been thousands. Just know that that's how things will likely end up with us." Because you know what, at least that's convincing.

At this point, the only way I would be convinced by this trope is if your super special protagonist is Jobu Tupaki.

Also, imagine being an immortal and not even considering the 90-year-old Betty Whites of your world as a potential love interest. (I mean, if you want to talk unique, statistically at any point in history, there have been far fewer 90-year-old women than teenage girls.)

When both characters happen to live in human years, I still get a little weirded out by big age gaps. Typically anything above ten years, give or take, makes me a little uncomfortable. A decade is usually enough that the people involved won't be in the same stage of life, and this can introduce pretty big power imbalances. Again, I want to reiterate my disclaimer at the top: I'm not judging people in real life who may be part of relationships like this. You do you, and I'm sure you're comfortable with whoever you choose to be with. But in fantasy settings, where the older person also tends to be in a position of more significant power and experience, it's hard for me to believe that the couple have equal standing and inspire equal respect from each other.

Insta-Love

I'm noticing a trend in the tropes I dislike so far: I can't suspend disbelief. I just don't feel like they engender true love. Insta-love falls in the same bucket.

I don't really have a lot to say about this trope, because I think it's pretty understandable why I find it unbelievable. In order for you to love someone, you actually have to know them.

Enemies to Lovers

This is a trope I generally dislike, but I'm not wholly averse to it, because I've seen it executed in ways that are interesting and convincing.

The execution of this trope that irritates me most is when two characters believe in polar opposite values, have polar opposite personalities, have belittled each other, even physically harmed each other, and then they change their minds because they find the other attractive.

I don't know about you, but when I dislike someone, they look really unappealing to me. Even if they're the golden ratio incarnate, suddenly I hate golden ratios.

What's annoying to me is the unrelatable mindset of, "This person believes I should die, but they're hot so maybe they're not that bad." I don't believe that a person's redeemability hinges in any way in how they look. You can argue that in certain cultures, how you look is an indication of your goodness, but I don't believe that, and most enemies-to-lovers aren't set in that type of culture.

I just think the catalyst for change should be rooted in something more substantial, like a common belief, or an actual act of kindness.

Another reason why I generally stay away from enemies-to-lovers is because of pointless banter. I feel like many books confuse witty banter with circular belittling dialogue. "You're bad!" "No, you're bad!" "No, you're bad times two!" "No, you're bad times infinity!" I'm not sure why I'm supposed to find that riveting.

It's even worse when one of the characters is a straight-up bully. Bully-to-lovers is an actual iteration of enemies-to-lovers, and it's one that I have a hard time buying into. I understand that this is a power fantasy for some people: to think that they can render their bully so hopelessly in love with them is an ultimate demonstration of power. But like I said in the Love Triangles section, I don't find power play to be romantic.

What really drives me up the wall is when bullying is written as a manifestation of romantic interest. "I treated you so badly because I secretly liked you." End me now! Is this supposed to excuse the harassment and intimidation? Is this supposed to make me feel like the relationship is healthy? Look, if that's how they treat you when they like you, imagine how they'll treat you when they love you, when they feel more possessive of you. I shudder to think.

Romantic Tropes I Love

All right, let's put the salt-shaker down and move on to romantic tropes I absolutely adore. These are tropes that put me in such a good mood. They're so fun and energizing, and most importantly, makes me believe in the characters' affection for each other.

(Childhood) Friends to Lovers

Kind of the opposite of enemies-to-lovers, as well as insta-love, is it any surprise that I enjoy friends-to-lovers a lot? Especially when the friendship starts in their childhood. Unfortunately I feel like childhood friends-to-lovers is rare to see nowadays, at least as a standalone and not the side-dish of the popular love-triangle between childhood bestfriend and new, mysterious bad boy.

As I've alluded to above, one major way a romance feels believable to me is when two people truly know and understand one another. Being friends provides a good foundation for two people to reveal their inner selves to each other without the pressure and complication of potential heartbreak getting in the way. Passion also doesn't colour your opinions of each other in a way that can lead to misconceptions early in the relationship.

Another reason why this trope has a special place in my heart is because any kind of long-lived relationship is endearing to me. It's so difficult to maintain good relationships. People change, circumstances change. And when two people manage to remain close, caring, and affectionate even after many years, that really signals a strong bond to me. There's just this cozy, hygge feeling to this trope.

Here are some books I enjoyed with childhood friends-to-lovers:

A Treason of Thorns by Laura E. Weymouth
Isle of Blood and Stone by Makiia Lucier
The Lady Rogue by Jenn Bennett

Dynamic Duos

Remember my issue with power struggles in the prior section? Well, here's an antidote to that. What if you make both characters so awesome as individuals in their own right? And what if they're even better when they work together? That, my friends, is why I love dynamic duos.

To be fair, I love dynamic duos even without the romantic aspect to the trope. However, it's even more fascinating to read when romance is thrown into the mix, because it gives rise to other entertaining tropes. For example, I'm a sucker for battle scenes where one of the characters end up wounded, but they pretend they're okay so their partner doesn't worry. Or when a normally stoic character goes berserk because their partner has been hurt. And the scenes where they comfort each other afterwards? Be still, my heart!

I also like dynamic duos, because they can show that a good, healthy relationship doesn't have to be boring. There are two ways this generally plays out. The first is when the duo has an "Us vs Them" conflict, where their romance and their bond aren't even in question. Rather, the narrative treats their relationship as a bulwark, as a source of strength and motivation, against external struggles. This is probably my favourite type of dynamic duo romance.

The second is when the external conflict can interfere with the romance. I like this type a little less, but I've seen it done in some very interesting ways. Mostly, I like it when the couple seeks to equalize their power despite all the forces that are trying to bring one of them down or play them against each other. And when they both come out of that struggle better as individuals and a duo, while saving the world from utter chaos, my admiration just goes through the roof.

Here are two series that I enjoyed with some dynamic duos (both actually feature multiple pairs!):

The Queen's Thief by Megan Whalen Turner
The Legend of Eli Monpress by Rachel Aaron

Mutual Pining

This trope is probably my most controversial favourite trope, because it so easily plays into another trope that most people hate: bad communication. I don't like poor communication as much as any other reader, but I think mutual pining, when done right, can be satisfyingly angsty.

I like mutual pining that is caused by circumstances outside of the characters' control. For example, when they have a duty or a higher calling that requires them to be apart. My favourite part about this type of plotlines is when the characters come up with creative ways to satisfy that duty while still ending up together.

Another less common type of mutual pining, but one I really appreciate, is when the characters are actually honest about their attraction, but decide that they aren't willing to compromise other values by being with the other person. Usually this is when one character has a different moral compass than the other. And I know I'm making it sound like this type of story is preachy or like the characters are mouthpieces for the author's agenda, but don't worry. The few times I encountered this, the stories aren't actually moralizing at all. What I like about this type of mutual pining is seeing what characters eventually sacrifice in order to be with the other person. Sacrifice is how you know the pining was real, right?

Two excellent series with mutual pining:

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
The Glass Alliance by Joanna Hathaway

Mistaken/Hidden Identity

I like this trope best when it is written as dramatic irony rather than a plot twist. I love anticipating how the big reveal will happen and what everyone's reactions are going to be. Perhaps this is why I really enjoy political intrigue and spy stories, because there's usually at least one character who has to assume a different persona. And once romance begins to bloom, it's very interesting to see the dilemma in the character who's in disguise, and how the other person handles the truth once it's been revealed or discovered.

I really don't have much else to say about this trope. I think it's just a guilty pleasure for me. No matter how many times this plot device is used, I will always find myself interested in stories where a character has to go undercover and falls in live while they're in disguise. As a bonus, this is usually accompanied by mutual pining!

Some books or series that I enjoyed with this trope:

The Darkening by Sunya Mara
Dauntless Path by Intisar Khanani

Slow Burn

At first, I wasn't sure how to talk about this trope without reiterating everything I've already said in friends-to-lovers. But I think the key difference between friends-to-lovers and slow burn is the way the story is written. A book can have friends-to-lovers, but the romance can develop quickly within the story, so that's not slow burn. Or perhaps two strangers meet for the first time, and their attraction burgeons over the course of a few books. That's slow burn.

What I enjoy about this trope is the way the narrative takes its time in developing the relationship between the characters. It's almost like a character study, but about the relationship. So by the time the two end up together, it feels inevitable, and I love that. I love the surety of it.

It's funny, because the other week I saw a post on Tumblr that pointed out how strange it is that most romances end when two people kiss or confess their love or get married, because that's usually only when the fun begins. Or when the real challenges begin. And I'm not going to deny that being in a relationship poses problems that you likely won't face when you're not together yet. But I think there's also something really satisfying in seeing the relationship deepen and mature even before you get to the "I love you." Because then the "I love you" feels really honest and convincing.

There's probably some cultural influence playing here too, because in my culture, kissing is more serious of a gesture than it is here in North America. Kissing usually means you are absolutely serious about the relationship. Some really traditional folks even save their first kiss for the actual wedding ceremony. There are just so many ways you can show affection other than kissing. And so what I enjoy about slow burn is seeing those other gestures that tug the two characters closer together.

Some books/series that I enjoyed with slow burn:

The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
Lockwood and Co. by Jonathan Stroud

Wow, this post is over 3K words. But hey, I did admit at the beginning that I can get a little opinionated. If you made it this far, big thanks to you. I hope you found my thoughts entertaining to read. I would love to hear about the romantic tropes you like or dislike and why! Are some of them the same as mine? Do I like some tropes that you hate, or do I hate some tropes that you adore? Let me know!

5 Things I Like in Fantasy

2022-08-14T10:58:00-04:00

This post is so overdue! Earlier this year, I wrote about five tropes, or common elements, or regularly occurring things in general within the fantasy genre that I didn't like. I always meant to follow it up with a companion post about the ones I do like, but it turns out this post was harder to write than the first.

I think it's because I just love fantasy as a whole, and it's a lot easier for me to pinpoint the things that irk me, than it is for me to isolate the little things that I like about fantasy. Also, many of the tropes that I adore aren't exactly fantasy-specific. For example, tropes like found-family or secret identities can exist in almost any other fictional genre. And what I really love about fantasy is just the very act of slipping into an unknown, unexplored world and figuring how things work inside there. For me, it's all about the discovery. But that's too general for a post like this, so I really had to find particular things to write about.

Just a heads up: this post will contain spoilers for various books and shows. I avoided giving real examples about the elements I don't like, but I think it's fine to celebrate works that we feel really exemplify the things we love.

Non-magic Beats Magic

I know it might appear ironic as someone who loves reading about magic, but one of the things I really go wild for is when non-magical elements beat magic. Yes, it's amazing and awe-inspiring when I see someone display the full strength of their magic, but in the end, I prefer when it's human ingenuity that ultimately beats the villain. It doesn't have to be the killing blow, but it does have to be the catalyst that gives the heroes the chance or the method for winning.

Although not from a novel, one of the best examples I can think of for this is the ending to Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa. Edward managed to beat Father, not because he was more powerful, but because he'd befriended Greed, who realized that the toughest material in the world was also made of the same compound as one of the weakest. Greed merging with Father and then turning himself into carbon allowed Edward to deal the finishing blow against Father.

You could say that Greed's ability to transform into carbon was what really turned the tides, and yes, that's one of Greed's magical components. But Greed never actually transformed into carbon before. Always, it had been diamond. And I love this subtle insight that came just at the right moment but had been foreshadowed long before. The thing is, you don't need to be magical to have thought of this. It's the logic behind it that made it a wonderful twist. And of course, Greed wouldn't have sacrificed himself if the Elric brothers hadn't befriended him throughout their journey.

It also doesn't have to be a twist in logic or a loophole in some magical rule. I've seen magic be beaten by qualities like kindness, compassion, love, and other things we typically associate with being human. That's what I find most fascinating. I think it's really easy within fantasy to spurn the things that make us human, but time and time again, this genre has shown us impactful stories that value our humanity above even the most powerful of magics.

Hard Magic Systems

Brandon Sanderson has a wonderful post about his theories on different kinds of magic systems. I'm pretty sure those of you who are well-read in the genre have comes across these theories before, so I'm going to keep my explanation short. Basically "hard" magic systems are the ones made up of many rules and limits. Magic cannot be used to conjure simply anything, just to make the characters' lives easier. Because of this, Sanderson states that "hard" magic systems are usually ones that allow characters to use magic as a tool for their own needs, whereas "soft" magic systems usually work against the characters because they don't understand it and can't control it.

I'm pretty sure my constant exposure to 90s anime while growing up really influenced my partiality to hard magic systems. C'mon, let's face it, Pokemon has a hard magic system! All joking aside, I think hard magic systems appeal so much to me because of the discovery aspect that I talked about in the introduction of this post. It's really interesting to learn about how things work and how people manage the various rules around a powerful resource such as magic. It's even more interesting to see characters find loopholes in these rules to wield magic in a way not conventionally done in their world or even to uncover a new way of performing magic altogether; and the best part is that, if written well, it all still makes sense in the end.

Don't get me wrong, I also love soft magic systems, and in the past few years I've been growing more and more fond of them. But I credit hard magic systems as one of the reasons I was so attracted to the fantasy genre even as a child. It felt like a game I could participate in. And I'm aware that that's actually one of the criticisms people have about hard magic systems -- they want to feel a mystical sense of magic, not learn the points system for a video game. It's a valid criticism, and it all boils down to how you want to experience magic. Me? I love the feeling of participation, and I can't really do that unless I understand the rules.

Magical Ensemble

This is sort of a continuation of the previous section, although magical ensembles can happen even with soft magic systems. One of the things I love to see in fantasy books is when people with different magical abilities come together to form a team to achieve a single goal.

Heists are a great example of this, and it's a plot device that I absolutely love even outside of the fantasy genre. Some of my favourite books with magical heists are Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows duology and Cate Glass's Chimera trilogy. It's just so wonderful seeing how different specialties of magic can interact and enhance each others' powers.

I think this actually goes hand in hand with my point in the first section, because magical ensembles are rarely about the strength of the magic, and more about how different people can find a way to make their magic complement one another's. At the end of the day, it's the characters' wits and trust that make the ensemble work.

I know elemental magic is a super common type of magic system, but I, for one, never tire of it, because it's a really accessible type of magic system that can effectively support a magical ensemble. So if you're a writer and you're worried that elemental magic is overused? Stop worrying! So long as your characters are interesting and their teamwork is compelling, there are readers like me who will always sign up for it!

Magic with Personal Cost

One of the fastest ways for me to be intrigued by the use of magic is for it to exact a price from its wielder. This setup engenders a natural tension to using magic, especially when the protagonist themselves is the one wielding it.

I don't really have a lot more to say about this, because I think the concept pretty much speaks for itself, but here are a few examples of books that did this concept justice.

In the world of Janice Hardy's The Healing Wars trilogy, "magic" comes in the form of healing abilities, where a Taker can absorb another person's pain or injury and push it in a special metal called pynvium. However, the protagonist, Nya, doesn't have the ability to push out the pain she's taken into pynvium, and can only either endure it herself or shift it to another person. This leads Nya to face a whole host of ethical issues, like whether it's okay to bear another person's pain if they pay you for it, and push pain into another person if they are all right with it.

Similarly, in Splinters of Scarlet by Emily Bain Murphy, people with magic slowly crystallize over time, because their magic leaves behind crystal residues in their bodies. This means every time they use their magic, they are one step closer to death. It's interesting that the ethical issues in this book closely mirror the ones from The Healing Wars. The story explores how, when you live in a world where a coveted resource resides among those who don't actually wield societal power, these people often end up trapped in an exploitative system.

What I find really exciting about reading books with this type of magic is trying to figure out how the protagonist can find a cure for their limitation or a way out of their predicament.

Close Friend Groups

There's something really cozy about intimate friend groups in fantasy that you just don't get in a story set in the real world. I mean, of course it's entirely possible to live with and go adventuring with close friends, but we just don't have the type of society that supports randomly going on fun quests and foregoing your regular responsibilities for years on end. And especially not so when you're under 20. Honestly, the closest equivalent we have in the real world is probably being an idol in a K-pop group.

And yet. In fantasy, this is the norm. And I love that. I'm pretty resigned that I shall never go on a quest of my own; and you know, my life is comfortable enough that it's not a tragedy or anything. But boy, am I really glad that I can live vicariously through my favourite characters.

I'm also a really big fan of close friend groups in domestic settings, not just the ones that go on adventures. For example, in Lockwood and Co. by Jonathan Stroud, the teenaged employees of Lockwood and Co. all live in the same house that serves as their base of operations for fighting rogue spirits. In the anime, Soul Eater, the protagonists all live in a dorm-like environment as they attend the Death Weapon Meister Academy.

As someone who had a really hard time making friends growing up, I really value deep friendship. The kind where you can know another person's best and worst, and still trust them to save your life. I feel like we don't really have many opportunities in the real world to develop that kind of depth in our relationships, or it's somehow reserved only for romantic relationships (although to me, romantic relationships are merely a subset of friendships). I just find it so endearing to read about people whose loyalties have been forged and tested by difficult situations, and it's so entertaining to see their everyday interactions.

All right! Those are five of my favourite themes/tropes/concepts in fantasy! Do you agree with these? Or are some of these not your cup of tea? I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts and what other common elements in fantasy you really like.

Coming up next in this series of things I like or dislike is a post on romance. And ooh, boy, do I have lots to say about it. (Why is it so much easier to talk about the things you're so nitpicky about?)

Assorted Thoughts on Representation

2022-06-05T11:17:00-04:00

I've encountered quite a few posts on diversity and representation on social media lately, and I find myself coming away with a few opinions of my own as a response. This post is a loose collection of those responses. I don't think I'll ever have a definite, set-in-stone Thoughts™, because I'm still at the point in my journey where my understanding of good representation is still evolving, and I'm still trying to make sense of my own personal experiences, and the world is also constantly in flux so what I may need one day may not be what I need the next. Basically, take these with a grain of salt, and know that these are just my thoughts at this current point in time. I don't want to box myself in and never give myself an opportunity to change my mind. That said, hopefully there's enough coherence here that shows that my thoughts and feelings are rooted in something consistent.

No Summary Recs?

There's this post going around Tumblr that's causing a lot of different reactions. Some people are complaining that many book recommendations on Tumblr only list the diversity within those books, but don't mention the premise or the summary. Many people vehemently agree that this is an inconvenient way to recommend books, while others feel like this is attacking the call for diversity.

So my two cents: summary, please. I'm all for the summary. Please, give me the summary!

I've seen the reblogs arguing that anyone can simply look up the summary on Google, but I think that's less of an argument, and more of a capitulation that, yes, we do need to read a summary, after all. And I feel like that misses the point that the first few reblogs were making. The point isn't that people are being deprived of summaries. The point is that people expect you to pick up content simply because of certain representation, no other questions asked (see "What more info do you need?"). And that's where I'll be centralizing my response.

Just a disclaimer, my feelings about this stems from very personal experiences, so I understand that others may not have the same feelings. Also, I will mostly be talking about Filipino representation, because I feel like that's the slice of my identity that's most affected by discourse like this.

Filipino Rep and Me

Here's the thing. For me, just because a work is Filipino, it doesn't mean I will feel represented by it. I grew up consuming Filipino dramedy teleserye with themes that were unlikely to apply to anyone I knew, with characters portrayed by actors and actresses who rarely looked anything like me. I'm not saying these aren't valid Filipino stories, only that the Filipino experience is so vast and so diverse, that you can have an entire industry churning Filipino story after Filipino story, and still leave a significant portion of the Filipino people underrepresented and unable to relate.

For me, what happens to characters who represent me is just as important, or probably even more important, than their mere existence. Not gonna lie, sometimes I get more excited when books only go as far as mentioning manila paper, than when they introduce a Filipino-rep character. Because for the former, my brain goes, "Cool, Filipinos exist in this world, let me think of all the awesome things they're up to." But with the latter, I have to brace myself, "Oh geez, I wonder how this character is gonna turn out." After all, it's not unusual for Filipinos to be represented in some unfortunate stereotypical way.

I hate to admit it, but even though I want to see more Filipino representation, I can't help but feel this knee-jerk anxiety whenever something is touted to have it. Because I'm so used to seeing Filipino representation that I don't actually resonate with, that the prospect of being alienated yet again by something that's supposed to make me feel seen can sometimes be just too much disappointment. Or sometimes, I'm in the mood for different types of representation. Sometimes I want stories that acknowledge the poverty and corruption that make life so hard in the Philippines. Sometimes all I want is for Filipino characters to just be. This is why, to me, the story matters, and not just who's in it.

I saw a comment on that post that I can't seem to find again (Tumblr has made great strides recently in their UX, but comment searching is still not one of them), and it mentioned something that really got me thinking. The thing is, sometimes the people who are looking for representation are the ones who are hardest on the work that claims to be representing them. And the comment that I saw said something like, maybe if people knew going into the work what kind of story it will be and whether it's their cup of tea, we'd have a lot less disappointed people. They wouldn't have to tear down the very creators who put so much effort into crafting those diverse characters. Sometimes, even when there's diversity in the work that reflects you, you may still not be the right audience for it.

Anyway, I don't understand how people can misconstrue the desire for a summary and premise to mean that people are against representation. If anything, the desire for a summary and premise is an acknowledgment of representation. It's saying, "Here are books that represent a part of my identity. I understand that this is still a big umbrella, and that there's further diversity within this slice of representation. Help me find which ones I will resonate with." What part of that is against representation? I just don't get the backlash.

So where does this leave support?

In the Philippines, we have this saying, "Tangkilikin ang sariling atin." It basically means, "support our own." Thankfully, I don't believe that supporting a community or a movement is at odds with acknowledging that you have personal preferences. (Unless, of course, your personal preference is not supporting the entire community regardless of the individuals in it, in which case, we're sort of leaving "preference" territory and entering "prejudice" territory.)

As someone who is very picky about any media I consume, I wonder often how I can best support Filipino works. I think that as a whole, there is net positive outcome in having more Filipino representation in the media, more variety in that representation, and more outlets for own-voices. And I don't want my pickiness to hinder that movement.

My general rule is that when I do encounter Filipino works that resonate with me, I put my money where my mouth is and spread the word on social media. When I encounter Filipino works that I don't resonate with, I give an honest review and pick something else that's more to my liking. I talk more in a later section about how I reflect on diverse books before writing a review for them.

And another way you can give support is to be vocal about what you want to see. Because when creators out there see that there is demand for something that they can potentially supply, they will get encouraged to create these works.

Support isn't all or nothing. Sometimes, it's even better to put something you don't like away so that you can devote more energy to another thing you like even more.

Historical Fantasy vs Secondary Worlds

Elliot Brooks is one of my favourite BookTubers, and I watched one of her videos in which she talked about cultural appropriation in Leigh Bardugo's Grisha trilogy. And one question she asks here that really got me thinking is, when people demand something so realistic in fantasy, where does secondary worldbuilding end and historical fantasy begin?

This is a really interesting topic for me, because I write primarily fantasy in secondary worlds. I have seen secondary worlds being nitpicked when it doesn't feel like it has sufficient representation, and that's something I'm very self-conscious about when it comes to my own writing.

I think ultimately, this comes down to language. And a good example that Brooks brings up in the video is the word "kvas," which the reviewer complained about, because in real life, kvas can't really intoxicate you.

I don't know where I've read this anymore, but one concept that's always at the forefront of my mind (especially whenever I'm translating my stories into Filipino) is that all stories are a translation. They are a translation of ideas in your head, pictures in your imagination, into words that you can speak and that your audience can understand. In the case of fantasy, writers use words from our world to convey fantastical ideas. And some words will be better than others. For example, there are cases in secondary worlds where a leader might be denoted by the word 'king,' or they might be denoted by the word 'sultan.' It's because in each case, one word better encapsulates what that leader is, or how that leader functions, in that secondary world. (In the cases when our own words fail, many writers actually just make up words and that's totally fine too!)

This is where I think the reviewer who pointed out the incongruence of kvas has a leg to stand on. Bardugo chose a word from our world, thinking it is the best word that represents this drink in her secondary world, and it turns out it isn't at all. And that caused confusion.

I think when it comes to cultural inspiration for secondary worlds, rooting certain ideas and objects in real world vocabulary can be a bit tricky. To me, it signals that as a writer, you've decided to choose this particular word as the best way to convey to your modern-day audience what the picture in your head means. And it can be very jarring when you use that word in ways that contradicts the real-world concept. I think this is when thorough research can really come in handy; because sometimes, the word you think makes your world seem more "authentic" may actually make your world seem silly to those who are more familiar with its connotation.

Reviewing Diverse Books

I watched another video by Brooks where she talks about honesty in reviewing diverse books. I agree with most of her points in this video, and like I said in the first section of this blog post, whenever I encounter a diverse book that isn't my cup of tea, the best thing I can do is to review it honestly.

That said, before reviewing, I take some time to consider aspects of diverse books that I probably wouldn't think about when reviewing undiverse books.

What do I mean by this? Well, whenever I pick up a diverse book, I don't expect diversity to just manifest as set dressings and character costumes. Whenever I pick up a diverse book, I almost expect my reading ability to be challenged in some way, especially when I'm reading outside of either my or mainstream North American culture. In many cultures, the very style of storytelling is different, and I think that when we start to consider this, that's when we start to really engage on a deeper level with diverse books.

For example, many Asian narratives don't follow the three-part or four-part narrative structure we're so used to here in North America. Although Spirited Away is a really popular movie, I've heard people say they felt lost the first time they watched this movie, that they didn't really have a sense of where it was going. Another example is when author Ellen Oh mentioned that some reviewers found the formal conversations between characters in her books unrealistic. Yet apparently in Korean culture, people who aren't close to each other do speak in a more formal manner.

So, for me at least, when I pick up a diverse book and I find that there's something about it I don't like, I really try to examine whether this is because the writing is terrible, or because the author is pulling from conventions unfamiliar to me. After all, can we really call something diverse, if all the diversity exists only on the surface level, acting as a simple dress-up for Western stories and Western perspectives and Western values that we're already familiar with?

And you know, there are many times when even after giving the book as much consideration as I can, I still decide it's not my cup of tea. And that's fine. Reiterating my point in the first section, sometimes it's more productive and supportive to spend time on the things you actually do love, than to mull over the things you don't.

Publishing Trend

Now I do want to go on a bit of a tangent here, because Elliot sort of drops a comment or two about publishing companies using diversity as a trend. And I want to go a little deeper into that.

Although I agree that publishing companies should handle diversity with more seriousness than simply treating it as the next marketing gimmick or a checklist to tick off, I do want to unpack some of the assumptions that people are making when they make comments like, "This diverse book is bad and the publisher only published it because it has diversity."

First, I feel that people assume that the book is undeservedly taking up the space of some other more deserving undiverse book. I understand that publishing is a business, and that there's a limited space for stories out there, and that each spot is very valuable. But in all likelihood, if you really think about it, there are many, many -- and I mean tons -- of terrible undiverse books out there as well. So it's just as likely that the book the publisher would have published instead of a terrible diverse book, is a terrible undiverse book. That's why I don't really understand when people call for books with less diversity, as if somehow that will make them automatically better.

And that's exactly the second assumption I think people are making. That when they don't like a diverse book, they assume it's because of the diversity. But there are many things that can make a book awful. The writing, the plotting, the characterization, the inconsistent world building -- any of these can exist in undiverse books as well. So I don't understand why people assume that these problems arise specifically when there's diversity in the book. Yes, characters can be cardboard cut-outs and stereotypical, but maybe that's just because the writer did a terrible job, not because the character is Asian or disabled, you know what I mean? Do people think that if diversity were to disappear from the book, that suddenly the writing will glow-up? I definitely think this is a writer problem, not a diversity problem.

I don't know too much about the traditional publishing industry, but I think where publishing companies may be contributing to the problem is if they are skimping on the editing of diverse books. If they're trying to get these books out the door as fast as possible, and they're ignoring all the additional editing that an undiverse book would have gone under, then yes, that's a problem. Diverse books need just as much attention and care and polish that undiverse books get.

Software Developers are Creators too

2022-04-09T11:23:00-04:00

This is a bit of a hot-take, because I know there's this unspoken chasm between those in creative fields and those in technical fields. But today I'm going to propose that software developers and engineers are creators too.

(Note: I'm aware of the nuances between the terms "programmer," "software developer" and "software engineer" from the point of view of the tech world, but because I will be focusing mainly on the wider, business sense of building software in this post, I will be using these terms interchangeably.)

I was on Pillowfort.io late last year, trying to see what this new social media has to offer. Touted as a cross between LiveJournal and Tumblr, I was very curious about it, as LiveJournal had been my favourite social media platform back when it wasn't a ghost town. I came across this post in a community.

Five months later, I still quietly simmer in indignation every time I see this comment. There's just so much to unpack here, and you know what? That's what I'm gonna do. Let's get to it.

Software development is not a one-time thing

The notion that software is something you build once and merely "tweak" from time to time is so misguided, I half-think that this person is trolling. (Or I don't know, maybe they truly are trolling.) But let's suppose they're not, and who knows, maybe there are plenty of other people who have this misconception.

Look, if you think that software is only developed once and tweaked from time to time, all you have to wonder is this: if that were true, every software company will become smaller as their product matures. Which is unheard of. In fact, the only time companies grow smaller is when they actively retire products from their product line, or take away features from the products they're still supporting. The common denominator? The product is shrinking. That's because software requires deliberate and constant maintenance in order to remain usable to their customers.

These maintenance aren't mere tweaks either. The most common cause of stagnating software is simply that every other technology is rapidly evolving. A software can remain untouched and will still become obsolete in a matter of years. Operating systems are constantly updating. Hardware is becoming more advanced. Malware and hackers are constantly becoming more dangerous and more sophisticated. A piece of software needs to keep up with all of these changes even if its core functionality never actually evolves. Thinking that software updates are a mere "tweak" is the exact reason why those who exploited the Log4j vulnerability last December might be laughing at you now.

Maintenance can involve onboarding an entire new team of software developers and IT technicians. Database migrations? Moving from on-prem to the cloud? Switching programming languages? Supporting IE8 (lol)? Some of these "mere" maintenances can actually require an entire team of people to plan out a strategy and execute it.

And we've only talked about maintenance. What about fixing bugs and expanding support to a growing user base? What about implementing new features altogether? People's tastes and preferences change. If a piece of software fails to keep up with what people need, that renders them obsolete too. It's funny, because I think half the people who think software development is a one-time thing are the same people who make fun of developers for missing a bug, then demand from those same developers an entirely new feature with no notion of how complex building it might be.

Even the commenter's analogy to a shelf is kind of outrageous. What happens when it gets full? Does this person think they're the only ones who will ever put something on that shelf? That their work is so limited that they will never fill up that shelf by themselves? If they think they have a use for a shelf, then it follows that thousands, or even millions of people, will have use for a shelf. What, do they think that everyone will be using that exact same shelf? That new shelves wouldn't need to be built for everyone else? Do they think it's merely a "tweak" to build thousands of new shelves, even if the design is the same? Or how about the ingenuity and creativity it takes to craft a new design for a shelf that allows for personalization and better usage? Really, we're supposed to believe that all of these are mere "tweaks"? The analogy itself doesn't work for shelves, so I don't know why they would think it would make sense for software.

Software development... is like writing?

What really riles me up is this notion that software development, because it's apparently a "technical" field, is somehow less worthy of appreciation than writing or drawing or other art forms. But the line between what requires technical skills and creative skills may not be as distinct as you think.

I feel like people think there's no creativity in programming, because their introduction to the subject looks like this: System.out.println("Hello World"). Or they hear that you need to study math and computer logic to build software. Or... to be honest, I'm actually not sure why people think software development requires no creativity at all, because I've never encountered that absence in my entire career.

Seeing a bare-bones program that outputs the typical "Hello World" and thinking that's all software development is, is like seeing the grammatical rules of past/present/future tense in English class and thinking that's all writing stories is. And while it's a little bit more of a stretch to say that math is creative, it can actually be. Just think of proving and transforming trigonometric identities, or solving mathematical puzzles. These often require a type of thinking that you can't just memorize. They involve tackling the problem from different angles until you arrive at a solution.

Furthermore, building software isn't just about a single line of code. It isn't even about a single function or a single script. When you're developing a large-scale product that you know millions of people will be using, you need to think holistically. You need to build well structured pieces that can fit together. You need to ensure that what you write is understandable so that others can read it. You need to make sure you build your product in a way that is usable and engaging to your target consumer while remaining within the limits of your resources. Building software is often a labour of great caring and craft by a team of dedicated developers. There's a reason why software practices are debated heatedly and passionately on online forums. Developers actually care about what they're building.

Hmm... putting pieces together, using understandable language, making a product that's engaging to your target audience, ensuring you're more or less complying with industry standards, suffusing your work with love? Wait, doesn't that sound like... writing a story?

Yes, yes it does.

The converse can be true too: writing and art can be more technical than you think. Grammar rules? Story structure and plot points? Composition rules? Perspective? Rendering light and shadows appropriately depending on the material of your surface? These are technicalities that can make or break an artistic work.

And then there are lines of work that fall exactly in between what we consider "technical" and "creative". UI/UX designers, front-end web development, HCI research, technical writing, and tons more. Why are we playing tug-of-war with each other, when so many jobs require both technical and creative skills? A quick perusal of the popular website, Clients from Hell, will show that there are just as many programmers and software developers who have very similar experiences as designers and artists. Whether freelancing or working for a less than ideal company, we often face the same struggles. People make assumptions about the quality of our skills or how much we should be charging. Interviews are painful because the standard process doesn't actually evaluate our skills correctly.

I actually don't find it surprising that many authors had or still have a gig in software development. Naomi Novik and Carol Berg are the ones that pop quickest in my head, but I've come across plenty of authors whose bios listed programming as a career they once had or still have. And now that writing and selling books independently is becoming easier, many people within the software industry are also working on a writing side-hustle. Like me. Like my peers who write poetry or fanfiction in their spare time. Like machine-learning engineer and blogger, Chip Huyen, who writes Vietnamese stories on the side.

All of these points are just a segue to what I'm really trying to get at: the entitlement that consumers have towards creators is very much present in the software field. But somehow people think this entitlement is okay for software, and that bothers me.

The things that bother me

Lately, I've been seeing a really hypocritical attitude among online creators in traditionally creative fields like writing and art. They demand their work be appreciated, taken seriously, and financially compensated, but then turn around and show the same entitlement they complain about within their consumer base towards software developers.

There's a growing sentiment on social media, one I've seen become more prominent specifically on Tumblr, not to pirate books. There are lot of people on Tumblr who are in the publishing industry, and I noticed a few viral posts going around about how damaging it is to pirate books. Maggie Stiefvater was even on one of these posts. Ironically, when I go to the blogs of users who reblog these posts, some of the most vocal anti-piracy advocates for books will have posts for how you can pirate software. As if software developers don't deserve compensation for their work. As if how well a software product does on the market wouldn't affect the company's decision to scale back production and lay off programmers. As if profit from commercial products aren't diverted to support free-tier products that anyone can use. As if there aren't legitimate open-source libre alternatives to the software they're pirating. (You know people are pirating for the lulz and not out of need, when they ignore open-source software that are often just as good, or even better, than what they're pirating.)

People see writers and artists as humans who need to pay bills and put food on the table, but then refuse to see software developers as humans who need to do the same. Instead, they conflate us with the "Big Tech" giant business overlords who are all billionaires and can't be affected by a little pilfering. Look, I don't pretend to be on a better moral standing here, but if you're going to be a bleeding heart for anti-piracy, at least make it consistent across the board.

I see a very similar attitude when we start talking about monetizing software that was once free. Again, because Tumblr is basically the only social media platform I use, I can only talk about my experience on there. Over the last few months, Tumblr has been slowly rolling out new features to generate income. All of Tumblr used to be free, then they introduced ads when Yahoo! bought them, and now they're experimenting with features that people can choose to pay for. Every time they roll out one of these features, the Tumblr user base goes wild with criticisms. How dare social media not be free? How dare the staff ask for compensation? How dare it have ads? How dare they make it harder for content-creators to run their businesses?

Again, I feel like these sentiments are fueled by ignorance for how difficult building software actually is. Like our "bookcase" commenter on Pillowfort.io, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people who are saying these comments have absolutely little to no idea of the scale and complexity of building a social media that millions of people use. All those posts you put on your blog? Yeah, those need to be saved to a database. The fact that you can see those posts without waiting two to three minutes for the page to load? Thank you, NoSQL and CDN. The storage and infrastructure required to support a social media, even if it's one not very popular anymore like Tumblr, is still outrageous. Then of course the developers and designers and managers need to be paid. Where do the users think that money is coming from? Or do they think those people and services don't need to be paid?

I feel like the tension is coming from the notion that because software is a tool -- and in this day and age, it's a tool that supports content creation -- then the people who create software are somehow subservient to people who create content. Which is absolutely bonkers to me.

First, I already made my case about how software and creative content are both products that require a combination of technical and creative skills, and as such, people who participate in the creation of those products are all deserving of appreciation and compensation.

Secondly, I just don't understand how people fail to see that the producer-consumer relationship is a symbiotic one. Software is a product. Content creators consume that product so that they can create a different product. Other people (including software developers, actually) consume those products from content creators. We are all in a cycle of production and consumption. If writers and artists, or other types of content creators, don't want their work stolen or underappreciated or devalued or sneered at with contempt, why would they do the same to the creators of the very tools they rely upon? (For some context, the developers of Pillowfort.io are actual developers who decided they wanted to build a very specific type of social media, and even now, they are 100% user-funded. They don't rely on VCs. So yes, they can actually be considered creators.)

To further prove that creators and consumers are symbiotic, and that creators can't be the only raison d'etre of social media platforms, look at it from the consumer perspective instead. Consumers increasingly want control over their online experience. What happens if they no longer want to be on a platform that allows a certain type of content and decide to leave? Will creators remain on a platform without an audience? It's all a delicate balance. Sorry, but nobody is anybody's raison d'etre here.

I just want to reject this entitled mindset of "You need me, but I don't need you so you better do what I want." If you heard that from a friend or from a romantic partner, you'd think you're in an abusive relationship. So how is it any more appropriate saying this to people who help you in your work, whether you rely on them for your tools or for your views? How many writers have been told by so-called fans that they owe the entirety of their success to their readers? How many artists get approached by clients who want to pay them with exposure? And now people are actually saying that software devs are subservient to content creators? Are you for real? That is not a healthy producer-consumer relationship. Our relationship will be more enriched if we treated each other with respect and dignity. I can't believe I wrote 2,400 words just to get to that conclusion, because honestly, it sounds trite and mundane, and it's strange that people still need to be reminded of it.

My Stories are Now Available as eBooks!

2022-03-25T16:00:00-04:00

Hi guys! I got a nifty new feature for you today. All of my web stories will now be available for download through Bookfunnel as epubs, mobi, or pdfs. So for any of you who would like the chance to read my stories but don't like reading through the web, you can now get a copy to put on your eReader. Downloads, just like the online versions, are completely free. You don't even need to sign up to Bookfunnel.

You can find a download link on the homepage of my website or the main landing page of each story:

Trying it so far on my Kobo looks all right. Here's an example with a Kobo Forma and a Kobo Aura 2. Aside from a few minor formatting issues (like with the front matter and back matter being included in the numbering of the sections), the actual content looks quite good.

They look okay in Adobe Digital Editions and Calibre as well. Unfortunately, I don't use Kindle, so I can't tell how the mobi format performs. But if any of you have any major issues, feel free to let me know. eBook formatting is a whole new art form for me.

If any of you are curious what software I used for formatting, I used Atticus.io, which is dubbed as the easiest formatting software in the market right now. I'll have to agree! It took me two days to get the downloadable versions of my books, as opposed to the weeks I was expecting fiddling with html.

I don't think I need to say it, but since we're on the Internet and anything goes, please don't distribute the downloadables to other places. Only use them for your own personal entertainment. I may be offering my stories for free, but I invest a lot of time and money to be able to give my readers a good experience. I rely on everyone's good faith so I can continue to do what I do. But I know you all already know that!

Give the ePubs a try and let me know what you think!

5 Things I Dislike in Fantasy

2022-03-12T21:25:00-05:00

My favourite genre is fantasy, but like most people, I too have some issues with my fave. Like they all say, nothing is perfect, right? So today, I'll go over some tropes or concepts or common occurrences that I see in this genre that aren't really my cup of tea. It doesn't mean that these are bad or that the authors who employ these in their stories aren't skilled. I can even understand why these concepts make sense in certain contexts or might appeal to some readers. But they just don't work for me.

In another blog post, I will talk about some of my favourite fantasy concepts. And perhaps after that, I will write another one specifically about romance tropes I like and dislike. As you all know, I can be very choosy about how I want romance in books to play out, to the point that I will often DNF a book if I so much as catch a whiff of a trope I hate.

(EDIT: In the previous version of this post, I used the term "trope" to describe these items, but while I was working on the post about the things I like, I realized many of the things I'm talking about aren't actually tropes. So I'm broadening the term a little.)

So, let's get started!

Novices being better than masters for no reason

We've all seen this. A young boy or girl from the country, all wide-eyed and innocent, gets whisked away to the magic-filled city. Or perhaps they're from the slums, and the royalty suddenly takes interest in them. Regardless, they find out they're the most powerful magician that any of the elites have seen in ages! Experienced crones and aged scholars begrudgingly beg for their wise advice, because for no apparent reason, this young person knows everything and can do anything with magic, even though they didn't know they possessed such skills five minutes ago.

Now, I don't want to appear elitist. I know that this trope really appeals to people who want to see someone challenge those who are stuck in their ivory towers. And honestly, I am one of those people! I love seeing the underdog outsmart people who think they're always right. Ironically however, I find that this trope often ends up reinforcing the concept of ivory towers instead. When someone is inherently better than anyone else through no effort of their own, that reinforces the idea that certain areas of society are inherently closed off to some folks no matter how hard they work or how skilled they get. What prevents the protagonist from forming their own ivory tower eventually?

Do I believe that novices can be better than masters at some things? Of course! I think no matter how advanced you've gotten in a particular field, you can always learn something new from an outside perspective. Sometimes the most creative ideas come from the people who haven't been so knee-deep in that field, because their mindsets aren't stuck in a rut or they aren't aware of limitations that masters assume are set in stone.

However, I most appreciate this trope when the underdog uses something from their unconventional background that makes them think or act differently from the average master. Jumping off of the example I gave above, if the young boy or girl uses their knowledge of country folklore or street superstition to piece together a new way to use magic, then that's impressive. Even more so if that type of background was something that masters sniffed at and derided. This is where a character can really show their mettle or their cunning. Applying knowledge gathered or talents honed from elsewhere to wield magic in a new way takes great creativity and insight. It's this type of underdog stories that I really adore.

But if the character's affinity for magic has nothing to do with skills and knowledge they've gathered through their own experiences and effort? It's a little hard for me to believe they will be better than people who have spent decades studying and wielding magic. This is why I'm also wary of the Chosen One trope, because most of the time it plays out exactly like this.

Poor Female Representation

Ah, this is probably one of the most common criticisms regarding the fantasy genre. I'm not here to talk about the consequences on a grand scale of having harmful representation, because you'll find plenty of other sources that can articulate the issue better than I can. Also, I'm actually pretty good at choosing books that have great female representation, so this one doesn't bother me as much as other tropes.

That said, there are three types of poor female representation I don't like for the simple reason that they annoy me, so I'll tackle each of those separately.

No female characters

Yes, yes, I know what you're thinking. "Leng, your favourite series is The Queen's Thief! How can you complain about this?" I admit it, it seems a little hypocritical when two books in my favourite series don't have any prominent female characters. In my defense, I read The Thief back when I wasn't as intentional about my reading choices, and I didn't become fully invested in the series until after the third book. And then The Queen of Attolia and The King of Attolia showed me some of the most complex and subversive female roles in any books I've ever read.

But this isn't a post about my feelings about The Queen's Thief. (Although if you do want a post on that, let me know, because I have many, many feelings about it.)

I just find it weird reading a book with no female characters. As a matter of fact, I would much prefer books with Smurfette than a book with no women at all. I'm a woman, and growing up, I've almost always had exclusively female friend-groups (blame it on my strict parents), and even in my own family and extended family, the ratio of female to male is a little skewed to the former. Again, I'm not saying you can't have a good, well-written story without any female characters. It just feels weird to me. It's like having a story where nobody eats and food doesn't exist. I know that many people will retort that there are plenty of spheres historically from which females have been excluded, and that there are still interesting stories to tell within these spheres. That's true too. It's just not my cup of tea.

All female characters are either princesses or prostitutes

Or assassins. Being an assassin is a very popular career these days for female characters in fantasy.

It's not that I have something against princesses or prostitutes or assassins. It's that I think it's a lamentable waste of opportunity not to come up with more creative careers for your female characters in the fantasy genre. Admittedly, male characters tend to get pigeonholed into very tried-and-true careers as well (soldier, thief, rake), but I find that writers tend to be a little better in giving these old roles a new spin. Whereas for female roles, there seems to be less subversion or twists.

You know who I think gives her female characters very creative livelihoods? T. Kingfisher! From a baker with a sourdough-starter familiar, to a skilled perfumer, to an expert forger of official documents, I'm amazed at the wide array of careers Kingfisher has come up with for her female characters. And looking at those examples, it's not like the writer is coming up with these careers out of the blue. (While a baker and a forger is pretty typical, I'll confess that Grace was the first perfumer I've ever encountered in any fantasy book.) But Kingfisher writes these roles with a new magical spin appropriate for her setting.

A single female character embodying every characteristic

I mentioned above that I prefer the Smurfette principle than having no female characters at all. And while this is true most of the time, there's one depiction of the Smurfette that really grinds my gears. It's when the writer clearly wants to represent a wide range of feminine traits, but they didn't budget for the number of characters accordingly, and hence, they end up stuffing every single one of these traits into the lone female character. That's how we get the young, cute, skinny girl who can beat up every villain, and yet clean up nicely in make-up and a ballgown; she's book-smart and street-smart; she's sassy and fierce, yet vulnerable and loses all the time to the male protagonist; she doesn't give a damn about anybody, yet she's the team's HR department.

The unfortunate outcome of this trope is that we get a Mary Sue, and nobody enjoys a Mary Sue. And readers end up hating the character, which is ironic, because the writer's intention was to probably make her so awesome she appeals to everybody.

The best remedy to this is honestly just to have more female characters in the cast. Then you get consistent characterization for every single one. None of them even have to be a main character. Those of you who have seen or read Fullmetal Alchemist might agree that its female representation was excellent, and yet even the most prominent female characters like Riza Hawkeye and Winry Rockbell were, at best, only supportive characters.

Checklist Quests

This is such a staple of classic fantasy, going all the way back to fairy tales, but I just get so bored reading it. What do I mean by "checklist quests"? You know, those quests where first, the hero has to fetch magical potatoes, then they need to collect one-horned iguanas, then they must travel to the north of the wind to capture the scent of the moon. And only when they have all these ingredients can they actually proceed to solving whatever problem prompted their quest in the first place.

Oh, but it gets worse! Because sometimes, in an attempt to make the journey even harder for the hero, the writer will throw in a twist in there! Suddenly, it's impossible to collect one-horned iguanas without... you guessed it: going on a different checklist quest to collect even more items.

I don't know why I find this type of quests so boring. I think part of it is that it feels predictable. Even though you know there will be twists along the way, in the end, the story will still revolve around retrieving these objects or going to specific places. Usually the beginning of the story will also heavily hint at what flaw or weakness the character will overcome in this quest (ie. fear of iguanas, allergy to potatoes, etc.), so even the character arc becomes predictable. I don't think I've ever read a checklist quest type of story where I felt excited about going on the journey with the character.

The strange thing is that heist stories may actually be a variation of this, and yet I love heists! But I think the difference is that heists usually involve an ensemble of characters with different specializations, and it's more exciting to see how they apply these specializations to their quest. I also think that the character arcs in heists are prompted not by the specific things they have to steal, but by the fact that they have to work together.

Unexplained European Folklore Creatures

Okay, this one isn't really a trope, and more of an issue with authors underestimating their global reach or under-developing their worlds.

Although many people all over the world will recognize typical European folkloric creatures these days, I still think it's a good idea to introduce any fantasy creature with a bit of breathing room. Especially because there are instances when the book might end up in the hands of someone who isn't familiar with this creature. The first time I encountered a brownie in a fantasy book, it took me an entire chapter to realize that the protagonist wasn't actually afraid of a freshly baked fudge square that came from an oven.

I also think that because European folkloric creatures are ubiquitous, so many writers have given their own spin to them already. The fairies that appear in Maggie Stiefvater's Lament aren't the same fairies that appear in R.J. Anderson's Spellhunter. The trolls that appear in Harry Potter aren't the same trolls that appear in Ella Enchanted. Sure, there are similarities. But writers often infuse them with unique attributes that work well within the world of their story. In fact, one of the things I really look forward to when I pick up a fantasy book is seeing how the author makes these creatures unique. So when I encounter a book where a fairy or a troll comes along, but there's no description of how they appear in this world and what kind of relationships they have with humans, I get a little annoyed.

No Consequences to Using Magic

My issue with this trope is less about the magic itself having an actual effect on its wielder, but more about the character themselves experiencing consequences from their social sphere for wreaking havoc with their magic. Again, this might seem kind of ironic as someone who was a huge fan of Dragon Ball when I was a kid, but in Dragon Ball's defense, it had the kind of whimsical world where you can blow up a planet and bring it back with a wish. That's just how things work in that setting.

However, when I'm reading a fantasy book where the world is a little more rational than DBZ, sometimes I can't help but feel let down when a very powerful character doesn't face any repercussions for unleashing magic in a destructive way. Especially when magic is shown to be a scarce resource. It just doesn't make sense to me how someone can waste all that coveted resource for their own gains, and nobody bats an eyelash. Even a comment like, "Hey, you destroyed the river that nourishes this city. We'll take that out of your treasury," can make the situation feel more believable.

Now this can simply be a plotting problem or a characterization problem, but I've seen it enough times that I do think there are writers and readers out there who are okay with powerful magic not having any societal consequences. But to me, it's a little difficult to swallow.

All right, that wraps up this post! What do you guys think? Were you able to predict the entries on this list based on my previous book reviews? Which ones surprised you?

Which fantasy tropes or common themes and elements do you folks dislike?

So I Turn 30 Today

2022-01-08T13:30:00-05:00

It's a little difficult having a birthday in the first week of the new year. Nothing puts your life in perspective and under a microscope than having family gatherings or virtual catch-ups during the last two weeks, and a mainstream culture that hammers the importance of new year's resolutions. Admittedly, it only became difficult after I finished school. Suddenly the next steps people are anticipating from me seem largely out of my control or things I just don't feel ready for. I've come to face my birthdays with some trepidation, nervous about the next year where nothing might change for the better or everything might change for the worse.

But I also acknowledge that within the last couple of years, many people lost the opportunity to have their birthdays at all. For some people, the prospect of having their next one seem pretty dim. In the face of a massive global loss of life, do I really have the right to complain about an otherwise cushy, sheltered life?

On One Hand

Maybe I would feel a little less uneasy, if it weren't the big 3-0, you know? I remember a co-worker at my old job who's a few years older than me. She told me about her experience turning 30, and laughing about it in hindsight. She thought she needed to change her lifestyle entirely, dress up more formally, throw out her jeans and her sweatshirts. Seeing that she still often wore sweaters and jeans when we were working together, she clearly didn't follow through with that. And to be fair, she had a very youthful personality. Before I had known how old she was, I thought she was just a couple years out of school.

And maybe that's where my issue is; maybe I'm struggling with my birthdays because I have this preconceived notion of what I should be as a person getting older. I saw a funny tweet some time ago that said something along the lines of, "Growing up feels like you're staying the same, but everyone around you is getting younger." And yes. That is exactly how I feel. I feel somewhat the same as my 18 year old self, although perhaps a little less insecure and a little more self-aware. I have the same aspirations as my 25 year old self. But I'm feeling the aging process externally, in the questions people ask ("Why are you still single?") and in the types of people I interact with. Celebrities feel like they are so young these days, although I know that young people have been rising to fame since forever. The interns we're hiring at work were born during the years I'd expect pre-teens to be born in. I now do a double take and think, "Oh, that's right, you're over 20 now."

I think part of my struggle comes from feeling behind all the time. I see people my age or younger getting senior tech positions in their companies, or getting six-figure book deals in major publishing houses, or getting married and having kids and buying their own homes. And while my accomplishments are nothing to laugh at — earning a good degree that led me to comfortable job that supports my current lifestyle — for some reason, I still feel like I'm at the early-20's stage of life compared to many people. Technology changes so quickly that I am hesitant to say I've achieved senior status in any of the tech stack I've worked on; I'm still trying to navigate my own path in digital-based self-publishing; and I've never had a serious romantic relationship before.

Many people will tell me, "Stop comparing yourself to others." And if "others" were distant acquaintances or some random person whose social media account I stumbled across, I would agree. I don't know what they are going through. I don't know what sacrifices they've made. I don't know if there's a gaping hole in their life that they're struggling to cover up. But "others" in this case are relatives or my sibling or close friends. We belong to the same socio-economic status, but sometimes I feel so much more behind than where they are given that I have the same access to opportunities and resources that they do. And sometimes I just feel like I'm doing things wrong.

It's difficult to envision what I will do in my 30s. It used to be that you could have a five-year plan or a ten-year plan, but if there's anything that I've learned in the past couple of years, you probably can't even have a two-month plan. In some ways this is disappointing. I've always been a goal-oriented person, and it's hard to look at my future and find it blurry and fuzzy. I feel aimless at a time when I should be laying the foundations for a good adult life. But in some ways, this may be a positive thing. Sometimes it's just as hard to veer off a well-planned life and just as easy to feel stuck when you've gotten in a rut.

And On the Other

I don't want this post to be all about my hang-ups. Taking stock of the past decade, there have been many high points in my life, many things that I've achieved that other people might struggle with at any age. Like I said, I do lead a comfortable, sheltered life, and if that contributes to me lacking experience in some ways, it also helps in keeping me safe and within a structure where I can pursue certain interests.

In the last decade I have earned a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in a field of study and work that I truly enjoy. I know that for many people, even getting through higher education is a struggle — either financially or because the path they want to pursue in life isn't something that can be learned within school walls. So in a way, I'm lucky, because I have the type of personality that fits what's currently the most popular form of instruction in educational environments. I'm lucky too to be in a country where the price of getting a University degree is lower compared to other places in the world.

I was also able to transition seamlessly to a software career, working at great companies that respected me and my skills, and whose values align with my own. I often hear of other young women ending up in startups or even well-established companies that have "bro" culture and "locker room" talks. I'm quite lucky that I've managed to dodge those. I'm definitely not saying that those experiences don't exist — they still do! But I also think experiences like mine give hope to younger generations that things are changing in the industry and there's space for all of us.

This may not seem like a major achievement to most people, but it is for me: I passed my driving exams. I know that many people take those exams and get their license when they're teenagers, but I only got fully licensed a couple years ago. And that's after failing three times across two of the different exam levels. I was such an anxious driver, and there have been plenty of close calls where I really thought I would get into an accident. But now that I own a car and I'm more comfortable in it (driving other people's cars just don't feel the same, let's admit it), I really appreciate that I can go to certain places without having to rely on other people to get me there. It's come in handy especially now during the pandemic — I have not taken the public transit in two years!

Last, but not least, I wrote a novel in not just one, but two languages! I think that's a pretty cool accomplishment. I still love that the story is set in a world inspired by my native country, because even now, I still don't see stories set in this type of world. Especially not ones written in Filipino. Not only have I learned so much about what it takes to write a novel, I am also really proud of the burgeoning community I'm building around my stories. It's very heartening to see that people are interested in the stories I have to tell. So I thank you too, if you've read my stories, or even just browsed through the site or my blog or any of my social media platforms. You're part of my journey in life that makes all the lows a little more bearable.

Of course, I couldn't have accomplished these things if it weren't for a bit of luck or privilege or blessings. It's easy to focus on the milestones that you have to hit and forget about the things that has allowed you to even be on the road that you're on. The fact that I was able to get two degrees, that I was able to be selective about the jobs I applied to, that I could spend most of my free time writing novels, I owe to my family who set me on this path and who continue to support what I want to do. I know how hard many of these milestones can be for those who may not have a support network, whether that be family or relatives or just friends you can rely on to help you when you're down on your luck.

What I know for sure is that there will be changes in the next few years of my life, and that they might not always fall in line with what I'm comfortable with. So I will need to be creative to see how to turn things around for the better. And I'm just going to have faith that things will turn out okay. Maybe not perfect. But okay.

I Miss Long-form Blogging

2021-11-11T17:57:00-05:00

I stumbled upon an author website a couple of months ago, one that has a personal blog that's surprisingly regularly updated. The author writes a hodgepodge of things, from free short stories to her writing process, and even introspective accounts of how she's handling the pandemic. I couldn't help but feel like I was sitting down and having a cup of tea with her, this stranger whom I don't know, but was able to put me at ease during a day when I felt a bit overwhelmed.

I miss this. I miss when personal blogs were where people formed connections. Perhaps I'm just viewing the past through rose-tinted lenses, but I remember reading people's LiveJournals and they were about the most mundane things! People wrote about their pets or their garden or the dish they baked. Knitting was a big thing there too, if I remember correctly. Very few posts were written in an outstanding way, and most of the pictures were ordinary. But I felt a sense of camaraderie with these bloggers anyway. Not to mention, LiveJournal actually had a pretty decent commenting system, and I used to have lengthy conversations with a few people there.

I'm not saying LiveJournal was the perfect platform, or that social media apps these days are not. But I do think there's a difference in the content people used to post then and the ones they do now, and that perhaps the shift in medium contribute in some way to that difference. Although I've done well in cultivating a presence on Tumblr, I don't think I ever really felt as much connection in microblogging as I did with long-form blogging. I admit that at some points, my usage of Tumblr and Instagram were quite high, but scrolling until 1am doesn't necessarily translate to meaningful encounters. Sure, I have made a few friends from Tumblr, but they seem to be more of an exception than the rule.

Many people might blame "algorithms," and how they promote the type of viral content that people can engage with really quickly but don't leave a wholesome, lasting impact. But as someone who works for a living developing "algorithms," I don't really think they're the root cause. Algorithms are a tool. It's the company's values that determine what algorithms ultimately promote, and they can always be optimized to promote a different type of content.

So at the end of the day, we need a new social media platform that prioritizes long-form content, but I don't see that on the horizon. Medium has done well so far, but the types of content I come across from there tend to be tutorials or casual journalism. I'm still hard-pressed to find a platform that really caters to simple everyday musings. And perhaps there's just no money to be made from that kind of content, and hence there are no companies jumping at the chance to serve this niche.

It's strange to me how blogging has now taken on a marketing role in cyberspace, whereas it used to be the place where people just journaled about their thoughts. I googled "How to write better blog posts" some time ago, and all the results were about how to use your blog as a marketing tool for your company. Make top ten lists. Make comparison posts with your competitors. Select keywords that people are searching for, and write a blog post about how your product is related to those searches.

Some people are of the opinion that the days when one can simply write their thoughts on their blog is long gone. If your posts don't provide value, nobody will click on your page. There are thousands of other websites to go to. Fair enough. But what are we considering valuable here? The blog which I spoke of at the beginning of this post was valuable to me.

It just makes me question. If I'm a reader looking to find more blogs like that, where am I supposed to look? If I'm a writer who wants to write blogs like that, how am I supposed to share it? If all the popular social media platform these days limit your word count, or manipulate your feed, or surface hateful content, or feeds trolls; and if blogging is supposed to be marketing oriented, where can people actually make meaningful connections online these days?

(And yes, before anyone tells me to get off my butt, stop staring at the screen and go out, I do have friends in real life. This post isn't about my non-Internet life. This post is about the opportunities I once found online to be part of communities, opportunities that I am increasingly and ironically struggling to find today despite the plethora of social platforms we have. And sometimes you're looking for people who share interests with you that are not easily found in your own local neighbourhood.)

This is a little bit before I began spending time online, but apparently, hosting your own content actually used to be the norm. Which makes sense, I suppose. I imagine that once upon a time, if you really want to put content on the Internet, you have to host your own server (or rent space from someone else). People who want to subscribe to said content then used RSS readers to build up their feed. This is still somewhat popular within tech circles, and I'm curious to see if this catches on to other areas. RSS seems like it can provide better controls over both the content you put out and the content you consume. Imagine having consistent voice and branding over all your content. Imagine not having to feel pressured when a new platform becomes viral and opportunities move away from where you've established your presence.

Others are not so convinced that RSS will save the day. RSS is a good way to subscribe to somebody's content, but first, you already have to be aware of their content. In other words, RSS doesn't give people exposure. That's why we still need social media. Because even though we complain a lot about "algorithms," they really do have the ability to separate certain folks from the noise. The downside is that many times, what ends up in the spotlight and what ends up as noise aren't aligned with what we personally want.

Over the past few months, I've signed up for several author newsletters. I initially thought they were just a way for authors to keep their readers updated about new books (and because I'm not on Twitter or Facebook, this was the best way for me to keep tabs on those), but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the blog voice and feel that I'm looking for seems to have transferred over to newsletters. They're casual, usually a collection of tidbits people want to share, some personal, some related to their work, etc. Perhaps people are now reserving their more intimate thoughts for those whom they know truly are interested in what they have to say.

I don't know if long-form blogging will ever be a thing again. Nor do I really want to romanticize the blogging age as "the good old times," because I'm sure lots of drama still cropped up even then. A quick google of fandom wank will lead you to old blog posts and book communities where much tears have been shed. But I'm still holding out for a new platform or a new framework where blogging can be personal and community-oriented again, as opposed to strictly commercial. Social media platforms rise and fall all the time, so maybe some code whisperer out there who might feel the same way as me would step up and decide to serve this niche.

By the way, if you're curious about the author I talked about at the beginning, she's Laura Weymouth, and you can find her website here. (This is not sponsored, I promise! I really did enjoy browsing through her blog.)

Reflecting on my Translation Process

2021-09-30T21:04:00-04:00

I just posted Ang Malagim na Hangin a few days ago, so I thought it might be a good time to bookend my previous post on starting my translation journey while the process is still fresh in my mind.

The short version? It was extremely difficult, much more challenging than I assumed it would be at the outset. More times than I am proud to say, I wanted to abandon the project altogether. How many people will read a Filipino high-fantasy story anyway? How much time and effort am I wasting working on something few people will read, when I could be working on a new story in English? These thoughts often crossed my mind.

Even now, I still find it very challenging to translate many words and phrases into Filipino. In my recent novel, I sometimes re-worded sentences altogether to avoid these. Although I worry that the Tagalog version ends up conveying a different meaning than the English version, sometimes it couldn't be helped. It was better that my story was understandable and easy to read, even if there were small deviations in the nuances.

Emotional Constipation

Having limited vocabulary is one of the challenges I already mentioned in my previous translation post. And I did expand my vocabulary as I persevered through the draft, but there were still instances when I couldn't find a Filipino word with the right feel.

Many times, I found myself grasping for emotions. There is a wide array of words in English to describe very specific emotions, whereas I know only a handful, more generalized words in Filipino. One example would be the words "warm" and "hot," in the context of internal feelings. These two words in English have different connotations; the former evokes a nice, cozy feeling, while the latter evokes intensity. In Tagalog, I only knew the word "mainit," which aligns more with "hot." Every time I used "warm" in English, I struggled to find a translation that conveyed the same feeling.

Least and Most

In Filipino, whenever we want to say "least", we append a prefix to the adjective that we are indicating. This makes it hard to say "least" when there isn't a specific adjective, such as in the case "at least he's still free." A similar phrase in Filipino is "kahit papaano," which sort of means "despite" or "even though."

But there was one scene in Chapter 12 where I said, "the least he could do was keep the atmosphere light and hopeful." Here "kahit papaano" doesn't seem to fit, and I ended up saying something more along the lines of, "he is only useful for providing joy and hope." And it just doesn't feel the same.

Speaking of "least," the opposite of that is just as difficult. I have no clue how to say "as fast as he can" or "as much as he was able." I think for "run as fast as he can," I ended up with "tumakbo sa pinakamabilis na makakaya niya." But that feels really clunky and long. When I read that, I don't get the feeling that he's going very fast, because I'm reading slowly.

Loan Words

I talked pretty extensively about loan words in the previous post as well, so I'll try not to get too ranty about that here. But loan words are the bane of my existence. Writing a story with a setting inspired by precolonial Philippines, and having to use words like "atake" or "idea" or "diskarte" feels like reading a historical fantasy and getting slapped in the face by "google." It just takes me out of the setting altogether, and breaks the immersive aspect of reading. I intensely wish there were other novels set in precolonial Philippines written in Tagalog, so I can have a reference of what words are acceptable to use.

I will forever lament my decision to give a character the epithet "Great Arbiter" in English. I could not find a suitable translation of arbiter in Filipino aside from "arbitro," which takes us back to the loan words issue. I have surrendered to the fact that this character from here on out will always be breaking readers from immersion. Might as well have named her Google.

Consecutive Adjectives

There are several passages in my novel where I described things, places, and people extensively. The good thing with English is that when you want to use multiple adjectives, you simply string them along in a chain, separated by a good, old comma.

In Filipino, when you want to chain adjectives, you have to use 'na' in between, or use the ligature '-ng' in the preceding word if it ends in a vowel. This gets pretty tiresome when there are more than two adjectives. Saying 'adj1 na adj2 na adj3' doesn't provide a good flow.

It is also easy to negate adjectives in English. You can say "un-" something, or something "-less". The Filipino equivalent of that is to prepend the word with "kawalan." Do you see how much longer that is to say? And this isn't really all that common in oral Filipino nowadays, so having to say "kawalan ng pag-asa" for something as simple as "hopeless" makes me feel hopeless.

Inconsistent spelling

Is it "anong" or "ano'ng"? Is it "balewala" or "baliwala"? Is it "gayon pa man" or "gayumpaman"? Is it "ninyo" or "niyo"? Is it "kaniya" or "kanya"? Why is it "pwede" but it's "kuwento"?

Pilipinas, explain! I am confusion!!

It wouldn't be so bad if dictionaries could have pointed me out to a standard way of spelling. But I had three dictionaries open the entire time I was doing my translation, and they all said these were all valid!

At least give me a set of words that go together. You know, like if I used "niyo" then I have to use "kanya." Or is it okay to just jumble them up?

I could have sworn these were real words

Siring. Pampanan. Usod.

I grew up hearing these words all the time. I thought they were real words. If they are, then at least five dictionaries are gaslighting me, because these words are not in any of them. I know that there are multiple Tagalog dialects, and maybe these words are specific to the particular dialect in the region I lived in in the Philippines. But oh boy, it was a blow to find out they weren't in the standard Filipino dictionaries. Not even the ones online that included slang.

Old Tagalog words mean different things now

I was really excited getting a chance to incorporate some of the old historical words I read during my research. But I found out that either the definition has diverged significantly that it just wouldn't make sense to use them in my context now, or there is another word of the same spelling that is more prevalent these days.

For example, old Tagalogs used the word "laho" to indicate the serpent-like creature that ate the moon. This mythology is actually the reason why the term for eclipse among the Tagalogs is "paglaho ng buwan." But these days, "laho" no longer refers to the mythological creatures. Rather, it means to disappear or dissipate, or an actual eclipse itself. It retains the traces of its origins, but when I tried to use "laho" to refer to the sea-serpents in my story, my editor suggested for me to use the direct translation of sea-serpent instead, "ahas-dagat."

Another word I tried to use is "dulohan," which according to Scott's Baranggay, refers to a chief's following. But in today's age, "dulohan" would be more associated with the root word "dulo," which means the end or edge of something. So I understand why using this term would cause some confusion.

How do you tell time?

I have a really hard time trying to convey the passage of time. Anything along the lines of "it happened ten years ago," or "it's the worst thing that's happened within the last few years."

I looked up various translations of these phrases, and I get back something like, "sampung taong nakalipas" which sounds… awkward somehow. It's worse when I don't have a specific number in mind. I'm never certain how to replace "a few" or "several" with an equivalent quantity in Filipino.

I think because English has become so prevalent in Philippines, we simply say "ten years ago" too. It's strange to think that certain phrases are so under-used, that when I actually hear them, the sound weird.

Who is "Siya"?

We don't have gendered pronouns in Filipino, just separate pronouns for he/she ("siya") or it ("ito"). This makes it difficult to write sentences where I refer to different people, because unless I always use their names, it can be easy to lose track of which person "siya" refers to. When I read in Filipino, I notice that some authors would sometimes substitute the pronoun for "it" to refer to the person who is not the main actor in the sentence. Initially I found this strange, because I was never taught this growing up, and when I looked up grammar books, I couldn't find anything regarding this technique.

I even asked my followers on Tumblr what they thought of this strategy, and it appears that they too found it ungrammatical. Unfortunately, I did end up using "ito" in rare cases when I just couldn't get the sentence to flow properly.

Of course, that left me in a bind when I had to talk about the Ghoul, who was once referred to as "it," but whom the main characters realized was really human. I feel as if I lost the significance of that shift every time I had to use "it" to refer to somebody.

Lack of Support

The most disappointing part of embarking on this translation journey was the dearth of resources for Filipino writing. Even something as simple as a spellcheker on my word processor was difficult to find. I came across a plugin, but it was poorly maintained, and it kept flagging legitimate words as misspellings.

In hindsight, I dived into this project with rose-tinted lenses, hoodwinked by the popularity of Wattpad among Filipino writers. I'm not on Wattpad myself, but being in the tech industry here in Toronto means I hear about Wattpad a lot as an example of a Canadian start-up success story. One point that Wattpad touts often is how huge its base is in the Philippines, and that Filipino writers on their platform often go on to have publishing deals, TV show deals, and movie deals in the country.

So I thought, great! Self-publishing must be robust in the Philippines! I mean, sure, most people on Wattpad are probably amateur writers, but coming from a fanfiction background myself, I know just how much work writers put in their stories even when they don't get paid. And how high the quality of those works can be. And because there seems to be a Wattpad-to-publishing funnel going on, surely there's got to be a lot of support for these writers.

Nope. I don't know if that's because I just don't have my foot in the correct doors; perhaps there does exist support for Filipino writers, but you have to be part of the right networks to access it. Or perhaps there really isn't. For the most part, my searches for self-publishing resources in Filipino turned up empty, even after changing my geolocation on Google and using Tagalog keywords. It's not like in English where millions of results will crop up, blog post after blog post giving tips about anything from plot outlines to character sketches, from editing to book covers.

It took me a long time to find a copy editor in Filipino, and it was mostly out of luck that I saw they were offering a copy editing service on their website. If you're writing in English, platforms like Reedsy nowadays make it extremely easy to find an editor with the right experience for the genre you're writing in. In Filipino, you'd be lucky to find any kind of editor at all, let alone one who is right for your story.

I worry about this, because if I can't find good resources to help me with writing in Filipino, then it might mean that the Filipino versions of my stories will always be inferior to the English versions. I don't want that.

(As an aside, I had once thought that maybe one day I would be good enough to write a story first in Filipino, and then translate it afterwards in English. Knowing how limited editing resources are in Filipino, I doubt that would be a smart strategy even if I were to become very adept in the language.)

Pushing forward

Thank you for coming to my TED Rant.

No, really, if you made it through all that, thanks. I just had to get them off my chest. As you can tell, I had a lot of frustrations with my experience, but if you ask me if it was all worth it?

Yes, it's absolutely worth it.

The thing is, who else is going to do it? Who else is going to give me Filipino high-fantasy in Tagalog without love triangles? If there's one thing my googling has shown me is that Filipino writers these days are more interested in writing in English and getting published abroad. And who can blame them? That's where the opportunities are.

Besides, even if nobody else reads these stories, I would. The younger me would have liked them. As much as "write to market" gets touted a lot these days (which isn't a terrible advice), sometimes it's enough to write self-indulgently. Sometimes writing for yourself is the goal.

I have not changed my mind about translating each of my stories to Filipino. I did learn a lot of valuable things over the past year. For example, I need to stop giving characters epithets I can't translate. And I continue to improve my wield on the language as well, so I'm confident that as I keep practicing, it will eventually get easier.