Monday, March 23, 2009

Enter: Bahay Talinhaga

So, my resignation takes effect this Friday, after which (between what I hope will be semi-regular writing/lawyering gigs) I will be doing a lot of planning, a lot of research, and a lot of writing. When I made the decision to put up an epublishing house and finish my novel, I knew I'd be spending a lot of time in libraries doing research into old books (partly for the story, partly to find some old tomes which I might conceivably acquire the e-rights to) and I thought it'd be a shame if I kept all that data to myself. That was when I thought about putting up a site that would gather my research into, say, Philippine mythology, (from my own books, the interwebs, and my library raids) and make it available for anyone else interested in an organized format.

From there the idea kind of... morphed, as ideas tend to do: The more I thought about putting up a site, the more I thought that it would be cool if it would not only serve as a dumping place for my research, but also if it could be something of a Tor.com or io9 (though obviously not of the scope of such professional giants) for those interested in the "Filipino Fantastic" - books, art, games, comics, shows and strange news of interest to people who make or are fans of Philippine works of sci fi and fantasy. I think that we're pretty much covered when it comes to news sites for prose and comics (what with Bibliophile Stalker, Philippine Genre Stories, Philippine Speculative Fiction, Komikero Comics Journal and Komiks News Now Philippines) but I think it'd be great to have a place where we could geek out over stuff like Trese and the Mythology Class and, yeah, downhill wooden scooter races.

So, without further ado, I present to you Bahay Talinhaga.

So far I have three articles up (not counting the intro) on google book search, Filipino deviantartists and the Igorot wooden scooters. I'll have a review for the first 6 stories of PSFIV up within the week as well, then hopefully I can fall into a T-Th-S routine.

If any of you have any ideas/suggestions or want to volunteer to write anything, let me know! (And let me know if I screw anything up site-wise too... It's a bit more complex than a typical blog.) Hopefully in the future I can beg/borrow/buy stuff like the short-short stories on Tor.com for the site ^_^

No comments: