Ozine Fest 2009

Visited my first ever anime convention while searching for local komiks/ indy manga/ doujin. I've got two posts on this: the more professional article is at Bahay Talinhaga while the more rambling, personal impressions (and more pics) are at my livejournal account.

More on the Book and the Launch

I put the event post up on Bahay Talinhaga but I did have some more personal thoughts on the launch of "A Time for Dragons" as well as the book itself. Since they were more personal in nature, I put them up on my livejournal account instead. It has a picture of my super special "reversal-of-talent-signed-edition" :P

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 ^_^

Persona 4 - Hesitating at the Finish Line

Last December, when I first got my grubby not-so-little hands around a copy of Persona 4, I positively lived and breathed the game. I spent most of my free time either playing it or thinking of what I would do the next time I could play it – how I’d try to solve a murder mystery while simultaneously learning how to juggle treasure hunting and persona fusing with girl-wooing and good old fashioned studying; one would almost think I was trying to fall into the TV world myself, by sheer dint of the number of hours I spent glued in front of the television. By January, I’d reached the end game, and I knew I was only a few hours away from culminating what, to that point, had been a truly exemplary gaming experience.

Two months later… and I’ve barely touched my PS2.

This isn’t to say I don’t want to finish the game, because I do. I like being able to wrap up a narrative, tie up the loose ends, and have some sort of resolution that makes me feel that the journey I (for in Persona moreso than even other RPGs, it is “me” who is the protagonist) have undertaken has had some weight, some consequence in that other world. There are other advantages as well to finishing the game: I can move on to another game for one thing, and I’d be safe from any game-end spoilers I might encounter in forums or fan fiction.

And yet… I hesitate. I tell myself that there’s no real rush, that I can finish it anytime I want to, when I’m not too tired or too stressed to fully appreciate the ending, when everything is “just right.” There’s always something just a little bit more urgent to be done: work to finish, a show to watch, a friend to visit… and then, lo and behold, months have passed.

I think that the more I enjoy a game, the harder it is for me to write finis to the whole experience. Of course I could always replay it, but while Persona 4 certainly does offer a lot of replay value, I’m a man who plays games primarily for the story, and while the depth and breadth of the narrative may change on subsequent playthroughs, the climax and the “truth” of the narrative will – except for games with truly divergent multiple endings - remain largely unchanged. In Persona 4, I can do different things during the year of gametime – but no amount of variation in my playing will give me a story which happen after the events of the ending.

In Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book,” an adult explains to the young protagonist the distinction between the dead and the living as a matter of potential: the living have an infinite amount of it, and the dead have none. I suppose in some way, I feel that in completing a game, I “kill” it – I have fulfilled its potential, seen all it has to offer. The characters who I’ve grown to love will never again say or do anything I haven’t seen before – oh sure different dialogue choices may lead to different responses for them, but I have to “reset” their lives to see these alternate possibilities – their growth as characters has stopped. The end of the game is the limit to which I can follow the lives of these characters, these friends… and as long as I don’t reach it, their potential remains; their life remains.

I will finish Persona 4. It is too good of a game, of a story, for me to relegate it to the ranks of the never-finished: one can only hold off completion for a certain amount of time before one forgets the details of the story, and the ending loses its impact. Soon, I’ll return to Inaba, put on the glasses, and call out my inner selves one last time…

But not before I will have hesitated at the edge; and, when I do take the plunge… not without a trace of regret.

Empathy

[There's a bit of graphic detail here. Please proceed at your own discretion.]

They found the body of a twenty year old girl near an irrigation ditch last Thursday. She'd been kidnapped the day before, then tortured, then killed.

I read it in a newspaper article Saturday afternoon, while my wife and I were having a late lunch. My mind didn't really process the information until 2 a.m. the following morning.

They found the body of a twenty year old girl the other day. She was tortured.

The article stated that she was the daughter of one of the leaders of the New People's Army in the South. The family blamed the army. The army denied involvement. The mayor of Davao vowed to personally arrest the perpetrators. The NPA stated that they would launch no retaliatory attacks against the families of soldiers.

The facts seemed completely unrelated to the truth.

They found the body of a twenty year old girl the other day. Her body showed signs of beating, stabbing, and laceration of her genitals.

Her mother asked: "Where is justice?"

Where is justice?

At mass today, the priest started his homily with a story: he related how impressed he was when he visited the convent run by a group of devout nuns: apparently they had moved into the convent - which would also house children and elderly in the care of the nuns - recently and had been shocked by the state of the comfort rooms - because they were too comfortable. So they had the comfort rooms changed, to be more in line with their teachings regarding the utility of suffering.

I almost walked out of the church.

I believe that Christ died on the cross for our sins. I do NOT believe, that the only way we get to be virtuous people is by actively seeking out nails to ram into our palms. Good can come out of suffering... but suffering MUST be alleviated whenever possible.

There are too many people suffering. Too many people willing to inflict it.

Who tortures a twenty year old girl for the sins of her father?

And what the hell can we do about it? Guy Davenport once said that "Distance negates responsibility." If so, knowledge can negate distance: That's the problem with the internet age. In a world of instant access to information and 24/7 news, every statistic can have a name, every name can have a face.

They found the body of a twenty year old girl the other day.

Steinem was right. Empathy is the most revolutionary of emotions.

Even when the same can never come close to the reality.

WATCHMEN

... is out now. As in, today. Here. (Just called Podium to confirm)

What the hell cinemas? If you're going to show the movie of the year one day early, at least tell us @_@

A Declaration [Up the (Main)stream Without a Paddle (Part 2)]

I love stories. I love science-fiction and fantasy. I think a lot of us here in the Philippines love it. I’ve read some of our cracks at the genre – and I really like what I’ve seen. I want to see more of it. I want more people reading it.

Yesterday, I gave my thirty-days notice; come the 28th of March, I will cease being an associate at the 4th largest law firm in the country. (Hence the reason why I couldn't post these thoughts with Part 1 of this entry @_@)

Come the 28th, two things happen: first – despite whatever odd jobs I may need to pull to keep from having to mooch off my wife - my primary vocation, my primary occupation will be that of a writer. I have an urban fantasy novel that needs finishing.

Second, I set about trying to establish a publishing house. A digital publishing house, with a special place for novel length Philippine Speculative Fiction.

The other week I attended a seminar on Publishing in Cyberspace, sponsored by the National Book Development Board (NBDB), in partnership with the Book Development Association Of The Philippines (which I heard of at Philippine Genre Stories). The publishers in attendance were affable, intelligent sorts, but many of the representatives seemed to be at a loss with regards to the full potential of the Internet (with the exception of those who sent younger representatives). This shouldn’t come as a surprise – many big US publishers seem to flounder a bit in the ebook realm.

Yet, the ebook market is here, and it's steadily growing. Lots of people all over the world already read reams of stories online, on their computers - just look at how popular fanfic is. Mobile devices that can read ebooks will only become more prevalent: the iPhone has apps like Stanza – which is free – which can read most ebook formats (though there are some formatting issues) and can receive files via wifi. The Kindle 2 has just been released, and late this year/early next year, the plastic logic reader might finally come out. In a year where traditional publishing struggled, Ebook sales increased - by quite a bit.

Back at the local level, at the Publishing in Cyberspace conference, a representative from yehey revealed some telling numbers: around 27 million internet users in the country, 83% of whom were part of a social network (1st in the world); 90% of whom have perused blogs. Even just limiting ourselves to the Philippines, there are a lot of eyes on the internet, a lot of people before whom we can display our works. I think there’s an audience here for genre fiction: look at the number of people who flock to the SFF section of Fully Booked – the people from all social classes who splurge on complete collections of the works of Rowling and Meyer; the number of fans drawn by Neil Gaiman whenever he’s in town; the droves who descend upon Komikon; even the popularity of story-intensive RPGs.

There’s room for growth in this market I think. As I said last post, I think there would be a market for homegrown SFF novels and serials… These are the type of stories I’ve always loved to read. These are the type of books that create not only readers, but FANS. Let’s go make some.

Of course, going digital also means that whatever the state of the market here may be, we don’t have to limit ourselves to our own shores: the accolades received by the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler of Charles Tan and Mia Tijam should be encouraging. In the United States, the number of people reading fiction is on the rise. Books can do well even during a recession – all the more when they are so much cheaper than other entertainment forms… as ebooks have the potential to be.

That doesn’t mean that the author will be getting less – ebooks can allow an author to get a larger slice of the revenue pie. Ebooks allow the author to do things which would be difficult (high def color photographs on every other page) or impossible (experimentation with audio files, or hotlinking, or what have you) with a physical book. We could even experiment with visual novels – the Ren’Py Visual Novel Engine is free and, from personal experience, I know there’s a great community that supports it. This is a great time to be an author.

There’s a lot of work to be done yet: a business plan to make, investors to convince, bandwidth to purchase, editors and codemonkeys to hire, marketing strategies to figure out. It will be hard work. It may fail horribly – but if it does, I hope others will learn from my errors and push forward.

But for now, I am throwing my hat in the ring. I am 29 years old and from now on I’m setting out to cross out quite a few things from my list of potential mid-life regrets. If I don’t end up contributing anything to the development of Philippine Speculative Fiction… well, at least no one will be able to tell me I didn’t try.

I’m betting on us – us as readers, us as writers. If you like the odds – or, hell, if you don’t like them but want to spite them anyway, then welcome aboard.

Let’s do this.