Signs of Life

It's been a while. 

The last thing I wrote here was about the Nightfall book giveaway in January 2020, months before countries started closing down their borders due to the you know what. The month before that, we actually had a nice vacation in Melbourne, but I wasn't able to write about it or any other nice things because personal challenges, the rising cases of the Delta variant in Sydney, the collapsing healthcare system in the Philippines, and the confusing and ever-changing rules of the on-again-off-again lockdowns have drained my life of what little joy it has. My master's degree was conferred in the midst of lockdown (so no face-to-face celebrations), and I'm now studying another degree at another university here in Sydney, once again in the midst of lockdown. This blog is supposed to be about fun things but there's not much fun happening in the world right now. 

I may have wallowed. I may have neglected to regularly exercise. I may have eaten too much junk. And I may have convinced myself that what I do - writing - isn't all that important and that I should just, you know, shut up. 

But then: an essay of mine got published and I gathered the courage to share it online - there was a time when I set all of my social media channels to Private because I was, shall we say, Not Doing Well - and to my surprise, I started getting messages from people saying that the essay resonated with them. 

So someone out there is reading and is finding some meaning in what I write. (Thank you.) So maybe, just maybe, I can convince myself again to go back to writing, and to go back to earnestly sharing my writing without feeling guilty or feeling like an impostor or constantly thinking Who cares why bother it doesn't matter anyway!

At the very very least, it still matters to me. 

There are Exciting Things brewing in the background, one of which involved me sitting down for an 11 pm meeting with [redacted] due to the time difference and trying to stay lucid and important-sounding haha. I'll tell you all about it soon! 

For now, you can give me a follow on social media or check out my website. 

Here's a roundup of some writerly things since we last spoke. You can find a more complete list on my website. 

• My poetry collection What Comes After will be published as part of the University of the Philippines Press's Philippine Writers Series! I'll share more once I know more. 
• My story "Ayani" is included in Dark Region's Press Stranded anthology.
• "Down the River" is in Multispecies Cities with a review on Publishers Weekly.

• My Fireside Fiction story "Where you are now is better than where you were before" is a Tor.com "must-read".
• My story "Panoptes", which is set in the same universe as Nightfall, is in Issue 8 of the Future SF Digest.

• I spoke with Victor Ocampo, Isabel Yap, and Vida Cruz on Future Currents: Philippines and Singapore. You can watch it on YouTube!
• At the BDAP Literary Festival, I spoke with Dean Alfar and John Jack Wigley on the Science Fiction and Fantasy in Today's Dystopia panel.
• Check out this review/overview of the Lapat Anthology which includes my short story "Blessed are those who suffer". Photos from Lakan Umali's Twitter page.

• If you missed my one-act play "Ang Bahay sa Gitna ng Kawalan" at the Virgin LabFest, check out this amazing virtual restaging by Teka Lang Wait! Photo source

More soon!