Recently I went back to grad school and my classmates found out about what I write. After a bit of encouragement, I’ve decided to spend some free time (when not bogged down with assignments and thesis preparations) to review and revise an old story that I blazed twelve chapters into back in 2006 – A… View Article

Whether Memphis, Manila, or Mindanao, setting has its special place in my stories. I try to feature landmarks and places of meaning to me. The backdrop to the action gives me opportunity for poetic descriptions, whether remembering the soft music and brown tones of the now-closed Figaro’s Cafe in Riverbanks Mall, Marikina, or the haunted… View Article

I found an animator! OMG. He redid Bonni’s character design for anime style animation and this is the first look at her. Animake, a Filipino animator, happily took a go at redesigning the characters Myke Guisinga drew to prepare them for animation in the future. I am thrilled. Once he’s able to animate the story,… View Article

So in the past year, I’ve been talking to artists to help make SCRAMBLE into an animation. That had a couple of steps. The first was character designs, which the talented Myke Guisinga, a professional and freelance comic book artist, readily crafted while I searched high and low for an animator. When Myke was done… View Article

About a decade ago, I wrote the worst story I have ever written. It was a tough sem. I failed nearly all my classes except for a foreign language and this one creative writing workshop class. The story made no sense but I submit it anyways. The most interesting character was a side character, and… View Article

I have a few stories, still unfinished, that have to do with a sense of destiny – not for a specific character, but for humanity as a whole or for some large chunk of human kind…  Like what happens to the fate of all Filipinos in the Middle East when one young man goes there… View Article

As this is posted, I’m probably already back at work. But as I write this, I’m on what is likely my last week of vacation, sick leave after recovering from a surgery. This isn’t the first time I’ve taken a break from work to write. I find it helpful. Back around 2014, when I shifted… View Article

When I was little, I’d imagine myself into X-Files or Star Trek, but that only lasted until I learned about copyrights. Weirdly, despite its popularity, I’ve never really written fanfiction. I may have role played in it with others via text based mediums, but I haven’t tried to story it the same way I do… View Article

My friends who are successfully e-published authors encouraged me to do what I did back in high school, but more seriously this time – they invited me to publish some stories for free via websites that have replaced FictionPress in the decades since. These are Wattpad, Royal Road, and Tapas (the last one is for… View Article

So the other day, my successful web novel author friends gave me some advice. And I’m sharing that with y’all. Works that are published online for free can be monetized through Patreon (avid readers can read chapters in advance – its simple enough) but not all stories will work in this format. Web novels require… View Article

So the other day my successful web novel author friends came by for coffee, and to take a look at my novel manuscript (YAY!). I was able to ask them for advice, and learn more about how e-publishing via free websites works. A web novel generally requires consistent updates – multiple times a week, or… View Article

Recently I met with friends who are now successful e-book writers. Together they publish a web novel, five chapters every week, with weeks worth of chapters in advance available on their Patreon. For them, this is a full-time endeavor, but it supports their family. I can’t write full-time, but to some extent they invited me… View Article

So I’ve been reviewing my 280 page manuscript since I have a personal goal to ship it off to the publisher by the first week of October. I read it all in three days, with breaks of course. Most of what I’ve read so far has been a blast. I’m optimistic. One chase scene made… View Article

The other day, I was rereading my first novel manuscript – Hunting the Rememberer: Chimera Anamnesis. In 2013, the ending I wrote made me roll my eyes and facepalm. Now, the ending I wrote in 2021 made me scream and squeal as multiple plot threads were tied off in a single, action-packed chapter. Goodbye, summary… View Article

Over a decade ago, sometime around high school and before I started studying creative writing more seriously, I had a bad habit of writing a summary as a short story or a chapter. I knew an entire universe, and I tried writing it out as a book with eight chapters. It did not go well…. View Article

So recently a friend posted a lesser-known song by Avenged Sevenfold saying it would be a great end credits song for an isekai adventure. Isekai is a Japanese word that refers to a portal adventure, like Alice in Wonderland, or Gate. In it, the main character(s) are transported via portal to another world or dimension… View Article

Exploring Patreon has made me consider – what do I want to make? I want to create and publish stories (novels), comics, and animations. But can I make comics? I checked my sketchpad and found something from high school. Another extracurricular project about my high school barkada. It was meant to be a written story… View Article

SCRAMBLE is a six episode series. Each episode should be about 15 minutes long… And it takes $1,000 USD to animate a one-minute clip in the Philippines. I checked with multiple options. That is the price. Since I know my doodles of my characters aren’t detailed or consistent enough to pass muster (see Bonni, right,… View Article

In the summer of 2005, my barkada and I decided to make a short film project. Consisting of six, fifteen-minute episodes, SCRAMBLE was originally supposed to be a group effort. Sarge, Danny, David, Michael, Justin, and me, and a few others whose names I have to dig up were the team for this.  My high school savings… View Article

A year or two ago, I paid a sensitivity reader to check a chapter I was worried needed a trigger warning. Her feedback was that it was atrocious, like the chapter needed to burn unless there was some way to turn back time and unwrite it. It was the only problematic chapter in the entire… View Article

I requested a few friends to ask me questions I can answer in my blog while I recuperate for a month. My Malaysian-Japanese expat friend, Azman, asked what headspace I have when I write. So here goes. When I was six or seven years old, I decided to try writing my first ‘book’. All I… View Article

In 2000, as a twelve-year-old, I made a story universe called Vylron. Set in a post-Earth universe after alien interference, it transformed our planet into a fantastical world with dragon people, cat people, and elementals. My brother and the neighborhood kids and I played D&D-esque games set in Vylron, developing our characters and doodling stat… View Article

I made the decision recently to post or rather repost my old work from high school, the stuff I published to Fiction Press back in 2005-2007. Side by side with my 2021 work, I can see differences in my style, how I’ve developed as a writer over the decades. The way I write an intro… View Article

So in 2020 I was stuck in North Africa during the pandemic, locked down in some shnazzy city with a laptop and some hard copies of my old  manuscripts to my first novel. I retyped the whole damn thing. All 60,000 plus words. And then my elbows  and hands started to go numb, all pins-and-needles… View Article

Back  in 2013, I was in my final year at UP. I started the second semester  with 100 pages of novel – carefully workshopped pieces over the course  of six years of creative writing classes. But I also had a day job.  Thanks to exciting work, I sort of forgot that I had a thesis… View Article

It’s  been 13 years since I started my first novel (and I’m still writing  it). I just wanted to look back on why and how I started this.  Back in 2006, I made the  biggest move of my life: from the United States to the Philippines,  where my family is from. After a gap year… View Article

Hello  world! I’m Isabel Risone, a Filipina-American science fiction novelist  working on my first book. Here’s a little bit about me.  I was born and raised in the  United States to Filipino parents. After high school, I moved to the  Philippines and studied B.A. Creative Writing at the University of the  Philippines Diliman, in Quezon… View Article