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 during which I started developing the Philippine characters for Hunting the Rememberer, I started college in June 2007 and wrote the first lines of my first chapter on the steps of the massive Main Library, while eating my lunch alone. I knew no one yet, and I had all the time in the world to write.
My original course was anthropology, and it helped me grow accustomed to cultural differences in the Philippines that I wasn’t aware of. As I learned the theories, the examples came from all around me, even phrases and jokes that I would not have understood if they hadn’t been brought up in class. But my favorite class was on folklore. Monsters of lore, more interesting than the bland vampires, werewolves, and zombies of Hollywood. I was raised on X-Files from a young age, so I guess I needed my paranormal to have more variety.
So I went into the basement of the Main Library, to the Filipiniana section, and did extra reading on Philippine mythology and folklore – not the deities but the creatures, the lower mythology. Maximo D. Ramos’ works were a major reference in my research.
I started a ‘Spook Book’ – a special blue notebook where I copied by hand and summarized what I found in the aging, crumbling hardcover tomes. Because the Filipiniana section books were in such poor condition, they couldn’t be brought out. But I had the beginnings of my story there, in and around that Main Library.
In later years, as much as I searched, I couldn’t find satisfying Philippine science fiction. So I proceeded to write my own. What if the aliens I’d written about when I was 12 set their sights on my beloved Philippines? And what if something went horribly wrong there? And so the story started. 🙂
Hunting the Rememberer: Chimera Anamnesis is currently at 62,000 words and still growing. I hope to have it ready for a publisher before the end of the year. 🙂
10 May 2020