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.

[BaTa] Review: Philippine Speculative Fiction IV (2 of 4)

The second batch of reviews is up at Bahay Talinhaga. The post contains my thoughts on the following stories:

• "The Day that Frances, the Copywriter, Became God" by Monique Francisco
• "A Retrospective on Diseases for Sale" by Charles Tan
• "Sky Blue" by Celestine Trinidad
• "All We Need is Five Meals a Day" by Jose Elvin Bueno
• "The Sewing Project" by Apol Lejano-Massebieau
• "Dreams of the Iron Giant" by Joseph F. Nacino

Once again, thanks to the authors for sharing the wonderful stories ^_^

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

Book Launch: A Time for Dragons

It's late but I managed to eke out a post on Bahay Talinhaga about the book launch of A Time for Dragons yesterday. It was an honor and a great deal of fun. ^_^ More on it later but for now, zzz....

Apocrypha

In commemoration of the launch later today of "A Time for Dragons" (and in line with having BaTa serve as a home for some original fiction) I thought I'd post over at Bahay Talinhaga a slightly cleaned up version of a story of mine that didn't make the cut. It's a bit of an odd story - is "quasi-Genesis-myth "a genre? - but I felt nostalgic after reading it again so I decided what the hell: it'll stand as a testament to the fact that not everything I submit will make the grade ^_^;

[BaTa] Review: Philippine Speculative Fiction IV (1 of 4)

Just a heads up that I've posted my thoughts (let's call them "reviews" for convenience) on the first six stories of PSF 4 over at Bahay Talinhaga. I'm almost done with it but it's good to know that I'll have "A Time for Dragons" waiting for me come Sunday ^_^

In unrelated news, don't forget that Monsters vs. Aliens is showing today ^_^ Oh and for all those who've read and loved the book, check out the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are. You know... they might actually pull this off...

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 ^_^