I’ve been posting about The Crocodile God on social-media for about a week now and nobody’s following my instructions to LEAVE FEEDBACK ON THE INKITT WEBSITE, so I hope you folks from WordPress will take a look at my novel.
This is copy/pasted from my Facebook, but most all of my social-media is getting spammed with similar posts.
Continue reading “The Crocodile God – Looking for readers”
Was planning on updating my novel-in-progress “Moonflowers,” but ended up brainstorming some cover-art instead. The baybayin doesn’t translate quite word-for-word: It’s “bulaklak sa buwan,” or “flowers of the moon.” Link to the story is here, and I swear I’ll update it soon. https://www.inkshares.com/books/moonflowers And the photo’s link to hitRECord is here: https://hitrecord.org/records/3674764
Hey guys, I wrote some horror/modern fantasy because a friend tagged me for this Tumblr writing-prompt: “Date a selkie, but don’t hide her cloak because trust is important in relationships.”
I revisited selkie lore since the last time I read it in detail was when I was like, twelve, and I found out IT’S ACTUALLY MISERABLE BECAUSE A WHOLE RACE OF WOMEN ARE GETTING ABDUCTED. Sometimes the selkies are even married already, and I’m like “well, abduction is already a shit thing when she’s single, but y’all just straight up rape someone’s wife and then you wonder why she wants to leave so bad???”
So I was like “I’ll shipwreck some Filipino cannibal-mermaids in Ireland, so they can fucking eat the bastard they encounter who’s trying to kidnap a selkie-woman.”
I was hunting around for this short story on my writing-blog and it turns out it’s been sitting on my main blog for a damn year, so I finally reposted it to my writing-blog… waaaaaay too late for it to be imported. Lol at my crap timing.
Context: On Tumblr, David J. Prokopetz wrote some hilariously creative Dungeons and Dragons prompts, and the one that jumped out at me is “A river that flows uphill. Somehow it never occurred to the enchanter that a backwards river necessarily originates in the sea; as a result, the water is saline, rendering it useless for drinking and irrigation and playing havoc with the riverside ecosystem. On the plus side, having rivers that go both directions has been a great boon for inland trade.”
So my ass was like “OMG A BACKWARDS RIVER WOULD BE GREAT IN SOUTH ASIA, AND NOT JUST FOR THE TRADE ROUTE AND INSTANT SEA-SALT. WE COULD GROW COCONUTS AND MANGROVES AND HAVE DELICIOUS SALMON/MARLIN.”
I finished the 12th chapter last night, and I’m so glad I updated it before New Year’s. Main story link on Inkitt is here, so just click the chapter menu at the right to read Chapter 12.
And I am now working with Maarte Theatre Collective for their precolonial Filipino mythology project. They love my “Elegies” collection and I’m retooling their version to become a single narrative. Technically I talked with them on Sunday, but I wanted to actually send them some progress before I told folks, lol.
Duplicated with edits and re-formatting from my Tumblr, which has finally been imported to WordPress. Lol.
“Diwatahan” is a Tagalog term for a priestess/shaman. My other poem titled “Babaylan” uses the Bisayan term, since that was before I realized “babaylan” was tribe-specific; modern Filipinos of all ethnicities (both island-born and diaspora) tend to use “babaylan” as a spooky old-fashioned word for “witch,” probably because the Spanish had a habit of slaughtering the actual babaylan who wouldn’t convert to Catholicism. Revivalists use babaylan or “babaylan-inspired” as a tribute to them, so that’s me.
This was written for a friend’s wedding, which is why it logically centers a precolonial Tagalog wedding.
