I seek out the funky places. Here, my Habagat hideout in Makati.
More for myself than for any legions of readers, I have mapped out a few literary goals for the next year or so.
1. Arisugawa Park
2. Habagat
3. Cowachunga
4.EVEN
1. Bring the cloud novel Arisugawa Park to a reasonable conclusion. In the past two months, though still on the first day of the action, I have put up 20 sections of carefully reedited (and in many cases rewritten) Japanese novelistic material. I feel that a few people who know me are reading, a larger number of people who don't know me are reading, and everyone is respectful.
This is a powerfully good feeling that washes out some of the bad taste of the Internet. It has really pushed me to dredge my memories of Japan, the ones really in my bones, and present a narrative that is somehow recollection-based and in the now. The novel is ambitious and original, it just doesn't contain drone hunters, zombies, magick, overdone violence, techno disillusion, snarky cleverness, verbose fracturing, or the other hallmarks of post-oak lit.
1. Arisugawa Park
2. Habagat
3. Cowachunga
4.EVEN
1. Bring the cloud novel Arisugawa Park to a reasonable conclusion. In the past two months, though still on the first day of the action, I have put up 20 sections of carefully reedited (and in many cases rewritten) Japanese novelistic material. I feel that a few people who know me are reading, a larger number of people who don't know me are reading, and everyone is respectful.
This is a powerfully good feeling that washes out some of the bad taste of the Internet. It has really pushed me to dredge my memories of Japan, the ones really in my bones, and present a narrative that is somehow recollection-based and in the now. The novel is ambitious and original, it just doesn't contain drone hunters, zombies, magick, overdone violence, techno disillusion, snarky cleverness, verbose fracturing, or the other hallmarks of post-oak lit.
2. Get another novel, tentatively entitled Habagat, in the air. Habagat is a season when the winds change in the Philippines and you start getting typhoons. It is a transition period––I thought about calling the novel Love in a Time of Duterte, but that is maybe a little premature. The inspiration will probably be Dumaguete and Siquijor, involve a combination of Cannery Row Steinbeck and Savage Detectives Bolano, though I haven't quite decided how to make it post-oak enough.
3. Come back to Cowachunga. This book I believe can only be written again once I am in somewhere like Miami Beach or Tulum, for starters, and then maybe Guatemala, other parts of Mexico, moving toward Las Vegas and ghost town Nevada on the way to Reno. The book would have been banned and sold in paper bags out of the sides of renegade literary dens in Swansea and Bourdeaux (under the black cat imprint) a hundred years ago, lets see what happens in this post-oak world.
4. Start presenting research background to EVEN, my future-set trilogy on the horizon, on the EW blog. The fictitious Hendrix/Marley meetup in 1968 was the first of these and will not be the last. Pieces can take all kinds of forms, from NGO white papers to HuffPost editorials. EVEN is going to blow a lot of minds... it is something I see myself grappling with as an author only when I have earned enough from my fiction to allow me to write creatively full time.
In other news, Arisugawa Park 1.21 - David & the Two Heavies is nearly ready for publication. This is my most thriller-esque section yet and is 100 percent newly created. I am proud of it and think it gets the reader into a DaVinci Code level of understanding that there is some intricate, shadowy plot behind Eve's waking in the love hotel with her dead lover on top.
#endwriter
3. Come back to Cowachunga. This book I believe can only be written again once I am in somewhere like Miami Beach or Tulum, for starters, and then maybe Guatemala, other parts of Mexico, moving toward Las Vegas and ghost town Nevada on the way to Reno. The book would have been banned and sold in paper bags out of the sides of renegade literary dens in Swansea and Bourdeaux (under the black cat imprint) a hundred years ago, lets see what happens in this post-oak world.
4. Start presenting research background to EVEN, my future-set trilogy on the horizon, on the EW blog. The fictitious Hendrix/Marley meetup in 1968 was the first of these and will not be the last. Pieces can take all kinds of forms, from NGO white papers to HuffPost editorials. EVEN is going to blow a lot of minds... it is something I see myself grappling with as an author only when I have earned enough from my fiction to allow me to write creatively full time.
In other news, Arisugawa Park 1.21 - David & the Two Heavies is nearly ready for publication. This is my most thriller-esque section yet and is 100 percent newly created. I am proud of it and think it gets the reader into a DaVinci Code level of understanding that there is some intricate, shadowy plot behind Eve's waking in the love hotel with her dead lover on top.
#endwriter
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