I've started working on a Middle Grade urban fantasy/paranormal series-of-sorts that's also semi-autobiographical. It's about a 13 year-old Filipina named Ning Santos who stumbles upon a box of items that belongs to her great-grandpa who died way before her mom was born. The items, such as his anting-anting (amulet), were collected from his US Navy heydays and become a trigger for weird occurrences around town. Throughout her journey, Ning gets to know her past and bridge a cultural gap in a time where the wrong kind of patriotism encourages erasure of ancestral knowledge and wisdom. And I'm just going to drop some (ok, a lot of) links to the various elements and inspiration behind this series: Fil-Am History 5 Things You Didn't Know About the Watsonville Riots (dooblydoo contains links to articles) Little Manila: Filipinos in America's Heartland Filipino Americans Discovering Their Past for the Future Acradia Publishing: Filipinos in San Diego Filip...
Idk if I'll ever get the hang of blogging on the regular; but since it's the middle of 2018, I might as well spring one up amidst all the ucky-mucky news cycle of the past 7 months. Looking at my 2018 writing goals from my last post, I'm proud to be accomplishing 2 of the 4: Re-worked my NING SANTOS WIP and am 11k into drafting, which isn't technically a lot...but it reads a lot better than what I had reworked back in January. Completed and surpassed my 2018 Goodreads Reading Challenge!!! Set myself up for 6 books and ended up reading 8: 5 Middle Grade books by Asian American authors 1 YA book by an Asian American author 2 poetry collections by Asian American poets. Currently on my 9th read: Nightbooks by J.A. White , my only non-POC/non-APIA authored read so far. Current poetry WIPs aren't quite yet ready for submitting, but I do have a forthcoming poem publication this year in Hay(na)ku Anthology #15 (they'll be having a book launch in Septembe...
Be-holding the Waters The cactus holds water much like the way camels hold water in their humps and dams and reservoirs hold water and how the moon pulls and pushes the water and the gravity that keeps it all in. We hold water too, keeping it, guarding it, taking our instinctual share. But when we begin to own the water, we own the cactus and the camel and the people. Water adopts our toxicity and so do they. Nothing floods the heart as easily as greed.
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