I began reading genre fiction simply to entertain myself. Then, I read it to learn and hone my skills as a fiction writer. You may think that if I’m always on the lookout for new ideas while reading, that it would be impossible for these novels to provide escape. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. Good stories give you words, but make you forget the words. All good stories do.
I’ve always enjoyed a good ghost story, whether it be found in a book or via some other medium. I would get terribly sad whenever I missed the Halloween episode of the now defunct Magandang Gabi Bayan (which my siblings and I watched in bed with a blanket around our shoulders – at least the first few iterations of the special, when they were still scary). I also enjoyed reading about different kinds of mental illness, and given my particular affinities, how could I not fall in love with the horror genre, which offered all these and more? I got it into my head that I wanted to write a horror novel, and so I treated every short story and book I read as research, and, more importantly, as a challenge.
Eliza Victoria 