The Kindle edition of my poetry chapbook, Apocalypses, is now available. My thanks to the hardworking people of Flipside Publishing, and to Adam David for the cover. Take note that this is a fixed-layout format.
Do check it and/or share the link, and watch out for more announcements as the collection becomes available in other stores.
Apocalypses collects poems by Eliza Victoria, ranging from observations of the tragedies and banalities of everyday life, to reimaginings of biblical stories. Many of these previously appeared in Victoria’s Palanca Award-winning collections “Maps” (2011) and “Reportage” (2009), as well as in various other publications, including High Chair, Kritika Kultura, Room Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, and Stone Telling.
MOBI: This digital edition is in a fixed-layout .mobi format, and is best viewed with Kindle for Android, or on Kindle Fire/Kindle Fire HD devices.
“Outcry”: Only after the sixth small black girl goes missing does the police commissioner finally make a statement, interrupting the season finale of a popular soap opera. The enraged letters start coming soon after. “Are you going to tell me if Susan’s baby belongs to David or not, Mister Police Commissioner??????” says one. Another person sends anthrax.
…
“Design”: “If this child is part of The Plan, then The Plan was that I would be raped. If this child is not part of The Plan, then my rape was a violation of The Plan, in which case The Plan is not a Plan at all, but a Polite fucking Suggestion.”
Those are passages from Carmen Maria Machado’s “Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU“, first published in The American Reader, included in the massive 2014 Campbellian Anthology, which you can download for free by following the link (thanks Phil for the tip). It’s a great boulder of a collection that I have been chipping at for the past days, and oh my God what a beautiful, funny, clever, brutal, haunting piece of art this story is. I have described this as episode recaps of Law and Order SVU — if the show were written and produced by David Lynch.
The year’s just begun but this is definitely going to be included in my year’s best reads.
My thanks to M. David Blake for compiling these amazing stories and making the collection available!
M. David Blake’s magnum opus, the 2014 Campbellian Anthology, is now available for download! This book attempts to collect in one volume representative works by most of the writers eligible for this year’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. We don’t have them all—there were a few we couldn’t get—but all the same, this book contains more than 860,000 words of fiction by 111 authors, and best of all, it’s not merely free, it’s DRM-FREE.
Also:
The Nebula Award nominations are out and some of the nominated work can be accessed online here.
Maximum Volume is launching tomorrow. Read an excerpt of my story, “The Missing“, on the anthology’s website.
Spent some time in Bulacan with my siblings. J and I thought we were going to spend the weekend with just my brother, then two of my siblings and my cousin decided at the last minute to come home. The house became less lonely.
It was J’s sister’s birthday. V is a vegetarian, and so we had some vegetarian dishes, and the spread was amazing. I wish I knew where the goodies came from.
Even the cakes were/looked fabulous.
We tagged along the next day to breakfast at Fresh in Solaire.
They served the best yogurt I have ever had in my life. Thick and filling, almost as heavy as cream. I loved it.
I would happily wash all of the dishes if you cooked for me. Thank goodness J is a good cook. Here he perfects his gravy.
Taco Tuesday!
That salsa had other uses.
As a dip for grilled cheese sandwiches!As ingredients for — we’re still not sure what to call this. I thought it tasted like caldereta.
We had a nice Valentine’s Day dinner at Wooden Spoon, where everything tastes amazing. SERIOUSLY.
Look at kuya at the back, looking so happy for our love huhuhu.
J’s nephew wanted to drag us here. We really didn’t need to be dragged hehe. Project Pie, where you can create your own pizza for PhP 285. Apparently everything’s 285, no matter how many toppings you ordered.
J said their interior looked like the set of Rent.
I can see that.
Ooh, this is a highlight. We saw the matinee show of Wicked on Feb 23. We were seated all the way up in Balcony I Center, but we were able to buy these cheap binoculars for only PhP 75 each. They helped a lot! But in truth, the distance wasn’t that bad. J said we had good seats, right smack in the center of the balcony facing the stage.
We really enjoyed the show. Great set pieces. The last play I saw in the CCP Main Theater was Cinderella, starring Lea Salonga, and that was years ago (and my sister and I were in Balcony II)! I was astounded by the spectacle. Suzie Mathers as Glinda/Galinda is a standout and Jemma Rix nailed the musical’s showstopper “Defying Gravity”. The applause was thunderous. I wanted more more more, and I would love to see this again.
Photo below from the official program. Read more here and here. I wonder what the next big production is going to be. The Book of Mormon? Pretty please?
Some photos at the lobby while we waited for the doors to open.
Publishing via print-on-demand is tiring and expensive. You can’t really earn much as the margin for overhead is narrow — unless you want buyers to pay for a slim volume of stories with the price of the Codex. And it’s certainly not for the lazy, or the very very busy.
But I did it for readers who requested for physical copies of The Viewless Dark, and also to see a small number of my poems in print. There is narcissism involved, a fair bit of mania, and love, too. And you know what, I enjoyed every minute of it. It made the selling of my books more personal, more meaningful.
So thank you to those who ordered copies. The last copies were handed out in December 2013, during the Readercon, and now we’re closing the store.
However, Unseen Moon (a dark fiction collection containing three novelettes and one short story) can still be purchased online for your Amazon Kindle and on Smashwords for only $1, and soon Apocalypses will be available in online stores via Flipside Publishing.
I would love to see physical copies of these titles in bookstores, but I’ll probably have a publisher handle that for me, if only to drive down the cost per book. Or I can continue printing in small batches for special occasions. We’ll see.
I don’t know if you judge games like I do — that is, if you focus more on the story and the writing than the puzzles. I don’t play games often, and I don’t follow the game blogs and the reviews, so you’ll have to forgive the misuse of jargon. What I’m saying is the games I usually play are slow and boring (compared to games like Borderlands 2) with huge blocks of texts and minimal gameplay. And by “minimal” I mean mouse clicks. Maybe click-and-drag when I feel magnanimous. The thing is, I am impatient, I have horrible hand-eye coordination, and I am lazy. To give you an idea, I tried playing a sample of the first-person survival horror game Amnesia, and quit after three minutes because I can’t open the door, and I can’t be bothered to learn how. (Sorry.)
So if you’re like me, you’ll love these games:
My Father’s Long Long Legs (Play Online) – Created by Michael Lutz. Protagonist’s father loses his job and locks himself in the basement, digging for years. I’ve played a handful of online interactive horror games before, and this is the best I’ve seen so far. Great writing, great use of the medium, with a story that gets under your skin.
It begins: My family lived on the southern edge of a certain Midwestern industrial city in an old house, old enough that its basement still had a dirt floor.
I was not yet old enough to openly question a parent’s behavior, but certainly old enough to recognize its oddness, when my father began digging.
Analogue: A Hate Story (Get on Steam) – Visual novel created by Christine Love. An interstellar ship called the Mugunghwa reappears after hundreds of years of disappearance, and you, the investigator, is tasked to find out what happened. You will do this by reading log entries and interacting with *Hyun-ae or *Mute, the ship’s two AI, who withhold or reveal information based on their biases and loyalties. It tackles the effects of tradition, misogyny, homophobia, loneliness, and scientific ignorance on families and individuals. Love based characters and circumstances in Analogue on the Joseon Dynasty, which reigned in Korea from July 1392 to October 1897 and is known for its dehumanizing treatment of women.
I got the game as a gift, and didn’t know anything about the plot. Powerful stuff. It affected me more than I expected.
Note: The following games I played with J.
Walking Dead: Season One (Get on Steam) – Developed by Telltale Games, based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series. The story unfolds based on your choices, and you can choose to say nothing at every turn. Are you going to save the little boy, or the man who helped save your life? Will you choose to leave someone in order to save the group? Are you going to tell the man that you were on your way to prison when the zombie attacked, or are you going to lie?
The developers get the flavor of Kirkman’s comic book series right, focusing on the characters and the relationships rather than on the shock value of zombie attacks. (Something the TV series is clearly enjoying, with their million-dollar budget on special effects. Yeah let’s tear open another zombiedude’s abdomen while this character’s story arc crashes and burns why don’t we.)
To the Moon (Get on Steam) (Listen to the soundtrack) – Created by Canadian designer and composer Kan “Reives” Gao, produced by Freebird Games. A cross between Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. You control two scientists who are hired to create a dreamscape for a dying client that will help him die happy. The request involves going to the moon, but the client himself can’t tell you why he has such an intense desire. The task is to find out, and make it happen. It’s a story of love and memory that keeps you guessing, with a clever and effective gameplay. Poignant and heartbreaking.
The night before, I asked the front desk to get me a cab by 9 AM. I don’t think they told the driver where I was going, because when I got in and told him, he looked like he died a little inside.
The BenCab Museum, which houses National Artist Ben Cabrera’s own paintings and personal art collection, is located on Km. 6 Asin Road. Go to Google Maps and see how far away that is from Baguio City Proper, not to mention from freaking Kennon Road.
I don’t care! I’m going to the museum!
My cab fare was PhP 144. Museum entrance (marked “donation” in the ticket) is at PhP 100. Be there early! The museum opens at 9 AM. Visitors entered the museum in droves just when I was heading out, around lunchtime.
I made it! Woohoo!
Cafe Sabel, the museum’s own restaurant, is located inside, so you can look at art, take a coffee break, and look at art again.
By the way, this is Sabel.
The memory of a slightly deranged homeless woman clad in plastic sheets billowing in the wind has inspired Filipino artist Benedicto Cabrera, better known as BenCab, for decades. He first started on his Sabel series (named after the woman) in the 1960s and has constantly revisited her image since then, over time abstracting those billowing sheets for example, showing them as elegant dresses. Yet, he had always done so on paper or canvas. (Source.)
Devote an hour or more to your museum visit.
Great view from one of the galleries.
I took a lot of photos but unfortunately was not able to take note of most of the artists’ names. My apologies.
“Portrait of a Woman from the Cordilleras” by Raymond Halili, an incredibly detailed 4 x 3 cm painting.
“A Good Night to Dream” by Welbart Bartolome.“Graces II” by Gregory Halili.
Detail.
Norberto Roldan’s Assemblage called “The Beginning of History and the System of Objects”
Detail, and texture.
Leroy New’s “Psychopomp”Julie Lluch’s “Lily for Georgia”
And here are two of BenCab’s erotica pieces, “Love Positions” and “Draped Figure XX”.
I have to say I love this one, Abigail Dionisio’s “Ready to Hope”.
Igan D’Bayan’s “Disco Purgatorio”
Detail.
Kawayan de Guia’s “Attention”.
Virgilio Aviado’s “Subdivision”, a collage.
Norberto Roldan’s “Medicine Cabinet No. 8”. Love love love the objects in this.
“Basic” by Ronald Ventura.
I was lucky to be there when Ben Cabrera dropped by. My thanks to one of the members of the museum staff for taking this wonderful picture.
I went down to Cafe Sabel, but took a picture of the surrounding duck pond and garden before grabbing a table.
Beautiful!
Inside Cafe Sabel. I ordered a Tomato and Basil Pasta, a sundae with chocolate and fresh strawberries, and coffee. Note that Cafe Sabel is a cash-only restaurant.
Took a cab back to the city, this time to Burnham Park.
Most of the roses looked pretty wilted, but this was a bright spot with these pink blooms.
It got pretty hot, so I walked back to the Cathedral (taking the stairs from Session Road – ugh, my knees), shedding my jacket, my cap, and my scarf, and sat for an hour and read a book. I also went back to the store I saw yesterday and bought pasalubong. I was too tired and too broke to go to Mines View and other tourist spots, so I just walked back to SM and took more photos before heading back to High Point.
Ended the night with another sandwich and a Red Horse. Heh.
Went on the bus back the following day. Thank you, Baguio, and see you soon. I hope.
Let’s see how much I spent this weekend.
Hotel – PhP 3500
Bus – 910
Handling fee for tickets – 100
Cab fare to Ruins – 63
Ruins meal – 300?
Cab fare to Hotel – 77
Cab fare to Session Road – 70?
Book – 525
Vizco’s – 110
Knitted cap – 50
Cab fare from SM to Hotel – 70
Dinner – 100
Cab fare to BenCab – 144
Entrance – 100
Cafe Sabel – 300?
Cab fare to Burnham – 80
Meryenda (Bread Talk in SM) – 180 (I ate a lot of bread okay)
Pasalubong – 700+
Cab fare to Hotel – 70
Dinner with drinks – 200?
Lunch – 200?
Cab fare to Victory Liner – 70
TOTAL: PhP 7800 + (around 170 US Dollars)
Yikes, those cab fares really destroyed my budget. I’m sure you can bring this down by taking the jeep and finding a hotel on promo or a transient house near Session Road. And maybe by not eating too much? But where’s the fun in that?
Eliza Victoria 