Author: elizavictoria

‘reunion’ recorded

I am happy to announce that Pakinggan Pilipinas will be featuring my story “Reunion” as its eleventh podcast on May 1st. Click here for the teaser. :)

You may download previous podcasts for free here. (My favorite is Episode 2, “Ghost Between Moments” by Kate Aton-Osias, read by Elyss Punsalan.)

According to podcast goddess and fiction writer Elyss:

Pakinggan Pilipinas is a website that features Filipino short stories in audio/podcast form. The aim of the site is to promote homegrown fiction in a fresh new way to new audiences -primarily fellow Pinoys who are not into reading Filipino fiction. The site comes out with a podcasted story every month, read by a narrator who is not the story’s author. The intention is to encourage readers to be creative and more involved with the author’s work.

All rights to the stories are owned by authors themselves, and are produced here in audio form with the authors’ expressed permission. The audio files are property of Pakinggan Pilipinas. These may be shared freely, but cannot be sold or altered in part or in whole, without permission.

Contact us by emailing PakingganPilipinas(at)gmail(dot)com. You can help support this site by clicking here.

Beach tomorrow, then home on Friday. I’ll be offline till Easter. My mother’s been pestering me to take home my Free Press copy with “Reunion” published in it, so yeah I should put that on the to-do list. (I also have awesome news involving that story, but I’ll keep that under wraps for now, tee hee.)

Stay safe, you guys. Spend time with your loved ones.

moxyland

The book opens with a young photographer agreeing to become a sponsorbaby for the beverage, Ghost. She receives an injectable tech that circulates in her system and attaches to her cells. The Ghost logo will appear like a luminescent tattoo on her skin. She will crave for Ghost for as long as she lives.

This is her world. The city is drowning in advertising. Everyone is dependent on their phones for money and identity, and even the simple task of opening a door. To be without a phone is to be a disconnect: homeless, identity-less. But someone is forming a group that will aspire for just that – to be disconnected from the world, in order to change it.

The divide between corporate versus “civilian-plebes” plus the brutality of the police force is reminiscent of apartheid (author Lauren Beukes is from South Africa, where the novel is also set). Beukes says so herself in the “Extras” that the novel grew from the legacy of this divide. “Don’t let anyone tell you that apartheid has nothing to do with South Africa now.”

She covers several topics in her novel – gaming culture, nanotech, technological dependency, advertising, corporate rule, oppression, terrorism – and presents them fresh and highly charged. The energy of the narrative is amazing. Read this book.

The Mighty Reading List!

Feast for Crows

The Kobayashi Maru of Love

Showbiz Lengua

PGS Horror issue

Floating Dragon

El Bimbo Variations

The Tesseract

Faithful Place

Moxyland

Zoo City

The Dispossessed

Our Story Begins

Glass Soup

Here on Earth

The Pull of the Moon

Little Bee

source code

It is easy for us to guess who the bomber is, but not so for Colter Stevens, who wakes up on a commuter train in the body of another man. The train explodes, and Stevens finds himself in a dark, cold capsule with a video monitor. You have to go back, the woman on the monitor says. Eight minutes, like last time, until you find the terrorist.

I have to admit that when I first saw the trailer for Source Code, I dismissed it as just another brainless, heartless sci-fi summer flick with an A-list cast. Glad to be proven wrong.

book giveaway

Gave away these books to friends.

I want to do more book giveaways (to readers for example) but I don’t have the time and the energy to do meet-ups or send books via courier. What if I parked myself in a nearby McDonald’s, would you come meet with me? Haha. Give me an idea. (And a truck, while you’re at it, so I can get my books from my parents’ house.)

senior year

The high school that Senior Year shows is the high school that I know. I have never seen a more honest, more vibrant depiction. This is not the oversexed, ultra-hip, super-rich, privileged variety shown in Western TV, or the overwrought, lachrymose, mechanical high school dramas shown in local shows. In this high school, teachers are real characters, lovelorn students leave anonymous letters, graduating students fret over college entrance exams, and players cry when their batch loses during the intramurals. Here, the characters talk in class and with each other, and every time, they sound exactly like high school students – overeager, overconfident, a little bit naive. They speak in cliches (“Wala kasi tayong batch unity, e.”), use generic terms, and at times are unintentionally funny, but always, always, you see that shrug, that smile, that says you cannot touch them because they are invincible. And then, years later, the things that used to mean the world to them, they forget. High school has always been bittersweet, and Senior Year works because it offers no false note.

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What could be better than watching Senior Year with your high school friends? Jaykie’s my date. After the movie, we had dinner. It was a good night.

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Old pictures (ninakaw sa Facebook ni Ghia):

:)

a word from the philippines free press

If you’re a writer, the world inside your head can be as chaotic as you want, but at the end of day, you’ll still need  order and process. I’m happy to read this.

Source.

Notice to Contributors to the Philippines Free Press Literary Section:

The Philippines Free Press is streamlining submissions to the magazine’s literary section. In this light, hereunder are updated guidelines that we hope would address most contributors’ common concerns.

1. Contributors are kindly advised to submit one short story or a maximum of two poems to the following centralized email address: literary@philippinesfreepress.com.ph.

Do indicate your contact info (landline/mobile) for faster advisory from the literary editor if and when the work will be published. The editorial board will only contact (via email notification) contributors whose respective works have been accepted for publication. Sending rejection letters is not a practice of the magazine.

2. Submission by regular mail or post is not encouraged. Contributors are advised to submit no more than twice per year, and submissions should not be a combination of poetry and fiction. All entries must be written in English. Any contributor who is not based in the Philippines but whose work has been published is automatically disqualified from the annual awards.

3. Following up of payment should be done a month after a contributor’s work has been published. The members of the Editorial Board have agreed that such inquiries should be made solely by email (via the abovementioned address) and not by calling the Free Press landlines. Please indicate the title of your work and in which issue of the Free Press it has been printed. This is to facilitate the faster issuance of your check payment by the magazine’s Accounting department.

4. The FP Literary awards will be held toward the end of August 2011, and covers all entries published during the preceding year (2010-11).