This may be the most political story I ever write. It's not my usual line of work. The occasional political essay, sure, but not fiction. It's also sci-fi, which again is not my usual line of things. But there really wasn't any other way to frame this story except as SF. How else could I explore a truculent mainland China, with its island-building ( Read more... )

Been a while since I wrote any story under 4,000 words. It's something of a homage to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, which I read in my late teens. I forget how I came upon it exactly, but that smell that is the colour of paper was in one of the school libraries I frequented. I have a strong suspicion it was in the second-last ( Read more... )

Word count: 36,000 words

When I first began writing Finches, I had no idea it was going to be a book. At best, I thought it would be a triptych of short stories. Then a novella in four parts. Then, it grew to three parts and seven vignettes. The characters grew with me -- from set old men doomed to live and perish in paradises of their own making ( Read more... )

The climactic scene in this piece came about because of a particular fascination I had with the idea that children were their mothers' shields from the flames of Hell according to a story related in the hadiths of Al-Bukhari and Muslim. Specifically, as narrated by Abu Said Al-Khudri:

Some women requested the Prophet to fix a day for them as the ( Read more... )

So I was supposed to have finished this thing a month ago, complete with, you know, debugging. Then, of course, I showed it to a few nice friends, let's call them scanner_darkly, mokie and countlibras, all awesome people I respect, because that's what you do when you have friends. Let's say your friends come back slightly puzzled at your ending, and maybe notice where you've ( Read more... )

Now this was a pain to debug. It's the longest portion of the stories set in the world of Finches -- I predicted it'd be around 6,000 words when I first worked on it, but the last scene just wouldn't end. The piece was full of hard angles to work through, just way too many scenes where the action didn't quite glide along as it should, or the ( Read more... )

I learnt, while writing this, that my stamina as a writer is no longer what it was when I was 19. I don't even remember how I wrote 5,000 word chapters a night anymore. Staying up any longer than till 7AM already feels like I'm about to collapse, and that's only if I really make myself write the next sentence I see in my head instead of lie down. ( Read more... )

I suppose, if there ever was a story to accuse me of literary fiction for, it's this one. Not Finches -- it is a horror story, even if it does get buried under the rubble of being awfully quiet. A Foreigner's View pretends to be nothing. I don't know how I want to define it. It's a slow simmer, moving quietly downriver with the occasional corpse. ( Read more... )

Worked on editing the original Finches tonight. I didn't originally write this as part of a series. The stories that came after it, Rahim (Finches II), and the as yet incomplete Finches III and IV, have ended up being framed in more of the correct sequence than the original. I've deleted the original dream sequences that started the frame -- I ( Read more... )

I like the sound of the word calamansi. It sounds like calamity. Calamity juice. Nice vibe to it ( Read more... )