Published At Last


Well, this is cool. On Dec. 10, two of my short stories were published.

"Gunsaddled" came out in Philippine Speculative Fiction 2.
"Inhuman" came out in Philippine Genre Fiction - Issue #1.

I'm still writing, trying to broaden and improve my body of work, but this is a nice milestone.

My wife's incredible story "Snippets" also appears in Philippine Speculative Fiction 2.

Go out and buy 'em!

Finding Good Books: A Different Search Site


I was browsing the web when I happened upon StoryCode.Com. It's an intriguing idea: each novel is coded using a set of criteria by a number of people who've read it. These questions range from "how easy is it to read" to "is the exposition handle more by description or by dialogue". The options for answering are a slider knob that allows you to give an approximate placement between the two extremes for each answer.

The upshot: assuming that the perceptions of most of the people who've rated the book aren't totally off kilter, you can get interesting recommendations for books by checking out the books whose codes are similar to the ones you like.

Still In Stock?


Philippine Speculative Fiction 1 - am looking for copies of it to send to friends in the U.S. Will have to ask Dean if he has any copies still, but I wonder... which bookstores actually have copies?

I don't know if all the stories are the type my old friends enjoy. Some are pretty hard core in terms of science fiction and military fiction, while others are into fantasy, and others are into horror!

Still, I'd like to hear their reactions - it's enlightening to hear how local writing comes across to folks living abroad.

My Earliest Memories of Fiction

Speculative fiction wasn't really a term i was familiar with in my early years of reading. In my earliest years, I was reading Dr. Seuss and the Bernstein Bears, and looking at the Time-Life series of science books and developing a strong sense of wonder.

When I'd transitioned to more "mature" reading, the first "series" that I really followed was the Hardy Boys series, along with the Three Investigators. I also read my early science fiction books like "The Girl With Silver Eyes", an early Young Adult Science Fiction novel about a young girl who discovers she has telekinetic abilities as a result of her mother's participation in an experiment, and the more difficult (at the time) read which was Dune, by Frank Herbert.

The latter book came from my Dad's collection, as did the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I was only able to complete half way through the second book.

Other fiction came from the grafiction arena: Tintin, Asterix & Obelix, and DC & Marvel comics.

I often go back to these books and try to remember my early experiences - what turned me off, and what drew me further into a story - when I try to write my own fiction now.