A lot has been going on, which means I haven’t had the chance to string my thoughts together to update this blog. And one of the news is pretty damn big: I have a literary agent. She’s wonderful, and for some inexplicable reason, seems to like my work. I’m still in complete shock over how this happened.
I used to say I would bash my head against that door until it breaks–head or door, whatever came first. To talk about tenacity for someone as sensitive as myself is always a weird sort of balancing act. I’ve heard people’s methods and coping mechanisms for sending out queries–mechanically filling in excel sheets, printing out rejection notes and plastering their walls with it, etc.–and can admit that I don’t have anything close to that. I don’t really have a thick skin. I’d query furiously for a month or so, see all the rejections, and then go back to the drawing board, rewriting whole novels from scratch. People blame everything under the sun for perceived failures and injustices, but I’m used to an unfair world, so I blamed only myself. I’ve never expected shortcuts. I think at some point I made the decision that if I was going to have to take the long way around to the base of the mountain, so be it.
My dear friend Ash, who writes under Julie Midnight, once made this great comment in a private conversation about how we have to make that decision at some point on whether to continue or not even if we’re not guaranteed to get anything out of it. The only real, tangible reward are the words on that blank screen–how much do you love this that you’re willing to embrace it all, and the pain and suffering along with it? We were all young, dewy-eyed writers once; by that point in the conversation, we weren’t anymore. We knew how it all worked, knew the business side of this as well as those little truths about why we keep going. Love for the craft had prevailed all these years. I’ve never stopped writing, never really stopped to take a break or remove myself from this world, which I’ve been part of for so long my brain writes stories while I sleep. Even when I was producing nothing but garbage. Even when the only way to get the words out was to drag myself kicking and screaming over the morass of depression and fear and exhaustion, or bother my friends for help when I feel like I can’t do it anymore.
It’s strange to see the door crack open. I think I had somehow believed, along with the conviction that I needed to give this everything I had, that for me the door was welded shut and barrel-bolted from behind. Some of my peers may scoff at that: “This is hard for everyone!” they say, but bear with me for a moment. This was the mindset that drove me to last month’s rant. While many people are bombarded with the notion that all they have to do is try hard enough and the world will turn for them, others, like me, have to make do with mixed messages, the biggest of which was realizing no other Filipino is publishing Filipino-inspired adult epic fantasy through the major houses (as far as I know, I could be wrong, which still means we have a visibility problem) and seriously who are you kidding, do you even know what you’re doing? What qualifies you to write in such a challenging genre? I once saw someone comment that you just don’t see Filipinos write epic fantasy or science fiction with the underlying tone that we aren’t intelligent enough and then the other night I had an argument with a friend over her insistence in calling employers “Master” in Tagalog (which is still a thing, I shit you not) and she doesn’t see anything wrong with this and I’m already spinning my wheels, aren’t I? You see where I’m going with this. We’re all grasping blindly in the dark, but for so many, there are very few voices calling encouragingly down from the end of the tunnel: “There’s light out here! You can do this! This can be done!”
Well, here I am writing this now. There’s light out here. You can do this. This can be done.
What happens from here on out? Well, my cousin has been listening to this Filipino rap song (Balewala by Loonie) in the car, and in the chorus it says: “Anu man ang hangarin sa akin ng langit kakayanin ko. (Whatever the heavens will for me, I will handle it).”
And so it will be.
