As of end-of-year 2017, I have written and published the following books (in chronological order, so no book gets hurt because of course books have feelings):
Blossom Among Flowers (YA romance) – July 18, 2015. Japanese high school kids. Popular, seemingly cold boy genius grudgingly tutors headstrong yet head-in-the-clouds manga fangirl. Jdorama feels. I wrote it because I loveloveloved Hana Yori Dango and couldn’t get over how Rui didn’t get Makino when they’re obviously soulmates.
Songs of Our Breakup (New Adult romance/Playlist #1) – August 22, 2015. First book set in the Philippines, with Filipino characters. Band boy breaks up with band girl. Band girl’s Japanese celebrity friend flies in, sets himself up as her perfect distraction, and for so much more. I wrote it because I’m a Pinoy music scene fan and Oguri Shun fan and why can’t I have it all in one universe? Oguri Shun is my Shinta, but the easy rule is you choose your own.
Majesty (Urban Fantasy/ Young Adult/#StrangeLit) – October 2015 on Buqo/ March 17, 2016 on Amazon. Welcome haunting of a beautiful ghost, friendship you find in hopeless places, and friendship and love that endure even death. I wrote it for Bronze Age Media and Buqo‘s StrangeLit workshop. And also because it’s a story that’s been living with me for years and although painful it needed to be written.
Songs to Get Over You (New Adult romance/ Playlist #2) – February 29, 2016. Band boy pines for band girl but does nothing. Accountant girl pushes him to move, and towards a new direction. I wrote it because Miki needed to learn things. I love him that way. You’ll understand once you’ve met him.
Songs to Make You Stay(New Adult romance/ Playlist #3) – October 9, 2016. Japanese celebrity boy gets band girl, but the struggle doesn’t end there, does it? Living the life you know versus living the life you choose, and finding out where exactly love fits in. I wrote it because Shinta is extra and won’t quiet down and leave me alone.
Make My Wish Come True (#romanceclass Christmas anthology) – December 2016 on Gumroad/November 15, 2017 on Amazon. My short story is Christmas Chicken Dance. Japanese celebrity boy flies to Manila to surprise his mother for Christmas + an ulterior motive to get the girl. I wrote it because again, Shinta. Extra.
Promdi Heart(anthology of love stories set in Philippine provinces) – March 29, 2017. My short story is One Certain Day, set in Hagonoy, Bulacan. Artsy girl and band boy end up being cemetery neighbors one All Saint’s Day. It becomes a yearly tradition and grows into friendship, and to girl, maybe something more.
Summer Crush (anthology set in a music festival in surftown La Union) – April 7, 2017. My short story is You Only Need Reminding. Accountant girl drops all the balls she’s been juggling for a summer getaway with band boy boyfriend. But what if there really is no such thing as escape? I wrote it because Tara Frejas,Six delos Reyes and I wanted to merge universes. It wasn’t easy but it was awesome and why yes, I’d totally do it again.
You Out of Nowhere (steamy romance/ Flair #1) – November 4, 2017. Train meet cute. Accidental Seoulmates. Older, cookie bar boss lady is so over dating and looking for the One. Younger corporate boy thinks she might just be it. I wrote it for #romanceclass2017 (alternating POV! Filipino characters! Heat level 3++!). It’s the first book from #romanceclassFlair and it makes me feel honored and grateful and pressured all at once.
Nine books in three years. NINE. Six novellas and three anthologies. All love and work. All thanks to the village it took to make the books and to people who read, reviewed and rated and told me they’ve read and enjoyed the books. All thanks, always, to the #romanceclass community.
Like most things worth doing, I’m realizing that the more I write, the more I need to learn, and the more I should improve and it’s a cycle that will never really stop. It’s hard most days (lots of days), and some days I truly believe I suck and should be banned from ever lifting a finger over a keyboard. Days like today and the past few days, for example, when even the thought of starting a sentence and plotting outline makes me shrivel up and die a little inside. But it’s all part of the process. I shall get through this. There are more stories to be written. Until then I am proud and grateful for the stories already out there, and if you find them, I hope they bring you the feels you need too.
Happy New Year! Here have an adorable Joe Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel song!
In Songs to Get Over You, Ana suggests that she and Miki get to know each other better by playing Twenty Questions. Now I don’t know the actual questions you’d find if you get this game, but as Ana said, the rules are pretty simple: 1. You answer all the questions, and 2. The questions don’t have to end at 20.
So here I’m sharing with you Miki and Ana’s version of the game. I’ve put down my own answers (feel free to ignore them, haha), and I thought it would be fun if you answer them too. Tag me?
It feels good to do this again, because it tells me that 2015 was not a fluke or a very vivid daydream, but was something that really happened and led to more things in 2016, writing and publishing-wise.
Wrote a children’s short story for Bayong ng Kuting called The Kitten She Didn’t Love, loosely based on the love-hate relationship between my sister and our indomitable male feline, Bing. This may be a trope.
Attended a YA writing class organized by Bronze Age Media and facilitated by Ines, because I liked hanging out with the people and because my YA wheels needed oiling.
Participated in Manila International Book Fair on the first year that #romanceclass had a booth. It felt surreal. Until now I know my understanding of its significance remains dim and narrow. Suffice it to see though that our booth was right in front of National Bookstore, but our books were being bought anyway, such that panic-reprinting and restocking had to happen. Suffice it to see how the community came together, in manning the booth and playing tindera for the day and hollering mamser, pagibig? and recommending each other’s works to readers. There was already boundless joy and pride in that.
Contributed in the first ever #romanceclass Christmas anthology Make My Wish Come True with a Shinta story called Christmas Chicken Dance. Because Shinta is clingy like that and I appreciated it.
Met wonderful new people—fellow writers, readers, both local and international. Saw a bit of how people in other places responded to my books, and got the happy surprise of seeing them accept my book people too.
Signed up for my second Mina V. Esguerra workshop, #romanceclass2017, a thing that is carrying me through to 2017. That and a fun project with #romanceclass chicas Six delos Reyes and Tara Frejas.
I ended my 2015 post with a list of goals, and I am happy to have checked them all off in 2016, at least at the minimum. So I thought a new list would be a good way of ending this post too.
In 2017, I will:
Write and finish my #romanceclass2017 manuscript. This is uncharted territory for me, because of the POV, the steam level challenge, and largely because this is a new universe, not the familiar terrain of my band boys and girl in the Playlist series. Scareciting. I’m building a Pinterest board as I write, because I do that now, apparently (visuals are important). Check it out if you’re curious? 🙂 https://www.pinterest.com/jayetria/where-this-takes-us/
Write one more book, maybe YA. Maybe Nino, or Kim, or someone yet to be imagined. Will see where my feelings will take me.
Publish one to two books.
Work on the fun, secret-for-now project with Six and Tara.
Go out and go places and do new things for feelings, special challenge dated 12-10-2016 in mind.
Rest and recharge haha because sometimes I don’t like to do this until my body breaks down and forces me to. And being forced to rest doesn’t feel restful at all, if that makes sense.
Every year is bound to be better than the last. That’s a good way to look at things, right? I’m going to keep that in mind. Hello 2017! I hope you’re ready for more of my words and feelings 🙂
I agonize over writing a lot (normal), but it took me more than a few months to finally decide and write this book. As far back as last year (soon after releasing Songs of Our Breakup), my friend/fairy godmother Layla and I had been plot-bunnying about this. It was supposed to be Miki and Shinta in one book, in alternating perspectives. But then I thought, ‘no, what a mess that would be.’ Also they deserved more than that <3 So Miki got his own book, Songs to Get Over You. Now Shinta has gotten his, and they share the same timeline.
Although I thought I left him and Jill in a happy space in Songs of Our Breakup, I also knew it wasn’t going to be easy for them. Because long distance relationship. And celebrity problems, on both sides and in different ways.
So yay, here you go. Here’s Shinta’s story. I hope you’ll enjoy spending more time with him like I did. Happy book birthday, Shinta*!
Now that he’s finally won Jill, the girl who’s always rocked his world, you’d think life would be heaven on earth for Shinta Mori. In a way, it is. But maybe he’s underestimated the fact that he’s a hunky movie star in Japan while his girl is ruling the indie music scene all the way in Manila.
When he spends a long-awaited vacation with her–through impromptu performances, frenzied flyer distribution, and unhinged radio guestings–he realizes how imperfect his seemingly perfect life is. And he begins to wonder if what they have is strong enough to survive years of being apart.
Can Shinta prove he’s worthy of the spotlight the universe shines on him? And more importantly, deserving of the devotion of a young girl in love?
I see a few of the previous #romanceclass articles featured confessions. So here is mine: I’m using a pen name.
That won’t come off as a shock, I am sure, since I’ve been fairly open about it. When I first decided to venture into self-publishing, the next decision to make wasn’t even if I was going to use a pen name, but what pen name to use.
I told myself I was doing it to separate my identities. I wanted my author self to be in this box, while the rest of me—the corporate girl, the teacher—to be in this box. Separate and distinct. Organized. I wanted Google searches for my real given name—and I know HR people at the very least do this—to pull up results linking to my daily 9-to-5 life, and just that. It was done to prevent confusion. To maintain some semblance of order.
But when I am being honest, I know I did it because I wasn’t ready to be found out as writer, and a writer of romance.
Growing up, my parents surrounded me with books and not Barbies, but much as they didn’t mind the fiction, they did push the Math and Science books toward me with more urgency. For the most part their efforts worked, if my academic and present career would show. But I also had my Sweet Valley Highs, and my Unicorn Clubs, and eventually Sophie Kinsellas and Meg Cabots. And as early as elementary school, reading romance wasn’t enough. My imagination was wider than that. So I wrote romance in notebooks with a ballpoint pen, about girls and boys and kisses.
I hid and protected these notebooks with my life. I figured my parents would be shocked if they knew. I was groomed to work in a cubicle, in a building with an elevator. There was no space for writing about kisses there. But beyond that anxiety was another, more pressing one. One that was best encapsulated by every other writer’s favorite question—is this story about you?
I wrote my first New Adult romance novella Songs of Our Breakupwithout a thought of publishing it, just because the story was there in my head and it wanted out. And yes, because the process of writing it gave me kilig and feels. It’s about a girl in a band fresh out of the dissolution of a seven-year relationship, and her Japanese celebrity friend who was there for her when she was picking up the pieces of her broken heart. When it was finished, and I’d decided to publish it, I feared that ultimate question.
It is exactly one year to the day since I released my first ever book baby into the wild. ONE YEAR! I can’t believe it’s been that long since this series of rambling posts (1234). Heh. I can’t help feeling sentimental and nostalgic.
I was very afraid to even think of self-publishing then. A few years earlier I’d tried the traditional route (at the time, the only route I knew) of sending query letters to international agents. I received polite rejection emails if I was lucky, but for the most part I was ignored. Can’t say I didn’t expect that. I was peddling a 180k-word YA manga-Jdorama novel thing that I didn’t even know how to explain.
So I shared the book with the one person who knew I had written it, and asked if she would like to read it. You know, exclusively for feels. She knew why I’d written it in the first place. We shipped the same sunk ship, so she was super sweet and supportive. She got back to me with the book printed in short bond paper and ring-bound (maybe done in UP SC?) in two copies–one for her to keep, and one for me with little sticky notes of her thoughts and feelings.
We laughed, we giggled, we bonded over it, then the untitled book slept in my hard drive. (Aside: before the first draft was completed I lost my first hard drive and all the words so I had to write the whole thing over! But that’s a story for another time)
I kept coming back to it every once in a while. But I was already working on what would become Songs of Our Breakup then, and another thing based on another ship/crush. I started reading about self-publishing, and found Mina V. Esguerra and Marian Tee‘s blogs. I even sucked up the courage to email Mina and message Marian. Both were very sweet people (ILY guys). But it took me Easter 2015 before I got the just-do-it epiphany. Mostly because other people were doing it already, and were succeeding at it, and also because I was turning 30 then and I was terrified (I eventually got over this).
So I got to work. I pared down that monster of a manuscript to 65k from 180k (what was I thinking? I wasn’t writing a Westerosi epic!). I found people willing to help, cold-called some people (Mina, hello haha), and eventually, on a random day in July, hit publish. I made a lot of mistakes, but I was honestly happy to make them. Because the mistakes meant I’ve done it. I’ve written and I’ve published, and I can learn from these mistakes and be better. I also met lovely readers (they exist! Hurray!) and of course the wonderful #romanceclass people who make this writing thing all the more fun and crazy. ThankyouthankyouthankYOU everyone <3
Anyway. I said I wouldn’t ramble. Told you I’m feeling sentimental. The point of all this, really, is that I’m stoked and I thought to share my gratitude and happiness with a giveaway, YAY!
