That "#¤%&/ first draft

Ambitiously took on two writing projects at the same time.

This on top of a third that has been (leisurely) in progress since November 2012, when I thought I could do my own version of the NaNoWriMo 50,000-word novel task in the privacy of my home office.

I have a quota of 1,600 words per day, roughly the equivalent of NaNoWriMo's. Oddly enough, when you use a combination of finger-typing (my own system, natch!) and Dragon Naturally Speaking Dictation software, you do hit the word count -- and acquire the strangest perspectives in the process.
Nothing publishable, but certainly not a repetition of myself -- a nasty tendency when you have been writing off and on, professionally and for the heck of it, for most of your life.

My rough, red, wet and glistening, squalling and kicking first draft. Drafts. A multiplicity of drafts.

"In the Empty Places" : an anthology for a cause

The editors at In the Empty Places are putting together a second edition of the book! It'll soon be available for sale via Amazon, and at the moment can be bought through their website. My contribution is a story called "The Memory Cheetah."  

From their website:

"In The Empty Places contains stories from authors around the world. Many of these stories are being published for the first time, and many are also in translation for the first time. All the authors have generously donated their time and considerable talent to the this project for free, and we are heavily indebted to them.

"Every copy of the book sold, whether hard-copy or e-book, raises money to help the victims of child prostitution in Indonesia. The Bantuan Coffee Foundation provides scholarships, safe-houses, skill development and counseling to help children to escape child prostitution. If you would like to know more, see www.bantauncoffee.org."

What floats your boat?

This man was paddling his way across the Thu Bồn river at a rest stop halfway between Hoi Yan and the ruins at My Son, Vietnam. Look closely at his raft!
The most amazing things resurface as you flip through your old travel pics. This is from November 2012. Photo by me.

Resident feline

At my parents' home in Dumaguete City, June 3, 2007. Photo by me.

No shortage of language

... There was always a gap between the family and the world immediately beyond our home. The Christmas I was seven, I was declared old enough to hand out candy to the children who came to carol. Once I counted out eight pieces, one for each caroler, as they watched, their eyes huge in their starved and dirty faces. I handed the candy, reveling in Christian charity, to the smallest boy, and in a flash he was off, grinning, leaving the other seven children to stare at me, closing zombie-like as I stood paralyzed, their palms out, that pleading, demanding singsong that beggars make rising from their throats. The selfishness of it, the opportunism of that stunted, crafty child, swamped me. I dashed back into the house, wailing for my mother.

I was terrified of the children for another different reason. I would situate myself in the front porch and jeer at them as they passed, daring them to pelt the house with a stone or a green mango. This they never did. They would hang their sun-bleached heads and shuffle guiltily past, towards the beach, sometimes swiping a hibiscus blossom just to spite me. I had power over them, as long as I remained in the safety of the house, and of my half-language, a collection of Binisaya insults that I had picked up at school. If they had turned around and shouted back at me, I would have had no words to reply. If I had called to them in English they would have mocked me and barraged the house with stones. That was what worried me, each time I peered out from the potted asparagus ferns to taunt them – that my toughness was fake, and that sooner or later I would be found out.

But there was no shortage of language within the confines of home. We discovered my father’s books early on: it seemed that, after his studies abroad, he had diligently shipped back every last book he had ever read or touched. Penguin classics, Life magazines, National Geographics, expurgated bestsellers from the Readers’ Digest, and the anthologies of literature that he relied on for his teaching. Where had all these books come from? How could he have afforded them? He never explained. They simply sat there, like three dimensional wallpaper. I had awakened from the sleep of infancy to find them already gathering dust. The family shelves were filled by the time I was in pre-school, a few years after he came home with his PhD. That was the year my mother and father began to enshrine and gild the memories of his foreign studies. Perhaps the books had come from secondhand sellers in the various countries he had traveled in. I could not tell which ones he had read and which ones he had always meant to read, and which ones were there to make his friends envious.  I could look at anything I wanted, but was forbidden to lend anything out. The collection was sacred. It had to be saved.

From "The artifice of recollection" by Lakambini Sitoy, an essay that appeared in The Dumaguete We Know, Merlie M. Alunan, ed. Anvil Publishing, Manila, 2012.

The Dumaguete I Know...

I WAS born in this city and I left it when I was 21. My memories of Dumaguete are those of a very young, unformed person. Which is not to say that the memories themselves are unformed – rather, gazing through a window of solid, two-layered glass at the snow-covered remains of my summer garden, through the lacework of naked tree branches to where an aircraft has left a white trail of vapor in the sky, I believe that the Dumaguete I knew was the one place I could call rock-solid, real.

Real, and safe, in the way a child in the bosom of her family believes herself to be safe.  A large part of my Dumaguete is private, personal, having to do with the textures of nature, the patterns of light on a bedroom wall, the pleasure of watching a servant at her tasks, the mystery of what adults did each day after the screen door banged shut behind them.

Every morning, my mother and father left for work, which was something terribly serious, because they discussed it incessantly as they bathed and dressed, and then came home at the end of the day to argue some more about what had been said and decided in those eight unseen hours. But the maid was quiet, methodical, competent. Imitating her, I learned to slice beans and pluck the odd-smelling malunggay leaves off their stems. I foraged in the ditches on the other side of the road for kangkong, learned to tell the green shoots apart from those of the morning glory vines. I begged for the honor of cooking the day’s rice from scratch. It was a game – scrub the grains between one’s palms and fill up with water a little past the second knuckle on one’s middle finger. Twist the gas tank ring, wrench the burner knob, and then, quickly, quickly, strike a match into life, before the smell of escaping gas overpowered me. My fingers would fumble with the damp matches until one flared into life. The flames came roaring out of the burner, singeing my fingertips. Blue fire tore up the sides of the pot…

From "The artifice of recollection" an essay that appeared in The Dumaguete We Know, Merlie M. Alunan, ed. Anvil Publishing, Manila, 2012.

Perfume promiscuity

In a world where there's so much pressure to be the right body shape, the right height, to wear the right clothes, have the perfect career, perfume remains a pleasure that is unique to you -- married to your memories and in constant interplay with a very personal aspect, the scent of your own body.

I don't stick to one perfume. Even if I rotate promiscuously, certain scents still do remind me of stressful or uncomfortable or downright painful moments, i.e. a serious, screaming quarrel. So the solution for me is not to get too attached to a single fragrance. Or go fragrance-free when I know I'll be going into something stressful, like a confrontation, so as not to have to deal with the memories afterwards.

Kept by my pillow while I travelled

I knew Jim and Neal long ago, 20 years ago in fact. Jim is in South Africa at present, Neal in Israel. I mean to get these books inscribed. Someday.

Copenhagen, pastel pretty

Final approach to Kastrup airport, last leg of a 20-hour journey from Manila.

Happy New Year!

2014 was the warmest year in Denmark since records began to be kept 140 years ago. Autumn, all the way into December, were also quite mild, with only a few nights at below zero temperatures. But on Christmas morning snow fell, and we woke up to a white world -- as though to confirm that Christmas Day is the most peaceful day of the year. And so for the first time this year we had a few days of slight frost, and the blue skies and bright sun that ironically accompany them.

Once in a while the pop of fireworks breaks the silence, as people let loose a rocket or two in anticipation of New Year's Eve; in the living room stands a Christmas tree topped with a white star, hung with paper drums, flags, angels, tinsel, hand-folded paper hearts, and red candles now lit on New Year's Eve, the last day of the year.

2014 was an exciting one for me, with many welcome challenges in my professional and creative life.

In February I started work as a moderator at a children's social networking game / website. Although the community is in the United Kingdom, I work from home in Denmark; it is a job that gives me considerable flexibility in my schedule and reduces the amount of time spent on a long and expensive commute. The portability of the job was aptly demonstrated during a four-week visit to the Philippines in March, where I continued to work while able to spend time with my family (and applauded as my niece Fia graduated from elementary school).

In May I published my third work of fiction, the novel called Sweet Haven, which was released as an e-book by the New York Review of Books in the United States and Canada. I continue to write fiction, and this year stories were printed in a magazine in the Philippines and in an anthology in the United Kingdom.

We entertain quite often, at a table that my husband inherited from his father (and grandfather), at which two Nobel prize winners, Wole Soyinka and Bjørnsterne Bjørnson have sat. This year, we were visited by Valerie Coghlan from Ireland, director of IBBY's journal Bookbird, and Edwin Thumboo, Singapore's "grand old poet", and two of Brazil's children's literature stars: Ana Maria Machado and Roger Mello. In the summer, we visited two of Vagn's longtime friends at the seaside town of Bastad in Sweden, where world-famous tennis matches are held. And this summer I persuaded my husband to drive me all the way to the Louisiana Museum to watch a reading by Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite authors, and to get my copy of Handmaid's Tale in Danish signed. It joins the modest collection of signed books in the small room I call my office -- I have likewise a small piece of authors like Doris Lessing, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison and Richard E. Grant.

In the fall came another challenge, something I had been looking forward to for some time -- teaching two writing courses in English (intermediate and advanced) at Studieskolen, a language school in Copenhagen, as well as a course in beginning-level Filipino.

My health has not been perfect the last few years, and three weeks into the fall term I underwent laparoscopic surgery -- my first under general anesthesia; fortunately what was found and removed was not malignant. The procedures at the Danish hospital where I was treated were all impressive, and I amazingly it was free, or rather, paid for by the high income taxes (nearly 50% in some cases) that are a part of life in Denmark. Now I have every reason to pay them with gusto (insert smiley!) I recovered quickly and missed only the fall break and two class days out of the fall term.

This year, I travelled to Mexico for the first time to accompany my husband Vagn to the IBBY Congress in September. We spent three days on the Yucatan peninsula, renting a car and driving from Cancun to Rio Lagartos, then Valladolid, then the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza, then the seaside resort of Tulum. Once we drove through a curtain of rain so thick we navigated only through the lights of the truck in front of us. We took a boat tour through mangrove swamps, and photographed flamingos, egrets and a crocodile that slipped sinuously out of its hiding place in the mangroves to take a whole fish from our guide. Flying to Mexico City, we visited the canals at Xochimilco (boatloads of mariachis bellowing "Cielito Lindo" etc), and, while Vagn was at the Congress, I ventured out into the city with map in hand, visiting the Zocalo, the Diego Rivera museum, and the amazing National Anthropology Museum. I took a guided day tour to the ruins of Teotihuacan.

Six years have passed since I moved to Denmark to be with my husband, and 11 years since I first set foot in this country. I speak Danish fluently enough, but I doubt will ever be considered "one of us," and so I am happy to have found jobs that make use of my English skills. There are many challenges in this adoptive country I have learned to call home, but many beautiful things besides, not the least some very special individuals I wouldn't have met otherwise. And thanks to the miracle of technology, we can keep in touch with the many wonderful people who have crossed our lives, so that if we choose, we can opt for a constant state of awareness of each other, making the state of foreignness that much more bearable.

Happy New Year, dearest friends!

Sweet Haven by Lakambini Sitoy (New York Review of Books), 2014: now available

My novel Sweet Haven is now available as an ebook in North America, published by the New York Review of Books. Here is the synopsis from their website:

From a brilliant new talent, comes a sharp and sensual novel set in a decaying and unromanticized Philippines. In the little city of Donostia, bad news travels fast. So when 16-year-old Naia is found in an illicit pornography video, the tight-knit community is outraged. They want answers. The finger of blame soon points to Narita, Naia’s absentee mother, for putting career ahead of duty. Now Narita is back from Manila and must face her past and the memories of a life she fled. In search of the answers to her daughter's scandal, she follows a trail of evidence to reveal a web of family secrets, corruption, prejudice and the barriers of social class. 
At its heart, Sweet Haven is a story of a family buffeted by an ailing and intransigent nation, of the simple and bitter ways by which a family falls apart, and the brave leaps they can take to put themselves back together. Sharp-witted, keenly observant, with a passion for the rich tragic-comedy of life, Lakambini Sitoy takes on the everyday complacencies that can shatter a life – or save it.