#StrangeLit: Finally Letting My Mermaid Swim Free

#StrangeLit class pic (Sept. 5, 2015)

#StrangeLit is an online writing workshop facilitated by Bronze Age Media (read more about it here), conducted by bestselling author, Mina V. Esguerra (with the help of fantasy author gurus like Budjette Tan, Paolo Chikiamco, and Kate Evangelista), and sponsored by buqo, that culminated last September 5. I'm so glad I joined! My manuscript, The Mermaid from Siquijor (a whopping 28,000 words. It's a novella, ladies and gentlemen!) has been submitted and ready to be distributed. Yay!

Last Saturday, Mina asked us to share what we did right and what we did wrong. So, I just wanted to share what those were for me.

What I did wrong

I was in a rush and I sacrificed a lot of sleep. If you ask me, I wouldn't take back those hours of writing, anyway. The sacrifice of sleep was worth it. I should have paced myself better. I'm now back to regular programming (until #HeistClub starts...That's another story).

I didn't give my beta readers enough time to read my manuscript. I'm so grateful to those who agreed to beta read despite the condition of next-day feedback. I also didn't give myself enough time to mull over the edits that would address the feedback of my beta readers. I just wrote them in as soon as I got the comments.

I had 5 weeks. And the expectation was 5,000 words. I over-delivered, yes, but I also crammed a lot. When I found out that someone wrote 60,000 words (a full novel!), I realized, though, that there are really no excuses. I have to live with the amount of time that I dedicated to the workshop.

What I did right

I signed up for #StrangeLit. This story has been brewing in my mind for three years already. In fact, I've released a free flash fiction version (what became the prologue in my novella) online and it's one of my most popular downloads. If this class didn't come up, I wouldn't have given myself a deadline. That's what I love about Mina's workshops, it makes me accountable to someone other than myself.

My outline saved me. If I didn't have an outline to keep me going I wouldn't have finished.

My research was complete. I did it three years ago!

Freeing the mermaid

All in all, I'm just glad that my mermaid isn't swimming in my head anymore. I love Siquijor and I realized that if there's any one place in the Philippines where mermaids would hang out, it would probably be there. I'm excited to release my story! I'm also excited to read what my fellow classmates wrote.

Here's the blurb for my story as well as the tentative cover art.

The Mermaid from Siquijor

Tentative cover art. What do you think?

Lorie Cenas gets invited to go on a diving trip to Siquijor, an island famed for its connection to the supernatural, to heal from a broken heart. She accepts but her friend doesn’t know that Lorie has a secret: she already has a deep connection to the island, the place where her mother died a long time ago.

There, she meets Marceau Egasse, a French diver and marine ecologist, who is passionate about the ocean but skeptical about the island’s mystic powers; and Elena, a mysterious island woman, who has secrets of her own.

Elena wants something from Lorie that she is not willing to give up.  Will Lorie heal wounds from her past in Siquijor? Will she find love and a kindred spirit? Or is the island a maelstrom that will consume her, just like it did her mother?

What's next? Well, there's #HeistClub!  Research the hash tag and find out more about it.

#buqoYA: Finishing a Portrait of Jade

#buqoYA class pic (not a complete one, though) last Feb. 28, 2015. We had cupcakes!

I am a fan of Mina V. Esguerra's workshops. I've only just completed one in the past: #buqosteamyreads. I came away with two short stories, both over 5,000 words.  I tried joining a #romanceclass and a #flirtsteamyreads class but these two are still in draft and outline mode. I'm not sure when I'll finish them because a) life got in the way (yes, excuses, excuses) and b) I already missed the bus. Deadlines are deadlines, after all.

Okay, first of all, what is #buqoYA? It's an online YA (young adult) story writing class moderated by Mina V. Esguerra (with two optional face-to-face classes) sponsored by buqo (a Pinoy digital bookstore, see more below). It started last January 19 and ended last February 28 2015. The goal: finish a story, not less than 5,000 words, based on an assigned trope (trope = a significant or recurrent theme; a motif. In other words, a familiar theme that one can find in literature).

My number one reason for loving writing classes like #buqoYA: I am a working mom. Huh? What does that have to do with writing a story? It just means I'm busy. I have a regular job* and I have two young kids. I do a lot of balancing acts. I need structure to finish anything. I need to be accountable to someone, too (like Mina, for instance). I also especially like the way Mina gives me an assigned trope. It's like fate dealing me a hand (or like life, pretty much!). This kind of structure doesn't clip my creative wings. It actually gives me flight! It's narrow enough to challenge me and yet broad enough to take on any number of characters I can create. I just love this kind of assignment.

Other things that helped: detailed discussions on each trope (I really appreciated the face-to-face class where we got to interact with screenwriters, Chacha Sawit-Esguerra and Anton Santamaria), having team mates to cheer us on (my good friend, Ines Bautista-Yao was a fellow trope mate!), and (this one is new from Mina) challenges along the way to spur us to really think through our stories (and submit on time!).

The result: a story that reached more than 15,000 words. I've called it A Portrait of Jade. It's gone through a lot of draft titles already, from The Color of Complicated to Semi-Precious to, finally, A Portrait of Jade. I have my beta readers to thank: Liana, an editor I trust, Ricky, a friend who also happens to be an artist, and my fellow trope mate, Ines. With all of their input as beta readers, I think the story improved a lot (it was their input that got me editing the existing story and writing another 2,000 words).

So, how did I finish? Apart from loving my main character, Jade, I really wanted to get to the bottom of the story. I wanted to understand how such a talented artist could be so insecure. I really liked how Mina requires all of us to write about a main character who is "not ordinary." It's easy to start with a blank canvas: a Hello Kitty without a mouth, a character that anyone can insert themselves into. So, I liked how I needed to come up with someone who's both interesting and still developing. I honestly thought I wouldn't be able to finish my #buqoYA story. A fellow #buqoYA classmate and I were joking about how we, married (and older!) women, found it easier to write steamy reads versus YA. Teens are hard to figure out! But then, of course, as we wrote, we remembered that we were teens once, too. So, surprise, surprise. I ended up writing something longer than both my #buqosteamyreads stories combined. It helped that I learned stuff from Mina's other classes: 1) writing in acts and scenes (these gave my outline a fixed structure -- more of the acts, I was a bit more flexible with the scenes) and 2) reading from Mina's reading lists (they really help!). 

I'm excited to see my fellow #buqoYA classmates' stories on buqo over the summer! Congratulations to everyone! Thank you, classmates and beta readers! And thank you, Mina! I'm looking forward to finishing more stories under your classes.

*Disclosure: I work for Hand.Interactive, Inc., the company behind buqo, the Pinoy Digital Bookstore and Reading App. I also happen to be a writer. :-)