“You can’t say, I won’t write today because that excuse will extend into several days, then several months, then… you are not a writer anymore, just someone who dreams about being a writer.”
Dorothy C. Fontana

I started writing when my grandfather caught me conversing with a couple of bugs that were hanging out on our wall. I was sitting on the sofa with my back to daddy who was finishing up his crossword puzzle from the PDI. I didn’t know that he was already watching me. He asked what I was doing, and, embarrassed, I said I was talking to the bugs. He handed me a pen and pad paper, then went back to his crossword puzzle. Little did he know, he had created a monster. I was eight years old.

I started writing in a diary that same year, and I would write how my day went, if I saw my crush, how annoying my little brother was. Most of all, I wrote alternate endings for books I’ve read that I wasn’t satisfied with, and even movies. The very first film that I had the audacity to write myself into was Star Wars. I read the film adaptation before I watched the film so I wrote myself into it, as Princess Leia’s younger sister.

After that, I made it a point to write myself into stories that I liked. I also tried poetry but I suck at it. My very first concrete story is a book my high school best friend and I collaborated on for a school project. We had to write a science-fiction story and submit it at the end of the school year. For research, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation and got hooked. I wrote the story, and my best friend illustrated it while her aunt typed the thing in an old typewriter. We got a perfect score. I was around 13 then.

My first Filipino story came out when I first read one of those My Special Valentine books that my aunt and our helpers were addicted to. I was bored out of my mind and wanted to hang but they were all reading, so I pulled a story out of the pile and plopped down in our sari-sari store and read. I don’t remember the title or the author, but I remember the story. The female protagonist was a runaway who went to Baguio and met the male protagonist in the bus. The story was light, funny and kilig. Of course, me being me, I got inspired and wrote a Filipino romance novel for our helper.

It was a typical story about a rich girl who ran away from home and met a poor boy who was a working student. It was hand-written in a Blue Feather notebook, and I called it “Masarap Pala ang May Asawa”. Sorry, I suck at titles, too, and it was my first attempt at writing in Tagalog.

I gave it to our helper who immediately read it. I spied on her while she was reading, and she was laughing and crying along with my characters that I figured, hey! I could do this. I could write!

My next attempt was written on a roll of paper that grocery stores use for their receipts. It was uso when I was in high school because we used it to write palanca letters to our friends and classmates during retreats. We gave out little diploma-type palanca letters tied with colored strings.

Anyway, I was a chapter away from the climax when I stopped writing, shoved the whole unrolled pad under my bed because I was so sleepy then went to sleep. I went to school the next day, got home at 4 p.m. and my mom had already thrown the thing away because she thought it was trash. I think I must have gone into a coma that time. It never had a title but the main female character’s name was Monina, and I don’t remember what it was about. I do remember that I told our helper what it was about she wanted me to write it.

The Tagalog story that I wrote, I was already thinking of selling it for publication. My tita was still addicted to the thing so I knew I would always have an audience in her. I also saw that one company was looking for manuscripts, but I didn’t get their address. So I put on dark sunglasses and inconspicuously went to the bookstore, bought a couple of My Special Valentine books (to get their address and to get the feel of how to write in Filipino). I sent them an e-mail if I could send a manuscript online, and got a reply from them. That was January 2006.

I got caught up in all my other characters, none of them were Filipino. Heck, very few were actually human. So I never actually had the time or inclination to write in Tagalog. But doing it had always been at the back of my mind.

When I finally got my laptop, I said that I have to finish at least one story. I’ve always been putting writing off for a variety of reasons: no time, no inspiration, I have something else to do… So I said, I will finally finish one of my stories. My other stories in English were too complicated to finish in such a short time. I was lying in bed, thinking of what to write when I met the Callanta brothers, Nathan, Nicko and Noah.

Nicko wanted to be the first one I write about so he told me his story, but never finished it. He was precocious and still unsure of where he wanted his life to take him. I was stuck with Nicko for a month. His older brother Nathan stepped in around August 2007. He had gotten impatient and wanted to tell me his story. I wrote his story in a week. I didn’t immediately send it. I was worried and was like a mother fussing over her baby who was off to kindergarten. I tweaked, edited, revised, rewrote, but I knew it was hopeless because I can’t write well in Filipino. I didn’t know which dash went where and so on.

Finally, September came and I figured what the heck. I attached the story to the e-mail and hit the send button. I prayed over it and crossed my fingers, and I got a reply that they were going to evaluate it and that it would take a month. So I started working on Nicko’s story, and on another one that was not in Filipino, and a month later to the day, a day before my birthday, I received an e-mail that the story got accepted and to wait for their e-mail for when the check would be ready.

I got paid a month later. It’s not a BIG, I-can-retire-and-go-to-the-Bahamas amount of money. It’s a pang-Jollibee amount *hihi* but the fact that I’m actually going to be a published writer IS enough. I stared at the check for about three hours before I finally let it go.

Right now, I’m a couple of chapters away from finishing Nicko’s story then I’ll coax Noah, the shiest brother, out of his shell so I can finish their trilogy and move on to another.

See, I don’t even know for sure when the first book would come out! I’m finishing the next one, hopefully this weekend so I can send it off…