mababang langit

a woman starts posting fan fiction online, gains an enthusiastic readership, and the "online novel" gets picked up by a major publisher. sounds familiar, right? now imagine it happened in the philippines . apparently, summit is, um, taking a page from the 50 shades of grey phenomenon by way of meteor garden: It all started when 17-year-old Athena Dizon unwittingly plays a trick on resident heartthrob and bad boy, Kenji de los Reyes. All of a sudden, she finds herself pretending—unwillingly at that—to be his girlfriend to make his ex-jealous. Now, not only does she have to deal with dirty looks from the girls in school who want Kenji for themselves, but her supposed boyfriend is getting on her nerves. He's hotheaded, never seems to agree with her on anything—and everything about him screams gangster. Has Athena gotten herself into more trouble than she can handle? Or has she actually found herself a boy she can call hers—gangster be damned? from what i'...

an oxford grad student ghostwrites sweet valley high : "Imagine, superimposed on the gray-and-grainy screen of a floundering, slightly depressed twenty-something, the shimmery outlines of an idealized adolescent world. All drawn—I just had to color it in. I could pick any colors, as long as they were pastel! The characters were already invented...The plots were already there... A plane crash in a Cessna. Hysterical paralysis following a bad break-up. The rich posing as poor and the poor as rich. The tennis star that longed to be ordinary, the ordinary girl that longed to be a starlet. Differences smoothed away by the sameness-machine of narrative. The teachers with secrets, the students with secrets, the secrets revealed, the revelations turned into new secrets. The core secret—the one I knew, and harbored myself, and saw in those around me—the bland central core of “sameness,” of normalcy...  Your task, my thesis advisor in Oxford told my tutorial partner and me, is to be...

and wow. it is what the harry potter series wishes it could be. peter just talking about killing his siblings in the early chapters was far more brutal and disturbing than any of the actual deaths in the hunger games. if i had read this book when i was twelve years old i think it would have become a central text of my tweens. ender is a fascinating character with a terrible burden. people say that about harry, katniss, and bella too, but to me ender carries his heavy destiny in a much more convincing and less contrived way. he does things, he drives the plot, as opposed to having things done to him, or having the plot carry him along, as is the case with the above YA triumvirate. he is also so much younger and more truly alone. i really, really hope the upcoming movie adaptation turns this into the next YA megabestseller. the book also got me thinking about orson scott card and the recent petition trying to get him dropped from a superman writing gig at DC comics for his ant...

Nielsen's apt description of the online reader: "Users are selfish, lazy, and ruthless." You, my dear user, pluck the low-hanging fruit. When you arrive on a page, you don't actually deign to read it. You scan. If you don't see what you need, you're gone. And it's not you who has to change. It's me, the writer. full article here. via 

it's the usual story. you hear a lot about a certain series ("greatest thing since tolkien!" "HBO's making a series about it!"), you download the first audiobook, like it (roy dotrice voiced the definitive tyrion lannister, as far as i'm concerned), you buy the paper version at booksale (see above), despair of finding the next three paperbacks, buy them at full price (well, NBS cut-price sale price), exclaim "i've never bought a brand-new hardback in my life and i don't plan on starting now!", download the fifth book in audio again. --get pissed off that dotrice changed a couple of major characters' voices in the fifth audiobook. get pissed that you'll have to wait a couple of years to find out whether x really died or not, or died and come back to life, or whatever. you try out the HBO series. you love the casting and the script but feel shortchanged by the breakneck pacing. well, it can't be avoided i guess. you...

remember james frey, that a million little pieces novelist who duped oprah? he's set up full fathom five, a "fiction factory" composed of young writers trying to create the next twilight . what could possibly be wrong with that? well... a number of things. nymag.com has the dirt. Frey emphasized that this was collaboration—not my own project—and that he needed writers who will listen to him. He gave as an example a King Arthur adaptation he was working on with another writer. That author had listened to his criticism and rewritten it in a different voice; because the author was receptive, Frey was positive the book would sell, and big. Another project, a Gossip Girl–like series he had worked on with two writers employed at Star magazine, he said had gone south. The writers hadn’t made his requested character changes, so Frey had recently fired them. He reintroduced the idea that he was modeling his company on Damien Hirst’s art factory, a warehouse in which a report...

huge news for pinoy komiks. but don't take my word for it, here's what the 2009 national book awards committee had to say : In Trese, Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo has [sic] crafted a testament to the limitless capacity of the Filipino imagination, as well as one of the best Filipino comic books of all time. yeesss looks like the lit establishment has finally started taking notice. budjette reacts with a graceful, ovation-worthy acceptance speech , which impressed me so much i'm reposting it in full: To the National Book Development Board and the Manila Critics Circle, thank you very much for recognizing our work and giving us this award. To Ruey de Vera, who has shown support to local comics since 1995, writing reviews and interviewing local comic book creators, introducing them to Pinoys through his newspaper articles. Thanks to Bow, Taps, Arnold, and Mark --the skeleton crew who conjured The World of the Unknown, a radio show about ghosts, aswang, and wit...

lots of good stuff here: Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading By Ursula K. Le Guin Once you’ve pressed the on button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities. In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. you know filipino comics have been misunderstood, underestimated and basically bo...

farewell and thank you, mr. salinger. your book changed my life.