Rocket Kapre – Fantastic Filipino Speculative Fiction

Unofficial Kwentillion Young Adult Carnival poster by Frantz Salvador

We all know how popular young adult science fiction and fantasy stories are in the Philippines. Harry Potter. Twilight. The Hunger Games. The Immortals series. Heck, many super hero comics and shonen anime fall comfortably into the young adult category. But still, there was no publication catering specifically to the genre, nor a general gathering (as opposed to a franchise-specific event, like a book launch) for readers of young adult literature to gather together, to listen and to speak. Budjette Tan, Summit Media, and I tried to address the first issue with Kwentillion Magazine — and now it’s time to address the second.

Kwentillion Magazine, in cooperation with National Book Store, would like to invite fans and readers of Young Adult books to the 1st Kwentillion Young Adult Readers Conference, to be held on July 21 (Saturday), from 1-5PM, at the National Book Store Bestsellers branch at Robinson’s Galleria.

Events include an  Author Cage Match, where teams of high school and college students will try to convince the audience that their chosen author is the Best! YA! Author! Ever! (at least, for the day); a Philippine YA Creators Panel, where we speak to a new breed of local writers/komikeros who are producing SFF stories for young adults; and finally, for the 1st and possibly last time, a Kwentillion Issue 1 Panel where we gather the fiction/comics contributors for a short Q & A followed by a signing. (I’m not sure the next time so many of the contributors will be gathered in one place, so best take advantage!)

Will be posting more details and promotional activities leading up to the event, but for now, if you’re a fan of Kwentillion or a fan of young adult literature, or simply of Philippine speculative fiction, please do spread the word and try to attend. The best way to make sure the 1st isn’t also the last is to show everyone that this is something that readers have been waiting for.

Gunship Revolution is an art and design group currently making waves in the country and abroad, with some of the top local talent in the field today. They’ve been running a series of workshops–dubbed Creation Live!–for the benefit of aspiring creators, and their latest one, Sellswords, will veer away from art tips and into the murky-yet-rewarding world of freelancing. I asked Gunship’s Marthy Angue to give us a little preview of what he’s got in store for Sellswords, and he graciously agreed to write a guest post on the topic for Rocketkapre.

FREELANCING: THE UNEXPECTED UPSIDES OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
By M. Arguelles Angue of Gunship Revolution

The smart thing, of course, would be to not quit your regular job. Steady work means steady pay and most companies do provide some semblance of insurance in case your boss decides to toss you off the building after being caught playing Angry Birds on company time once too often. That’s the kind of good, clear-minded sense that gives parents confidence that their children aren’t throwing their lives away. Conversely, walking out of your nine-to-fiver (or its night-shift equivalent) to pursue freelancing is pretty much the most spot-on illustration possible for that old bromide “out of the frying pan, into the fire.” Stomping off, especially in this economy, is like breaking free from a bag of Jalapeno-flavored Cheetos and realizing after that glorious split-second of liberty– “oh snap, I’m gonna get eaten out here.”

Then again, it could also be noticed that history is seldom made by people doing “the smart thing”. “The smart thing” was never to go past the horizon on your moldy, rat-infested ship nor was it ever attempting to fly using a pair of highly-flammable wings propelled through the air by explosions. “Adventure” has always been taking the worst bits of the human experience and insisting that there was something in the journey that made it all worth it. The rogue little cheeto could have escaped to go on a Pixar-esque adventure or it could have been eaten but either fate, one might be led to believe, would be preferable to staying inside the bag. In the same way, Freelancing is made more bearable when it is seen as an adventure. The problems don’t stop being problems but you may find that some harrowing experiences are worth the trouble after all. To note a few:

1.) Freelancing is a Voyage of Self Discovery

You’re no longer an employee. Heck, you’re not even self-employed (you have clients, after all.) You are now both a product and a service primed up to be sold for the highest bidder. When you’re trying to come up with ways of promoting yourself, you are pretty much indulging on one of the fundamental themes of human existence: “Who Am I?” You can either make this a matter of leveraging your education or your work experience and making a four-page CV out of it for your email blast. Or you can promote yourself as being more than a list of statistics and a glossy 2×2. Whichever rocks your boat, as they say.

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Punisher artist Mico Suayan will be having an interview and signing session at Comicx Hub this Saturday, from 2PM – 5PM. Here are the details, from the Comicx Hub Facebook event:

On Saturday July 7, 2012, COMICX HUB – The largest Online Comics Shop in the country, brings you yet another comic signing event, this time with famed MARVEL Artist MICO SUAYAN, as he brings out his pen for PUNISHER #13 and #14!

Starting at 2PM the artist known for THOR, X-MEN LEGACY and BATMAN ARKHAM UNHINGED will be gracing the walls of the COMICX HUB Warehouse in PASIG CITY.

To ensure you do not miss out on your copies of these, PRE- ORDERS for the upcoming books can be made here:

http://comicxhub.com/index.php?route=product%2Fcategory&path=59_66_254

Comes with a CERTIFICATE OF AUTHENTICITY!
Limited copies of MICO SUAYAN Varaint cover of Harbinger Avaialble too for signing

PLUS Sketch-a-thon guests include:

Carlo San Juan
Allen Geneta
Julius Villanueva
Ernest Fiestan
Ariel Atienza

Kwentillion Magazine is thrilled to be a partner of National Book Store and Power Books as they bring Alyson Noël, bestselling author of The Immortals series, to Manila! The signing takes place on July 20, 6 pm, at Powerbooks, Greenbelt 4 — and that weekend is shaping up to be a great one for Young Adult readers in Manila (stay tuned for more). You can see a video invitation from the author herself at this link.

I didn’t see this until yesterday, but in May, “Alternative Alamat” received a great new review on Goodreads from one Robin Edman. No, it’s not great because of the rating – although that’s awesome – but because this is how I was hoping the anthology would be received by those unfamiliar not only with Philippine mythology, but Philippine culture as a whole.

For those who are looking for additional reviews of “Alternative Alamat”, I’ve compiled some of them on the book page, including the wonderfully in-depth story-by-story review from Jaymee Goh. (Scroll all the way down – this post reviews three books.)

It’s always cool when local speculative fiction gets reviewed by international publications. This time around it’s a Publisher’s Weekly (hooray!) review of “Lauriat”, the upcoming Filipino-Chinese speculative fiction anthology edited by Charles Tan. It’s a largely positive review, and my story “The Captain’s Nephew”, gets a nice mention. The book will also have stories from Kristine Ong Muslim, Christine Lao, Fidelis Tan, Andrew Drilon, Yvette Tan, Kenneth Yu, Gabriela Lee, Crystal Koo, Margaret Kawsek, Isabel Yap, Erin Chupeco, Marc Gregory Yu, and Douglas Candano.

The anthology is being published in the U.S. by Lethe Press, and I hope the local bookstores order copies. It will be released on August 1, though you can pre-order from stores like Amazon as early as now.

The second compilation of Mervin Malonzo’s “Tabi Po” aswang webcomic is now out on Flipreads. As with Book One, this is an English edition of the online comic (which is written in Filipino), with a translation by Adam David. Those of you who’ve seen the webomic, or Mervin’s cover and interior illustrations for “Alternative Alamat“  know that he’s one of the most talented Filipino comic book artists in the field today, and this is a great chance for fans to support his work, or for those who don’t speak Filipino to be introduced to his work, so go check it out.

Speculative Fiction writer, and Usok contributor, Yvette Tan was interviewed by Charlene F. Sawit on her blog “Field Trips to the Real World” as part of an ongoing series called “Postcards on Writing.” The interview came out on the 4th of June, but I haven’t had the time to link to it until now. Go check it out if you haven’t already: Yvette talks about good stories, what creeps her out, and being labelled as a horror writer.

Another year, another #RP612fic… is what I’d like to say, but the rate at which our twitter-fiction celebration grows from year to year never ceases to astonish me. We even made the news this time, with GMA and ABS-CBN and Katipunan Magazine each doing stories on #RP612fic, and listing their favorite stories.We were also named Hashtag of the Week by the Philippine Star Supreme:

It’s reached the point where I can’t do my usual screengrab-and-paste aggregation of all the stories. What I’ve done instead is turned the search results for #RP612fic into a PDF–a 506 PAGE PDF, to be precise. It’s not as pretty as a screen capture, but my poor, old, PC just couldn’t take the size of the image, and it would take me too long to efficiently cu it by batches.

Before I give out the link to the PDF though, a few disclaimers: it includes every instance that #RP12fic was used in a tweet over the last few days, and while most of these are stories, some are not. This is also a raw list, as again it wasn’t feasible for me to pick and choose, so there are some bad eggs here, personal attacks masquerading as fic, or “jokes” in bad taste fueled by an ugly racism… but these are in the minority. A few bits of adult content – nothing raunchy – and a ton of slash fic, so if you’re offended by that, proceed with caution.

As a whole though, there was a lot of humor in this batch, and most people seemed to have a lot of fun looking sideways at history – and it shows. Here’s the PDF.

Here are around 30 of my personal favorites. Once again, thank you all for participating, and see you next year!

There are more Philippine Dr. Who fans on Twitter than I thought. A *lot* of WHO-related tweets…Who else would wear a mobile suit?

And then we were all obliterated, Independence Day style.
Ol’ Douglas is fast catching up to Magellan as the most popular foreign character in #RP612fic.

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Just a reminder that the 11th annual Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention (TOYCON) takes place this weekend. Here’s some relevant info:

11th Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention 2012
June 15-16-17,2012
10:00am – 9:00 pm
SM Megatrade Hall 1-2-3, and Conference Room

June 15 – retailers day only (toys, comics and collectibles sales)
June 16 – retailers day, cosplay contest, exhibits, bands etc.
June 17 – retailers day, cosplay contest, exhibits, bands etc.

www.toyconph.com
www.facebook.com/toyconph
www.twitter.com/officialtoycon

Program schedule – http://www.toyconph.com/p/program.html

Contest mechanics – http://www.toyconph.com/p/contest.html
(no need to pay any registration fee to join in our contest)

Contact us only at
email: toyconph@gmail.com
PM us: http://www.facebook.com/messages/toyconph

TICKETS
entrance fee: P100/day

For Philippine komik fans, there will also be an artists’ alley where some of your favorite local artists will be doing sketches, and likely selling their komiks as well. Here’s the list as posted on 100 Araw ng Komiks:

JUN 16

Heubert Khan Michael (Vampirella)

Gilbert Monsanto (Bayan Knights)

Lui Antonio

Elmer Damaso (Hero Factoty / former Culture Crash)

JUN 16 – 17

Ariel Atienza (KOMIKON / West Side / Class)

Lyndon Gregorio (KOMIKON / Beerkada)

Jon Zamar (KOMIKON / Digmaang Salinlahi)

Sherry Zamar (KOMIKON)

Lei Muncal (KOMIKON)

Melvin Calingo (former Culture Crash)

Joanah Calingo (Cresci Prophecies)

Freely Abrigo (Kulas / Kapitan Tog)

Tepai Pascual (Mark 9 verse 27 / Maktan 1521)

Mel Casipit (Mukat)

Rommel Estanislao (Lipad / Tupang Itim / Bruho Barbero)

Ruben Nacion (BENNAC Cartoons)