Notes from the Trenches

Observation #1

The meme about a deserted island brought a thought boiling up from my subconscious, an observation I had while I was in Boracay a couple of months ago. While I was going around the island, I noticed that there were very few people with reading materials on the beach. Aside from a couple of young Filipinas with magazines, there were specifically around five people with books in hand. And all of them foreigners.

Of the five, two were middle-aged women (white) and both had non-fiction books. One was a young white man with Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code while another (same) had Angels and Demons. The fifth was a middle-aged black man with Jude Fisher's Wild Magic.

And I thought: that's not so bad, right? Given the percentage, speculative fiction readers comprise 1/5 of the reading population.

Heh. I wish.

Observation #2

Yesterday, I was at National Bookstore in Shangrila Plaza when I saw a familiar name on the Filipiniana bookshelves. That is, Bud Tomas, a former classmate of my older brother, had come out with a book on essays about-- well, nothing really. Supposedly Tomas wrote these essays that he would e-mail to his friends concerning observations about the world around him.

This in turn reminded me of Charlene Fernandez, a state university teacher who had come out with her own book of essays. If I remember the write-up in the book correctly, Fernandez had printed this book as part of her masters thesis but the essays really were part of a weblog she had. Or something like that anyway.

Anyway, this made me wonder: is there a wave of published essays-- I'd say online but it's more internet-derived than anything else-- that's coming out in this country? I surmise that it's relatively cheaper to have a book published here (having the public read it is another matter altogether), thanks to Anvil and other publishers. On the other hand, local published essay collections from the print side have been a regular staple on Filipiniana bookshelves. I myself started out with Jessica Zafra's Twisted series and Karen Kunawicz.

Not that I'm making any generalizations here. Just a thought...

One of these days I have to pick Dean's brain on how the local comics industry publishes their stuff.