Can I Get A Woot?

Well, this is nice.

I just found out that Philipine Genre Stories has just accepted my Lovecraft-in-vein horror story for their 1st issue. Thankfully, this will justify my absence from a friend's housewarming party last Friday (sorry RJ!).

Of course, just in case I haven't mentioned before, dean also accepted my version of Aliens! In! The! Philippines! for the 2nd volume of the Philippine Speculative Fiction. So that's two stories to be published before the year ends, and three stories altogether for this year if I include the short-short Manual magazine accepted and published without telling me. (There are also pending stories in the pipeline but will wait and see for further developments.)

Funny enough, both stories represent a certain theme I'm trying to develop, a kind of synthesis of something dean and skinny have advocated online. dean of course is pushing for speculative fiction rooted in the Philipines whereas skinny wants an introduction of pulp stories in the field of local speculative fiction. Both ideas, I thought, have very good points so I thought why not combine both?

After all, there are a lot of science-fiction/fantasy/horror tropes in genre literature but nothing, I think, that deals with such-and-such and its effects on local culture. To be specific, in my aforementioned two stories, I tried to see how Filipinos would deal with two ideas that are common currency in genre stories abroad: extraterrestial aliens and the unspeakable horror akin to Lovecraft's stories.

This also forced me think and analyse "why this is so" when for example, local writers write about vampires or robots in a local setting. And its damn fun in trying to claim such ideas in a Filipino sense. A kind of empowerment, yes?

What's more thrilling is the fact that there are now two-- count 'em, two-- sources of local speculative fiction that can be bought on bookshelves.*

• Philipine Genre Stories, of course, is a small publishing firm with the excellent goal of growing the readership for Philippine genre stories, including fantasy, science-fiction, speculative, crime, mystery, detective, horror, suspense. A most laudable goal, I would say.
• Then there's dean's advocacy for fantastic literature with his annual Philippine Speculative Fiction, which is going from strength to strength every year.

Of course there are other compilations out there that push for specfic (like PsiCom and that book published by Anvil, Nine Supernatural Stories) but still, the two upcoming anthologies don't limit themselves to horror. Yes, I've also read bayaw's editorial SF antho debut with PsiCom but I can't find a link to it, dammit.

I am so hyped. Of course I'd be more hyped if you people would support such efforts to make local speculative fiction as good as to those abroad.