The Late Lamented 2007 PSF List

Riffing on charles' excellent essay on the possibility of a Year's Best for local spec fic, I once told him that the reason I haven't done a list of year's best short stories for 2007 because I felt like I hadn't really read a lot of the local stories last year. How much is a lot? Well, to use a word frequently heard nowadays, it's has to be a permissible number for me.

On my part, I've only read dean's Philippine Speculative Fiction volume 3, Fully-Booked's Expeditions book, plus most of kyu's Digest of Philippine Genre Stories issues last year (except for the Christmas issue). Unfortunately, I wasn't able to pick up the 2007 run of Story Philippines due to finances as well as time. And I still haven't gotten around to reading Vicente Groyon's anthology A Different Voice, which has a number of spec stories nor dean's A Kite of Stars collection (though really, I've read most of 'em already in other forms). And let's not go into the matter of magazines like Philippine Free Press and Philippine Graphic.

At least for 2006 I managed to read the PSF2, the 1st issue of PGS, and the sole Pinoy Amazing Adventure collection. Maybe once I finish Groyon's antho I'll be confident enough to make my own list. So, in essence, I still feel like I haven't read enough to justify making a list. And this proves charles' points about the hardships and tribulations about doing a best of the year collection, much less a best-of list.

On the other hand, I'd also like to suggest one other difficulty about such a collection. That is, one thing dean mentioned about spearheading such an effort is that it's hard to be the 'leader' (i.e. editor) when one just wants to write. Let's face it: there's a number of reasons why there are writers and there are editors. One is that between reading submissions (whether an open call/invitational for an anthology or finding stories for a year's best collection) and writing the submissions, most of us would prefer to do the latter.

Hey, that's one of the reasons we're here talking about local spec fic, right? We're trying to come up with stories that best describe Philippine speculative fiction. We want to compete with the rest to see how well we've done and improved.

In other words, I am in awe of what dean has done but I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. *winks*