MAJESTY by Jay E. Tria

What would you do if the ghost of someone you loved appeared in front of you?

‘Majesty is a beautiful ghost, with her hair of fire and eyes gray like smoke.’ That was Andy Fey’s first thought when the ghost of her best friend Majesty Hall appeared in her bedroom, only two months since her death. Majesty doesn’t know why she’s there, why only Andy can see her.

Andy wasn’t sure if she could tell Gale, that boy who claims that he and Majesty were in love. Funny, sarcastic, and a self-proclaimed serial heartbreaker, Gale is proving to be a good friend in grief, though his trail of broken hearts could soon include hers.

As Andy and Gale wade through their sorrow, Andy wonders if Majesty is here to help ease her into this new, complicated friendship, or if she has a mission all her own.

Read the excerpt.

Jay E. Tria writes contemporary Young Adult and New Adult stories about characters that live inside her head, about people she meets and people she wishes to meet. She also reads, daydreams, and blogs. She loves skinny jeans, sneakers, live gigs, and adopted cats. She is not a cool kid.

Books: Blossom Among Flowers | Songs of Our Breakup
Official site: www.jayetria.com
Facebook, Twitter, Wattpad: jayetria

More about JAY

How long have you been writing? How did you ‘discover’ your talent in writing?

I tried to date the handwritten stuff on notebooks that I still have in my room. I wrote those back in my elementary days, I believe, around the same time I discovered Sweet Valley, Unicorn Club and such. It wasn’t really a discovery of anything. It felt more of a compulsion, a ticking nerve. I was daydreaming too much about these characters and these scenes that one day I decided to be productive and put words down on, yes, a lined notebook.

How do you prepare to get into writing? Any particular ritual?

No ritual at all. The things I was able to write and finish…those things started as ideas and when the ideas were being kind, they just jumped off from my head to my fingers to my laptop. All messy and jumbled, but still they were there. They were words. I do start with an outline, and also character profiles. But with the actual writing I just do it.

What was/is your greatest fear as a writer?

That one day people who’ve read me and liked what I’ve done will suddenly realize that I’m a fake. That I’m not really a writer and that I can’t write shit. Yeah sounds like Mike Ross’s nightmare, I know. I’ve been watching too much Suits. But there’s that nagging feeling that maybe I really suck and I can’t really do this. Dark, brooding thoughts that I try to keep at bay.

What more do you aspire for in your career? For this industry?

I want more Filipino-penned books in bookstores. I want local publishers to publish more books in a year, especially of the stuff that we write—romance, young adult and all other genres we dabble into.

What was your inspiration for this story?

I fell in love with Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen soon before joining Strangelit. I loved that it had whimsy and fantasy without being completely out of this world. It’s like the story moved within this flimsy intersection of real life and magic, while dealing with grief and loss. Heavy things that could easily make a story impossibly sad. But the way it was written was delicate, and sweet yet still powerful.

Are there particular individuals in real life on whom you based your characters?

Majesty was based on a person I loved, and will love forever.

If it were you in the MC’s place, would you make the same decisions?

I believe so. Andy was faced with a choice. To either stand still forever, or to learn to live with the truth. It will take me some time too, but I think I will take a path similar to hers, though with a lot more mistakes.

If you were to be a heroine in your own story, how would you describe yourself?

As I am I’d be a lot less interesting, haha. I’d be awkward and shy and not witty at all. But if you can magically write me some guitar skills and a hot LI, I can probably make things work.

 

DARE TO DREAM by Madelyn Tuviera

Step one: devise.
Step two: develop.
Step three: dream.

Weaving dreams is one part creativity and two parts quick thinking, Ellen believes – you receive an assignment as soon as open your eyes and are expected to absorb every single detail within the next minute so that you can craft an exciting dream for your subject. You have to monitor your Dreamer the whole time he’s snoring his heart out on his bed and going through the story you’ve made just for him. When your Dreamer rouses for a quick second then falls right back into a sweet slumber, you have to weave another dream for him that you’re certain will keep him asleep as long as he has to be. Rinse and repeat until the alarm sounds off – both for the Dreamer and the Weaver – then you move to your next assignment. That’s the routine. Easy as pie.

That is, until Ellen finds a couple of things in the dream she’d woven that she’s pretty sure isn’t part of the plan: two chairs, a flying platypus, stardust in the air. A voice she can’t recognize even if she’s supposed to know this world inside and out. And a man who isn’t her Dreamer changing the world she’s made and rewriting her Dreamer’s world altogether.

Read the excerpt.

Madelyn Tuviera’s love affair with writing began in fifth grade, when she was put on the spot and was asked to write an expository paragraph about her favorite sport. She’s been writing all sorts of stories ever since, most of them peppered with romance and real life struggles. On the off-chance that she isn’t, she’s crafting designs for brands that you use almost everyday.

Madelyn in based in Manila, Philippines. She plans to stay there forever.

WordPress: https://maddietuv.wordpress.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/maddietuv

 

LAGABLAB (OR HOW L CAME TO BE A WARRIOR-MAGICIAN) by Myra Mortega

If there’s anything that L takes great pride in, it’s the fact that she knows herself fully well. For example, she knows that she enrolled in law school because she just can’t take injustice. She also knows that she can see beings–various shapes and forms and figures nobody else can see. She has also been dreaming of the same dream for 24 years, and it has been driving her mad.

But one night, a shadow appears over her bed and tells her things that make her question her idea of who she is.

Intrigued, she goes into a wild goose chase to find answers and meets a bevy of beings–the White Lady, a wakwak, a kapre, among other things–that give her bits and pieces of her past and give her a glimpse of a future that’s far beyond her imagination.

Read the excerpt.

Myra has been enamored with strange worlds for as long as she can remember. She loves getting lost in fantasy, and she is grateful to Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and Dr. Who for introducing her to alternate dimensions of make believe.

At the same time she loves words and daydreaming, and she feels that the two are just perfect for each other.

This is her second attempt at documenting her flights of fancy. She hopes to do more of this one day.

In real life, she is freelance writer and editor who’s glued to the digital world.

You may reach her at:
myramortega@gmail.com
0929-325-0477

 

 

SOJOURN by C.J. Edmunds

Sometimes being a fish out of water can be a good thing. Only two things can happen. Either one adapts to the environment or simply peters out from intractability. Enter David Lansing, a half-Filipino call center trainer whose normal life took an unexpected turn when he suddenly woke up and is presented with visions and a spirit guide to boot! Why was he seeing these things? Who is the Guide and what did he want from him?

Peppered with appearances like the Tikbalang, Aswang and even the White Lady of Balete Drive, all part of Philippine folklore and urban legend, the story traces David’s existential journey of becoming; from his naive acceptance of the world to his burgeoning skepticism, and his acceptance of what his life is and how it could be. And while he’s at it, another Guide presents himself to him, one with a more pragmatic approach and outlook to the world of the supernatural; the same world that David is finally learning to accept and participate in.

But who is the better Guide or is he better off trusting his own instincts  as he embarks on his journey to find that supernatural promised land;
a place where people like him are common and living the most normal of lives; a place that is known only to a few; the magical community of the Dark District.

Read the excerpt.

C.J. is a waking Geek magnet whose fandoms range from Star Wars to Vampires, to Elves, Wizards, Zombies and Superheroes.

Currently he is the co-host of Mellow Nights; a weeknight program on radio over Mellow 94.7. He also hosts a segment for Geeks on Tuesday called Geek Central.

He loves Chinese food, Filipino food and can most certainly be counted on to join you for buffet at Vikings, Heat or at Spirals on weekends.

He dedicates this his first work to his father who passed away in 2008.

Twitter – Cazedmunds947
FB Author – www.facebook.com/CJEdmunds.Writer
FB Dj – www.facebook.com/CazManila

 

TRADE by D.A.

Sacrifices have long reaching consequences for both the living and the dead as Carter discovers when Michael (yes, that Archangel) gives him a chance to be with his soul mate Alexa. He is tasked with being her personal guardian angel until the day she dies. But, when the end comes, Carter learns the hard way that life goes on no matter what.

Read the excerpt.

D.A. has been amassing notebooks filled with scribbles over the years but has just recently worked up the nerve to show her writing to anyone. Being a fan of paranormal literature, she tries to write stories that make daily life a little bit more interesting. You may reach D.A. on Twitter at @komorebi_days.

 

BAYANI by Motzie Dapul

In the year 2050,  Patrick “Paquino” Aquino: president of the Philippines, former superhero, and murderer–not necessarily in that order–deals with the consequences of his actions following four years of martial law and the raid that ended a bloody political dynasty in the far north.

With a death sentence looming over his head and a revolution rising against him, he begins to wonder if his bid to save the country, made back when he was the impetuous young bayani Lastikid, is worth dying for.

Read the excerpt.

Storyteller, writer by passion and artist by trade. Long-time writer and longer-time reader. Lover of Philippine mythology and culture, propagator of LGBT+ literature and media. Every story will have an LGBT+ character, no exceptions.

Former Literary Editor of the De La Salle-College of St. Benilde’s Benildean Press Corps and author of the Project Bayani independent komiks series.

Written works can be found online at mozzarellastories.wordpress.com
Art and animation can be found online at atemozzarella.tumblr.com

 

WHEN IT RAINS IN MYSTIC RIVER by Therese Barleta

Whenever sirens sound off, Naomi is always worried that Seth is somewhere being chased by the police, if not already gunned down by rival gangs that pollute the south side of Boston. “Please help me just this one last time,” Seth would always tell her, but Naomi just wants to live a normal life as a pretend human being, not Seth’s Encantada girlfriend who always bails him out of his shady dealings. As soon as Seth finds an out from this life he’s known forever, he takes the opportunity before Naomi can even say no. How could she when this is the exit they’ve both been waiting for? Or is it a shortcut to their doom?

Read the excerpt.

Therese Barleta is a human anomaly. This chill frat man trapped inside a 12-year-old girl’s body enjoys HBO and Netflix a little too much. She likes reading and writing depressing stuff.Contact Therese at AuthorThereseBarleta@gmail.com

 

 

IN MY DREAMS by Yeyet Soriano

Welcome to Barrio Malaya!
Everyone in Manila will visit Barrio Malaya at least once in their lifetimes. It is a rustic yet picturesque town, with the sea in the north, thick woods in the east and west, and a train station in the south. It is one of the stops of a high-speed train system, which the dying board to go to their next destination.
Sixteen-year-old Olivia Roxas has a lifetime pass and has almost permanent resident status in Barrio Malaya. She first visited the place when she and her father met an accident when she was seven. They explored the town and rode the train together. But at some point, they got separated—she had to get off the train and her father continued his journey. She woke up to a reality without her father, and with an emotionally distant mother. From then on, Olivia was homeschooled and prevented from having any access to the outside world by an alcoholic mother who seemed to both hate her and love her too much to risk losing her.
In her dreams, Olivia has unlimited access to Barrio Malaya, and it is where she learned about everything, from how to make friends, to how to live, to how to fall in love. She also continued to board the trains, in the hope of finding her father.
Nineteen-year-old Gabriel Sahagun first came to Barrio Malaya when he was twelve years old. Victims of a freak accident, he and his parents already had their tickets to ride the train, but at the last minute, someone pulled him back. He never saw the man’s face. He woke up in the real world discovering that his parents were dead, but he had developed the talent to transfer Death—he can take whatever is killing one person, take it upon himself, and then transfer it to another person.
Liv and Gab meet in Barrio Malaya. Gab visits Barrio Malaya whenever he is in mid-transfer, meaning, he is the one dying. They fall in love but have never met in real life. But that is about to change, because Gab has taken a terminal condition and has lost all strength to transfer it to someone else. As he lies dying in the real world, it is up to Liv to find him, find a person to transfer the condition to, and get that person to Gab before Gab dies.
Did we mention that Liv has never set out from her house alone in all her life?

Read the excerpt.

Yeyet Soriano has been writing her entire life, first as an angst-ridden teenager, then as a single working woman, then as a married working woman with kids. Though the themes of her written works have changed over the years, she held on to one truth—she needed to write to keep the voices in her head at bay.
Her first foray into self-publishing was when she collaborated with some of her high school friends on a book in 2011, where one of the mini books was entitled “Yeyet,” and some of her nonfiction and fiction works were included. The book was Life in the Middle, A Discovery, and it is being distributed in print by Central Books (central.com.ph/bookstoreplus).
She just self-published Turning Points, her first e-book novel through Buqo, as part of the #JustWritePH writing class. It is included in the #JustWritePH For Redemption bundle, but will also soon be released as a stand-alone novel in e-book format.
Her day job is that of an IT manager for the Asia-Pacific region for a multinational corporation. She is married to a man who reads only to fall asleep, and they have three wonderful kids—two of whom love to read and one, only starting to learn to read.
Contact Yeyet:
yeyetms@gmail.com
http://twitter.com/ysrealm
http://facebook.com/Yeyetsorianowrites
http://www.ysrealm.com

More about YEYET:

How long have you been writing? How did you ‘discover’ your talent in writing?

I’ve been writing for most of my life, although I never really thought of it as “writing,” like a career. But since I was a teenager, I already had notebooks or journals that I filled with my thoughts, musings, poems, stories, etc. As time went on, I compiled my stories and printed them out and gave them out as gifts to my family and friends. They were the ones who encouraged me to write more. They were the ones that said I had the knack for it.

My father was a writer too and when he told me that he thought I inherited my talent and style from him, I knew I had received the highest praise I could have ever hoped for.

How do you prepare to get into writing? Any particular ritual?

No specific ritual. I write when I need to write—that’s why I always have a small notebook with me everywhere I go. Sometimes inspiration hits me at the most unexpected moments, and I just had to write. For the more structured writing workshops that I attended, where I need to write a certain number of words within a specific period of time, I always allot some time at night, when everyone else in the house is asleep. I would usually have my laptop, my notes, a glass of wine or a cocktail and some chips handy. Then I would write well into the early mornings.

What was/is your greatest fear as a writer?

There are times when the words just stop flowing. I panic. Try as I might to write something, nothing comes out. When this happens, I just stop. I try to do something else to get my mind off the writer’s block. I do normal things – spend time with my family and friends. I try to get some inspiration elsewhere, and normally, after a period of time, I find myself being able to write again.

Another fear is the fear that no one will appreciate what I wrote. At the start, I wrote mostly for myself. But just recently, I tried self-publishing and submitting to publishers, and this opened everything up to criticism and judgement—whether I was good enough to have my story read and liked/loved by others, etc., or if I was good enough to have my story published.

What more do you aspire for in your career? For this industry?

For myself, I am not that ambitious. I just would like to continue to write and have people appreciate what I write. I don’t aspire to reach millions of people. I know I won’t get rich with my writing. But I do aspire to touch some people with my stories. Even if that would only be one person, it would fulfill me already.

For the industry, I would like our Filipino writers to be more recognized locally and abroad. Sadly, most Filipino readers still tend to patronize the foreign and popular authors. It would be great if our Filipino writers can get the recognition they deserve. But I think, we are slowly and surely getting there. Baby steps though. It will take time, and some deep commitment from the Filipino authors to not give up and just plod on. Sooner or later, it will happen. This is my hope.

What was your inspiration for this story?

I’ve always been fascinated by Death—the possibility of knowing when it would happen and the possibility of delaying or derailing it from happening. My first image was a girl suddenly seeing the death of a loved one and her dilemma of whether to tell the loved one so he/she could do something to prevent it from happening.

That’s how Barrio Malaya came to be. The place where people near-death or in a different plane of consciousness would be able to visit. Then of course my main character became the girl who knew about people’s impending deaths, because she could see them in Barrio Malaya. I just then needed to add the boy that could transfer death, to complete the story.

Are there particular individuals in real life on whom you based your characters?

My main character, Liv, was modelled after my daughters. Her seven-year-old persona when her father died was modelled after my seven-year-old daughter. And Liv’s teenage persona was modelled after my sixteen-year-old daughter.

Liv’s alocoholic, Seattle grunge rock music-loving work-at-home IT consultant Mom was roughly based on me. No, I am not alcoholic (thought I can imagine what it would be life, having known people who could be diagnosed as alcoholics), and I’m not emotionally distant, but all the rest of the descriptions just fit me to a T.

There were other characters in the story that were based on real-life characters. Rica, Gab’s aunt was modelled after a friend of mine who just turned forty and who also did accessories and stamping. And Dale . . . Dale was based on a little boy that was just recently diagnosed as autistic. I wrote into the character, and that scene when Liv visits Dale and his family in real life, all the frustrations and fears that his parents and loved-ones felt when they realized he had that condition.

On the lighter side, Tomas was unabashedly based on Tom Hiddleston. Because . . . Tom Hiddleston!!! Gab was just too young for me, so I had to put someone in there that would give me kilig while I write the dark stuff. Haha.

If it were you in the MC’s place, would you make the same decisions?

If I was in Liv’s place, definitely yes. I wouldn’t hesitate to go out of my comfort zone to save Gab. I wrote a lot of my past insecurities into Liv as well, so I was speaking from experience about her fear of the unknown, where just venturing out of her house was a big step, much less trying to find a guy who could just as well be a figment of her imagination.

If you were to be a heroine in your own story, how would you describe yourself?

Ahhh . . . Since I am a wife and a mother of three now, if I were to write myself as a heroine in my own story, it would have to be a family story, where I would be juggling between a career that brings in the money, my family, and my passions in life, I think I have already written this story, in my first novel, Turning Points. It is about the this woman who felt pressured into the situation she found herself in, realizing she never followed her passions in life because real life just took her on another journey. She wished she could just go back in time and had never met her husband, so she would have had a chance to pursue her personal dreams. The novel is the journey she took when she woke up to a world where her wish came true and she realized that what she already had was everything she actually really wanted in life. Since it is my story, it had elements of the macabre—parallel realities, time travel, a fantasy element, and with lots of juicy family and love stories to spice things up.

 

I MELT by Chen Cabaluna

Rick is predictable, organized & doesn’t like to take risks because of his condition. His clothes are color coordinated. His books are arranged by height. He only eats & drinks cold stuff. He’s very cautious to avoid human touch because he might melt. But then he met Alice, his new too perky lab assistant who helped him to overcome many inhibition and open up more to the world. There’s only one problem–he thinks Alice will melt him.

Read the excerpt.

Chenley Cabaluna is a registered nurse by profession. She is a fellow of the first batch of the eros atalia writing workshop. She already had several of her short stories published in books and online. You can read her other works at her Wattpad account with the username @Chenaciousley.

 

GAMECHANGER by Mikael Javellana

Mxyzalne – or Mix – has found her new Other: a boy named Jacob Dela Rosa. As a Herald, she knows she must take the boy under her wing and train him – in spite of how glaringly average he seems to her – if the world is to be saved.

When a powerful Decayed One makes an attempt on Jacob’s life, Mix calls his True Name out and sets a chain of events that will either save the world, or destroy it completely.

Read the excerpt.

Mikael Javellana is a full-time writer for a local start-up company. He enjoys writing stories at cafes, mostly in the realm of urban fantasy. This is his first published work of fiction.

You can reach him via e-mail at cmgc2010@gmail.com, and follow him on twitter @eclecticmimicry

 

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BY MAYA ANGELOU