TL;DR Version

Ask four-year-old me growing up in Southern California what I wanted to be as an adult, and I'd have answered "a writer" before you’d even finished asking the question. I drew picture books before I could read them. I entered every writing competition I came across. I was also diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis at six, and doctors told my parents the disease was progressing so rapidly that I might not walk by the time I was a teenager. That prognosis turned out to be wrong, but it shaped what I believed myself capable of for a very long time. 

I was so painfully shy I couldn’t make friends, my legs and arms were too stiff to run, I didn’t have the coordination to play sports, but, hey, I could lift a pencil! So I wrote. Through severe social anxiety and depression in my childhood and teen years, I wrote. My English teacher at Cerritos High School, Don Teague, was the first person outside my own head who encouraged me to submit my poetry to literary journals as a teenager, so I did. And when I dropped out of high school at sixteen in the middle of my senior year due to debilitating anxiety, I locked myself in my bedroom, and I wrote.

I didn’t have many friends, but what I did have were stories. At eighteen, I was nominated by the English Department Chair of my community college for a writing scholarship, which I won, then used it toward studying literature abroad at Cambridge. 

But things changed in that space between then and adulthood.

I was accepted to the English programs at UCLA, Berkeley, and NYU. I chose NYU, attended orientation, and then let fear make the final decision for me and walked away. Ten years later, I applied to a Creative Writing MFA at Birkbeck College, University of London. I submitted two short stories and was interviewed by a panel that accepted me into the program. I ended up turning that down, too.

Yup. That's how much I feared failing at something that I wanted more than anything in the world.

I entered the corporate world as a technical writer and when that got oppressive, I became a singer-songwriter for four years. (Long story.) And when performing onstage became too stressful to sustain, I went back to corporate life as a marketing copywriter. During the recession at the end of the 2000s, I went to graduate school (as one does when there’s no work) at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast. I published academic research, then went back to corporate life. I wrote marketing copy, wrote articles for websites, edited video, and built a career out of some form of storytelling except the one I had always wanted most—writing fiction.

How did I finally drum up the courage to put myself out there? I partly credit mortality anxiety. After I hit a certain age, I sat down to write the fantasy novel I’ve been carrying for thirty years. It’s not the work of literary fiction that I once thought I wanted to write, but it’s the work that required me to reach back to the girl who rode the short bus to school and who ate lunch alone, yet still dreamed extravagantly.

Shay from my debut novel, Song of the Nightbeast, is also that girl. What’s more, she’s a woman of few words in a land where she doesn't belong, whose power comes not from being the loudest person in the room, but from listening when others speak and finding meaning between the words. As a Filipino-American who grew up in the 1970s and '80s, I know what it feels like to scan every book, every screen, every toy store shelf, and see myself nowhere. I wrote Shay because I grew up believing that only Type-A, fast-talking, ass-kicking personalities were destined for greatness, and I spent most of my life mislabeling my own strengths as weaknesses. I needed to write a story that paid homage to quiet strength so that a younger version of me could find themselves in a hero.

I am not afraid of putting this book into the world anymore. At this point in my life, I am far more afraid of not doing it.

My Fantasy Fiction Aesthetic