bethgstories

I was in Boracay when I received the invite to the initial meeting of Pinoy Indie Authors for their second collab. The week before that, Yeyet Soriano sent a message of the prompt and asked if I wanted to join. I kid you not, she got me at the word “aphrodisiac”. Needless to say, I went “hell yeah!” and now here we are and Marahuyo is about to be launched. What is a tamawo? I’ve never heard of the tamawo until Yeyet sent me that message. When I read the prompt, I immediately thought of Sehun, Chanyeol, and Mingyu in long white flowing hairs in white shirt and black pants. Here’s how the prompt went: Tamawo or Tamao is a mythological creature of Philippine mythology. They are believed to be malevolent but extremely handsome with very pale skin to white skin that sparkles under direct sunlight, they also have light colored hair, and fangs. They reside primarily near the sea or any body of water. Their Western counterpart would be the Germanic Elves. They are said to abduct any human fe

Storytime to when I submitted my first published book to the publisher. I actually submitted Destiny Cheated Me to two publishers. I can no longer remember the first publisher I submitted it to. What I can remember was they had tons of comments about my manuscript. Even  the first working title was unacceptable. Thankfully, the 2014 version of me wasn’t a severe procrastinator, and despite my extremely weak finger muscles because of myasthenia gravis , I edited the manuscript. I tried to clean every nook and cranny of that story and addressed all the comments the first publisher had. But I never went back to them. I submitted the much cleaner version to Lifebooks. I didn’t know where I pulled the confidence to hit Send on that email, expressing the desire for my story to be published. I didn’t think it was crap. I didn’t think I sucked. All I thought about was how much fun I had while I was writing that story. Louise and her friends were the barkada classmates I’d want to be in. They w

Characters make your story moving. Essentially, they are the life of the story, and so may it be a person, an animal or an inanimate object (in fables), your readers must be able to relate to them. From a reader's point of view, I want books with characters that are too relatable I could imagine them standing and dancing and breathing in front of me. Character development is also something that I look for when I read books, and this is not exclusive just for romance. How are you going to make your characters relatable to your readers? Basically, you just make sure that your characters act, think, and react the way real human beings do. In other words, make them three-dimensional. You have to be particular in all the details of your characters, and to do this, you have to describe them just like how you'd answer a slum book. Personal information These are the basic details about your characters - name, age, where they live, school/workplace. Do your characters still live with th

Story ideas pop in my head all the time. When I'm drinking coffee. When there's an ending to a book or a movie or a scene in a Kdrama that I don't quite agree with. When there's a couple sitting next to my table in a restaurant barely talking to each other. Are they breaking up or the guy just feels so nervous because he's about to pop out an engagement ring? Or when there's a cute dress on display at Forever 21. Could it be the dress that my main character is going to be wearing when she went out on a failed date and now she has a collection of Failed Date Dresses? Although, my creative brain cells are more active when I'm chatting with Nicole. I bet we can finish an entire romance novel if we'd sit down to it in one day. Maybe there's something that's been playing in your head. Not exactly a story, but a flicker of idea and you just don't know how to start making a story out of it. There's the character, and you can picture this person

All of us have a story tell, or two. Or maybe a lot. Sometimes you feel like your brain is going to explode of all the things that want to be written and shared so bad. I'm like that, like, all the time. I was in high school when I started to write stories, and the characters were mostly me and my friends, with our celebrity fantasies (oh yes, mine's Nick Carter of the Backstreet Boys). Today's generation is lucky enough to have Wattpad. Me? I wrote my stories at the back of my math notebook because it's the most unused notebook I have. Why do you want to write? Your reasons for doing this are important, as they are going to be your fuel when the nights are slowly becoming long and sleepless and agonizing. There'd be moments when you'd ask yourself why you're doing what you're doing. Why are you still awake in front of your laptop at two in the morning when everyone else in the side of your world is sleeping. Trust me, I've been there. Still, here I

Yay for my newest book out in the market! The complimentary copies of The Shape of My Heart arrived in the mail last month, right before Valentine's Day. A gift that made me feel beyond kilig , that I should say. My 6th baby The inspiration It was in 2018 when I went back to Enchanted Kingdom with my colleagues, and for the for the first time in years I opened my long-forgotten story which took place in the said amusement park. I wrote it during the lazy afternoons at home on my phone, in between the series of my hospital confinements in 2013 and 2014. It was a mix of my experiences as a call center agent in a BPO company and others' experiences of love and heartbreak. It took me several months in deciding what to do with it, and even considered writing it in English and release it as another self-published book. I thought it was the right thing to do since I already have a short story (also in English) to follow it up with. In the end, I just tweaked the story a little bit to

One reason why I don't want to go back to school and learn the essentials of writing is because I know I can learn all of those from workshops and other materials that some successful authors have generously shared on their blogs for the internet to see. Look, I absolutely have nothing against you if you're currently taking creative writing class, but I feel like I can spend the three years doing some more productive stuff than sit in a classroom with my professor berating me about what I am still doing in his class after I've published five books (oh yes, this happened to one of my friends). My writing career is purely consisted of knowledge from free writing workshops, wisdom from the experiences of other authors, and determination to go through the entire process of writing and publication - write a story with roughly 30,000 words, draft a nice email and send it to publishers who may or may not ignore it otherwise look and pay for professional editing, choose the bo

Right Where You Left Me is my latest release to date – I introduced it to the world in April last year, two days after my birthday. It was supposed to be for a workshop but I wasn’t able to finish it on time. While I must say that I had so much fun writing this book, needless to say, the making of this book was actually more challenging than doing all my other books combined. The inspiration Just like If I Knew Then, some people in this book exist in real life. Dan Almendras is based on Dr. Danni Diestro, the neurologist behind my successful battle against myasthenia gravis. He gave me full consent to do this, provided insights on a day in the life of a resident doctor and even gave me the permission to use one of his adorable graduation photo as the book cover, courtesy of the UPCM Collective. Sahara Sevilla is based on the female lead of that random Thai romantic comedy movie I saw on Facebook (yes, on Facebook) one lazy, rainy afternoon. The lady was an ESL instructor an

If I Knew Then is my first self-published book in print – it was released back in October 2016. After almost 3 years, I can still remember the euphoria that washed over me. I mean, it wasn’t the first book that was published in print under my name, but it’s definitely one of the projects I did that required me more energy, sleepless nights and midnight coffee. You know that feeling of giddyness and excitement and butterflies in your stomach when you finally see the successful fruition of all your hardwork along with the blood, sweat and tears spilt? That feeling. Amazing, right? The new cover. Photography by Nathan Hill featuring his wife, Nicole Hill. The inspiration I wrote this book in honor of my high school girl friend Nicole, who became the official beta-reader of all my books eversince I started going indie. I’ve always talked about writing a story based on her character, as most of the stories I wrote when we were teenagers featured me, my crushes and the people I hate

Oh yes, for once the traffic wasn’t so bad—I got home much earlier than my usual ten-thirty. Of course, I was pretty excited because that meant I’d be able to work on some of my projects list. I just finished outlining another story, so I thought of adding more words to the actual manuscript or maybe finish a chapter. But I didn’t do that, not right away. Instead I rummaged my old file folders, lingered a bit in the short stories sub-folder, and found some hidden gems. There were short stories, all written several years ago that reminded me of how I used to write. Wordy. Conflicts that are no longer (maybe) socially acceptable. And they all involve accidents. I had no idea what to do with these back then. All I know is that, I wanted to write, and that I did. Plus, my frustrations toward the customers I handled during my long nights as a customer care specialist was just too much to behold I would sometimes just write them down. I put everything into words. I wrote when my hea

I wrote I Still… in 2015, during the very first writing workshop I attended, #JustWritePH. This was by far the most generous workshop I attended, because it was free and didn’t require me anything but to attend the live session and it’s only if I wanted to ask questions to the speakers. The speakers were also great,   including Liana Smith-Bautista, Ria Lu of Komikasi, Mina Esguerra of #romanceclass, Ines Bautista-Yao of Summit Magazines—just to name a few. In this workshop I learned about loglines, narrative elements, the importance of beta readers, editing, publication, and even how to pick the right cover for your book. All of this while we were writing our story which we would eventually launch in its digital format as an output of the workshop. This book is technically the second book published under my name, followed by Come and Rescue Me which would be released October that same year. I could still remember how many nights I spent trying to somehow perfect the story. Nicole

They say there's no such thing as a frustrated writer. That as long as one writes, then one can be considered a writer. I wanted to believe this so bad, but then oftentimes it felt like the fulfilment of being a writer comes from the fact that someone actually takes the time to read what I write. This sense of fulfilment I started to enjoy when I published my very first book. How and when did I start writing? Let me tell you my story.  Yellow pads, scratch papers and magazine cutouts.  I spent my high school days way before the Wattpad era. Even so, my classmates and I were already fond of our own written stories. Fan fiction was the most popular among us - we'd write stories with Backstreet Boys, Hanson, The Moffatts and N'Sync as characters (well you could guess how old I am now, hahaha!). If you spent your teenage years in this era too, then you might be familiar with the cutouts of Bop magazine - you'd fill in the blanks with adjectives and nouns and right after, a

It's Christmas eve, and while most of the blogs today might probably be talking about menus for Christmas dinner or maybe how to gift-wrap properly, I'll be talking about the perfect gift I received this Christmas.  Last night I was so agitated upon knowing that my publisher already announced the coming out of my book in the market very soon. A lot of people liked, commented, and marvelled upon the superb book cover that is courtesy of my brother, a superb artist. That alone was indeed a very great deal, knowing that my book, will be finally read by many, after having to collect dust in my hard drive for a long time. I was never a confident fiction story writer. I mean, sure, my friends can read my works, but I never had the courage to have them submitted and evaluated by strangers (except for my journalism teacher in high school). But then maybe the time just came when it finally dawned on me that I would never achieve my dreams if I were always scared. It's not that I had

It's just less than two months before Christmas, and though I could already feel the cold Christmas breeze on my face, the one that just makes me smile for absolutely no reason at all, I still think it's too early for a Christmas present. But I guess, if something's meant to happen, it is going to happen at the right time. Not too early, not too late. So I was scrolling through my Facebook timeline yesterday when a private message pinged my inbox. It was the publisher that I have spoken with months ago, to whom I submitted a manuscript for publication. He approved it, but I had to wait for the contract and the finalization of the printing, until yesterday. So sitting in my email inbox was the contract that I needed to sign. That's one step ahead, right? I am pretty much excited about this, as would no longer dub myself a frustrated writer because I would soon be a published writer. I can't believe that it has taken me this long to pursue my dreams, but like I said,