JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Listen to the beginning of The Adventuress, a new short story by Jessica Zafra.

Signed copies of zine#1: The Adventuress are available here, P250 each. Limited edition, 500 copies only. To order, email your full name, delivery address, and mobile number to saffron.safin@gmail.com. We’ll get back to you with the total cost including delivery charge. We accept payments by BDO deposit, PayPal and PayMaya.

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The Department of Health has announced that the Philippines is now in its second wave of coronavirus infections. This is news to me because I didn’t know that the first wave was over.

Last year I realized that the media industry has changed so much I barely recognize it. I had grown sick of pitching ideas to potential sponsors. Apart from shrunken budgets and control over content, most advertisers understandably want a personality that matches their branding, and I am a weirdo.

So I rethought my options and decided to focus on selling my books, doing events, giving workshops, and promoting my work on social media (I am antisocial media so I write the stuff and Bubbles posts it). I had lined up events in Baguio, Bacolod, and Naga, and scheduled a writing workshop in Makati. Then Ateneo named me the Irwin Fellow for Creative Writing, so my first quarter calendar was full. I finished the first two stories for my monthly zine (very 90s) and had the pages printed.

And then this.

There’s no point in bewailing cosmic injustice. Get in line, we’re all in suspended animation, like Ripley and Jonesy the cat, asleep in the pod after the alien ravaged the Nostromo. Obviously the events had to be rescheduled. The writing workshop is ongoing—we meet on Zoom every week and participants email their homework. I read, make short videos for my books, and write this journal. I sell books and zines on Instagram. What I have learned from decades of freelancing (a.k.a. a life of uncertainty) is that the point of working is not how much money you’re going to make, but the work itself. If I just keep working, something turns up.

Which is why I’m at my desk with paper, needle and thread, a heavy letter opener instead of a bone folder, and a drawing compass instead of an awl, binding copies of my zine. For someone who loathed Sewing class in grade school, I enjoy this manual labor. It clears my head so I can think of the next story.