JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The trouble with the good times is that while they’re happening, we do not know that they are the good times. They may even seem terrible. To acknowledge that they are the good times is to curse the rest of our lives: they will not be as fun, it’s all downhill from here. Time is the queen bitch who doles out wisdom only in hindsight.

The more we think about it, the more idyllic the 90s seem. There was no social media and the Internet was new. Life was lived face to face, you could touch things, and friends were people you had shared histories with. We experienced boredom, which now seems to be a luxury. It was the last time we thought we understood the world.
(more…)

Have you ever thought that if you were locked up in your house with nothing to do, you would write all the stories you’ve been kicking around your head?

In 2020 I was locked up in my house with “nothing” to do (but endless chores and disinfecting), so I wrote the stories I’ve been kicking around my head. Before the pandemic, my plan was to write a short story every month. I ended up finishing one every other month, which was not bad even without the constant anxiety of living through a very strange year with the air trying to kill you. I had also planned to make zines, and I did—seven in total, including a story I wrote in November 2019. Apart from the writing I really enjoyed making the little magazines: printing, folding, sewing (and I loathed sewing in grade school). Later, Bianca who designed my book cover gave me a template so now I even do the layouts myself. This is what kept me sane in a year that defined Bonkers.

1. The Adventuress. Based on true stories I heard from my friend who’s lived in Paris since the 80s. A beautiful, feckless girl, raised to find a rich husband, thinks she’s finally hit the jackpot when she marries a Frenchman. She finds herself in Paris with a husband but no money, no language, no one to rely on but herself. And then she discovers that she has a mind. A love story between a woman and herself.

2. Genius and Garbage. They say you shouldn’t meet your idols. What happens when a cinephile seeks out a reclusive filmmaker living in the ruins of his once-beautiful house? This is based on the time Noel and I went to Siniloan, Laguna to interview the great director Celso Ad Castillo. It took us four hours of inching through traffic, but it was an unforgettable encounter. Castillo died a few months later.

3. Rumpelstiltzkin. Gemma’s eccentric literature professor represented the cultured world she dreamed of, where people discussed art, opera, cinema, and casually tossed off bons mots while sipping martinis in posh drawing rooms. But just how fine are “the finer things” Named for that very bad-tempered creature in the fairy tale who helps the beleaguered heroine spin straw into gold.

4. The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, vol. I no. 1. It’s 1886 and Jose Rizal, Juan and Antonio Luna, and the Ilustrados are young men living it up in Paris, the most exciting city in the world. Drunken shenanigans! Romance! Duels! The secret lives of national heroes, as told by one very modern woman who witnessed it all.

5. The Ordinary Nurses of Halloween. In the 1990s Malate is the epicenter of Manila social life, and on Halloween night everyone gets ready for the wildest party of the year. Two fabulous gay men, Benjy and Matty, embark on a surreal comic adventure.

6. The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters, vol. I no. 2. In between attending classes, subsisting on frugal meals, moving from one cheap boarding house to another, and hanging out with his friends, Pepe Rizal writes a novel. The national uber-nerd gets an unexpected review.

7. Phantoms in the Spring. “I have never seen a ghost, a fact that has not stopped me from expecting one to materialize before me. I assume they will be translucent, floating several inches off the ground, and making weird moaning noises. Ridiculous, I know, but for this reason I avoid watching horror movies—they interfere with my sleep. When I’m about to lose consciousness I imagine a figure standing at the foot of my bed, and my eyes fly open…” Every place is haunted by history, from Galicia in the Civil War to Manila in the midst of a pandemic.

The zines are available on Shopee.

Yes, I am holding my new book. You can buy it at Fully Booked, Mt Cloud, Solidaridad and Shopee, or order a signed and gift-wrapped copy right here.

I apologize for not having blogged regularly in the last couple of years. The page views had dropped, but that’s not an excuse. I figured the readers had all decamped to the social media, so I asked my friends to set up and manage social media accounts for me. This blog has a Facebook page and my cats have an Instagram account—they’re updated daily by our social media manager Bubbles, and doing very well, thank you. My hiatus from blogging allowed me to figure out how to keep writing for a living when all my old jobs have died or mutated.

The answer, funnily enough, is Books. Having spent the last quarter-century wondering how to support myself so I can write books, I find that I should just write the blasted books. The digital revolution has killed a lot of things, but books have survived and are thriving. Yay!

So this blog is aliiiiive, and from hereon I will be updating it at least twice a week. I hope my old readers will come baaaaack and new readers will wander onto this site. In the coming weeks I will post photos, videos, and podcasts from my book talks in November.

You can reach me in Comments, by email at saffron.safin@gmail.com, or DM @jessicazafrascats.

Have a comparatively stress-free holiday season, and don’t feel compelled to act happy unless you really are happy!

Artwork by Jason Moss. Used with permission.

The Defenestrations
Chapter 5C
by Roni Matienzo

For mature audiences

1.

“Ma’am?” Melissa tried to make sense of what Teepee was saying. Then she laughed at herself for trying to understand the insane.

“Hija, muchas gracias for everything. I need to go as I’m famished!” Teepee left before Melissa could say anything.

Teepee proceeded to the über chichi Chez Manille in the next building and ordered enough food to feed an orphanage. She was staring at a head of salmon when one of the waiters approached her. “Uhm, Ma’am, is there anything I can help you with? It’s just that you have been here for four hours…Perhaps you want dessert? Or the bill?” It occurred to Teepee that Inigo never paid for his meals, there were people who vied for the honor. She had connections, her family had influence, therefore she was an influencer and could refuse to pay for a whole salmon when they’d only served half.

“Get me the manager, gar?on. I want to do an ex-deal.” She didn’t actually know what an ex-deal was, she only heard the term from Iñigo. Where was her bag, did she leave it in the car? She didn’t know where her keys were, either. Maybe Claudio had them. Claudio, her darling husband.

“Hi! Teepee, nice to see you again, amiga,” Lee the manager said. Knowing the names of all 500 members of Chez Manille and acting like they were all his close friends was his schtick. The Villa-Reals were old rich, but according to the grapevine the family fortunes were dwindling.

Illustration for Faust by Harry Clarke, @publicdomainrev

2.
Teepee was paying him no heed as she was distracted by a fly that had been buzzing around her head for the last hour. Maybe it was Iñigo trying to tell her something. She would give everything she had just to have her baby back again. “Amiga, is something wrong?”

“I’m not paying your restaurant a cent. I’m a Villa-Real and I won’t pay for trash.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It means that you should comp the meal since the food did not taste as good as advertised, and I won’t badmouth your restaurant in exchange. Also, your spittle is all over my Chanel sunglasses and they might be damaged from all the acid in your personality.”

“What the…? Just pay your packing bill! Pay. Your. Packing. Bill!” In his rage he forgot to enunciate the f-word and shed his pseudo-American accent altogether.

Teepee saw the fly enter Lee’s mouth.

“Are you just going to stand there? Where’s your wallet? Pay up!”

Teepee stared in horror as the fly multiplied and swarmed all over Lee’s face, then his body. The swarm ate all of Lee even as he continued to shout invectives at her. A single fly separated from the body and flew towards her. It landed on her vintage Patek Philippe watch. She took it off and threw it across the room. Another fly tried to land on her Harry Winston ring. She took it off and threw it as well. The swarm of flies that were formerly Lee caught it mid-air. She took off everything she could take off, including the La Perla set that she had made-to-measure. She dashed out the door before the swarm could eat her as well.

Artwork by Egon Schiele, @WikiCommons

3.

His name was Apinya Chadesakan. I learned his name post-coitus, after I took advantage of the hotel service that the Tawan Spa offered. God knows I tried to resist, but it was so long since I felt like a beautiful woman, and each smile he gave me told me that I was. I felt like this was how an x-rated high school romance should be, and I found myself addicted to the way he made me feel. I could go on and on about his smile, the way his eyes disappeared, the way he touched me, but to talk about him is to end it. I knew it was not love, I’m not a fool.

It ended when I received a condescending response to my email telling him I was pregnant. I was so angry I wished I was in Bangkok so I could push him out his apartment window.

Book cover from @publicdomainrev

4.

Melissa and her boss Nick Romero were outside their building when they saw a very naked Teepee running and laughing. “Oh my God! Boss, that’s Iñigo’s mother! This could be a PR nightmare! Help me get her!”

Melissa felt she should be given stock options, the way she’d saved the company’s ass today. Running after a crazy woman in the middle of BGC. They caught her, but could not find out where she left her clothes or her shoes. What were they supposed to do with the crazy woman?

What happens next?

A. Teepee is admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
B. Teepee is locked up at home until she comes to her senses.

Tune in next week for the continuation.

Treasure Island (2018), embroidery on sackcloth by Jay Lozada. Used with permission.

Have you been following our group novel? Have you caught up? Are you confused?

Good.

The Defenestrations is a novel by different authors: Jessica, Allan, Roni, Patrick, Deo, Don, PJ, Allan A, and many others. The core group is composed of people who went through Writing Boot Camp. We post a new chapter every week, in daily installments here, on @jessicazafrascats, and on this blog’s Facebook. At the end of each chapter, we give the readers two options to choose from. The option that gets the most votes will be posted first, and the other option will be posted the week after that.

In short, the novel is proceeding forwards and sideways, resulting in not one novel but several. Here’s a helpful chart.

Got that? Here are the previous chapters.

Version A

Chapter 1 by Jessica Zafra. In which our protagonist Iñigo Villa-Real, the latest in a long line of Villa-Reals who have fallen out of windows to their death, falls out of a window in Prague Castle in the Czech Republic.

Chapter 2A by Allan Carreon. In which Iñigo mysteriously lands in Chiang Mai, but despite having survived the fall is still douchey.

Chapter 3AB by Patrick Limcaco. In which Iñigo finds himself alone, hungry, penniless, with no identity and no knowledge of Thai, in Silom, Bangkok, and has to get a job.

Chapter 4A by Patrick Limcaco. In which Iñigo becomes an inept worker in the sex trade.

Version B

Chapter 2B by Roni Matienzo. In which Iñigo has died, and in Manila his mother Teepee must deal with the funeral arrangements.

Chapter 3BA by Deo Giga. In which Iñigo’s mother Teepee surveys the detritus of her social-climbing, and is haunted by her dead son.

Chapter 3BB by Angus Miranda. In which Iñigo’s mother Teepee goes mad with grief.

Chapter 4B by Don Jaucian. In which Iñigo is a ghost..or is he?

Chapter 4C by PJ Caña. In which poor Teepee’s life may be in danger.

Chapter 5C by Lord Fernandez. In which Teepee meets a mystery man who may or may not be her dead husband.

Yes, it’s kind of a surrealist exercise, inspired by Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch. I’m the general editor and I work with each author for the next chapter so the story doesn’t get too far away from us and turn into ungovernable chaos. Our goal is governable chaos, and to have fun while writing.

The Baleful Head by Edward Burne-Jones, @WikiCommons

The Defenestrations
Chapter 5C
by Lord Fernandez

1.

“Mrs. Villa-Real, would you mind if we make a quick stop at our warehouse? I just need to grab something from my office.”

Teepee recognized the gray building as a warehouse. As far as warehouses were concerned, there was nothing special about it—except the absence of security guards.

“This warehouse is fully automated—we don’t need security guards because it’s locked electronically,” Nick explained, as if he’d anticipated Teepee’s question.
(more…)