How long did it take to write this book?
I wrote the first draft in 2016, and I sold it to a publisher in 2021. It went through more than 13 revisions in between – mainly because I didn’t have a good revision process in place. I drafted 2 new books between 2016 and 2021, but I kept coming back to The Moonlight Blade.
There are a lot of books and free resources on writing, but not so many on editing. Through all the trial and error, I learned how to edit a complete manuscript, and what method works for me. If you want to know a little about my editing process, I wrote about it here.
Will there be a sequel?
Unfortunately no, Entangled only bought one book. I did plot out Book 2 which should have been from Kuran’s point of view, and Book 3 would have been from Virian’s. Maybe some day I’ll find a way to get them out in the world, but in the meantime I have other stories already in the works with my agent.
Was Arawan (their homeland) really destroyed?
Narra is a very unreliable narrator thanks to her stubbornness and guilt. A lot of the things she believed to be true, weren’t. So…
Just because she assumes it was destroyed doesn’t mean it actually is. That’s something I looked forward to exploring in a future novel, but it will have to live in my imagination for now.
Where did the inspiration for this book come from?
I’d just had a baby, and had a terrible experience both with pregnancy and post-partum. This book about mothers and daughters poured out of me after more than 2 years of being unable to write. I spent a lot of that time thinking about good parenting intentions gone wrong, utang na loob (what we owe our parents), how I was raised, and how complicated family can be.
It’s not a coincidence that the supreme Diwata Omu in this story is a mother figure to Astar, who plays a contrast to Narra’s human mother Shora. There’s also the difference between Oshar and Narra’s maternal grandmother Yirin.
This was also the first book where I attempted to incorporate my Filipino heritage into a fantasy setting. I didn’t know how to do that. I’m still not sure how to do it. Unlike established fantasy subgenres, there isn’t a framework that can be used for the worldbuilding (ex. wuxia) or a coherent mythological framework (ex. K-dramas), because the Philippines is an archipeligo with many enthnolinguistic groups and mythologies (further complicated by the erasure of colonialism).
When I was querying the book, one of the agent commented that “I don’t see what’s Asian about this book.” I kind of took that as a challenge during revisions and added MORE rather than editing things out.
But that’s also why it was very difficult to sell this book. It was hard to explain or find anything to compare it to. But also, what is a Filipino fantasy supposed to be like? I think it’s something that we’re all still defining, and we need a lot more stories in the world before we can come close to an answer.
What are you working on now?
Something gothic, dark, and full of monsters, but I personally like to call “Kaiju Karaoke”. For vibes, check out my Pinterest.
