🏆 THE AMBY AWARDS 2023 TOP PICK - DIVERSE LIT 🏆
It's Rin and Hye-jin against the world. Or so it should have been.
Nagara Rin and Joon Hye-jin, college sweethearts and passionate gamers, have lived a fairytale marriage. Not even a decade after did...
I hope the title of this part has prepared you for the rambling I'm about to do.
The journey with WLNDE is nothing short of anxiety, stress, and peak pulling of hair. The idea for this novel (read: unncessary-long saga) came when I was in the middle of drafting Manila Sunsets With You because my brain likes to bully me like that. Since then, the vibe for WLNDE has hijacked my mind and hasn't let go since.
This is probably the only work that I let other people know that I have coming, going as far as asking several friends about what they thought about the title, the cover, the blurb, just...everything. This is also the work that I was so reluctant to tackle because 1) I have no experience in marriage and divorce aside from contemporary media and what I see in the people around me, 2) I have no experience in video gaming and had to rely on my eighth-grade exposure to friends who do, and 3) I have no idea how in the world I can merge two different things together without overloading the story.
And overload it, I did. See the convoluted amount of words I had to cough up for this novel in the blurb.
Since then, I have ruminated on the concept of WLNDE. I've written MSWY in Feb 2022 and by August 2022, I was panicking because it's 2023 soon and I still haven't worked on anything for this novel. Then came one night in September (?) when I happened to watch CinemaTherapy's analysis of The Marriage Story (featuring Adam Driver and Scarlett Johanson) and it just..clicked.
So, I grabbed the first thing I could. It happened to be this paper bag I got from buying my meals for the day.
That way, you have this thing here as pictured. No, it's not an ancient page or something. It's just a flimsy paper bag and my scrawly handwriting enough to rival the hieroglyphics.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
For a while, I felt like I had achieved something and stashed that paper away. Then, when I had to go home from my uni for Christmas break, I became stuck in a jeepney who took an hour waiting for nonexistent passengers. I nearly forgot about the mystical paper bag containing the secrets of the universe, of course, until I saw it.
And in that jeepney bound for home, I completed the basic plot points for WLNDE. That, people, is how to stay productive.
Come Christmas, I didn't get any writing done. In the first month of 2023, that's when the real work began. Note that I started writing this thing on February 2023. Just imagine how much stress I was in because I was used to having my works planned years in advance. For WLNDE, I literally did the outlining, the character sheets—everything—in a span of a week.
That's how I felt like I rushed through this thing, because it simply didn't have an acceptable time of stewing in my head, unlike literally all the other projects in my profile (we don't talk about the ONC novellas, though. We just don't. lol). Other than that, I was afraid I'd be letting down this excellent idea. It didn't really change until now, even after I have sat down and written the whole thing up to the last dot. I was still afraid I've said the wrong things, misrepresented the wrong stuff, tackled the wrong themes, and told the wrong message.
