FINALLY!!! Freakin’ finally! The initial interior sketches for the 240 pages of SQUALO & MAGE are complete! With everything that went down since signing the contract and completing the script to bring this book to life, I sometimes can’t believe I actually made it out in one piece. It’s been a crazy past 2 years—much longer than I expected to complete this stage of creating a graphic novel. Why 2 years? Besides being totally new to this and dealing with events that were out of my control, a lot of personal life things happened, including the craziness of planning a wedding, the downward spiral my family faced following the death of our dad, suddenly having to deal with carpal tunnel pains, getting COVID, and the jampacked daily schedule I had working full-time as a music journalist. Things finally eased up after I left the day job, giving me the freedom to work on SQUALO & MAGE alongside my first picture book, BIGGER THAN ME. And then last October, Sho and I discovered that we’re pregnant with our first kiddo! There was yet again a lot of juggling, parkouring, and figuring out life in general, but halfway through my second trimester, […] Continue Reading
Why, hello there, friends! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Since I took a step back from music journalism late last year, I’ve been hiding away at home to focus on my life as a full-time author-illustrator. It’s been really tough, to be honest, getting the chance to actually do the thing you’d always dreamed of your entire life. But man, oh man, has it been sooooo cool! So here we are! I’m super excited to finally share with you the cover of my first picture book, BIGGER THAN ME. Written by Erica Simone Turnipseed, BIGGER THAN ME follows a sweet story of two siblings who band together with the neighborhood kids to better understand the big words that are thrust upon them through crafts and play. This book was drawn entirely on Procreate, which inevitably led to an increase in iPad time over the past couple of months. Check out the cover and what the book is all about below: Children discover the impact they can have when they band together in this picture book ode to how solidarity lifts everyone up. Siblings Luna and Zion are feeling a bit overwhelmed. Big words keep rushing at them: Homelessness. Pandemic. […] Continue Reading
Took the leap and here I am now doing the author-illustrator gig full-time. Yup, I’m stepping away from the life I’ve known for 10 years as a music journalist. For the meantime. Maybe. It was a long time coming and sometimes I can’t believe I’d actually turned in that resignation letter to pursue a lifelong dream of becoming a full-time author-illustrator. You still might see my byline at Bandwagon Asia every now and then, but most certainly not on a daily frequency it appeared for almost five years. In fact, shortly after my last day at work, our Editorial Director Camille Castillo called me to do an interview with Raymund Marasigan (literally a week after my retirement) about the Eraserheads‘ highly anticipated reunion concert Huling El Bimbo this December. “You’re the only one who can do it,” she told me, adding how this was going to be Bandwagon’s biggest story for 2022. It was at that “casual conversation” where Rayms talked about his retirement from music, specifying how he’s ” technically semi-retired” since his daughter graduated from college in August. He went on to share what he’d been spending his time on, and guess what, it was still music! And […] Continue Reading
Back when I was six, I told the world that I wanted to write books. I had all these weird ideas I’d turn into stories with my pad papers at school and show them off to grown ups with that cheeky little “look what I made” grin. The grown ups with the money and the real jobs cheered me on, but their praise never led me to one lesson I had to learn to be a good writer: I needed to be a good reader. You see, I was ridiculously lazy when it came to reading material at school. Reading simply wasn’t my thing. I just wanted to make the stuff. I didn’t know what it took to be good at making the stuff. You can have all the brilliant ideas, you can daydream all you want, but if you can’t articulate yourself well on paper, it definitely won’t work. I thought it was enough to surround myself with fantastic video games and movies and pick up big words from the music of Slipknot, but it’s not the same. It’s through reading that a writer learns new words, different ways to structure sentences, and how to craft suspense and emotion that […] Continue Reading
I’m just not so sure about 2017. It was an okay year. Definitely no comparison to how much 2016 sucked, but it wasn’t that great either. I guess you can say it’s part of that prelude to the elixir I mentioned, back when 2016 was still saying bye. It’s still not our Resurrection. We’re still being tested one last time (maybe it’s a test of patience?) for whatever lies ahead. Just like last year, I’d like to take a look back at what made 2017 the year things sorta happened. From going on submission for my debut novel, working on commission pieces for some ～☆dream☆～ clients, to confronting my mental health issues for real, it’s safe to say that the past year was all about personal growth. Being on submission has taught me how to be patient and I’ve since made some new authorly friends on that road (thanks, Twitter). Taking on commission requests from not just new, but also dream clients made me realize the value of my illustrations. And most importantly, facing my mental demons was the biggest change for me. Here are events that made 2017 the good kind of okay that it is: My life as […] Continue Reading
2016 averages as the Year of Suckitude for everyone. There’s so much suck that happened that the good was easily pushed away to the side and was forgotten. But c’mon, it couldn’t have been all bad–sure, the world’s gone insane, but life is really all about the ups and downs we face. Before the year ends, I’d like to remember all the positive things that 2016 (which voice actor Troy Baker dubbed “an epidemic”) has brought onto my life, because who knows, what if this is just a prelude to the greatest year of the decade? Or maybe the century? Whatever 2017 has in store for us, I pray to the multiverse that it’ll top the bad and recover from the crap the Year of Suckitude has dropped upon us. Besides, 2016 might have been our Resurrection (as Christopher Vogler explained in his book The Writer’s Journey), where “death and darkness get in one last, desperate shot before being finally defeated.” It’s the point in any story where the hero is tested one last time, before charging on with the Elixir to heal the wounded land. And guess what? We’re all heroes here. We just need to remember the positive things […] Continue Reading
When she isn’t writing the next heart-wrenching song capable of drowning listeners in tidal waves of emotion, you’d find Up Dharma Down frontwoman Armi Millare in a corner devouring a book. Though Millare has yet to write a song based on a book, reading about social sciences and how the brain works gives her a better understanding of human emotions and relationships by exploring the realms of non-fiction. “It’s nice to observe from afar and also dive deeper through books, because there’s always a new development especially in these fields,” she tells BillboardPH. “Sometimes certain people respond to stimuli because of their genetic limitations or disabilities, but also the expanse of human emotion and psychology sometimes validates many things we’ve experienced—and to know more gets us to understand better.” With a penchant for non-fiction over novels, Millare’s vast collection mostly covers topics from empathy to fields in neuropsychology and sociology. “I just got into reading these kinds of books, because I wanted to know why or how I felt certain things.” She notes that it isn’t safe to self-diagnose, take these books too literally, or to base everything on them, and to see them merely as guides. Here are the books that […] Continue Reading
