Hello!! Last week I reviewed The Difficult Loves of Maria Makiling by Wayne Santos a brilliant inventive mix of Filipino fantasy, Canadian culture and exploring forgiveness. Wayne very kindly agreed to talk to me about this novella and a few things on the horizon.

 

How do you like to booktempt The Difficult Loves of Maria Makiling?

 

Okay, so I am not good at selling myself or my work, let alone booktempting anything I wrote, but backed into a corner, I guess I would say, in my best sarcastic voice…

 

“Hey, so I know Filipino folklore has been done to death, unlike those super rare mythologies like Greek and Roman that no one ever covers. But if you can stand one more story based on Filipino folklore to add to your voluminous pile, here’s one that’s an urban fantasy comedy about bad relationship choices, true love, demon horses with disturbingly high anime literacy, toxic masculinity, some of the best and worst places to go in Toronto and distant fear and respect for Margaret Atwood.

“Also martial arts, car chases, nature as a superpower, and so many one-liners the scale broke.”

 

What led you this choice of myth?

 

Maria Makiling is a Diwata, which is essentially a pretty powerful spirit/goddess type, who has her own territory, Mount Makiling. I’d actually written about her before in another story, but that was a more serious take on the goddess.

One thing I’d noticed while I was researching her was just how many stories there were surrounding her and even her character and origins. So there were quite a lot of versions of Maria to choose from, which made me feel a bit limited that I’d only picked on for that story. It was the more ethereal, serious, Galadriel-esque version.

But in some of the other folklore, Maria had relationship problems with some insistent Spanish conquistador types that made her life a living hell. I found that particular version really fascinating and immediately wondered just how messed up that dynamic would be if it had taken place in a contemporary setting.

So even though I’d already written one version of Maria that was all goddessy and respectable and stuff, I decided to write another version where… she wasn’t. But still powerful. And let her deal with all the fallout of trying to get away from a couple of guys who wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, not even from a goddess.

 

This feels a story where the old world and new world has to learn to meet in the middle with both myths and characters learning to embrace change – was that in your mind while writing?

 

That’s kind of an ongoing fixation of mine, though in more general terms, not so much old world meeting new. I like seeing what happens when different systems that are usually considered isolated from each other have to meet and interact. I like seeing what kind of chaos, new methods, or “cheating” or “exploits” can come out of that. Kind of like how people would use the strengths and weaknesses of different physics laws in a Star Wars versus Star Trek argument to see ways in which these two separate worlds would collide and make a mess of things.

You can see I did that in a big way with The Chimera Code since that one was “magic in a cyberpunk world.” For The Difficult Loves of Maria Makiling, it was “old school Southeast Asian folklore and 17th century standards of relationships and romance meet with 21st century Canada,” which is often considered one of the more liberal countries in the world today.

I think part of that is the result of my own experiences growing up in a diaspora context. I’m a second-generation Filipino Canadian, which means that while I have the DNA of someone from the Philippines, my primary introduction and knowledge of my culture came initially from my immediate and extended family. Growing up like that, there’s this constant tension of living in a Filipino household, but then leaving that and entering a “white world” of mid-western Canada. Some things from that experience will have to “stay” in the house, like the language, or daily home habits, like eating rice with hands instead of utensils, but some of it will have to forcibly interface with the Western world, such as being visibly not white.

Every diaspora kid has to make certain choices about what to “take or leave” of your family’s culture in any given situation. So in that sense, there’s always a certain amount of adaptability and change involved. What do you take from your culture into this meeting with other students? What do you pretend to not be or leave behind in your interactions with fellow co-workers in the office? Diaspora navigate those choices all the time, so the middle ground is always different given a specific context or circumstance. I thought it would be fun and funny to have Maria explore that in some large, ridiculous ways, as she grappled with both her divine nature and traditional Catholic conservative Filipino upbringing in a country where marijuana is nationally approved, and same-sex marriages are legal, and how that would impact her traditional perception and legacy as a nature goddess.

Like, we talk all the time about how some romantic heroes, especially the older misogynistic type, wouldn’t fare so well by modern 21st century standards, so I was like, “Well, why not put those guys in a modern setting and see how well they hold up?” Spoiler, not very well.

Comedy in fantasy is always a fine line. How did you find the tone for this story?

In all honesty? I didn’t. I’m still now sure what I wrote, let alone how I did it.

One of my biggest influences in comedy for genre fiction is Douglas Adams. While I’ve always enjoyed comedy, I’ve only really flirted with it in my writing. And even though Joss Whedon has ended up being pretty disappointing, I owe everything in my dialog to the stuff he did with Buffy The Vampire Slayer and even when he wrote comics, like Astonishing X-Men. Everything I write will usually have some fun or funny dialog or maybe a narrative observation here and there, but the comedy has always just been an accent on the story I was telling, never the focus. That’s mostly because I understand that comedy is one of the hardest things, especially in a book, where you have no way to control the “delivery” of how the reader receives the humor, versus being a comedian who controls that through the performance of the jokes.

I’d write that stuff in there because I found it amusing. I figured as long as I confined myself to just small amounts of stuff-I-find-funny, other readers wouldn’t complain too much if they didn’t find it funny because it wasn’t a major fixture of the stories. It was just dressing or accents to the explosions and cultural or social observation. But then I noticed when I finally got published, readers actually noticed the funny stuff and, to my amazement, didn’t mind it. They actually liked that stuff and made a note of it sometimes in their reviews and comments. So I cautiously entertained the idea, “Maybe I’m not just telling these jokes only for myself. Holy crap.”

So The Difficult Loves of Maria Makiling is actually the first time I’ve tried writing a story that was primarily a comedy from start to finish. I just took the lessons I’d learned in writing “straight” stories, that I couldn’t resist seeding with jokes, and really just turned the comedy tap from “trickle” to “full-on flow” just to see how it would end up.

It’s not like there weren’t going to be crazy action sequences, or cultural or social observation, since I still enjoy doing that stuff anyway. The big difference now was instead of cutting down on the jokes because the internal censor was all, “Nah, that’s too much,” instead it was, “We gagged and bound that internal censor and dropped him in the well, so go nuts.”

 

The Importance of Margaret Atwood – discuss?? 😊

Okay, so… the Margaret Atwood thing is really me just taking a very personal anxiety and putting a weird sort of spotlight on it. All of my friends in Toronto recognize this particular thing because they all had to live with me making their lives slightly more bizarre because of it.

The Difficult Loves of Maria Makiling has a good chunk of its events in the Annex, a specific neighborhood in downtown Toronto. It’s the neighborhood I happened to move to and live in for several years when I finally migrated back from over a decade in Singapore to living as a Canadian again back in Canada. As the book points out, it is also the actual home turf of Canadian National Treasure Margaret Atwood™.

So I, as an aspiring science fiction and fantasy novelist, lived in the same area as one of the greatest living forces in contemporary literature. There were local diners with her autographed picture on the wall, where the waitstaff would casually throw around, “Oh yeah, that’s Maggie, she likes having her breakfast here.”

And this gave me a massive, massive inferiority complex and the complete certainty that she had a keen instinct for detecting genre hacks. I basically had this irrational notion that if Margaret Atwood and I were ever in the same space, she would start hacking uncontrollably and say something like, “HACK HACK… There’s a culturally devoid genre writer somewhere here, and I’m having an allergic reaction to the trivial writing and insipid voice, HACKHACKHACK…”

So really, what it comes down to was I was writing a story with a bit of a love letter element to the Annex, and that meant including Margaret Atwood. So since I had irrationally built up Margaret Atwood in my head to be this omnipresence of the Annex, I was damn well going to foist her on everyone else too.

It’s just my way of saying, “Ha, ha, Margaret Atwood, I have confronted my neurotic issues about you—but not really—by making you a major marginal element of my story. Just like you were in my life when I lived there, SO THERE! HAHA! Please don’t hate me.”

 

What else can we look forward to you in the future and where can we find out more?

I usually try to keep my own website current, though in my case, current usually means the occasional video game or anime series review. But when I do have announcements, such as interviews, or book announcements, you’ll usually find them there eventually. And I’m on Twitter, so that’s always a good place to reach out to me. Those should be the two primary go-to sources for the latest.

As far as what is actually the latest… I’ve got a few things cooking. The next guaranteed release for this year is a short story in a Canadian SFF anthology collection called Alternate Plains. That was a call put out to both current and former residents of the prairie provinces to contribute their own SFF stories focusing on the Canadian prairies. As a seething hotbed of Cthuloid madness and despair disguised in hockey games and snowed-in days, that wasn’t too much of a stretch for the contributors.

I’ve got a couple of things already written and finished. One is on submission to various editors. The other is currently sitting with my agent before going out on its own round of submissions. The one currently out on submission is more YAish, I guess… The elevator pitch of that is The Breakfast Club goes to Hogwarts by way of Persona 5. It’s about what happens when a top magical student makes a serious mistake and ends up in the worst magical reform school in America. The one my agent is currently reading and getting ready to send out actually features the character from the Alternate Plains short story. I won’t get into the plot, but I can share that it’s about as bonkers as the Maria Makiling novella in that it’s also an urban fantasy comedy… about a paranormal insurance investigator. Because it always bugged the hell out of me that you’d have ghosts wrecking homes, or kaiju leveling buildings, or even aliens taking out city blocks, and someone had to pay for that repair in the aftermath, meaning insurance companies needed to verify that stuff.

On the “things that already exist” front. I already have the bones for a Chimera Code sequel. I have even started writing the opening pages of the prologue. But that’s kind of an on-again, off-again thing. Still, it’ll get finished, and hopefully, another Witchware novel won’t take until the next decade to come out. I’m also not entirely sure that we are done with Maria since the novella ends its conflict definitively, but just as definitively points out that there’s still plenty more to do. So maybe someday, I might just dive in and continue that story, too, because I have a soft spot for Teek.

Read any good books while in lockdown?

Lots! I’ve only got one book left in the original Frank Herbert Dune series; I just read Heretics of Dune. I was a big fan of Chuck Wendig’s Wanderers, which had a Stephen King The Stand vibe I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen has a level of imagination I’m not even going to try to approach. Darby Harn’s The Judgment of Valene continued his superhero novel series, a pretty rare genre even in genre fiction. Then there’s all the Rebellion stuff, like the New Suns and Outcast Hours anthologies, Beneath The Rising by Premee Mohamed, Steel Frame by Andrew Skinner had mecha in it, so… Yeah… Mecha… I’m sold… and K.S. Villoso’s Wolf of Oren Yaro was pretty impressive.