BY Danton Remoto Philippines Free Press Magazine On the first day of April, we moved to a row house in a subdivision carved out of the Antipolo hills. A row house is a nice word for houses that somehow managed to fit into 120-square-meter lots. They looked like matchboxes, really, built near the riverbank. The larger houses, of course, stood grandly at the center of the village, in front of the chapel. We’d be renting the house from the mayor’s mistress, one of three houses she owned there. The living room of the house spilled over into the kitchen. The house only had two tiny rooms, but it was enough for us. The owner of the apartment we had been renting in Project 4 wrote to us (in pink stationery with the letterhead “Dr. Antonina Raquiza, Ph. D.”) to say that she’d raise the monthly rent to five thousand. If we couldn’t agree to her new terms, we’d have two months to leave. Mama glared at the letter, then said something obscene about our landlady’s father. A day later, she began ...

thanks for those who texted and commented about my second novel. My first novel was finished in the year 2000, on a Fulbright grant to the US at Rutgers University in New Jersey. It is my dissertation for my Ph.D. in Creative Writing, which I will defend in the first semester of 2008. Anvil wanted to publish my novel three years ago, in 2005, but I told them I will first defend it before my Ph.D. panel for additional comments. So it is finished. Don't worry about that. All 350 pages of it. The original draft was 550 pages. I threw away the rest. As for the short story collection, it is finished, too, and I will give it to a university press. I am choosing one that will not censor the stories, because some of them are too risque by Catholic university press standards. Maybe UP Press is the best bet. Some people told me I will stop writing once I run. I think they are wrong. I am giving to the UP Press a manuscript of new poems in English that I have just finished writing. I am also ...

I am writing a novel based on what happened to me and to Ang Ladlad in the days before, during and after the last elections. I am having a grand time writing this. Let me caution you that this is fiction. Oh, yes, indeed. “Power is like a lighted matchstick. The closer your fingers are to it, the more you will get burnt.” --Tu Fu Chapter 1 The Commission on Independent Elections (CIE) was housed in a three-storey wooden building erected right after World War II. Its dark-brown paint was peeling off, and the musty interiors were hardly lit by bulbs filmed with dust. One hundred meters away to the north, the Manila Cathedral sat on raised ground. Its round gray dome could be seen from the Manila Bay, and the long central aisle towards the grand altar had already exhausted many old women who walked to the altar on their knees. In front of the cathedral was the plaza built by the Spaniards. When the wind from the bay began to blow, the fire trees would move like waves touching each other....