It occurs to me that the novel is partly “inspired” by Talking Heads’ two greatest albums, Fear of Music and Remain in Light. No connection to what’s excerpted below though.

From Chapter 3, in which I kill one of my more interesting characters, which may not be a good move.

Ext.: steam rising from a destroyed radiator obscuring the green mountains beyond the freeway. The camera does a slow pan along the slick black oil on the road and the underside of the chassis and the brand new treads still slowly spinning and they come to a non-ironic halt.

Cut to: The driver’s door, large dent along the side, the muffled sound of kicking from the inside. It opens with a creak and it scrapes along the spilled gravel from the truck. Mang Kaloy emerges, a gash on his forehead, dazed. He puts a bloody hand to his side, clutching his ribs, looks around.

Cut to: A slowly widening shot as the camera pulls back, revealing the truck that has wandered roughly into the opposite side of the freeway, the gravel from the truck bed scattered in random piles on the grassy median and on the concrete. Mang Kaloy in the center of the shot as he turns around slowly. The vehicles on both sides have stopped, their drivers aghast and curious and horny for vehicular accident porn. There but for the grace of god and all. No soundtrack, just the ambient hum of the highway and the maya bird singing non-ironically in the trees.

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For a long time I was debating whether to write a serial killer / science-fiction hybrid thingie — certain groups of people (I called them Mimics) were dying mysteriously, and this hard-boiled detective and a geeky hacker was going to join forces and hunt down the villain, which was this mysterious man who lived in the slums of Manila and had uploaded a virus onto the net. And then I thought, well maybe the Mimics were actually avatar-type creatures made of code, and therefore they could be infected by a software virus. That whole idea didn’t last very long, so the story’s completely different now. (A friend commented that he could imagine the pitch: “It’s Slumdog Millionaire meets The Matrix meets Blade Runner meets Macho Dancer.”)

Anyway, what used to be called Mimics is now American Idols.

From Chapter Two:

In the morning Brian will be awake before everyone else and will have burnt the pan de sal in the toaster oven and will be watching his Japanese robot cartoons. Delphine remembers watching similar cartoons with her older brothers when she was a little girl. Then President Marcos, in a dictatorial snit, cancels everything. Delphine’s mother tells her it is because the President was worried about children neglecting their homework and that discipline was what was needed for this country to progress upward and onward. Later the President would come for the video games, the arcades shuttered and padlocked. An entire generation of children, robbed of digital pleasure and prowess. Delphine’s brother wailed when he realized his robot cartoon was gone, erased from the airwaves by presidential fiat. Still they sat at 6 p.m. in front of the Radiowealth television set with the sliding wooden cabinet and waited in futility. Commercial after commercial and still no robots. Delphine turns the plastic knob to a different channel to make sure. Still no robots, and then finally their mother calls them to dinner. They have taken advantage of the disappearance of the robot cartoons to eat earlier from now on. She will never know what happened to Koji Kobuto, to the fey villain with the scar, to their lost scientist father. She is mixing up the cartoons now. She remembers that one of the robots had breasts which were also missiles. Delphine smiles in the dark.

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So… the original idea was to write posts leading up to my first time to join National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, detailing my ideas for plots, figuring out whether I wanted to write in the first or third person (that process alone took almost a month), or whether the novel was going to be set in the present time or on December 26, 2043 — coincidentally, the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines, but that’s not happening anymore. That subplot about the disembodied talking head gone missing from Utrecht and held for ransom — like Niles Caulder’s head on a bucket of ice, around the end of Grant Morrison’s run on Doom Patrol — well, that’s fallen by the wayside. Maybe next year.

Instead, I’ll be posting a random excerpt once a day or so, just so I’m held accountable to more people, i.e., the few people left reading this blog. If anyone out there is doing NaNoWriMo this year, feel free to add me as a writing buddy. I’m behind on my word count and I need the motivation.

And here it is from Chapter One of American Idols, in all its unedited stinking glory:

Tom Cruise remembers the great flood from the year before: the hungry brown churn devouring everything in its path, LandCruisers and karetelas swallowed alike, houses and furniture and trees and carabaos and god, all those people, sucked in and spat out as useless debris. Tom Cruise remembers how the water recognized no municipalities or borders or class, how it consumed without prejudice. Waters that knew no bank accounts or property holdings until the rescuers arrived, when the boats came first for the wealthy who sat on their roofs and tweeted their locations. But the flood was impartial in its seething roil, implacable and blind. What Tom Cruise now faces is a mere trickle.

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When I was growing up in the Philippines, every guy in my neighborhood played basketball. As a writer one is trained not to use absolute terms like “every” or “all,” but this is surely a statement of empirical fact. Maybe those guys were too busy now, or their knees, like mine, had given way in middle age, but at some point in their lives, they had picked up a ball and chucked it through a hoop. And in every neighborhood, there was one. Even I can still remember the makeshift basketball court near my house: planks salvaged from some construction site and nailed to a tree, a frayed net clinging to a rusted hoop bent funny from all the dunk attempts, skinny street dogs weaving between the players’ skinnier legs, worn-out tsinelas and fake Reeboks raising little puffs of brown dust, overshadowed by the clouds of diesel smoke as a jeep rumbles down the street, and the game is temporarily interrupted to make way for the vehicle.

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[Crossposted from a 3-star entry on Goodreads.]

No, it’s not a proper review (I leave that up to the experts), but more of an extended observation, which can perhaps be best illustrated with an example of Arthur Phillips’ prose, with our protagonist Julian listening to his Walkman in the Manhattan twilight:

…and he had the sensation that he might never be so happy again as long as he lived. This quake of joy, inspiring and crippling, was longing, but longing for what? True love? A wife? Wealth? Music was not so specific as that. “Love” was in most of these potent songs, of course, but they — the music, the light, the season — implied more than this, because, treacherously, Julian was swelling only with longing for longing. He felt his nerves open and turn to the world like sunflowers on the beat, but this desire could not achieve release; his body strained forward, but independent of any goal, though he did not know it for many years to come, until he proved it.

Because years later, when he had captured all that — love, wife, home, success, child — still he longed, just the same, when he listened to those same songs, now on a portable CD player, easily repeated without the moodicidal interruption of rewinding (turning spindles wheezing as batteries failed). He felt it all again. He pressed Play and longed still.

It’s eloquent stuff, yes, all this aching, the blunt and concise beauty of a phrase like “this quake of joy.” And yes, there are small gems like these scattered throughout the novel. But see, it’s that word “moodicidal” that’s, well, moodicidal. All this rapture, then a tiny thud, as if our appealingly lovelorn but not completely sympathetic protagonist — the sort of person who would craft a word like “moodicidal” as a form of emotional self-defense, if that makes any sense — had insinuated himself into the narration. A private grief made more palatable, perhaps, pulled to the surface, manifested and masquerading as verbal artifice. Because after all, the emotional core of The Song Is You is loss (the death of a child, a divorce), its depths momentarily excavated, dragged up to the light, by the fortuitous turn of the iPod’s click wheel.

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