Adarna House, in partnership with the Filipinas Heritage Library, is now accepting entries for the 6th Barlaya Writing for Young Adults Workshop.  The workshop will be held on September 6 and 7, 2007 and only ten fellows shall be chosen on the basis of their literary work.

Guidelines for prospective Barlaya fellows:

1. The workshop is open to all Filipino citizens.
2. All submissions must consist of a) 2 sample chapters (not more than 20 pages); b) a story synopsis (not more than 3 pages in length) that includes details regarding the plot, characters, and any special twists the story might have; and, c) a 1-page bio-data of the author.
3. Submissions may be in Filipino or English.
4. All submissions must target readers within the age range of 12-18 years old.
5. All submissions should be typewritten on short bond paper, double-spaced.
6. All submissions must be original and unpublished. If the entry has won an award, please indicate this on the first page of the entry.
7. Four (4) copies of each entry should be submitted, enclosed in 1 long, brown envelope. The envelope should be labeled with the author’s name as well the phrase, “Submission for the 6th Barlaya Writing for Young Adults Workshop.”
8. Prospective fellows may send in more than one (1) entry.
9. All entries must be sent through snail mail or parcel service to Adarna House, 2nd Floor, FSS Building, 20 Scout Tuason St. corner Scout Castor St., Quezon City.
10. All entries must be received by Adarna House no later than 5:00 p.m., on July 2, 2007.

Successful fellows shall be notified by August 17, 2007. Submissions that are not chosen for the workshop, must be claimed no later than September 21, 2007, from Adarna House, after which they will no longer be the responsibility of the organizers.

For inquiries, please call 3723548 loc 110 or e-mail events at adarna.com.ph.

Hooray! Got this in our mailbox this week and we’re all excited over it. We imagine ourselves sitting quietly and doing our job, trying to be the best bookstore website we could be, and somehow someone notices. It feels great. Thanks to DigitalFilipino.com and their sponsors for promoting the use and development of e-commerce in the Philippines.

Dear Sir/Madam,

The DigitalFilipino.com Web Awards just concluded its final judging and your site, Booktopia, was selected as winner in the Books category.

In this regard, please join us in our awards ceremony…

The agenda and details of the award can be found at http://digitalfilipinowebawards.blogspot.com

The DigitalFilipino.com Web Awards in collaboration with the APEC Digital Opportunity (ADOC) Award program aims to advocate the use of Internet and e-Commerce for business development, through the identification, promotion, and highlighting of best e-Commerce practices from various websites in the Philippines.

Websites in thirty-one (31) categories were reviewed and judged for their ability to create a noticeable presence on the Internet — their ability to be seen and heard among all the noise and clutter of the Net. Commercial websites were also reviewed for their ability to conduct e-commerce, in simple yet professional manner.

All entries were nominated by the public from December 2006 to February 2007 and were judged by members of the DigitalFilipino.com Club. Details about the club can be found at http://www.e-commercephilippines.com

All winners will receive a trophy, Google AdWords voucher, special prizes, and a slot in a three-day advanced e-commerce training at the ADOC Center in Quezon City this May 2007.

From the 31 winners, there will be three ADOC Award winners too where the first placer will be able to represent the Philippines in the ADOC Week on July 24 to 27 in Taiwan.

The ADOC project aims to facilitate the bridging of the digital divide within the APEC community through training and trading. It is an independent, not-for-profit program funded by Chinese Taipei. The project was initiated in 2004, and to date, seven APEC economies are actively participating in the project. These are Chile, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Through this project, we hope to increase the awareness and promotion of outstanding websites and to get a better understanding of the benefits of the Internet, as well as the various ways in which e-Commerce can play a vital part in business development.

Thank you.

Respectfully yours,
Janette Toral
DigitalFilipino.com

Millions of fans mourned the death of author Kurt Vonnegut who died last Wednesday at age 84 from complications from a fall he suffered weeks ago. Vonnegut is well-known for his satirical and absurdist works. He liked to combine literature with science fiction as he did with Slaughterhouse-Five, his most famous work and a very important piece of American literature.

Read or re-read Vonnegut. Available now at Booktopia:

Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, Welcome to the Monkey House, Mother Night, Galapagos, Slapstick: Or Lonesome No More!, Bluebeard, Player Piano, Jailbir, Deadeye Dick, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons.

Incidentally, back when e-mail was fairly new to most, a message that started with “Wear sunscreen” was credited to Vonnegut as a commencement address he gave to the graduating class of MIT. Though funny and well-written, it was not Vonnegut. What did go around the internet later on as the story of a soldier who goes AWOL to woo his childhood friend from the man she was to marry is a story from Welcome to the Monkey House. It’s the kind of story that will make you want to read more from Vonnegut. Search the internet for Kurt Vonnegut’s wonderful story, A Long Walk to Forever.

(1) Good news for Potter fans. First, released late last month was the front and back cover art by Mary GrandPré for the American edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. View the full cover art here. Beautiful, isn’t it?

(2) Here’s another piece of good news. The price of the seventh book has gone down. We’re not saying anything yet this time until we’re absolutely sure, but we are sure that you will be happy with the new pricing scheme. We are, still, of course, accepting reservations.

(3) And the final bit of good news. Just like the last time, if you live or work in our neighborhood — we mean Eastwood City, Libis, Bagumbayan, Loyola, Acropolis, White Plains, Valle Verde, Greenmeadows, St. Ignatius, Blue Ridge, Kapitolyo, etc. – you can have your book delivered to you for free by Owl Post on July 21, hopefully while you’re having breakfast, but definitely before you sit down to lunch. You’ll have to reserve the book to avail of this offer.

So you think you can come up with a good story using nine Talecraft cards?

Find the cards on the Talecraft contest page and submit your story. The best four stories will be chosen and read during the Talecraft event on March 30 at Booktopia. Prizes await the winners!

Visit the contest page and make sure to read the rules. To learn more about the game, make sure you visit the About pages of the Talecraft site.

Baen Free Library

Baen, a leading publisher of speculative fiction has made available for free some of its titles through the Baen Free Library. The home page, if you are interested, has an extensive discussion on book piracy and how the library came to be. Contributing authors to the library are well-known science fiction and fantasy authors like Mercedes Lackey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Eric Flint, Larry Niven…

LibraryThing

It’s like a library thing, you know, a way to catalog your personal library and arrange your books on virtual shelves. And then it’s also more than that because their BookSuggester gives you recommendations for books similar to books in your library. Strangely enough, they also have a device called the Unsuggester which will give you “humorous recommendations of books you probably wouldn’t enjoy.” You can also meet other members with the same interests by forming communities like the 50 Book Challenge group or the Read YA Lit group. Take their tour of the site to find out more.

The Best Book Ever is many a writer’s dream.  Watch this short animated film on writing “The Best Book Ever” from Lev Yilmaz.

Join us for a night of creative exchange! Come to the Talecraft Event at Booktopia on March 30, 2007, Friday, from 6:00 to 9:00 pm.

We first encountered Talecraft at the Read or Die convention. People were gathered around a table near the entrance to the convention hall and we couldn’t quite get a good look at what was going on. It turns out, they were playing a game, a storytelling game using a deck of cards. Ah, we thought. Interesting.

A few weeks later, I sat down with the artist and creator of TaleCraft, Ria L., and she showed me what Talecraft was all about. It is a deck of 86 cards composed of three types of cards: genre, archetype, and key cards. Players take a combination of random cards from the deck to come up with a story of the chosen genre, with characters based on the chosen archetypes, using the chosen key cards for plot elements. During RodCon where they assigned judges, the best stories were judged and chosen. It’s really very engaging.

* Designs for the Adventure genre card and the Pied Piper archetype card.

If you think playing Talecraft is difficult, think again. At RodCon, players who never thought they could tell a story from start to finish did surprisingly well. TaleCraft traces its roots to a game that Ria and her siblings used to play as children. (We’ll let her tell you that story during the event on March 30.) So it’s something that young adults can play too. Perhaps younger players will need the assistance of their parents to be able to understand some of the more difficult words printed on the cards.

You and your friends can invent different rules for the game and you can find helpful suggestions on how to play from the Talecraft website. Better yet, come to the event we are hosting on March 30. See the game at play, meet its creator, and take home your own story-creation deck.

Tell us if you are attending and how many friends will be there with you.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, priced at P1,700, is available at a discount if you reserve now. The first batch of reservations will be awarded a 10% discount.

To reserve, you can either drop by the store and make a payment there (our reservation fee is P500) or make a deposit to our bank account. You may reach us through our contact form if you need bank information.

We’ve been running here and there since the end of January and have only had a few chances to take pause. We’ve been packing books, unpacking books, moving shelves, talking to people, printing signs, and all the other activities connected with book sales and in-store events. It sounds tiring, and it is, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Near the end of January, we held a week-long book sale at the Ateneo de Manila University for their Humanities Week through the Ateneo Literary Society. Thanks to the teachers and students who passed by our table and thanks especially to Marielle of LitSoc.

The first weekend of February saw us at the Hotel Intercon in Makati for the Read or Die Convention. It was our first convention and we experienced for the first time setting up a booth. This involves hauling shelves and boxes and unpacking our things in the wee hours of the morning. It was a great experience though and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves during the convention. One of our favorite activities at RodCon 2007 was watching the Alitaptap Storytellers on stage. They were very entertaining and the children (and adults) in the audience were obviously enthralled by the storytelling. Even people who don’t read will love them. We plan on bringing the storytellers to the store in the future. We were pleasantly surprised to see a series of posters featuring local actors in a ‘Get Caught Reading’ campaign by the National Book Development Board (NBDB). (Local talents featured in the posters are Miriam Quiambao and Makisig Morales of Super Inggo. Interesting stuff, but useless if it doesn’t get the proper exposure.) We also loved that there was a publisher’s room where writers could meet up with publishers and discuss submissions. We enjoyed the concert with local artists featuring music based on literary works. It’s all in the interest of building a literary culture.

Hopefully, the other attendees and exhibitors feel the same way we do about the convention. It’s not the famous Los Angeles Times Festival of Books just yet but given a few more tries and a few more supporters, that’s how I imagine it can be. After seeing how much fun can be had and how much good can be done by having our very own book festival, I don’t see why we shouldn’t have another one next year. Thanks to the Read or Die organizers.

On the second day of the convention, we sponsored a panel discussion entitled “Speculative Fiction for Beginners: Reading Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror” which award-winning author and editor Dean Alfar facilitated with the LitCritters. It was great! And to think the LitCritters group only had a few days to work on their panel. It was a lively and interesting session. The LitCritters described their particular speculative fiction preferences: science fiction, fantasy, horror, interstitial fiction (general and young adult). Then they each recommended titles for beginning readers to look up. No wonder the sign-up sheet was full before noon and had to be taken from the reception desk because more people wanted to attend. Thank you to Dean and the rest of the LitCritters for a wonderful panel.

A few days after that, we held a book launch/discussion with first-time publisher Cozy Reads Publishing. (Incidentally, RodCon is where we met Cozy Reads Publishing!) The publishers and contributing authors were around to answer questions on the writing and publishing process. A book signing followed afterwards. Thanks to Sherwil for bringing their book, Heartbreak, to our store and for bringing those delicious mini donuts. We wish Cozy Reads more success with their upcoming titles.

(I don’t think it has been mentioned yet that aside from giving you the stories, one of the things that will impress you about the book Heartbreak is how beautiful it looks. People often complain that local books are just a bit unattractive but this book is different. The cover, the print and the thick and creamy paper look very professional; not your usual newsprint, and yet readers find it very affordable.)

We don’t really mind the running around. We love spending time with our customers and talking to publishers and writers. Hopefully the rest of year brings us a lot more of these activities. So if you have suggestions or ideas for future events, please tell us.