Okay, listen: I am instantly drawn to anything that presents stories of life and death, especially ones that create worlds and hypotheses about the afterlife. Tomorrow fits the bill, and I quickly put it on my Netflix watch list even if it took me months to actually be in the right headspace to consume it.
The short review: I loved it.
I really wanted to like this.
Honestly, anything KDrama and KPop would be a huge draw for me, and Flip The Script looked like a promising queer romance between two young KDrama actresses who were supposed to be rivals in a TV show. What’s not to get excited about?
I love cover reveals. I do. Especially when I know the author doing it and I trust them to “deliver the goods,” so to speak. And also when I’m the one doing the reveal.
In the #romanceclass community, we have a project called #romanceclasscovers where we (or actually, our resident photographer, Chi Yu Rodriguez) takes photos of Filipino models (sometimes they’re actors, sometimes they’re friends of friends!) and we put these photos on the covers of our books. It doesn’t sound quite revolutionary when you think about it, but it’s a statement. It says, loudly, that we want to see Filipinos on the covers of our books. We want to see not just faces, but faces with real emotion. Poses that entice and tickle the imagination. The whole she-bang.
It’s a representation thing. It’s an aesthetic thing. It’s a choice.
My choice for my upcoming book, What If We Fall In Love?, is a playful, happy photo of Gab Pangilinan and Gio Gahol taken way back in 2017, when we still did regular studio shoots for #romanceclass covers. It’s been hidden away for so long, I’ve just being waiting and waiting and waiting to see where I could use it, and the opportunity presented itself after deciding on releasing a romance anthology.
And here it is—the cover of What If We Fall In Love?:
Reading Kaith C. Cimafranca’s Take Two reminded me of those cozy Star Cinema rom-coms in the 90s where stakes weren’t as high, but you still root for the main characters really hard. In Take Two, now-Canadian resident VJ meets her TOTGA (she will deny this if you call him that, btw) at a party 19 years after she left the Philippines to start anew. Marco instantly feels how aloof VJ is, but he doesn’t seem to mind, and we understand this little dynamic of theirs as the story brings us back and forth from their college years to the present.
I had a lot of fun hosting last week’s back-to-back-to-back book launch featuring books by #romanceclass authors Angel C. Aquino, Ines Bautista-Yao, and Mina V. Esguerra, and tonight I’m doing it again!~
This week, we are launching three other #romanceclass books by authors Carla de Guzman, Jay E. Tria, and Kaith C. Cimafranca:
The stream is tonight (Saturday, October 15) at 8PM PHT, and if you want to tune in and watch, you can stream the video below or watch it straight on YouTube. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel!