Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is the author of the International Rubery Book Award shortlisted The Infinite Library and Other Stories (Math Paper Press, 2017 ; US edition: Gaudy Boy, 2021) and Here be Dragons (Canvas Press, 2015), which won the Romeo Forbes Children’s Story Award in 2012. His play-by-email interactive fiction piece “The Book of Red Shadows” debuted at the Singapore Writers Festival in 2020.
His writing has appeared in many publications including Apex Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Future Fiction, Likhaan Journal, Strange Horizons, Philippines Graphic, Science Fiction World and The Quarterly Literature Review of Singapore, as well as anthologies like The Best New Singapore Short Stories, Fish Eats Lion: New Singaporean Speculative Fiction, LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction, the Philippine Speculative Fiction series and Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction.
He is a fellow at the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference (UK) and the Cinemalaya Ricky Lee Film Scriptwriting Workshop, as well as a Jalan Besar writer-in-residence at Sing Lit Station (2020/2021).
You can Visit his blog at vrocampo.com or follow him on your socials at https://beacons.ai/vrocampo
Hi, Victor! How does it feel to be finally a part of Philippine Genre Stories?
I have always wanted to submit a story to PGS, but for various reasons, I kept missing the opportunity. Earlier this year, I faced a serious health issue hampering my ability to write, so I am especially happy to have finally completed this long-gestating story. I am even more grateful that PGS accepted it.
We’re grateful and relieved that you’ve been on the mend and gave us this story. So how did the idea for The Ocean Above Her come about? Which part of writing it was easy and which was challenging?
One of my all-time favorite short stories is “The Mats,” written in 1938 by National Artist for Literature, Francisco Arcellana. The story is set somewhere before World War II, at a time when people slept on mats instead of beds. As the story opens Mr Angeles, the head of a large family, had just returned from one of his farm inspection tours in the province of Bataan. While he was there, he had met an artisan from Mariveles who specialized in making beautiful sleeping mats. These mats were great works of art, with each one bearing the name of the person it belonged to, along with special symbols that related to their life. The children also noticed that their father had also brought three additional mats – one for each of their siblings that had passed away. This became a bonding moment for the family, with the mats serving as the keeper of memories for those they had lost.
I had always wanted to create a speculative fiction version of this story, one where Filipinos traveling on a generation ship carried the enneagrams and memories of their dearly departed on AI-powered quantum computers woven into blankets (reminiscent of the burial blankets used by tribes from the Mountain Province).
Originally, I had wanted to write a sort-of science fiction fairy tale infused with ancient Filipino influences. However, writing for children is much harder than writing a standard short story because you always need to be much more concise and precise in your writing style. The biggest challenge was tailoring everything to the needs, expectations, knowledge, and (especially) the limited experiences of children. Unfortunately, my initial attempt didn’t quite succeed because the limited vocabulary I could use couldn’t adequately convey what I had wanted to say. Eventually, I decided to just write a story for adults – although I kept the young protagonist and her perspective. Even then, weaving the mature themes of death, war, and remembrance into a narrative from a child’s viewpoint was particularly challenging.
Happy that we get to share this story with everyone! And what’s the next writing project that you’re working on?
I just finished writing an interactive science fiction short story designed as an escape room experience. We’re applying for an arts grant to bring this project to life. If we secure the funding, we aim to showcase it at the 2025 Singapore Writers Festival. Also, I aim to complete my second short story collection by the end of this year. Crossing fingers.
Wow! All the best to the grant application and excited about your second collection! Speaking of books: what are you currently reading? It’s for what kind of readers? Please tell us more about it.
I recently got Kenneth Yu’s book, Mouths to Speak, Voices to Sing from Kinokuniya and I am digging into it now. I’ve always enjoyed his short stories and I’m glad they are now available as a collection.
I am also halfway through the very bleak but extremely well-written book, How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. It’s a post-apocalyptic story that explores what happens to humanity after a revived virus from the Siberian permafrost reshapes all life on Earth. Although it’s a novel, it’s actually made up of several inter-linked short stories, a format that I love.
Lastly, I am also reading Imaginable by Jane McGonigal. This foresight strategy book teaches people how to “think about the unimaginable and imagine the unimaginable”. I currently teach something called Science Fiction prototyping to MBA students here in Singapore, and this is a seminal text. SF Prototyping is a method that uses SF narrative techniques in business forecasting, product development, as well as in threat and risk management. Although Imaginable is not easy to find, if you search Jane McGonigal’s name, you can easily find many of her papers and resources online.
Wonderful books! And in Philippine Genre Stories, which among the published stories do you like the most so far? Why?
I love many of the stories here like M.A. Del Rosario’s haunting tale, “Cañao”; Raissa Falgui’s Maria Makiling myth-inspired “The Shyest of Flowers”, and Marianne Villanueva’s dystopian “Why Didn’t You Tell Me”. But by far my favorite is the extraordinarily lyrical “Song Of The Body Cartographer” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz. How I wish she would write an entire novel set in this world.
Oh those are fine choices all right! We certainly miss Rochita’s writing, too. And what tips can you share for aspiring storytellers out there?
I can only really share what I do for my own writing:
- I like to write stories. As such I need to make sure that each one has a beginning, a middle and an end. No matter how well written, without these three parts, it’s a prose poem and not a story.
- People read stories for the characters. The most important part of worldbuilding is crafting the people that will inhabit your stories. To me, every other aspect of worldbuilding is secondary.
- To sustain interest, your character must grow through some kind of conflict. This is the plot of your story. I have always found writing the beginning of the story to be the hardest (where is your character at the start?). However, once this initial hurdle is overcome, things get easier. I then use a blank wall as a plot board, using post-it notes to map out possible endings (how do you want your character to be changed at the end?). Afterwards, using more post-it notes, I build out the possibilities of the story.
I usually need to do these three steps before I even write a single word in narrative format.
Thank you so much again, Victor, and we are really happy to have you and your story wrap up 2024!