From Bataan New Jersey to WHAT TIED IS TIED

WHAT TIED IS TIED -- that's the new title of my literary historical novel, Bataan New Jersey.

When I finished the novel in 2024, I basically did not take a break and went directly into literary agent research, and then, querying. I applied all my management skills to the whole process, and I was quite organized so it became a part-time job.

The biggest challenge in the process, believe it or not, was the writing of a one-sentence PITCH. And if the pitch was problematic, imagine writing the SYNOPSIS. And add to those two, the QUERY LETTER. A domino effect of a mess. Sometime last year in the early summer of 2025 -- I gave up on literary agenting hunting, quietly. Something was off with what I was doing. I left the process, and focused on other things in my life. For the first time, I didn't go to a coffee shop at 6am in the morning to write or edit. Bataan New Jersey was finally given a rest. And if that 700-page novel was resting, and so was my tired brain.

Re-focusing, 2026.

Early this year, I focused on writing another novel, a much older one than the historical novel. The Bataan novel only began in 2022, after the pandemic and after I read Pachinko and watched a series of K-Drama during isolation. Min Jin Lee's novel gave me permission to write my own historical, but I didn't start from scratch. I took two Bataan-related stories from my short story collection called The FLIP Show, and expanded on those two. 6am, every day, coffee shop in Jackson Heights, and there it was, a historical novel spanning 100 years. Of course, the whole time, I thought I wrote a Bataan novel. I kept a writing diary of what I was doing on my Facebook author page, a diary with a Bataan New Jersey hashtag. That whole period of Philippine-American-Japanese history was terrifying to write. But as most people should know by now, I am a son of a Death March and Japanese concentration camp survivor --- this novel was bound to happen at some point in my life. Also, 30 years ago, I started collecting Bataan-related novels and books. And I have a whole shelf of books. Interestingly enough, none of them was written from the Filipino POV.

Spring 2026 was a good break. My husband and I traveled a lot, from Vienna to Prague, from Milan to Venice. My FT job increasingly became problematic and unbearable.

And then it happened.

Almost a year after I stopped querying literary agents, which also meant, I didn't touch the novel for that long, my husband and I went to Venice, Italy. Being in a 1,800-year-old city, which we both had attempted to visit at least three times, woke me up. Vienna, the bienniale, the living Art everywhere. A complete contradiciton to the challenges at work that I had to deal with. It was as if the universe was pushing me to make some drastic and long overdue decisions in life -- which I did as soon as we returned home. I left my FT job for reasons I wouldn't discuss here, and for the first time in three decades, I became unemployed.

Being in-between jobs and the throes of job-search in the age of AI, I found a gift -- TIME. I decided to finally go back to Bataan New Jersey and tackle what I knew I would eventually do, bring it down to a literary-agent-acceptable WORD COUNT. That means, go back to the coffee shop early in the morning, almost every day before my job search. That means, remove as much as I could from the manuscript. That means, revisiting the painful process of writing a SYNOPSIS, a PITCH, and a QUERY LETTER.

What was different this time?

A lot of soul searching. I always knew I didn't write a war novel. When I wrote my previous query letters, I kept including the word "war.". I knew I was writing about the aftermath of war, and its impact on four generations of Filipinos. I knew how to describe the novel, but I didn't know how to SHARE the actual story.

That was the beginning of the process of revision and editing of the manuscript. If I couldn't deliver an elevator pitch and a query synopsis, was it because I myself was confused about what the novel was really about? I must have written a hundred versions of the synopsis by now. I would sleep with these paragraphs at night, and wake up revising them.

The query synopsis is basically a 2-3 paragraphs about the novel that a writer inserts into a letter for the literary agent. I had been describing it well, with the most intellectual words I could pull out of my brain--but I was never really telling the story. I started to follow literary agents on instagram, and found new ideas. I finally did away with watching videos and reading tips online, which was how I got in trouble to begin with. All of them were saying the same thing, and none of them was giving explicit guidance on what to put in the letter for a literary fiction book. It wasn't until this summer that I heard of HOOK BOOK COOK.

Hook, Book, Cook

A reckoning. While I was cutting down the fat from the novel, I was also beginning to understand what I always knew about what I wrote. The question now was how to write in three paragraphs a Hook to get a literary agent to ask for more. I decided to let go of the title, Bataan New Jersey.

While Bataan was the novel's conscience, the book was not about Bataan, at least not 100 years of the historical saga. It was always about women, four generations of them that defied tradition to do same act of defiance that echoed from the past and into the future.. And what started the novel? What was the HOOK? That I always knew. It was the death of the Bataan Death March survivor, except this time, I moved the scene to the first page instead of the last pages of the first chapter. A death scene at the beginning as the main trigger of why the novel split into a dual timeline. Once I discovered that -- of course that only took weeks and who-knows how many iterations -- it became a lot easier to decide what to remove and what to keep in the novel, with now a new guiding title, WHAT TIED IS TIED.

Chop, Chop 300 Pages

I started a separate of documents, by chapters, of what I was deleting from the 700-page novel. I could how it was growing. I had a mental goal -- to keep the shorter chapters to 20 pages. I was adding them as I went along. That was easier than I thought. Because I was re-reading the text almost every day, I was also catching a lot of grammatical and spelling errors. I also noticed questionable historical notes that I thought I had checked before. Since I had 700 pages to draw a novel from, it was easier to move them around. The second chapter, the one that won a Queens Council on the Arts Grant, was completely re-shaped using text from other chapters. I always had trouble with it, and as it turned out I need to step away from it to understand what shape it should take.

The opening pages that troubled me from the very beginning -- was gone. It was always the beginning of the short story it grew from. But the new opening was always in the first chapter, at the end. The end became the beginning. And the second chapter became an echo of the first, a shadow long enough to carry it until the end of the book. In my synosis, I described a rebellion in 1921. I always wanted a rebellion, but there wasn't a rebellion in Mindanao in 1921. I have books about the history of Mindanao and the Moros in my library, and I conducted considerable research -- only to realize I also had to fact check these books. No rebellion, but I could fictionalize RESISTANCE. And the last chapter started to make sense for the first time. Do I have to keep historical truths? Well, in my case yes. While the stories are fictionalized, the historical backdrop was real.

Months and months, early mornings at the coffee shop before I began the day to search for my next job--the document I named EDITED OUT started to grow. When I was done, the document was 300 pages long. And the new manuscript, WHAT TIED IS TIED, was now 400 pages, a perfectly acceptable page count for a literary historical. Since I went it with an editorial and copy-editing mindset, it wasn't so difficult to let go. I will always have those edited-out 300 pages to go back to later if I need to turn them into something worthwhile, say, essays. Much of them was exposition, because I was very much in the earlier version of the novel.

The New Title - WHAT TIED IS TIED

What Tied is Tied is one of the aphorisms in the novel. It was always there. In fact, the novel always had the image of knots of ropes in it. I wove the idea of time and history-making in the novel. I wanted to understand how memory happens in our life time, and why exactly people end up in the foreground of history when much of history happens in the background. And who are these people in the background anyway? What was their story? Why did they decide that historical silencing was acceptable, or was that imposed on them. My own philosophical exploration of time, storytelling, what gets told and recorded, and what doesnt became the novel. Of course, that's exactly what literary agents don't want to read on the query letter. They want to see Hook, Book, Cook, and leave the philosophizing somewhere else, the back cover perhaps. The title Bataan New Jersey was interesting, but it was probably too much for those who are not necessarily looking for another WWII novel.

Hopefully, this now works:

Bataan Death March survivor Efren’s son Ben cuts Efren’s hair at his father’s deathbed, keeps it in a Ziploc, and asks his father, who are you?  Efren had referred to Bataan Day as the Day of Silence, but he died saying, Gus, the name of a fellow soldier, and not his wife Lourdes’ name.  After he dies in 2009, Lourdes confronts a secret she has kept for decades, the identity of a man, a political poet known as Anak Laya, who was disappeared during the Martial Law era.

Who is Gus? Who is Anak Laya? Efren’s death opens and splits the novel into two intertwined timelines, following the women of the family as they make the same defiant choices over the paternity of their children for a century.  Anchored in 2009, the year Obama approved compensation for WWII Filipino veterans, the novel moves with the Rosas children through history’s Loob and Labas (inside, outside) from 2009 to 2021.  Irma moves to and through Latino L.A., becoming a national immigrant activist and a mother of twins by her mentor.  Ben travels to Spain with his Ziploc of hair, looking for ways to get out of his Humdrum.  Ray stays by Lourdes’ side through her battle with cancer, until they come together to face Lourdes’ own deathbed confession in Jersey City. 

As the novel moves backward from 2009 to 1921, we meet Lourdes during the protests in Manila that led to Martial Law in the 1970s.  She attends night school for adults and meets Anak Laya and the U.G., the Underground resistance.  And further back, we meet women in Old Manila and in a women-led resistance in Muslim Mindanao, women whose defiant paternity choices become the same knots that leave the Rosas children asking: is what tied really tied?

Follow me on this voyage

My Facebook and other social media accounts document much of my journey back to publishing. It has been over two decades since I first publish a novel and my first poetry collection. I now have three completed manuscripts, and am in a great space to publish again.

In fact, during the three years I wrote the novel, I documented it here: https://www.facebook.com/BinoARealuyo/