Poker Realuyo 2010-2025 For over a decade, I took a month off from my FT job and wrote in the Caribbean.  In my 20s, I was trying to independently study the colonization and mental conditioning of the Philippines, without having to return to Asia. I would find answers in countries with parallel history. Before the Caribbean, I traveled quite a bit looking for a writing "colony," not the package artists applied to, but one I created on my own. I went to Mexico a few times, as the Philippines was managed through Nueva Espan~a/Modern Mexico. But I would the find inspiration not in Acapulco or Mexico D.F., but in Puerto Rico, another island conjoined with the Philippines in 1898. I always used to say, I grew up on an island but I never saw the sea. As an adult, I cherished the communion with the ocean. In fact, after my father passed in 2003, I moved to Puerto Rico. But my romance wouldn't last very long after that. I noticed the climate changing. It had become more fanatical that every Friday, there was a cultish procession on the streets of San Juan. When my family came to bring me back, I never went back to Puerto Rico again. Most of my works after my first two books were written there. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic became my next sojourn. I made an annual pilgrimage to La Zona Colonial, so excited to find myself in the seat of Hispaniola. But even that would end, as if these island obsession was to turn a leaf. Indeed, my voyage to the Caribben would come to a halt, but not without a gift in 2011, for my birthday. A dog named Poker, named after Lady Gaga's famous song at that time. A friend gave him to me so I would have a companion in Manhattan. I traveled with months old Poker on the plane (he was in a dog carry-on under the front seat) to Miami and eventually to New York. I never had a pet. My family was dog averse. We had seen enough dog-butchering in Manila to understand the peril of having a dog in our lives. Poker would change that. At first, he lived with me on the Upper East Side, so fearful, he had to sleep between my thighs every night. When I left for work, he would go hysterical. And I would come back to a puppy spinning around in endless anxiety and chaos. But such was my life, and there was no choice but to leave him alone if I had to keep him. I would bring him to our house in Jersey City. My mother and my brother would fall in love with the tiny Poker. When I asked they if they wanted him to stay, they said, Yes. Our house was a palace for tiny Poker. There were three floors, a stairs where he could run up and down, and a backyard, an open air to play in. More than that, no one would leave him alone at home. He always had company. That's where he would end up for the rest of his life. And that's also how he became my mother's best friend. Our dog-averse family would turn around on pet-hood, thanks to Poker's character, a loving, caring, and lovable sunlight of a dog. Soon, he was a Realuyo. For fourteen years, he kept my mother company. I wouldn't text my mother without mentioning Poker. We panicked when he got sick. We worried. We celebrated his milestones. We calmed him whenever he trembled in the animal hospital waiting room. I never really understood until then why dogs were called "a man's best friend." My mother texted me his picture every single day for the past 14 years. I would always text back: "Goodnight/morning, Mommy and Poker. Love you." Poker kept her company all these years. Whatever makes my mother happy makes all of us happy. That was always Poker and his uncanny ability to center Grace. Poker had been very weak for the past few weeks. We knew he had aged. 14 human years was simply a very long time for him. Even if we knew somehow that he might leave us soon, we would still be unprepared for his passing. But he saved my mother from the trauma of witnessing his death. My mother went downstairs to prepare his puree of food, and when she returned to her bedroom, Poker was gone. I was about to get on the train when my mother called. I knew he had passed. My mother didn't know that I had answered her call and I could hear her wailing from where I stood on the train station. A paralyzing moment to hear my mother's pain. She had lost her dearest baby, as she would refer to Poker. But we are grateful to Poker. He had changed our lives. Gave us balance. Showed us love in his most special way. He came as an Angel and left as Sunlight. Thank you, Poker. We will miss you and we love you.

Augusto Roa Realuyo was 21 years old when Bataan Fell in 1942. World War II is a horrifying memory. That a 20 year old Filipino who was pursuing Engineering at the University of the Philippines would be recruited into the United States Armed Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) in 1941 to prepare the Philippines for war is unconscionable. World War II was not the first war inflicted on Philippine soil by a global power. Spain was already there for 333 years when the U.S. took over in 1898. And in 1941 Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and occupied the Philippines. In 1942, my father, Augusto Roa Realuyo found himself in the Fall of Bataan, the Bataan Death March and eventually, a Japanese Concentration Camp in Capas Tarlac. He had just turned 21. He survived. In human history, survivors held the testimonies. But my father kept them all, having to face the shame of being attached to a historical fact: the Fall of Bataan was the biggest military surrender in American history. To make it worse, the American Congress denied them wartime benefits by passing the Rescission Act of 1946 . Where would you go from there? While the world slowly moved forward, leaving the shameful past behind, my father and his peers suffered in fading shadow of war. When I was born, my father was pushing 50s. Just like many men of war in the Philippines, he married late for reasons only novels could untangle. Even with Engineering and Architecture degrees, he would struggle all his life running from war nightmares and trying to keep a family of five together. The world I grew up in was what anyone would expect in the belly of Manila. All of us characters in the aftermath of World War II. Bringing his family to America was his last act of forgiveness. He was after all brought here a last resort to reverse chronic and worsened war illnesses that piled on him in his twilight years. That was how our family found ourselves in the fabric of New York and New Jersey. America was his gift to us. It's the other country he fought for. He, just like all Filipinos, was an American national during the war. A history as complicated as our relationship to America. "I Shall Return" was a Filipino mantra during the torments of war, a song of hope. It was only three years ago that I became brave enough to tackle our legacy of war. While I collected World War II and Bataan books, I couldn't find myself in that trench. I asked my father's spirit to be there with me, every day, at 6am, in coffee shops, writing Bataan New Jersey, before I went to my FT management job. I asked myself what happened before, during, and after 1941. His story had grown much, much bigger. 100 years from 1921-2021: the history of the Philippines against the superpowers that destroyed its young heart makes more sense once human stories are thrown into the fray. And I began to understand my father and his generation more. In the same vein, I also understood the complexity of wars. It's always easy to protest against it, but what happens when it's brought to our doorstep? My father, at 20, knew what he had to do, whether he thought it a calling or a mission. Our family has sacred months. January because of my father's birth, and April because of the Fall of Bataan and his death on April 26, 2003. I lost him early in life. My first novel came out in 1999, and he would not see my second book. I never told him I was ever interested in writing about Bataan, although I knew that in the genre of WWII, the Filipino voice of Bataan was always missing. Majority of the people who died in the 65 miles of the Bataan Death March were Filipinos. Bataan was always in my blood. I will always be a son of a survivor. It's a legacy I understood when I wrote and published my first novel. Social justice is rea l for me. It has always been. Not a trope. Not social media virtue signaling. Not armchair activism. History is as complex as the people it railroads. But some of them survive to tell. Today is his 104th birthday. I thank and honor him. The burden of legacy of telling is Light.

#P2PPIT flyer on BlueSky I just joined BlueSky. I was hesitant to start another social media platform that I can't manage on a regular basis. I didn't leave Twitter/X although I am hardly there too. For me Facebook is easiest as it is connected to my private accounts, and I can manage it well. It also is where I do a lot of my quick readings as I follow a lot of Facebook pages. But with 16,000 followers on my FB author page , I also understand the need to honor them. The other night, I ran into a book pitch campaign on BlueSky (apparently on X too), and I decided to take a bite. I have had many pitches for #BataanNewJersey and I am still not quite sure which one grabs attention. The one of this website is what I have sent in my literary agent queries. And it has gone through many iterations. On #P2PPIT event, we were allowed to post three pitches during the 12-hour event online. And so quickly, without giving it much thought, I put together pitches at different times of the day. I wanted the pitches to be visceral, not overplanned. Straight from the gut. Like I would my Facebook posts. For each of them, I attached an image that I had used before, with the original pitch on the post. The BlueSky word limit is definitely constraining (but hey, I wrote a book of Sonnets). First was this. Fall of Bataan: the biggest military surrender in American history.  So many books written.  None from Filipino POV.   A survivor’s son pens an epic 100-yr literary novel about 4 generations of a Queer family reshaping the aftermath of wars inflicted on Philippine soil.  BATAAN NEW JERSEY.   #P2Ppit #UW #PW Second, I thought, why not try to pitch in NUMBERS. The novel is 700 pages, already epic in scope and depth, but what makes the pages running are the numbers in the story. The first few pages of the novel includes a timeline and DATES! So here goes: 100 years 1921-2021 4 generations of a #QUEER Filipino family 3 successive wars inflicted by Spain U.S Japan 65 miles of #BataanDeathMarch 4 languages 4 countries  in 1 epic literary novel inspired by a survivor of Bataan Death March (my father) #BataanNewJersey  #P2PPit #UW #PW #amquerying #A And last, I thought about going personal, but really personal. My original pitch to Literary Agents begins with me being a son of a Death March survivor, and then it goes off to comps and a short description. But how about I bring my mother in. She after all inspired all the women in the book. Inspiration.  My father survived the #BataanDeath March.  My mother was born during #WWII.   Their stories made me curious about what happened before, during, and after.  The result was #BataanNewJersey. 100 years. 4 countries. 4 languages.  1 Epic novel. 4 generations of strong Filipino women. #QUEER #amquerying #P2Ppit #PW #BluePit #UW. Watching other writer's pitches, I learned about Mood Boards and Guides for Literary Agents, all visual. A relatively younger group. Fun to actually watch them. I am a GenX and a world a part from many of them. Here they are with a new strategy in getting Literary Agents to notice the novel. And Mood Boards? I put Canva to work. I posted the following on social media and it actually got a response. My first attempt at Mood Boarding. A story in pictures. Some elements of the novel are there. The women all look alike for a reason. Love these young writers! The women on this mood board are the A.I. versions of my mother. She is the inspiration for all of them. The landscape of finding an agent has changed since the last time I was represented by Harold Ober. But that was now 26 years ago. I have always been tech savvy, and I did win a pitch event at Harvard, not to mention I taught "How to Pitch" workshops in a leadership organization. People can only read or hear so much of a pitch, so even the few words (not too esoteric and gimmicky) may or may not land quickly. Keep it simple. Even if a literary agent doesn't say a Yay now, the goal is to be remembered--or brought up in a future conversation. In a query letter, the pitch has to blend in naturally but without compromising one's writing style. Personal style still needs to jump at the reader. This is writing after all. And so yes, the voyage continues. It's 2025, and I am #querying.

This month, on the 19th, my late father turns 103 years old.   In 1941 when he found himself stuck in Bataan, he was only 20 years old.  That was 84 years ago.   We have not seen another world war, and there have been many international organizations that made sure it didn’t happen again.   WWII is the most documented of all wars. There are many missing stories, like Filipino-told Bataan, but the internet still brims with what most would be looking for.   For #BataanNewJersey, it’s important that I collect as much information for marketing purposes.   I have just started looking for a #LiteraryAgent, the first gatekeeper toward a gated community we would need to blast open.   That in itself is a gargantuan task, almost like looking for a dream FT job.   One of the reasons why I waited this long to send my work out again for publication was because of this—the business of publishing is time-consuming and personal.  And I have a FT job.   Writing books is my religion.  My DNA.  I just do it, with a lot of effort that I actually enjoy and cherish.  But the publication process takes the joy out of Art for many of us artists.  And so we look for a champion who will take the burden off our shoulders.  The first one would be a Literary Agent.   For The Umbrella Country, I was represented by Harold Ober, the oldest and storied agency that has ceased operations.   Even then, I knew that my job as a novelist wasn’t over once I handed over the book and signed contracts. 25 years since, I have become more experienced in managing what I cannot literally control.   84 years: the memory of my father lives on while the war and interest in WWII fade through time.  WWII professors are aging and retiring.  We have a new generation whose connection to WWII was a distant relative, a great-grandfather, possibly dead.  The question for me complicates through time:  where are these organizations that might be interested to hear from a son of a Bataan Death March and Japanese Concentration Camp survivor?  What would be the best way to approach this research without pigeonholing myself into a topic that might not even exist anymore?   For the past weeks,  I have returned to the coffeeshop.   Where I write this blog.  With my excel, I put together an organized lists of war-related organizations.  At first, my entry point was "WWII" until my chances thinned out.  I am now approaching it from a “War and Society” perspective, and this has given me access to universities and war-related organizations that I otherwise would not know had I stayed on a limited “WWII track.”  The research landscape has changed.  A lot of interest in Wars, an expansion from WWII.   But #BataanNewJersey is not only about WWII—the majority of the book is the impact successive wars on a family of four generations.     Last weekend, I ran into Zooniverse, a “people-powered” research hub, and found The American Soldier, launched in 2021 on the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor by thousands of “archivists.”   While it’s not an organization per se, it shows that there is still much interest in WWII in our time.  The modern lenses haven’t completely faded.  They are simply focused on other things never examined before:  War and Women, for instance.  Widening my research means capturing more organizations that might in part cover WWII.  An eclectic example of my growing list is below, not a deadend but in fact a tiny door to wider space of thinking. The first link seems suspect but once inside, you would see a deep common interest.   https://www.cyndislist.com/ww2/societies/ https://www.smh-hq.org/index.html https://www.docsteach.org/topics/wwii https://www.historians.org And this one moved me. My father used to receive a physical copy when he was alive. Glad to see its last issue as it turns into another legacy organization: http://www.axpow.org/bulletins/bullcur.pdf   #BataanNewJersey has an audience. Historical novels enthusiasts. War genre followers. Asian American historians. Historians in general. And those who love and enjoy a good story in the most unknown and vivid landscapes. At the heart of every novel is a human story, one that transcends time. Time-traveling is yet to happen, but we can already do it in our literature. For now, the dream is to add #BataanNewJersey to my own collection of World War II books. The honor is to see the spine next to these gifts I could only be grateful to have held and kept.

Every year since I was 19, I have spent time in another country to find a piece of Life I could grow old with. Wisdom is the seed of so many cultures, old and contemporary.   My inner core has been made from those seeds.  At my best and worst, what sprang from those seeds kept me going. And I continued traveling. And learning from complete strangers and wisdom givers. Our family spent the past two weeks immersing ourselves in the lights of Christmas in Europe, as we have done in the past few years. My best Christmases were in Manila, even if we didn't have much. I have never experienced that again since we immigrated to NY. But I thought the spirit, cultural not religious, is still out there somewhere, and so we started a tradition of following Christmas markets. The world has always been troubled, and no matter how rare and fleeting, Joy still exists. Finding and experiencing it, even for a short-term, is a Life of wisdom-sharing. 2025 marks my family's 40th year in America. Four decades of absorbing culture and wisdom brought me here. 2024 was and will always be a special year, the year I finished writing #BataanNewJersey — pulled from two stories from a short story collection I couldn’t get published.   While Bataan is known for its historical surrender, its legacy in Bataan families is to never ever give up.  I move to 2025 with the same spirit and grit to carve a space I never had.  Finding a literary agent is one step toward publication, a true challenge, but now I have three completed manuscripts.   Big enough a reason to go against the wave again.   Life has no clear paths.  As Machado said, we make it by walking. 2025 is the year I walk and clear a path made by and for me.   I can only be thankful to those who taught me how to live, love, fight. For the seeds, for the wisdom that grew from them. And grateful to be able to share the same with the next generation of artists and world travelers. On a full-time management job, I find time to do Art. I write. I enter the temple where I become an artist in his fullness. The artist's life is more tangled. But I also think it has always been like this. #BataanNewJersey was born of such entangled truths. I can only be grateful I finished it. All 700 pages of it. And now, with all the grit I have, I go forward to get it represented, printed, and read. And so the wisdom-giving continues. (Photo taken at Maison de Victor Hugo ) Why drinking coffee? Adding this photo to my cache of "drinking coffee" author pics. Taken at Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris. I have grown tired of the "pretentious" author portraits, so I thought what could be more pretentious than pictures of myself drinking coffee in different cities in Europe. :-) My images on my Google imprint has been Me and my Coffee cup for the past five years. All taken by my husband.

Virginia A. Realuyo ca. 1970s Today is my mother's birthday. The picture above is one of the few pictures we have when my mother was very young. It's the face that inspired the writing of Bataan New Jersey. While the heart of the novel is Bataan, it is about the impact of successive wars on Philippine soil on the characters, especially Lourdes. One cannot write a novel without seeing the faces of the characters. They have to move, talk, cry, scream, and appear in the writer's consciousness in all possible ways. They have to be real in that alternative world of fiction. Their gestures are the language of fiction, the quiet moments that are often better than dialogues. When I started writing Bataan New Jersey, I already knew what Lourdes, Dominica, and Eugenia looked like. They are three generations of women with the same face. My mother's face. My mother, Virginia Almonte Realuyo, is a Chavacana. She is a polyglot. I took that DNA from her. Because of her background, I studied in South America. I wanted to understand that colonial voyage from early on. I learned Spanish, but not the creole that my mother's family spoke for centuries. I headed to Argentina to study. Ferdinand Magellan landed in Patagonia, Argentina first before running into the "Philippine" islands. My mother is from Zamboanga, home to Fort Pilar, the Spanish stronghold in the south. Chavacano is the language and culture born to the interaction of the Spanish soldiers and the natives of the south. My mother is born out of that heritage. I created a whole world from my mother's face. The stories of her people, so un-acknowledged in a country that embraced Americanisms over Hispanidad, will hopefully be a part of a moving literature. It is my heritage too. I am a Chavacano just like her.

An offering for today, a Rebel Sonnet "Dear Blood" I came of age in the 1990s in New York City during the AIDS crisis. The era created what I am today. Survival was very personal. Information was critical. Anger was necessary. And death often around the corner. Dear Blood on Missouri Review, with an introduction: https://missourireview.com/bino-realuyo-dear-blood/ And thank you to Savage Mind's Himati for featuring Dear Blood and creating this moving visual rendition. Here it is beautifully read by Broadway actor Marc De la Cruz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJwFTeSOIOA

It's Veteran's Appreciation Month. I can't think of a better time to create a new website. Since I started writing Bataan New Jersey three years ago, I have reconnected with all things-VETS. I knew my late father guided me through the writing of a 700-page book and will be there through its publication. As someone who collects Bataan books, I can safely say that there is almost a non-existent Filipino voice in the WWII and Bataan genre. A couple of books I have are both from the Philippines, and not even Filipinos have heard of them. My shelf is full of Bataan books written by Americans, mostly white Americans. I am grateful for being able to add to this volume of literature. Bataan, after all, is in the Philippines. World War II came to the islands, where most had never seen a war of this magnitude. As I search for a literary agent (Wish me luck!!!), I have also decided to create a new website. I wrote Bataan New Jersey in the early mornings at a coffee shop every day (!!!) for three years. I finished it early this year, and I spent the following months re-reading and editing, and layering it with poetic language. I can only be grateful to the books that inspired it: Pachinko and Cutting for Stone. These big books gave me permission to see what was possible in darkness. Thank you, Min Jin Lee and Abraham Verghese. I would like to take a different approach to blogging, less pressure, short and quick. I don't want this to be some literary task. More stream of consciousness, like the rest of this website. Some aspiring writers might visit, and I'd like them to see the human behind the work. I do work outside the MFA system. I designed this website myself (based on a template of course). I have been developing websites going back to the Geocities days. Thanks to Wix, it has become incredibly easy. Thank you for visiting. Please know that if you encounter an unfinished page, it's because I am still working on this website.

Many things to be grateful about in a difficult world. I am grateful for my research in the past three weeks on literary agents. I have queried around 15 agents so far. I can’t imagine how many queries they get but I do believe in the cosmic system of right time, right place. The literary agent who will represent my work will have to go through a journey with me with my works. A 700-page literary historical novel about WW II’s Bataan is very timely, but the added contemporary touch of most recent sociopolitical events will make it controversial. War after all is a recurring human event, and most of us don’t connect them with each other. As if unrelated events. Human ecology is much about threads of time. I do miss the characters. Three years of writing and editing, truly every day in the early morning, was so fulfilling. Walking to the coffee shop while it’s dark outside and listening to my playlist so I would be in that world but the time I sat down to write their stories. Something I had not done before. What dreams are made of. I didn’t know I could write about Bataan. It has been a terrifying legacy of my family. For years, I collected books about war and Bataan. But writing about it was different act of commitment. Suddenly I felt the urgency to write it now. It finally called me. Asked me to sit down and listen. I understood Bataan better when I finally dove into the narrative. As it turned out, Bataan was not a singular event. The ripples began decades before. In my novel, I mentioned a theory about WWII—that Japan started it, not Germany. That’s one aspect of the novel I would like to explore more in Book 2. For now, the mission is to get Bataan New Jersey represented and published. For today and the gift this manuscript has brought me, I am grateful. 🙏🙏🙏