Hello beautiful people! I have a six-part serial coming out called SUGAR MAGIC. The first chapter drops on Inquirer Plus on May 23, 2022 and every following Monday thereafter. Download the Inquirer Plus app to read the story.
SUGAR MAGIC is about finding love after a betrayal, middle-aged kilig, trauma processing, haunted houses, sigbin, freak storms, and Bacolod, where I used to spend my summers as a child with my dad’s side of the family.
I’d been wanting to write this story for some time. More than 10 years ago, on one of my (soon-to-become rare) visits to Bacolod, my cousin told me about sigbin. They were creatures found in sugarcane fields. She told me they were humanoids who moved on all fours but with their bottoms in the air, kind of like in downward dog. She also said that if one were to capture a sigbin and keep it, great wealth would come to your family.
That story got stuck in my head for a long time. I don’t know how much of it she made up – for example, when I looked up sigbin on Google they’re described as doglike rather than humanoid (but sort of like chupacabra, oddly enough) and I can’t find any documentation of keeping them as pets for wealth. But, like I said, the tale fascinated me and I’d always wanted to write about it. Initially I was thinking about an NA/YA paranormal type story (for a time Mina Esguerra and I considered co-writing it). That story didn’t have any legs and was shelved, but it’s lived on in my head, waiting to be transformed into something new.
That’s where it is now: a tentative romance between two middle-aged characters, a woman seeking a fresh start after her annulment and a man caretaking his family’s past in an ancestral home turned museum. I really hope you all read it and like it! And if there are any inaccuracies about sigbin, please blame me and maybe my cousin Chrissie, just a little bit. 😉
Bianca Mori 