Mornings With Marie: Happy Book Birthday, HOTEL FEN!
Anniversary Sale, Filipino-isms in Monster Ridge, #IndieAugust
Can you believe it? Hotel Fen is now two years old 🥳 And we’re less than two months away from wrapping up the trilogy! Yeah, some days it’s still a little hard to believe that we’ve come this far, so thank you, dear readers, for sticking along for the ride ❤️
Book Birthday Surprises
One can’t celebrate a birthday without presents, right? So I’m happy to announce (if you haven’t gotten a whiff of it yet from social media 😉) that we’re having an anniversary sale for The Prophecies of Ragnarok series! Until this Monday, 28 August, the digital editions of Hotel Fen and Monster Ridge will once again be on sale for $0.99 and $1.99 respectively, while Midnight Son will be available for free.
You might also want to hop on over to Meri’s newsletter for a surprise announcement. Why? Because it’s her birthday too. 🥳 Happy birthday, Meri! 🎁
Say What?
You might remember that I said that August is Buwan ng Wika (“Language Month”) in the Philippines. Well, fun fact: in Monster Ridge, I had the opportunity to bring our story closer to home! 🥰
I really had a blast writing those chapters! 🤣 We intentionally left the Filipino dialogue untranslated — because if you’re not Filipino, you’ll be able to relate to our heroes and their confusion, and if you are, it’s going to be a treat 🤭
But, well, we’re celebrating a book birthday today, which means it’s time for more presents! This time, I’m going to shed some light on the Filipino-related shenanigans that went on in book 2. 😎
First off, there’s a fair bit of food and snacks mentioned in the chapters set in the Philippines, because Filipinos love to eat. Here are some of those goodies specifically named in the book, from left to right:
Sakto - Coca-Cola, but specifically the 200ml one that’s perfectly snack-sized. I don’t know how much it costs now, but it used to be super cheap back in around 2010. (I loved to pair it with a red Chippy.)
banana cue - Fried caramelized bananas.
buko pie - Coconut pie, which is a popular delicacy in Laguna.
suman - Rice cake.
bibingka - Baked rice cake.
bulalo - A beef soup dish native to the Southern Luzon region, particularly the provinces of Batangas (where Silje’s mother is from) and Cavite.
Next, expressions!
opo / po - These are ways to show respect to older people or people in authority, which is very important in Filipino culture. (Aside from using honorifics and titles like Sir or Madam. We only picked up the first-name basis thing when Western companies opened in the country and employed our generation.) Anyway, here’s a whole article about it, but to sum it up:
Opo is the polite way of saying yes. But to politely say no, you have to add po, like, “Hindi po.” (Some of us are comfortable enough with English that we mix it up with whatever local language we’re using, so it’s actually fine to say “no po” — but people will likely call you conyo and think you’re arrogant and elitist 🙄 It’s not always the case, but smart-shaming is, alas, a thing.)
Po, as shown above, is added to everything else. “Are you okay?” “Okay po.” / “What are you doing?” “Nothing po.”
mahal - Either means “love” or “expensive,” but in the book it was used as a term of endearment, hence meaning the former.
mamser - So, remember honorifics? This is basically ma’am + sir and is used to greet people regardless of gender. In my hometown, the security guards say this a lot. (Because establishments in the Philippines have guards. Malls, airports, office buildings, banks, you name it. That chapter with Thor getting stopped at the entrance of the theme park? Yep, bag check with a metal detector is a thing.)
ate - Big sister. That’s not pronounced like the past tense of eat but as a-te. On the other hand, big brother is kuya. Up north in Luzon, they call their youngest siblings bunso, but in Bisaya, the term is manghud, though not necessarily to mean the youngest, but any sibling who’s younger. So yeah, Lulu saying Ate Silje = Big Sister Silje, and she would use Kuya Victor because that’s polite. (Incidentally, repeated syllables for nicknames are common among Filipinos — which is what Lulu has, since her full first name is Luella. Silje will probably be Yayang because the je in her name is pronounced as ya, and adding the ng is a thing too.)
susmaryosep - An exclamation, like “oh my gosh” or “holy sh*t,” derived from the Spanish/Filipino equivalent names of… you guessed it, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Hesus, Maria, Jose. Some will even cross themselves while saying that, which is ironic given that you’re not supposed to use their names in vain and all that.
And a few other things:
tricycle - A vehicle comprised of a motorcycle and a sidecar, commonly used outside urban areas. Like jeepneys, tricycles were created from the military vehicles abandoned after WW2. Can seat as many people as needed, because what is personal space? (Can you imagine Hodr’s predicament now? The dude’s a six-footer, and don’t be deceived by everyone saying “he’s smaller than the average Aesir” - he is, in fact, built like Captain America.)
amusement parks - Enchanted Kingdom (or simply “EK”) is a popular theme park in Laguna, which is the closest we have to Universal Studios or Disneyland. There’s also Star City in Pasay. The theme park you’ll find in the book, Enchanted City, is… yep, a mashup of the two, and fictionally located right next to EK in homage to the fact that Filipino businesses will set themselves up right next to each other because that’s just how it is to do business. And let’s not forget the imitations, and the punny shop names, such as:
Mt. Makiling - A famous volcano, though inactive, located in the provinces of Laguna and Batangas. It is sacred to many pilgrims and widely believed to be the home of Maria Makiling, a diwata (nature spirit) and the guardian of the mountain. (While Maria’s last name was never mentioned in the book, our Filipino readers immediately knew who she was!)
Now you see how fun this was for me 😂 And if you still need the direct translations of the dialogue, just comment on this post or send me a reply and I’ll be more than happy to send them your way. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this surprise segment! 😉
#IndieAugust
Did you know that August is also a month for indie books?
And if you’d like to get your hands on more free or discounted ebooks (usually $0.99), just head over to Narratess Promotions on Saturday the 26th! Nearly 300 titles are going to be up for grabs, so don’t miss it 🥳
I’m going to be over there this weekend helping myself to some books too, so let me know which titles you got, and maybe we can even do a buddy read! 🥰