THE WIDOWER Peter Valentine, all of 51 in the first year of the COVID plague, began writing a novel on Wattpad on Nov. 1, 2020.
It had been a month since he met Luke Paclibar online. Met him, flirted with him, and cried hard for him when they fought. Valentine still loves Luke. Because like a love junkie, he falls in love so fast, and so intensely.
November is the National Novel Writing Month in America, and six years ago, Valentine wrote a novel to just to see if he could also challenge himself to write a novel in 30 days. He labored to produce 62,062 words that month. He finished a novel, but it wasn’t very good. And then, on Dec. 8, 2014, Martin, his husband of six years, died of pneumonia.
Valentine had been thinking again about Wattpad for most of October. The COVID pandemic was beginning to take a toll on everyone including the young widower. COVID fatigue ā the doctors were calling it. Always proactive about combating depression, Valentine wanted to do something exciting, to create, to produce something bigger than just Facebook status updates, and occasional Instagram posts.
In the last Zoom reunion with his classmates from the university, they suggested he wrote novels again. He just smiled at the idea then, but he thought about it many times during his morning prayers and coffee.
Valentine started a Wattpad account when he decided to do the NaNoWriMo challenge way back in 2014, but he never really used the app. He was largely insecure about writing the 30-day novel challenge then, and didn’t really want to rush into publishing online. What if he didn’t finish it? What if his novel wasnāt any good?
And then, life happened. Good old Martin died on him, and Valentine dealt with his loss a little differently than most. How does the first openly married Ilonggo gay man deal with grief? How does anyone?
Martinās death six years ago left Valentine some money. Not a lot, but enough to set him comfortably if he decided to come home to the Philippines after living in the United States for almost fourteen years.
At first, Valentine didnāt think he wanted to go back to the Philippines. But over the course of the five years after Martin, and after making several real property investments in Iloilo with his little inheritance, he was beginning to see some real advantages of being repatriated in his hometown of Dumangas.
He has many good childhood friends there, classmates from the elementary and high school, and he is well-loved by his town mates because he was always fun to be with. When he and Martin visited the Philippines yearly after they were married, they always stayed in Dumangas for at least three weeks.
Martin liked the trips to the Philippines. He loved the Filipinos, and the Ilonggos especially. But he didnāt want to live in the Philippines. Full-blooded American that he was, born and raised in the Deep South, Martin didn’t really want to live anywhere outside of the United States.
In fact, before he met Peter Valentine, Martin had never been anywhere outside of the USA, except for a weekend of a friend’s destination wedding in Cancun, Mexico. The man hadn’t even set foot on the Canadian border.
Valentine, on the other hand, is some kind of a wanderlust. He studied in Japan on a Monbusho scholarship in the early 1990s, right after college; and he went on to teach English in Macau, Hongkong, and Thailand until 1998. And in 2017, almost three years after Martin, he spent some of his inheritance money on a three-month grand tour of Europe covering seventeen countries including the Vatican state.
Valentine first came to America in late 1998 on a tourist visa. And on his 30th birthday the following year, he lost his virginity to a gay Hollywood actor who briefly appeared in the 1994 movie Interview with a Vampire with Tom Cruise.
Still contemplating about Wattpad in his kitchen on the morning of Nov. 1, after a Halloween that was sadly cancelled by social distancing, and after gaining an hour of extra sleep when the American daylight saving time ended at 2 a.m. in Eastern Standard Time, Valentine turned on his old Apple iPad Air, and started typing The Adventures of Peter Valentine. He has finally resolved to once again use his iPad for writing, deciding against the 27ā iMac in his rather cluttered home office.
Portability is important for him now. He badly wanted the month-long challenge to work, and although he doesn-t foresee any travel plans soon because of the plague, he wanted to move around the house while writing his new novel. This time, he didn’t want to be stuck in one room.
He left his iPad, with its attached black Zagg Rugged Book durable case and bluetooth-connected keyboard, wide open on the kitchen table. He popped a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice K-cup pod in his Keurig coffee brewer, and started making notes for himself:
1. I do not need to know the ending of this novel. I have a great working idea, and I only need to trust that a better story will emerge in the process.
2. I do not need to plot everything. I will write this novel with a sense of surprise and fascination with life as it comes to me everyday.
3. I only need to be faithful to what my heart wants to say. I only want to write about my truth. Maybe not the journalistic truth of my life, but the emotional truth of my being and humanity. Because, as one great Filipino writer said on Facebook, āIn order to change the heart and mind of your readers, you have to write about your truth ā your own truth, borne of your time.ā
4. This is going to be a unique novel. Different from anything I have ever written before. Maybe this is not a novel. I do not know. But I will write everyday for 30 days. I will write about adventures and misadventures. I will write about love and broken hearts. But above all, my God ā I will write something beautiful, something very realistic, something unforgettable, something that speaks to the reality of my 21st century, something inspiring!
That morning, Peter Valentine wrote a few hundred words ā 1,121 the Wattpad counter said. He also checked his red limited-edition iPhone 7 Plus from 2017 several times for messages from Luke. But no green dot appeared next to his last online lover’s name on Facebook Messenger. Valentine’s messages from October 29 were delivered all right, but it looked like Luke Paclibar has yet to see them.
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(You may also follow this story on Wattpad under the account of @PeterSolisNery.)/PN
