Article: 'Angelica's Daughters' in The Manila Bulletin

From the Angelica's Daughters blog:

NOVEL TRAIN
By RONALD S. LIM
September 24, 2010, 11:22am

There’s an old saying that goes, “Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

But that is not the case with “Angelica’s Daughters: A Dugtungan novel.”

Collaboratively written by five woman authors, the novel is a historical romance tracing the romantic adventures and misadventures of a family of strong-willed women through centuries.
The novel is brainchild of five equally talented writers – Cecilia Manguerra-Brainard, Erma Cuizon, Susan Evangelista, Veronica Montes, and Nadine Sarreal. But what is even more amazing is that a huge part of it was constructed without the authors even meeting each other face to face!

Gathered by Brainard in 2002 through the Philippine American Literary House, the women had initially started out as online workshop participants working on a writing prompt every week. The idea of doing a collaborative work was still far from their minds.

“Every week we would have a theme or a sentence to start. It was just casual, nothing structured,” recalls Nadine Sarreal.

“I heard about this workshop and I wrote to Cecilia and asked if I could join. I thought that it would be fun and that it was an interesting group of people,” adds Susan Evangelista.

It wouldn’t be long before the group would find itself looking for a bigger challenge in the form of the dugtungan, a form of collaborative writing popular during the 1920s and 1930s. Their first attempt would be a short story.

“We just wrote an unrequited love story with a comic twist. We sent it off for publication and it got accepted, but it took three years before it came out. We were joking that they accepted it but they’re not going to publish it,” recalls Sarreal with a laugh.

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