Helping People Help Themselves
Foundation for Aid to the Philippines, Inc.
By Greg B. Macabenta

It has become a matter of great concern among overseas Filipinos that the money they send to the Philippines has unwittingly been fostering a pensionado attitude among their beneficiaries. Even worse, a culture of mendicancy.

It is in this context that the programs and projects of the Foundation for Aid to the Philippines, Inc. (FAPI), a private non-profit organization based in Maryland, deserve recognition and emulation.



A Writer Worth Writing About
By Anthony E. Maddela

Bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz brings teenaged vampires and their immortal longings to life.

The many readers who were introduced to Melissa de la Cruz, age 38, by her profile in Entertainment Weekly’s vampire issue on July 31, 2009 have lots of reading to catch up on.

Published by Disney imprint Hyperion, the Blue Bloods series is the latest of several novels Melissa has authored since her first, Cat’s Meow, was released by Simon and Schuster in 2001. That book displayed her uniquely Filipina gift for the absurd in a work she describes as “P.G. Wodehouse meets Sex in the City.” Melissa’s eye for the inane soon went into investigative mode in 2003 with the nonfiction exposé on overexposure she co-wrote with Karen Rabinovitz, How to Become Famous in Two Weeks or Less (Random House), which originated from an eponymous article in Marie Claire.

There are stories all around us, though we may not always hear them. Author and playwright Merlinda Bobis considers it her job to listen. If stories are like music, Merlinda listens to even the quietest of murmurings, keeping her ear tuned to the small, human experiences that often go unrecognized. Everyday moments of tenderness, suffering, cruelty, and bravery inspire her most. “It’s the story that we stumble upon, or sometimes don’t see or don’t comprehend, that snags us into some conspiracy of feeling, of passion,” she says.

Journalist and Mistress of the Dark: The Enigma That Is Yvette Tan
By Alex G. Paman

The art of juggling is a skill seldom associated with writers. But for freelance scribe Yvette Tan, it best describes her life as a journalist. When not contributing to a seemingly endless stream of newspapers, magazines (including Filipinas), and even television shows, this self-described media mercenary and obsessive foodie even finds time to write a blog for the GMA network website.

Blue Bloods series author Melissa de la Cruz

A Writer Worth Writing About
By Anthony E. Maddela

Bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz brings teenaged vampires and their immortal longings to life.

The many readers who were introduced to Melissa de la Cruz, age 38, by her profile in Entertainment Weekly’s vampire issue on July 31, 2009 have lots of reading to catch up on.

Published by Disney imprint Hyperion, the Blue Bloods series is the latest of several novels Melissa has authored since her first, Cat’s Meow, was released by Simon and Schuster in 2001. That book displayed her uniquely Filipina gift for the absurd in a work she describes as “P.G. Wodehouse meets Sex in the City.” Melissa’s eye for the inane soon went into investigative mode in 2003 with the nonfiction exposé on overexposure she co-wrote with Karen Rabinovitz, How to Become Famous in Two Weeks or Less (Random House), which originated from an eponymous article in Marie Claire.

Her reputation and audience, primarily teen-aged girls, came into being in 2005 with two Simon and Schuster series starting with the Au Pairs series, completed in four books, then the Ashleys, halted at three so she can focus on Blue Bloods. Wedged in the middle of her expanding library was Fresh Off the Boat (Harper and Row), Melissa’s most autobiographical work, about a Filipina teenager’s arrival in San Francisco.

Nothing Typical About These Vampires
The Blue Bloods series began with Blue Bloods in 2006, followed by Masquerade in 2007, Revelations in 2008 and The Van Alen Legacy in Fall 2009. The novels reinvent the history and nature of America’s aristocrats who trace their bloodlines to the Mayflower in 1620. Every passenger was a vampire. Most of the families were good, with titanic names like Dupont, Getty, Rockefeller and, from one generation reincarnated into the next, built America from a colony of pilgrims into a country of metropolises.

Lives go on from cycle to cycle, family fortunes accumulate, skyscrapers go up, all is well until the present. Enter the Silver Bloods, the bad vampires, thought extinct or inexorably suppressed since the Renaissance, who are capable and willing to flout all codes of decorum, not just Emily Post, and suck the blood and immortal souls out of fellow vampires. The hard times ahead call for heroes, or, in this case, heroines: Schuyler Van Alen, Mimi Force and Bliss Llewellyn, three girls from Duchesne School, a prestigious Manhattan prep school much like the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School Melissa attended in San Francisco. So far into the series, they are rising to the challenge when they are not unwittingly abetting it.

The Blue Bloods books show the influence of Melissa’s idols, Stephen King, J.R.R. Tolkein, and J. K. Rowling. Horror on an epic scale is an obvious bow to King. The Caerimonia Oscular, the bite that binds humans to vampires, is a Latin term that figures as important to young Blue Bloods as expecto patronum is to Rowling’s Harry Potter. Upcoming Blue Bloods books will tell whether Melissa can conduct a war on the scale of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings without dwarves.

Fiction Meets Reality
Designer names spice the Blue Blood books and are even more prominent in Melissa’s The Fashionista Files: Adventures in Four Inch Heels and Faux Pas. As well, appearances on CNN and E! Entertainment showcase an articulate writer who can talk to millions about what she knows best. High society has long been the element for the daughter of investment banker Alberto and Concepcion de la Cruz, who raised her in Manila’s rich enclaves and the most desirable areas of New York and San Francisco.
Melissa’s appreciation of society functions and their denizens makes the selfish and fabulously rich Mimi the star of Blue Bloods. “Sixteen years old going on thirty-four, with a shot of Botox to prove it,” Mimi is more interesting than her warm, sympathetic rival, Schuyler, whose family fortune wanes. True to her fiction, Melissa admits, “I’m not into camping. I’m a hotel lady like the characters in my books.”

Before The Van Alen Legacy, published in October 2009, New York City was a playground for the rich. That changed with last year’s financial collapse and every banker’s fall from grace. The Blue Bloods are now coping with conditions vastly different from the first three books. Melissa explains, “It’s always been important to me that the books reflect the reality of the current time, and when I wrote the first book in the series, in 2004 to 2005, it was a very extravagant atmosphere especially in New York. The settings and the story were a reflection of what was happening in the city, in the nightclubs, the go-go optimism, the attitudes. As a reporter covering that scene, I was very true to it in my fiction.

“In the latest book, The Van Alen Legacy, some of the Blue Blood families have been affected by the crash as well, which was fun to write for the characters, to see how they would react to reduced circumstances. I think my readers like that the stories I tell are set in the real world, except, of course, there are vampires in my world.”

A Journey from Privilege to Much Greater Riches
Melissa is the oldest of three overachieving siblings. She studied at Columbia. Her younger sister Christina went to Yale and Columbia Business School and brother Francis, Harvard and Columbia Business School. They sought their fortune on Wall Street while Melissa fought to maintain her extravagant lifestyle in publishing and attain her childhood dream of becoming a writer. There is absolutely no lull in her career starting with her first article, “I Hate White Women” in the New York Press to her latest book.

One reason for her fans’ loyalty across multiple genres is Melissa’s sincere respect for them forged by personal experience. “Girls are very enthusiastic,” she observes. “I remember what it’s like to be a sheltered suburban girl. They have all the time to read books and think about them. They tell you when they like something, and they’re not cynical like adults.”

Melissa would like to extend the Blue Bloods series to at least ten books. Every book has a place in a detailed outline with cliffhangers transitioning one story to the next. Seemingly minor characters are bound to wreak havoc or save the day in a later book.

Like her architect husband, Michael Johnston, Melissa starts with a blueprint and also has the discipline to withhold information for a stirring crescendo. Her meticulous plots still leave ample space for the wonders of New York, Paris, Venice and Rio de Janeiro. Traveling is Melissa’s passion and her next book will lead her back to Paris for research, of course.

Melissa has cultivated her public image in vivid detail, and everything fans want to know about her can be viewed in bold colors at www.melissa-delacruz.com. All the facts, humor and glamour advice paint a different person from the mother and undistracted worker she keeps under wraps. “I’ve had to develop a public personality. People might be surprised to learn that I’m dorkier than my public persona. I write science fiction and I’m focused on my family.

“Motherhood is amazing. It’s the best thing to happen to me,” Melissa refers to daughter Mattea, age three. “It is difficult to have a career and family, but I need both. I have to have a kid to write.”

Not to say that her social life went extinct with marriage, a child, and the move from New York to Los Angeles. “I still follow fashion and enjoy the benefit circuit,” she assures her devotees. The fun and family commitments have claimed a chunk of a writing schedule that once produced four Ashley books a year. She and her editor are happy to release one Blue Bloods book a year on a daily writing routine of 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., 8 p.m. to midnight. Like her vampires, Melissa does not relish sleep.

This is a woman of contradictions. National news services tap her for the next trend in haute couture, yet she goes places in comfortable, loose-fitting clothing. She will spend $150 to rent a quiet desk for a day, yet wouldn’t mind another baby. Ivy League-educated graduates hardened by New York publishing don’t usually suffer fools, yet she lives in Los Angeles (the Hollywood Hills, no less). Melissa is too complex to suggest that writing integrates her disparate natures into a harmonious whole. Suffice it to say Melissa de la Cruz is one of a kind.

Anthony E. Maddela also writes fiction and is represented by Wales Literary Agency (206-284-7114). He works in Los Angeles as a grant writer for John Tracy Clinic, which helps young deaf children learn to listen and speak.