NEW YORK - I first heard of her name last May, when a friend, Western Union’s Shirleen Velasquez asked me to save a future date to have brunch with a friend of hers named Sam Yambao who was launching her book in New York.
Fast forward to August, and I get an invitation from Consul Elena Maningat of the Philippine Consulate General in New York for a book reading with Samantha Sotto.
The brunch and the book reading were scheduled one day apart. Upon further scrutiny, I came to the realization that Sam Yambao and Samantha Sotto are one and the same person.
This was the first thing I told her—Samantha Sotto Yambao, when we finally sat down to do an interview to promote her debut novel Before Ever After, published by the Crown Division of Random House.
For the first-time novelist - doing the press tour, speaking before audiences, book-reading with fans—are all surreal as she still can’t get past the fact that she is now a published author.
Not bad for a mom who just decided to write just to kill time. When her first-born with husband Joseph was in prep school, she would drive him all the way from Parañaque to the Ateneo in Quezon City. To save gas, she would stay at the Starbucks on Katipunan and type pages upon pages of this story, which she had been building in her mind.
“Para siyang eat-all-you-can buffet of emotions,” she says with a loud laugh, responding to my question on how she feels at the moment. Her laughter is infectious. “It ranges from feeling like I’m in an episode of Twilight Zone to feeling ‘kilig’ and every emotion in between. Most of the time, I feel terrified.”
Even if she used that word—terrified—it didn’t show, not one bit. Her gregarious and convivial personality masked that feeling.
“Everything that has happened has been unexpected. If you look at my life, parang sobra siyang nag-detour,” she explains, “I was never prepared for anything like this to happen!”
She wrote the book for one school year. Yes, that was how she measured the time element involved in creating her story. Day in, day out, from Monday to Friday, she’d be on the same corner of the coffee house for three hours. It was a self-imposed deadline because she knew that when the summer break came, the novel would take the backseat as she was primarily focused on being a mother first.
“I was so excited! When I finished the whole thing and I typed, ‘The End’, I thought that was the end of it,” she says giggling. During this time, she was toying with the idea of her little story becoming a book.
Then came the summer break and while on vacation in Baguio, she came across a bookstore and right there on one corner, a book caught here eye. “Para lang siyang nakalatag doon, hinihintay ako,” she says.
That book was The Idiot’s Guide to Publishing.
Through the book, Samantha learned about the publishing industry in the United States. She made a short-list of what she wanted. Next, she contacted some agencies, which requested for her manuscript.
She received a couple of rejection letters, saying her work wasn’t polished enough. This served as her wake-up call. She put a brake on the peddling part and went back to polishing her story, which took her about three months. She trimmed her novel from 120,000 words to 85,000. “Ganun karaming adjectives and adverbs ang tinanggal ko. Hindi na pala sila uso,” she says.
Then it came down to five agents reading her stuff. By then, she became confident enough to send her material to her top agent pick.
The agent, Stephanie Rostan requested for the full manuscript, and read it overnight. The following day, Samantha received an offer. Revisions were further made and Stephanie began pitching it to publishers. By December 23, 2009, they received an offer.
Finally, after a tedious publishing process, the book was ready.
Last May, during a trip to New York, Samantha had a first glimpse of the book’s jacket. “It was like seeing your baby for the first time. It was a magical moment,” she shares.
The first time novelist took up Communication at the Ateneo de Manila University. She was features editor at Guidon, the school paper. “I wanted to be like Tina Monzon-Palma. That was my dream, I wanted to be in broadcasting,” she says.
Sam’s life of detours brought her to a different field: marketing, working for multinational companies like Unilever and Johnson & Johnson for about a decade.
“Hayun, naligaw na naman ako ng landas,” she adds.
The Story
Before Ever After is a modern fairy-tale that asks, ‘What if your happy ending was only the beginning?’
Samantha admits to being so affected, and eventually inspired by the ending of Time Traveller’s Wife. The book for her ended how it was supposed to end, but she personally was kept wondering as well, ‘what if the main character had a penchant for not dying?’
“If he had a penchant for not dying, what would his life be like? What would his friends be like? It started from there, and it became a springboard. I was inspired by that, and the television show Dr. Who,” she explains.
Samantha’s protagonists are Shelley and Max, and the story begins just as the couple’s happy ending ended abruptly three years ago when Max died. The story gets complicated when one day, Paolo, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her late husband, appears on her doorstep with the unbelievable news that Max is alive.
In a sense, Samantha brings the readers back to the countries she visited when she was a teenager, and again as a carefree 20-something years later. She first fell in love with Europe’s cobbled streets and damp castles the moment she moved to the Netherlands as a teenager, when her dad was expatriated there. Her travels—backpacking on a beach in Greece, honeymooning in Paris and attending business meetings in Dusseldorf, inspired her to include bits and pieces of the places she loved.
“The only country I didn’t get to visit was Slovenia so the chapter about it is my favorite because my imagination was more free and I enjoyed writing about it. I made use of all the online resources that I had,” she adds.
The travels are essential to the story as Max works as a tour guide for The Slight Detour, the budget European tour package where Shelley and Max fell in love. Through Sam’s vivid use of words, Max guides us through the various European cities, starting the trip in London and ending up in Italy.
“I wanted the trip to be feasible, something that can really be done. That’s why I plotted the route, stopping once in a while enjoying the sceneries,” Sam says.
Commitment
As a newly minted author, Sam has promised her agent that she’d come up with more stories. For now, she is working on her second book.
“I’m 80 percent done and hopefully when things settle down, I’ll be able to finish it in the next two to three months,” she says.
Getting published, for Samantha, is like coming to a full circle. Detours may have brought her to different career paths but when everything has been said and done, she’s right back where she’s ought to be.
(www.asianjournal.com)
(NYNJ Aug 26-Sept 1, 2011 LifeEASTyle pg.2)
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