How to Write a Young Adult Fantasy Sequel, According to This Filipino Author
Whether you’ve fallen in via tornado, rabbit hole, or magical wardrobe, the eternal question when it comes to alternate worlds is: How the hell do you get back?
It’s the first question author Mickey Ingles had to answer as he was crafting the sequel to his 2020 Pinoy young adult fantasy novel, Alinam: Diego Domingo and the Mandato Ruiz.
To recap, Alinam—which any sharp-eyed reader can see is actually “Manila” spelled backward—is a version of our beloved capital city somewhere out there in the multiverse. In this universe (or “Line”, as Ingles calls each separate multiversal thread in his books), Alinam is a city that’s seemingly stuck in the late nineteenth century, riven by a simmering conflict between the humans who live there and the Natives—figures from Philippine folklore that include kapres, diwatas, and manananggals.
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Three years after its release, Diego Domingo (and the book’s fans) can finally return to that strange and wondrous city with the release of the sequel, Alinam 2: Diego Domingo and the Three Thieves.
“It’s a darker book,” warns Ingles, who, in his day job, is a sports lawyer who counts some of the country’s most famous athletes in his client roster. “In the first book, you had puppy love, you had that sense of wonder. You had danger there, but Diego could still find refuge in the Bodega. In Alinam Dos, everything and everyone that he used to have is now missing or gone. He’s left on his own.
“And it’s a darker book because the institutional changes are now being felt on the ground compared to the first book. The danger was just floating in the air in Alinam. But in the second book, you really feel it.”
But first, of course, Diego Domingo has to go back.
Who is the hero of Alinam?
In many ways, Diego is a reflection of his author’s high school self. They both stand slightly short at five-foot-one. They’re both a bit chubby, uncertainly growing into their adolescent frames. (Real-life Ingles, however, grew up to be a star university football player, leading his team to three UAAP championships. It remains to be seen if Diego will do the same.) They’re both awkward around girls. They both study in Ateneo—a setting that plays a small but pivotal role early on in the second book.
“Diego is from Ateneo High, so I thought it would be a good idea and a bit poetic to bring him back home before his eventual return to a place he’s slowly considering his new home, Alinam,” says Ingles.
“Also, Ateneo has a lot of urban legends and creepy stories, so it was a good opportunity to write about them and tie them into the story. If you’re from Ateneo, you’ll definitely know what I’m talking about.”
At the end of book one, Diego returns to his world—our world. But instead of finding a way to send him back to Alinam immediately, Ingles takes the opportunity to use the sequel’s first few chapters to stay in Manila and flesh out the series’ multiversal worldbuilding.
It’s the first of many unexpected swings that Mickey Ingles takes with both the characters… and the themes he wanted to wrestle with in the book.
“I really wanted to expand the universe and the story of Alinam to make it more real and grounded in our own reality,” he says. “Because I wanted to make Alinam more real compared to other fictional worlds. Because you have these problems that we also see, or that we also saw, here in the Philippines.”
What awaits Diego in Alinam 2?
When Diego finally returns to the alternate universe, “Alinam is in a state of reaction to the attack by the Indios Bravos,” explains Ingles. “You have institutional changes that are cracking down on the Natives—like a taking law, where they take things from the Natives without just compensation. So things are being institutionalized to further discriminate and further prejudice and further push down the Natives who were there in the first place.”
Diego Domingo finds himself confronting a grittier side of the city he thought he knew… as well as confronting more sobering realities: oppression, segregation, disinformation.
A darker tone, an isolated protagonist, a building sense of dread, and some wildly unexpected twists—it’s a story arc that’s been well-trod by Ingles’ literary and pop culture sequel forebears. The Empire Strikes Back, for example, famously departed from the first Star Wars’ swashbuckling tone to tell a more mature story. Even the Harry Potter series aged along with the Boy Who Lived.
“I’m not sure if it’s a natural thing when it comes to storytelling, that you heighten the stakes,” says Ingles. “But it’s a good way to show that things are going bad. Now, where are we going to go from here?”
When it comes to Alinam, the multiverse is the limit.
Alinam 2: Diego Domingo and the Three Thieves is out now on Lazada, Shopee, and all major bookstores. You can also order the first book on Lazada and Shopee.
