Love and football

As a writer, it's inevitable to get asked the question on your book: is this based on me? Or, quite more often, this is YOU right?

That's particularly troublesome when you and your heroine / protagonist share a hobby. For me and Patrice, the protagonist of Well Played, that hobby just happens to be football.

In action last February, playing for the company football team at a corporate tournament

The question I get is since I play football and Patrice plays football and Patrice and I both took Communication Arts at UPLB, therefore there is a Paul and can you introduce him to us?

Haha, nice try! Sorry to burst your bubble, but Paul is, like Mr. Darcy on whom he is based, imaginary. So is Patrice, for that matter.

The truth is that I only started playing football well into my twenties (just in 2009, in fact) and I spent most of my free time in college, well, partying, drinking and working for the Soc (The Org in Well Played). I was more a Bit-Bit -- Vice President of the organization in my junior year, though not as confident/popular as my book counterpart -- than the diligent, athletic, independent and hard-working Patrice.

I guess, in some ways, Patrice represents the type of person I admired in school -- the one who knew lots of people on campus but stuck to a close-knit set of friends, the one who had more responsibilities than simply passing the semester, the one who was an innate leader, the one who could be left alone and completely happy. I knew people like that at UPLB and took them for inspiration as I tried to grow out of my gimik girl ways. But I wasn't it.

So, yeah, the is-this-based-on-a-real-person question is quite fun to ask, and it's also fun to answer, but the truth is usually not as exciting as we'd like!

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