Albert Mulles

Being an indie author means you deviate from tradition. You are a non-conformist, and in the publishing world, it has its upside and downside. And I keep telling myself that just because there are bigwigs in the industry do not mean that they are the only ones who have the monopoly of knowledge. Everyone has the acclaimed right to express himself or herself. And that was the expression that I discovered through indie writing where no one is going to tell you what or what not to write. Knowledge ought to be shared and I have a profound conviction that knowledge was never meant to be kept.

Four days after the strongest typhoon on record pummeled my city, I was in the air aboard a C-130, making headway to Manila to ask for help from relatives and friends to help me pull out my family still stranded in the broken city. While I was in that plane, all I saw below me was the enormous devastation in the wake of the tragic event that has befallen us. People have suffered a lot. Many lives were lost and thousands of homes were damaged. It was a heartbreaking and pitiful sight to see. And I lived to witness hell through three months of decadent living on rationed food and water, and of literally living under the darkness. I made a resolution that such would never happen again. And one way to preserve such facts in the light of our own government’s indifference to the plight of the survivors during those first crucial days after the typhoon was to write it as part of our history, lest people may forget what really happened in Tacloban and of the towns and provinces that were destroyed by Typhoon Haiyan. The survivors were my inspiration to write this book.