In the quiet hours of dawn, when General Trias is caught between stillness and the first murmur of a new day, fictionist Cymbeline Villamin WRITES.
No rituals, only a mind attuned to intimacy, sharpened by decades of witnessing human desire and a voice that moves fluidly between tenderness and danger.
This winter season of her life, Villamin enters an ever fresh threshold in her evolving journey as a storyteller. On 3 December 2025, she has signed another major traditional publishing contract (actually, her third)for her new speculative fiction The Witch of Pontevedra with 8Letters Bookstore and Publishing, the independent Filipino press that has become synonymous with experimentation, creative courage, and literary inclusivity.
The contract signing is more than a career milestone. It is a cultural moment, an affirmation that stories forged by sensuality, subtlety, and emotional risk belong in the contemporary canon of Philippine Literature.
Villamin's trajectory is non-linear. She has lived several creative lives: essayist, science writer, memoirist, Christian writer, romance storyteller, and speculative fictionist.
Her works, Ang Maghuhurno, Lovers in Kyoto, and "Total Resistance Extreme" revolve around characters suspended between longing and awakening, silence and confession, selfhood and surrender.
Her fiction is marked by the ability to navigate the tangled and secret cartography of the heart; the turbulence of desire, magnetic pull between souls, ache of memory, electricity of touch that could alter destinies.
Yet her writing is not merely sensual. Beneath every intimacy is an undercurrent of philosophy. What does it mean to love? Who do we become in the presence of another? How does a heart reinvent itself after a rupture?
In Villamin's hands, desire is not an ornament of the narrative. It becomes a method. It becomes a myth. It becomes THE STORY.
