Tita/Tito romance era benefits
I like paying attention to my Wattpad stats on any story and those usually confirm that readers tend to read close to the age of the MCs but #amwritingFTFE my current WIP with 41-year-old MCs recently has 18 to 25 as the top age group.
Thinking about this as I remember what @/carljavier told me about his students reading See You Under the Counter (also 40-year-old MCs) and it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard about this my tita/tito romance era lol.
My work up until 2020 involved writing characters a few (to a lot of) years younger than me and there was always an edit pass to remove traces of me. And the way that people born before 1986 vs after just have different media memories. Sometimes I get lucky because in one book I wrote about a bar next to a palengke [based on a place that existed in the 90s] and a Gen Z reader asked if I was referring to [a new place I’d never heard of] and maybe some things transcend time like that lol.
ANYWAY in this era I’ve enjoyed being able to write from my view of time and space and culture. If you know these things too then that’s awesome, apir.
