Writing Rajah Versus Conquistador: On Historical Fiction, Self-Publishing, and AI | Ft. Kahlil Corazo

A conversation with Filipino indie novelist Kahlil Corazo ("Explorations.ph")

People On the Platform features real conversations with artists, writers, podcasters, editors, and content creators on human topics, from finding their footing to their worst fears and biggest fulfillment.

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I had the pleasure of interviewing Filipino indie author Kahlil Corazo for over an hour about his novel Rajah Versus Conquistador and the journey of self-publishing it. RVC is a speculative historical fiction that blends religious and political themes, such power, faith, and statecraft. Told from the ancient Southeast Asian strongman perspective, the novel retells “the fateful clash that birthed Philippine Christianity and reshaped a nation’s soul.”

Just to give you a bit of background about the author, Kahlil Corazo is also the man behind the highly informative Filipino-oriented Substack site: Explorations.ph—with essays mainly on history and culture. He’s currently pursuing a master’s degree in Anthropology, and the scholarly point-of-view shows—his work often integrates long-established ideas with contemporary events in hopes of better understanding today’s society.

If you would like to explore his writing, you can start with these few posts:

Things Hidden Since 1521 (Frankfurt Book Fair Talk Practice Run)

René Girard x David Deutsch

In Defense of Peter Thiel's Anti-Sacrificial Tech Optimism

Now back to my interview with Kahlil. Unfortunately, we ran into technical difficulties—about 15 minutes into our conversation, my audio stopped recording! Suffice it to say, we considered redoing the entire interview on video, but eventually decided against it, as it wouldn’t be authentic.

What you’re reading is an edited transcript, where we’ve reconstructed my questions and comments based on the flow of our discussion. The substance of our conversation remains intact, even if some of my exact phrasings had to be recreated.

France: I have Kahlil Corazo with me today, originally from Cebu but now based in Davao. You’re actually my very first Filipino interviewee for this conversation series.

Kahlil: Oh wow, what an honor. If I were in Cebu, I don’t think we could have done this conversation because they had a really strong typhoon last night.

France: Oh really? The first one I interviewed—in written form—was Wincy Ong. I don’t know if you’ve encountered some of his fiction work?

Kahlil: The new one? The Indio and the Impaler?

France: Yes, exactly! He shared about it in our interview. I thought there’d be some overlap since it’s also historical fiction, but with a twist. You guys should probably catch up and have a conversation about this.

The main reason I wanted to talk to you is because you’re one of the few people I’ve encountered who really went head-on with self-publishing. We’ll get to that. But first, let’s talk about your background and how Rajah Versus Conquistador came to be—the inspiration behind it, the writing process, all of that. Tell me about you and how you got started.

Kahlil: Let me rewind a bit. I’ve always been writing, mostly essays. But I started writing books during the pandemic. It came about because of being face-to-face with your mortality—people were dying left and right, and you had to ask yourself: what am I doing with my life? I realized I couldn’t just spend my life hustling for money.

My first book was about project management. I thought it was the easiest entry point since it’s something I knew, and I was already part of a productivity and note-taking community on the internet—actually jokingly called a cult back then because the fanaticism for the note-taking app was so intense.

But that was the transition into writing books. Before that, I’d been running a business for about ten years. And before that, I was in the corporate world. I’m still running the business, but I consider my main work to be my writing now. Writing is my main work, but I still need a job to pay the bills, so I continue running the business. My professional calling, though, is to write.

Rajah Versus Conquistador is the latest project, and I hope to do this for many, many decades to come.

France: That’s good for us readers!

Kahlil: Yeah, and I’m also a scholar. I’m in the middle of my master’s in anthropology right now, which has been really helpful for the book. My next couple of books will probably be more scholarly. I don’t know if I’ll write another novel in the future, but we’ll see.

France: Anthropology—what’s the focus of your studies?

Kahlil: My thesis will probably be at the intersection of ritual sacrifice and the figure of the Southeast Asian orang besar—the “big man.” If you read Rajah Versus Conquistador, you’ll see that the scholarship enters the story.

France: That’s something I want to ask you about at length. I watched a couple of your videos on Instagram where you talked about the background of how the book came about. You told a story about seeing the lone statue in Cebu of Rajah Humabon, who’s the protagonist of Rajah Versus Conquistador. Tell me about that—I’d never heard there was a statue.

Kahlil: Well, I grew up there, so I’d always known the statue. It’s been there forever. But it seems to be the only statue of Humabon in the entire world—just sitting there like decoration in my little barangay as I was growing up.

The real turning point came after I read Pigafetta. Pigafetta, for those who don’t know, was Magellan’s chronicler. He joined the expedition because he wanted to become a famous writer—he wanted an adventure he could write about. So in his account of the events, Humabon was there. But I sensed something missing. I sensed that he’d misread Humabon.

I think Pigafetta was charmed by Humabon, based on how he writes about him. Even though Humabon massacred his crewmates, Pigafetta never blamed him.

But it was maybe a few years after reading Pigafetta that everything connected with another book I’d read years earlier—An Anarchy of Families. It’s a series of ethnographies about political families in the Philippines. Once I realized that Humabon was the same figure this book was talking about—the big man, the orang besar—this charismatic and ruthless figure who could command men, which is present throughout Southeast Asia—I realized: I knew that guy. I grew up with that guy. He is our mayor. He is the CEO in our companies.

Suddenly his moves made sense. Pigafetta had written about what Humabon did. Once I connected him with the big man archetype, I really saw why he did those actions. I just wanted to see the story told. And it took years—years of negotiating with myself because I didn’t see myself as a novelist. I was more of an essay writer, more a scholar or an explainer rather than an artist. So I gradually eased into this project.

France: How many years are we talking about?

Kahlil: I read An Anarchy of Families around 2010, so that’s 15 years ago. Pigafetta, maybe 10 or 12 years ago. It was a very slow burn.

France: You probably weren’t thinking it would become a novel at first.

Kahlil: At first, I thought my next book would be something like a playbook for operating in the Philippines—understanding this big man figure and the ideological forces here. I wanted this to be the opening story, and then I’d use it to talk about the playbook. That was the plan.

I started doing that. I even have a preface up on my Substack for this book. But when I started writing it, it just kept going. The characters wanted their own backstory. At some point I realized: hey, this thing wants to be a novel. It wanted to be its own thing. It didn’t want to be just an intro to something else.

So I thought, okay, how do I do this? That’s why I got a writing coach—someone who was a novelist. I’d never done this before, so I figured I’d better get some help. How do you actually do this? I also studied structure and all that. But I realized in the writing process that since I’ve been reading for decades, I actually had it in me. I had the instinct for story.

Also, the really weird, strange thing with writing this was that I knew what it should be. Like, you draft and then it’s like, hey, this one doesn’t sound right. But why do I know that this version is the right one and this other version is not the right one? I was just so certain. It’s really strange.

France: And then you go back and wonder, how the hell did I—

Kahlil: Exactly. I have an explanation for that, or an approach. I learned it from Elizabeth Gilbert, but developing from that, I call it a neo-animist approach to creative work. To listen to these entities. I fully went into that mode of creation while writing this.

The book itself was a sort of entity that I was listening to. The characters themselves spoke to me—they were alive. Even the ideas or the forces behind the characters, the big cultural forces—they were also alive to me. I was listening to some of them. I was fighting against some of them. To weave together the voices in this story—that was really a strange, weird experience. My next book might be about that. As an essay writer, I couldn’t resist wanting to talk about it because it’s maybe the weirdest thing I’ve experienced.

France: I get what you mean. It’s a whole different experience. Even if you’re not really a writer but you enjoy movies, books, music—it puts you in a different zone, a different mindset.

I totally relate with what you’re saying. Why do I keep thinking about them 24/7, literally? Even before I sleep, especially before I sleep. You’re in their world for—I don’t know, however long you’re writing it, right?

That’s why I was curious: how long did it take you to come to the conclusion, “Okay, I have to write this”? And then what was that process like? Because a lot of writers, or want-to-be writers who think “maybe I want to write something”—they’re just too hesitant to start. I think it’s really all about: how do I start and where do I start?

What was the process for you—from already writing it to really finishing it? There’s always that cursed middle part where you feel like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing this? This is bad.” Did you ever encounter that phase while you were writing RVC?

Kahlil: I don’t remember whether I had doubts in the middle. I think I went through a lot of psychological pain pushing through the difficulty of writing, especially the early chapters. This might be a good segue to AI—can we share screens? In preparing for this conversation, I actually made a graph of my writing hours.

Okay, so these are my records of Pomodoros. I use the Pomodoro technique when I’m writing—25 minutes, then five minutes rest. Though when I’m in the zone, I just continue. This is essentially the record of all the writing parts—writing, editing, all the production work on the book.

April 2023 was more like planning. This December entry, I think, was the introduction. I really got into it in May 2024. So it’s around 15 months of making it my main work—every day, the best part of my day dedicated to this novel. That’s in the morning, maybe two to four hours. After that, I’m exhausted. I can’t write anymore.

The first chapters I wrote took me around 50 Pomodoros and about a month, looking at these records. Then after four chapters, I experimented with Claude AI.

Before that, I was already playing around with ChatGPT for research. It makes research so much easier—including searching through my own notes from the past. It’s so easy to get back to where I vaguely remember something. You still have to read, but the thing is, when you have so many notes, you tend to forget where you read something. Before, it took a lot of time to find those things. But with AI, you just ask it and it points you right to it. It’s like having a super smart assistant.

I’m using Readwise to capture highlights from all the books related to writing Rajah Versus Conquistador. It’s difficult to manually go through all those highlights. Even though Readwise is very helpful—you can search it, you don’t need to go to the books themselves and find it in the pages—at the time, Readwise didn’t have its own AI yet.

Now you can just go to Readwise and ask it, “Where in my highlights do I talk about this?” Even books I’ve forgotten I read—no longer in my memory—Readwise will show them to me. “I actually read this. These were my notes for that book.” This has been incredibly helpful, especially for research-heavy books.

Although maybe 80% of Humabon’s world came from two books—Raiding, Trading, and Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms by Laura Junker and Barangay by William Henry Scott. Those and Pigafetta’s chronicles were really the main sources for recreating the world of 16th century Cebu.

France: Reading RVC, I was honestly shocked by how much wasn’t taught to us in school about this period. There were so many details and complexities I’d never encountered before.

Kahlil: Yeah. Because in school, the narrative is that everything was perfect and then the colonialists came in and messed it all up. But it was also a complex and violent world prior to colonization. I wanted to depict something real—without any of the filters you have to put on when you’re teaching kids.

So for the first few chapters, I didn’t use AI. I tried ChatGPT for writing, but I found its voice too cringe—it just didn’t produce the kind of writing I wanted. But when I experimented with Claude, another AI from Anthropic, it worked. Partly, I think, because I uploaded my written chapters as examples. So it had a model of what it should sound like, what the voice should be.

Since using AI to write is controversial right now, let me be clear about my perspective: it’s either I’m going to spend four to five years doing this without AI, or I use it and finish in 15 months. So it was a trade-off between—honestly, it’s a trade-off with status versus efficiency. Because it’s sort of low status to actually use AI, especially with the conversation right now. It’s like, you’re a better writer, you’re a more skilled writer if you don’t need to use AI. But four years of my life is maybe an okay trade-off for that.

And as someone who’s very into technology, I had to experiment with it. It’s like anything new—I just want to be at the forefront. I had to do it.

Right now, though, I haven’t figured out how to use AI for my essays. For certain reasons, it’s actually faster for me to write them myself. There are some parts—like describing something that’s already known, introducing a reader to a concept, basically something from Wikipedia that the reader needs to know—AI can do that. But the actual thinking? My essays are me thinking through something. I’m actually doing the thinking in the writing. So if the AI does it, I’m no longer thinking. Those wouldn’t be my thoughts anymore.

That’s my experience with essays versus the novel. I think the reason AI made sense for the novel is this: if your craft is in the wordsmithing, then using AI means you’re no longer practicing your craft. But in my case—I don’t know if you noticed—my prose is very conservative and plain. Where I wanted to play was in the story itself. The 4D chess of ideas, making a story within the constraints of the historical and anthropological record.

France: What do you think will happen in the next few years with AI and writing? Where do you see this going?

Kahlil:I imagine it’ll be like what happened in Cebu in the 2000s. There was very little music in Cebuano before then. Suddenly there was this explosion of music in the Cebuano language because it became cheaper to record songs digitally. As you mentioned, there might be a lot more slop. Similar to what happened in the 2000s—there were some really bad songs. But from that came some classic Cebuano bands and songs.

It’ll be like that as well, I imagine. The kids growing up right now will be more comfortable with this technology. They’ll produce faster, maybe without needing years of education in English. They could produce something.

France: So that’s your hope as well, that this will open up more types of voices.

Kahlil: Yeah, that’s my hope. But we’ll see. I’m excited to see that world happen. When I started this, no one was talking about AI yet. I was just using different technologies—Readwise for research, and this was another tool.

Then at Frankfurt especially, I realized: okay, this has gotten controversial. It’s interesting as a scholar of culture to be in the middle of this—watching a taboo being formed. You can feel it. In this industry, there’s slowly this taboo being formed around using AI. I don’t know what the outcome will be, but it feels like an interesting cultural moment to witness.

France: I also noticed that your book cover is AI-generated. What made you decide to do that?

Kahlil: I tried reaching out to some artists, but it was just so slow. If I get a publisher to take this on, they’ll handle that part. Basically it’s another cost for producing the book. It’s not really the main thing I’m offering to readers. Also, I wanted to be the one to decide on the cover—this is what I envisioned. I want it to be realistic, photorealistic.

It’s hard to do this otherwise. I suppose you could get people to dress up in a certain way, but that would be so expensive to produce. If you get an artist to do this, you’re limited to illustration. I didn’t want it illustrated. I wanted it photorealistic because it reflects the book’s attempt to be realistic, to be there in that world.

I also wanted control over that. And this was a cheap solution. I’d rather spend the money on other things, like promoting the book.

France: Let’s talk about the economics of self-publishing. You mentioned treating it like training for an Ironman.

Kahlil: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s a luxury. It’s similar to joining an Ironman at a competitive level. Think about the training you need for an Ironman—minimum four to eight hours a week. That’s your time.

You’re not making money while you’re writing the book. That’s actually the biggest cost—15 months of not looking for money. You have to be able to afford to do that. That’s the first part: having the time to actually create the book.

Then there’s the publishing itself. With a commercial printer for this book, you need around 350 pesos per copy minimum. Maybe cheaper with other printers, but good quality cream paper for about 300 pages would be around that amount. Then you have to order a minimum of 50 to 100 copies for it to make sense economically. So you’re spending maybe 40,000 pesos, and that money will be stuck in inventory.

Then you have to distribute through consignment. You send it to a book dealer or bookstore and they only pay you once the books are sold. They get between 20% to 40%. Your money is tied up in those copies. And marketing is another cost entirely.

One thing that really surprised me—a beautiful surprise—was discovering these online book communities. They really support local authors. It’s amazing. You just send them copies and they promote your book. If they like it, they’ll make it their book club’s selection. I didn’t know this existed and it was wonderful.

France: You just reached out to them?

Kahlil: Yeah, I just reached out and they promote the book. The sales effects are hard to measure because you don’t know where people will ultimately buy. But the psychological effects are real. I realized that with having a publisher, you get validation. You also need some validation. You’ve been working on this thing for a couple of years. And you ask yourself, did you waste all that time?

At least having writers or readers give you actual feedback, or a publisher’s feedback—you can see it. Okay, they get it. That’s actually just a relief. Like, okay, I didn’t waste my time. I did something good. I realized that to operate well in this kind of work, you need those psychological aspects.

I did a launch in Cebu with a soundtrack, which was an experiment in marketing. I noticed that typical book launches—when you look at the videos, the photos—it’s just the author face-to-face with the audience, reading from the book. It didn’t look that interesting.

Having a soundtrack gave us a nice story. You have musicians collaborating with you. When we launched at Lost Books at night, one of the artists busked outside on the street while I talked about the book. Visually it was much more compelling.

Also, my hope was to reach Cebu’s independent music fans—that they’d also be interested in independent literature. Because this book is very Cebuano. That was really the crowd I wanted to reach. For that—the rights and the setup—it cost maybe a thousand dollars total.

So between printing and marketing and travel, I was just thinking: people I know spend much more on their hobbies. Their bikes, whatever they need. I don’t spend on other hobbies. This is very little compared to what people spend on Ironman training or CrossFit. This is my Ironman. This is how I’m treating it.

Because I don’t think you can make money out of writing right now in the Philippines.

France: So it’s really a calling more than a business.

Kahlil: I grappled with this before writing the book. In fact, I have a 4,000-word essay about it. I was grappling with this question: what is work? What’s the difference between work and a job?

You need a job to pay for things, to earn money. But you can’t let capitalism define what work is. I feel like my work is writing. This is my calling. This is the work I’m supposed to do. But it doesn’t mean the capitalist system will pay me to do this work. And I won’t let that stop me from doing my work. This is my work.

I might make money from it—I’m trying so hard. I still have a lot of things planned for the coming months: promoting the book, improving distribution. I’m approaching a big publisher—we’ll have a meeting tomorrow. We’ll see what happens. Whether or not that pushes through, I’m still going to hustle with distribution in Cebu.

I’m going to sell to pasalubong shops and hotels because this works as a pasalubong. I learned from the people at Lost Books that there are people who go to Cebu looking for a book to bring back with them, to remind them of Cebu. Since this captures the story of Cebu—at least that was my attempt—and the cover has the Sto. Niño, it’s like an origin story of Cebu. It works as pasalubong.

I’m also planning to approach teachers to see if they can use it in their teaching. I’m going to figure it out to reach more people. But I have no illusions of this making a lot of money.

France: You were in the Frankfurt Book Fair a few weeks ago. Did you feel any pressure there to write something more commercially viable? How do you balance what you want to write versus what the market wants?

Kahlil: I definitely don’t want to care too much about what the market wants. Otherwise I wouldn’t have written this. Because in Frankfurt, that’s the whole vibe. You can sense it—the industry wants certain things. The agents follow that, follow the money. Right now, it’s romance, horror, fantasy. The market dictates certain kinds of books.

Maybe as a professional writer, that versatility might be interesting—if you can write all these things. For me, this was the only work of fiction that I was actually interested in writing. I don’t know if there’ll be something in the future, but this was just something that called me. I had to deliver it as fast as possible. I was like, let me use everything I’ve learned: get a coach, clear my schedule, fix my sleep and exercise so I’m healthy with a clear mind to make this happen. I acted like an athlete—slept early, even did a weekly cold plunge because I saw that it clarified my mind. I just put everything into making this happen.

France: That kind of commitment—waking up early, the cold plunges, restructuring everything—that takes a lot of discipline, doesn’t it?

Kahlil: Yeah, I would rearrange my week to optimize for this. So it wasn’t about discipline, but more about clarity—the importance of this thing just made sense. Like not wasting time on social media.

I’m trying to get back to that now as well—the daily practice of writing, my mornings dedicated only to writing. I think that’s the ideal way for me to live. I feel like I’m wasting my life if I don’t do that. I need to do other things, of course—promote the book and all that—but I can do that in the afternoons. I want to reserve my mornings for writing.

France: Has your writing style changed through this process?

Kahlil: I feel like my style of writing has stayed the same, but what changed is my psychology, maybe. My way of writing was similar to method acting—I would enter the mind of either Humabon or Magellan, daily switching between the two. I’m glad I didn’t go insane.

Those guys live in my brain now. During that year I was writing, it seemed like my level of agency increased. I climbed Mount Apo—I’d been planning that for five years and that year it happened. Started a new business, started a book club. I absorbed maybe Magellan’s or Humabon’s “just do it” attitude.

Because these are very high-agency individuals. A datu or a conquistador—these people don’t let anything stop them.

From a more scholarly standpoint, another question: did I actually experience something which was a representation of reality? Because I was recreating this world based on anthropology and history. I was in that world. This is very similar to what we do in anthropology—ethnography. You immerse yourself in a culture so you can actually write about it.

This is the closest you could get to an ethnography of something in the past. So I’m exploring that question now: is writing a historical novel a kind of method for understanding cultures that no longer exist or couldn’t exist? Like fantasy—those are cultures. Or science fiction—cultures that exist in an alternate reality but still retain human nature, human psychology. Are you capturing a world similar to how you capture being within an indigenous community? These are the questions I’m grappling with right now.

France: Do you think AI and easier access to publishing will create more global literary stars? Will we see more writers from places like the Philippines breaking through internationally?

Kahlil: I’m more interested in things becoming more local. Because there will still be mega hits, just like in music—super big stars like Taylor Swift. It’ll be the same with literature. But at the same time, there will be more local stories.

I’m more interested in what will become more local. For instance, the stories of certain groups of people. Me, I’m interested in stories from Cebu. That’s where I’m from. I want to hear more stories from Cebu. If it’s cheaper to produce those stories, that’s the future I want.

Also in other areas—like here in Mindanao, I haven’t read any book written by a Lumad about the experience of being Lumad. Or more written from their side. Those are stories I want to hear. Very local stories. So I hope that whatever innovations come, we allow those stories to be heard.

France: I hope those stories can also bridge communities though—bring us all together in conversation rather than staying separate.

Kahlil: I think it has to start with the conversation within communities. And then the rest of us listen to those conversations. I don’t expect the Moro to talk to me. I want them to talk among themselves, to figure out what the experience means.

I’m looking at that from the outside, but I’d be interested to hear them talking among themselves, what that means in their own language. It’s easier to translate now. That’s going to be very interesting to me as an outsider—like overhearing their conversations. I think overhearing would be super interesting.

For instance, if I, a Cebuano, talk to an American, I’m translating my world into their world. It’s no longer the actual conversation happening within Cebu. The conversation I’m interested in hearing is communities talking among themselves. Then if they could share that, let me overhear.

France: Before we close, I want to ask something I think a lot of people listening will want to know—what advice would you give to writers who are hesitant to start?

Kahlil: Just listen to the voice of creativity. Listen to your calling toward creating something. When I started doing that, it opened so many adventures. When you listen to that calling—just listen to it and have the courage to try it out. Learn from the mistakes. Go on that adventure. It will be a much more interesting life when we listen and follow those voices.

France: That’s beautiful advice. I think a lot of people need to hear that—especially the part about not letting the market or what’s “supposed” to sell dictate what you create. It’s been so fascinating hearing about your whole journey with this book, from that statue in your barangay all the way to Frankfurt, and now figuring out distribution and getting it into people’s hands. Thank you so much for being so open about the process—the economics, the AI use, all of it. This has been really enlightening.

Kahlil: Thank you as well, France. This was great.∎

Rajah Versus Conquistador is available via Lazada and select bookstores in the Philippines, and via Amazon internationally.

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