owning a laptop roxxxx!

I've been really immersed in Sandra Cisneros' Caramelo, a story about a Mexican family living in the US taking a vacation one summer in the Awful Grandmother's house. In recounting the tale of this one summer, Lala, the protagonist not my friend the cat, realizes a lot about her family and the kind of person she had become as a result, as well as displays all these culture-rich facets of her Mexico.

I really love the parallelism to my own country as there are very many similarities that I had been relating to. For example: Befriending the daughter of the woman who washes clothes for you and it being frowned upon by your cousins until you're made to see (or believe that you see) why she is considered an "untouchable" and you don't want to talk to her, much less look at her, anymore. And other stuff. Lala is a child in the chronology of this story, so Cisneros tells her story as a child but tells it both with the innocence of a child and the wisdom of a mature woman remembering the story. It's fascinating how it all melds together and makes sense.

One of the reasons why I'm very impressed with this book that I'm already writing about it even while I'm not done reading it is I feel very staggered by her writing style. Female Latina writers always do this to me, make me want to write, and at the same time, make me feel so inadequate that my own writing isn't any good. What am I writing about, what do I want to encompass?

In the States, there's this thing called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. Participants try to finish their novel in a month, with an alloted number of words they have to accomplish each day, to be workshopped, I guess by the organizers. I'm not quite sure what all the details are; I didn't bother to check as 1. I'm not quite eligible to join (I assume that I have to be a citizen of the US of A, but I could be wrong), 2. I'm not ready to write a novel in a month.

My LJ friend Phinnia had joined NaNoWriMo and I've been reading her novel in a little community she made for all her writing (she's the only one who can post in her community, where she puts in chunks of her novel, while the members of this community can read her novel and comment, sort of a mini-workshop already). I've been holding this Waya story, er Maria story, too long in my head that I think maybe drastic measures should be taken for it to be written down. I have yet to do the same as Phinnia is doing, I totally lack the discipline and I have two jobs and my master's thesis to worry about. But, like I said, drastic measures. And then here's Sandra Cisneros rubbing in my face that greatness belongs to only a chosen few. Well, it seems like.

If I ever decide to do the same and post my chapters in LJ the way Phinnia does them, you, my friends will have to open LJ accounts to read it as I'll have the entries friends-locked. Or I could see you at the book launch. I hope.