30 Days of Writing, Day 4 (or I'm posting again, except I'm not being contemplative and whatnot).

It's nearly midnight, which basically means I am going to hit the tired mark in about 15 minutes and start writing complete and utter nonsense.
So, because my story is sitting there glaring at me, I'm going to do another one of those quiz questions I started ages ago before assignments hit. You know, when I naively thought I could write daily without issue.
Anyway.

Describe your inspiration and message you want to bring across
For anyone who says their family is not inspiration enough, I challenge you to live a week with my family. They are fantastic, and are just absolute gems for inspiration. They also don't seem to care when I blatantly steal their qualities and smoosh them around with other qualities.
As an example of what you'd experience in my family, the following happened the other night.

SCENE: The living room.
I am on my laptop, and Mum is watching TV.
MUM: Tash, can you please type this recipe up and email it to me?
ME: Yeah, sure. To your school email or your home one?
MUM: The home one.
The recipe is typed and emailed. Mum wanders into the study where Dad is sitting.
MUM: Sweetie, did you hear anything print?
DAD: ... no.
MUM: Tashi, I don't think the recipe printed.
ME: You told me to email it to you.
MUM: Oh, yeah! That's right!
She comes back and logs into her school email.
MUM: No, honey, it's not there.
ME: It's at your home email address.
MUM: What? Why? I told you school!
Dad especially came in from the study to give her a withering stare and a "And you say we've got memory problems".


My mother is gold in general. She was on the SBS website the other night and had multiple tabs open. One of the tabs had a video that automatically played. "Tashi!" she shouted at me, panicking. "Someone is haunting my computer!"
I fell off the lounge laughing.

As for the message I want to get across, I wouldn't say there's any message I'm actively trying to convey. I don't like overly didactic texts. Seven Little Australians springs to mind here, and that text was just

I'm sure something will end up coming through and I'll end up being all horrified with myself yet won't be able to find a way to remove it.

I didn't post for two days.

Okay, okay, hate me.
Or not, I'm really not sure how you guys feel towards my lack of posting.
I assume apathy is heavily involved.

Anyway, because I haven't posted for two days and I can't remember what I'm meant to have posted, I am on a dialogue-ish roll that I intend to share with you.
Yes, it'll probably read like a script. This is me on an unedited dialogue-ish roll (repeating words gah) and...
Also, the Spanish will be bad. I haven't spoken it in two years. Don't judge me.

SCENE

"Carmenita."
I say what.
She glares at me. "Porque tu no hablas como una niña..."
"Una niña linda, proper, what?"
"Polite."
"Because," I say, knowing full well how it sets her off when I start with because, "I am not linda, proper nor polite."
"You could be," she insists. "Ay, mi Carmenita, you'll never be married."
I reach for the cheese she's been carefully cubing, and get my hand slapped instead. "Maybe I don't want to be married."
"Don't be ridiculous," she says. "What will you do otherwise?"
"Travel. Read. Wake up at noon and go back to bed at 8."
She exhales.
"There's more to life than being married."
"For men, yes." She puts the fly net over the cheese, then begins to roll out the dough. "For you, no. Do you think that you'll be able to work?"
"It's not 1953, Nana, I can work if I want to."
"I only worked until I married your grandfather. He provided enough for me, and I never went without. Yet you and Ana, ay, both of you! Your hermana knows what's best. Why do you think she is marrying David?"
"Because Magdalena," I say, "is a gold digger and for some reason found a man who was stupid enough to not figure that out, and realised how rare a find that was."
"Your sister is clever," Nana says.
"She doesn't love him," I say, though I'm not entirely sure if it's true. "She saw lawyer and ran towards it, eyelashes fluttering."
"Cristian would be a good boy for you."
"Cristian? Nana, are you crazy?"
"He's studying medicine, niña, and he's a good boy. He thinks you're pretty enough."
Pretty enough, the compliment to last me through the fortnight and back to Melbourne.
"And your mother likes him, and his mother seems to like you. Well, no wonder, you're just like her."
I wonder if Nana sees my life playing out as Tia Camila's has. Spontaneously married, unhappily allowing affair after affair, reluctantly divorced and then probably dying bitter and alone.
"And do you know why she got the way she is?" She looks around the otherwise empty kitchen, as though suspecting Tia Camila is hiding in the pantry, and whispers, "Why she's divorced?"
"Because she married a horrible pile of idiocy who didn't understand til death do us part meant not banging every woman he came across?"
"Carmen!"
Oops.
"Don't use that language!"
I can't actually tell which part of my sentence most appalled her.
"She got that way, niña, because she was too fussy. She thought he would be perfect, because she had been with so many other fools." She leans towards me and gestures with her rolling pin. "Don't be a fool like her, Carmenita. There's no prince until you make him your prince, he won't ride in and save you, and the sooner you stop being foolish and thinking that you can exist by yourself and that a husband is only a maybe, the sooner you'll be married."
I remember now why I avoid visiting my grandmother.

30 Days of Writing, Day 2

Genre of your story, explained in detail

Another difficult one, so I'm going to be lazy and basically copy from my Reflection Statement of 2009. I did more research then that I'm unwilling to do now.

(You got me, I want a nap.)

Or not. Stupid Reflection Statement had to focus more on Romanticism.

Basically, this is YA fiction, fuelled by multiculturalism and the feelings that are involved when you're a kid with a foot in two countries. As I've probably said, my father's Chilean. He came over here when he was 18, and he hasn't been back since. My grandparents never went back either. My grandfather and father decided to cut the cords suddenly and to not look back. My uncle went back (and goes back yearly; he's currently there now with my cousins and aunt for two months), and I think my grandmother never went again because my grandfather refused to go. 

My mother is Australian, and is possibly as stereotypically Aussie as they come. She was raised on a farm in Tallimba, a 16 hour drive from Brisbane.

Because these two sides are as different as they come, I find it interesting to explore this, and I find it interesting to explore this in different age groups. I've written this story - or variations of it - for a long time now, probably since I was 13 and beginning to freak out about what it meant to be Chilean Australian. I myself was known as the White Girl in the family (in comparison, my cousin Daniela is referred to as Black Girl). To my father's side of the family, Daniela's perceived Black Girl status is good. The White Girl to them is an alien, one who has crossed the border from mid-80s Chile to modern Australia. I have never liked being touched, I chose to study French instead of Spanish, and I can't dance. Three inconsequential things, but my family is good at making a big deal of nothing.

To summarise:

• Young adult fiction.
• About a uni student.
• South American culture.

"This just sounds like your life!" I hear you say.

And yes, it basically is. It's the memoir in novel form, and I've chosen to do this so I can create situations that I want. (However, when I was 13 and first wrote Carmen (she was 18 turning 19), I wrote her as exactly who I wanted to be when I grew up. I sent one of those drafts to Joshua a year ago and he said, "What? Are you just writing yourself? Is this memoir?"

So at least I've accomplished one life goal.)

Read Looking for Alibrandi and you'll understand the genre, vaguely.