After a good week spent reattuning with my drawing desires and abilities—which is something I needed to do since long before November and NaNoWriMo, due to various reasons—I’ve gone back to finishing my first draft, and setting a final goal for it. I’ve decided on 75,000 words; it seems balanced enough for me to reach it, while not needing to focus so much on “writing fillers”, which I’ve never liked doing, even in the heart of NaNo. My problem very often being the contrary, I don’t think I need to worry much about running out of material. The daily amount I want to put in is 1,000 words, since in the frenzy of Christmas, I don’t want to eat more than I can chew. This will carry me to the end of the year without problem, I think.

Thus the evolution of the WIP bar in the sidebar of this blog. I’ve also settled on the title for the moment, but evidently, if by the end I find one that sounds better, I once again won’t hesitate to change it. If I follow my plan, I still have three scenes to write, including two action-filled ones, which still frighten me a little (I must confess that, as much as I’m at ease with dialogue these days, I’m still unsure of how to properly write fight scenes). After this, I’ll be back to deciding on a final plan for The Second Continent, and get this trilogy going the right way.

Wish me luck and commitment, please… I’ll need both * smiles *

Y Tags: NaNoWriMo | novel | writing

Not that I need any myself, but I thought this list of free blog hosts could be interesting. Since I’m a user of WordPress, and since I consider it like a pretty good platform, here’s in excerpt a list of hosts that function with the WP system:

http://www.wordpress.com
http://www.blogsome.com/
http://weblogs.us/
http://www.wpblogs.com/
http://www.blogthing.com/
http://globbo.org/
http://www.theblog.cc/
http://learnerblogs.org/
http://uniblogs.org/
http://edublogs.org
http://hrblogs.org/
http://beblogger.com/
http://www.evilsupergenius.net/

Personnally, among all of these, I use WordPress.com, and for one blog only, so I can’t really tell more about the rest. As they’re free, though, nothing prevents anyone from trying them, then switching to another one if it doesn’t strike one’s fancy.

(Via BlackhatSEO and The Blog Herald.)

Y Tags: blog | blogging | free | host | wordpress

Something a little weird happened in the past two days, within the frame of my work.

Not really believing in it, I had suggested a few ideas/improvements for our technical manuals. You see, I’ve never received any teaching/training to become a technical writer. Everything I know in that domain, I’ve had to learn it the hard way, through trial and error, through personal research. Since I’ve felt, in the past months, that things were stagnating and that it’d be a shame to not try and make them better, I had taken upon myself to push said research to another level, which in turn made me realize how much I still had to learn, as well as how much I could improve things in the job itself.

It looks like this may actually go further than what I had in mind, and that my idea struck the right nerve at just the right moment. This is, in fact, very exciting. It means tons of work in perspective, but I like and need having deadlines and structured schedules, as I already mentioned it here. It’s writing, too—not fiction, but writing all the same, and I somehow have the feeling that being able to produce good manuals in that regard will further my craft no matter what, even if not adapted to novels themselves. (I write these manuals both in French AND English… hence my expected improvement with the language itself.)

Y Tags: projects | technical+writing | writing

I really need to find a good book regarding the art of wielding stylesheets to their full extent. I’ve only used them for basic formatting, I admit, and this is a shame, since there’s just so much I could do with them if taking the time to dive deeper into it.

Recently, I was flipping the pages of an old computer arts-related magazine that I had grabbed at the office (or was it at school?) and never finished; that’s when I stumbled upon an article mentioning effects that could be created on images through the use of stylesheets. The image on the right is a screenshot of what I obtained in my browser thanks to the Alpha filter, and to do so, a simple line of code did the trick. No need to fire off Photoshop or any other graphic tool. This is the reason why I want—no, I need—to learn more. I don’t want to remain standing here with the feeling that I’m brushing past something interesting, when I could in fact embrace it with both my arms.

Of course, there’s the problem of browser compatibility, but this is where all the fun lies, isn’t it?

Y Tags: css | internet | stylesheet | webdesign

And I didn’t put any Flash into it.

Not much got written nor prepared today, since most of my free time has been put into finishing the redesign for Paradygma. It’s not totally done yet—I may decide later on to add some more information to the pictures, among other things—but at least, it’s now rid of the blah-blah, the frames and the iframes, as well as of the guestbook and news-with-comments that were attracting spammers and spambots faster than a porn mag does a teenager. Who needs these toys on a portfolio, anyway? I like simplicity.

PS - It’s in such moments that you realize that a Spam Karma or an Akismet is a two-clicks blessing.

Y Tags: internet | webdesign