Shoot, I haven’t blogged since the end of October! I guess this tells enough about how busy and tired and lazy I’ve been in the past two months, doesn’t it.

I wish I had more time and more energy to properly peruse the matter of writing here. Alas, keeping up with a job and studies takes at time more effort than I had thought at first, probably also because I don’t want to study ‘just enough’ to barely scrape an average note—aiming at a national competitive exam does that to people, hee hee. There are so many things I should do, too, like doing my best to go study abroad for a few months, in spite of the nagging fear and realization that without a job or at least some appropriate help from the Erasmus program, I won’t be able to go. Being older than 26 and a student sucks; I’m just as poor as the average student, yet I can only count on myself, not on State grants anymore. Well, you can say this builds some character. Later on, I will probably be the author whom people will write about in terms of “she worked plenty of odd little jobs during her youth to survive”. * laughs *

Anyone following my writing WP blog, or my writing LJ, knows by now that I failed at NaNoWriMo. I tried, I really did, but November was way too hectic. Managing my studies (my exams were in December, not in January) and real life-related issues proved to be too much to handle, and I’m glad enough that I managed to write over 20k words instead of nothing at all! Nevertheless, I wonder if I could have done it all the same, had I been more prepared; I barely had a viable outline, and an incomplete one at that, and it’s a fact that I hadn’t done my ‘homework’ as well as last year. I may be onto something here. I don’t know yet.

In any case, now that my exams are gone and I have all of January free (regarding classes, not my job), I hope I’ll be able to actually work on either of my WIPs. I need some serious intellectual rest for a few days, but by New Year, I should be okay and ready to kick in again. I deeply loathe the idea of ‘not writing as long as I’m not done with my studies’, else I won’t write anything at all until I’m 32 or something. There’s no way I can ever envision that!

That’s it for the writing stuff. Happy holidays to everyone who happens to visit this page! And I’ll do my best to update more soon enough.

exams, holidays, studies, update, writing

As my first post here for the month of October (wow, we’re already on the 13th??), and now that I have a good three weeks of classes behind me, let me tell you that I’ve realized an important fact about English language, that I hadn’t really paid attention to before, when I was ‘only’ reading foreign books for my pleasure:

The English lexis is fricking huge.

It may strike me more now because I’m using both languages—French and English—on a daily basis, and have been for some time. It’s true that when writing in a casual manner, only looking up a couple of words here and there in the dictionary, one doesn’t need to be aware of this difference, but when one then needs to explain texts, pay attention to semantic fields, perform an analysis of a poem, or learn to recognize each and every trope, all of a sudden this ‘novelty’ becomes overwhelming.

For instance, to throw/cast/dispatch/toss… may all be translated in French by the single verb of ‘lancer’, and the latter doesn’t manage to convey all the subtilities of each of their meanings. These are only an example among many, and probably my English-speaking readers here will simply shrug and laugh, wondering what took me so long. The fact remains that it’s all new for me, in that I’m becoming aware of it now only. French language also has its strong points, of course. Nevertheless, I can very well see that when translating a text, often I find myself wondering how I need to modify the French counterpart to convey every detail of the original words, without losing any meaning, yet at the same time without ending up with awkward, leaden sentences.

At the moment, I’m definitely fascinated with this new, conscious knowledge. It seems that large doors kept closed until now are slowly opening, letting me catch a glimpse of everything I’m yet to learn, and that I will learn, being back to a study environment that actually allows me to do so without constraints.

You can bet that as soon as I get to properly master this, my writing in English will jump a good notch.

Y Tags: english | language | lexis | writing

I’ve been a bad girl, I admit. I haven’t written much in the past few weeks, due to practicing English through exercises, diving back into some needed artwork, and trying to prepare for college as best as I could. Now is the week I’m finally settling down in my broom cupboard in S, and there are still so many things to worry about that, even though I had sworn to myself that I’d go on working on WoS in the next days, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to churn down. But I’m getting there. Oh, yes, I’m getting there.

College is a mess, as expected. Of course, getting listed for my classes was to clash with my work schedule. Of course, half the people I talk to send me to other people, who in turn send me to offices that are open only on mornings (or on afternoons; or on some days of the week only). Of course, I need my student card for too many things right now, when I only receive it on Thursday. It’s all good, though. As said, it was expected, and the brain manages to retain its zen attitude for the moment.

On the good side of things, people at work were oddly understanding. As long as I do my job, they don’t care if I work my hours in the mornings, in the evenings, or on Saturdays at 4 am. That’s all good with me. I just wish I had my own laptop back, since the one I’m on now is too old to run all my software properly. Ah, and I also have an internet connection. Which means no sneaky updates from cyber-cafés here and there.

I definitely want to post here more again, if only to share the latest news (I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year; I want to test how much not having a life and being busy 24/7 will make me more productive). Maybe I’ll even have nice bits learned during classes to share, who knows.

For the moment, I’m about to head to the office for the afternoon, so I need to put an end to this post. More to come soon. I hope!

Y Tags: college | life | work | writing

I don’t know how late I am exactly on this topic, since I only noticed it today on the Niltoy forums. In any case, for those of you who knew this e-zine as well as for those who had never heard of it, Deep Magic is closing down after August 31st, and in the process, they’ve made all their previous issues free for download. It’s sad news—I didn’t knew this website, I admit it, but now that I’ve heard of it and had a peek, it seemed pretty interesting. The magazines contained articles, short stories, interviews of both famous and non-famous writers, and even an ongoing novel, from what I could see just now.

Current and previous issues are available here.

Y Tags: deep+magic | download | e-zine

[Since I haven’t been posting much lately—that’s the least we can say, hmmm?—here’s a little “fan-fiction” story. It’s nothing original in itself, and far from being my best, but it kept me writing in English all the same.

For the information, it’s set in the Warcraft universe, more precisely after WC III: Frozen Throne (I happen to like this world somehow, even though it’s quite a simple and basic one). The human kingdoms of the North have been plagued by a strange disease called “the Scourge”, turning them into mindless undead drones, and only a small fraction of them, the Forsaken, has been able to return to their “sanity” – while still remaining undead, that is. Of course, normal humans now consider them all enemies. As for Brill, it’s a Forsaken-controlled village.]