Yzabel / January 29, 2007

Progressing: 4 short stories

Once again, I failed at keeping this blog updated… well, not as much as last year, that is. This time, it was for a good reason if there’s any: as you can notice in the sidebar (warning, it’s boasting time), I’ve finished three short stories answering to themes proposed by a few French publishing houses and magazines. Truth be told, I’ve actually written four of them, but the last one is more a rewriting than something completely new, and as such, I haven’t put it in the list.

Will these short stories be published? Nothing is certain here. This said, once I’ve properly proof-read them, I will send them, which will cause my chances of publication to soar through the sky–as stupid as it seems, before that, I’ve always been too shy to send anything, silly me!

I’m however resuming classes now, and will write more slowly… Nevermind, I already have caught sight of a couple more themes, and I’ll do what it takes to write some more by then.

Note: For those of you who read French, on Yzabel.net, I’ve added a page dedicated to keeping tracks of my submissions, nicely nicknamed “the rake list”. There, I’ll note down received comments, rejections, portential approvals, etc.

Yzabel / January 19, 2007

Website: The Fantastic Written Works of… Me

Until today, I had only mentioned it in a couple of places, but now that I’ve more or less finished building it, I’ve realized that I haven’t even written a word about it here on the Y Logs! Time to change that, I say.

(To those who’ve already seen a similar announcement in the past days: you can stop reading here, there’s nothing new under the sun for you.
Also: the website is mostly in French. Sorry about that. I’m focusing it on my career in my native country, that’s why… but you can still have a look if you wish, I don’t mind participation in English, and I will of course answer in English as well.)

More than one year ago, I had already mentioned my little yzabel.net domain name, and had vaguely used it for a purpose I’ve given up on since then. However, recently, I’ve decided to really do something with it this time, and not a pitiful blog. Therefore, I took on the opportunity to test a certain CMS and design a new site, a site that’ll be focused on my career as an author (amateur as well as upcoming one, because my dreams are strong and my pen very industrious)

.Contrary to my writing LJ, I’m not going to note down there a detailed account of how well my writing is going (or not). I want it to be a little more… let’s say ‘open’. On the other hand, I’m seriously toying with the idea of publishing Unsung Heroes on it, since I can’t do much with that story in France anyway. And Unsung Heroes WILL remain in English.

If you’ve visited Yzabel.net one year ago and found it completely lame (which I easily understand), or even if you had never seen it, this is the kind of new things you’ll find on it. And I do hope that one day, that page will become “the website of famous author Yzabel”. /smile/

Yzabel / January 12, 2007

Setting Aside Some Time To Write

Ah, the good old problem we all have to face sooner or later–finding time to write. Because unless it’s our job and we don’t need to have any other one, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

It did look easy when I was younger and only had to focus on my not-too-difficult high school homework. Now, after several years spent attending cramming classes, being in the workforce and going back to college while still retaining a job, I’ve seriously revised my opinion about that. And my guess is that for all of us who write with the aim of being published one day, it’s even harder to set ourselves to ‘work’–the pleasure is still here, yet our lives are already full enough as it is.

I’ve already expressed in the past how I agree that we have to set aside time to write, else we just won’t write at all. I still agree with this, however hard the prospect is: I know it’s the only way. That settles it. We may be tired after work, busy with school, busy with families, but in the end, it all comes down to the fact that nobody will write for us, and that if we don’t take that extra step, odds are we’ll simply never be published, and will remain amateurs until the end. I used to huff about that, now I don’t do it anymore. One has to accept the facts the way they are, and work around the problem. I can’t just go on dreaming about being a famous author later in my life if I can’t even find the time to finish at least a short story and submit it, can I?Read More

Yzabel / January 8, 2007

Short Stories vs. Novels

A little question has been wandering in my mind these last days, and I’ve decided to write it down here.

Those of you who are writers, are trying to be published, or are simply readers, do you think that the best course of action is to submit short stories in an attempt to be published in magazines, fanzines and anthologies, instead of working on a novel? Or, on the contrary, is publishing a novel or two first the right solution, before dispatching short stories around?

On the one hand, one could present the argument that it is best to be known through short stories before submitting a novel, because this sort of legitimates the author–much like a company would ask for previous experience before hiring you.

On the other hand, the format of the short story isn’t as evident as it appears to laymen’s eyes, and since selling such texts isn’t the easiest thing, what are the real chances given to unknown people in that area? Is working on short stories a waste of time? Should they focus on a novel instead?

I’m wondering about that, since myself am not the best judge in that regard. I’d rather leer toward the first solution, given my professional orientation, in which lots of previous jobs = valuable experience, not instability. But am I not too inexperienced in terms of writing to really have an opinion on that?

Is this only a question worth being asked, or am I nitpicking?

Yzabel / January 2, 2007

This is not a New Year resolution

First and foremost, I hope that everyone here had nice holidays, and that 2007 will be a good year.

As for the famous resolutions, I’m not taking any. Resolutions are only made to be broken anyway. If I need to wait for January 1st to be here to take a decision, then said decision wasn’t really worth it to start with.

This said, I all the same decided to aim a little higher regarding The Wall of Silence. Not that I have delusions of grandeur, but considering that I’m not past the 70,000 words mark and am barely finishing part 2 out of 4, I think I can safely deem this goal realistic. And if I have to do cuts durning the editing process, well, I’ll wory about that later.

In any case, I’m glad: the story is going quite nicely, I have to say.

PS – I’m clueless. I’ve only inserted the new word count in the sidebar on this blog, and now the template is working as intended again. Let’s say it’s 2007 showing me a good omen.

Yzabel / December 28, 2006

A Few Changes a-coming

A quick update to announce two things:

  • I’ve had this in mind for some time already, and I’ve finally taken a decision: I will progressively ‘get rid’ of my WordPress blog about writing. I will probably use it again later on for other purposes, and I’m not deleting the articles currently on it, but I won’t update it anymore. Since October this year, I’ve been posting my NaNoWriMo and other writings progression on a LiveJournal, and as much as this can seem ‘unprofessional’, the fact is that 1) I’m not published yet anyway, 2) what’s the point of detailing my antics as an aspiring author if nobody ever sees more than a few paragraphs of what I’m writing, 3) I don’t want to post full excerpts publicly, not yet.I’m not a huge fan of LJ when it comes to such a blog, but at least, there, I have full control on what accounts can and can’t access my posts. Sorry for those who don’t have a LJ account. A good half of the entries will be public, probably–just not the ones containing excerpts, or going into my plots in detail).
  • I know the layout here on the Y Logs is slightly off. I’m not sure when this problem has appeared, given how little time I’ve had to look into the matter. Before doing anything, though, I first need to update my version of WP and perform a database save–and the latter being a problem at the moment, I may not be able to do that in the next day or so.

Voilà, that’s all for the moment.

Yzabel / December 23, 2006

I Had to Cram in a Post Before the End of the Year, At Least!

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 grade–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.

Yzabel / October 31, 2006

A New Playlist Is (Finally) Here!

It took me one year to come up at last with a new lil’ playlist for the radio.blog here… And given the time of the year, what could be more suitable than one that I will use to keep me pumped up for NaNoWriMo! Of course, once again, this is only but a glimpse of what I’ll be listening to in November.

My genre this year is Fantasy, without dragons and all the fluff. It’ll be more focused on the characters, as well as on the magic in that particular world, its rules, and what being a mage really entails. So, don’t be surprised if there isn’t much… epic in that playlist.Read More

Yzabel / October 21, 2006

Updating The Books Page

It had been months I hadn’t kept up with my current & past readings listing, and it was high time to dust the place off. The past readings page is now up to date, at least when it comes to the present time–it was too much of a hassle to remember exactly when I had read each book during spring and the end of winter, so I just kept these out for the time being.

Also, I’m not sure I’ll put everything I read in there. Lots of these are/will be for school, and I’m not sure I want to brag much about the ‘How to write a proper text analysis’ books and the likes. I’ll see what I’ll do about these.

Yzabel / October 13, 2006

The Vast Lexis of English Language

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.