Yzabel / July 26, 2007

Writing Site Update

For some time, I’ve been wanting to ditch the Joomla! installation on my writing website. The RSS feed wouldn’t work, the URL-rewrite mod was a horror, and I don’t know if it’s me who’re lacking in skills, or if it’s really the CMS that can be a serious pain at times, but all in all, I got tired of it. Moreover, there’s no way I want to find myself fixing stuff in emergency during the school year. So, I finally gathered my spirits, and took a couple of days to redo everything from scratch, save for the texts themselves. The CMS I replaced with WordPress, and the forum with Simple Machine Forums. I can only hope that these changes will be for the best in terms of security and efficiency.

Why am I mentioning this now? Simply because URLs have changed, so in case you had bookmarked a specific category or something, be aware that the link may not work any more.

I’ll of course welcome any remark about how I could improve it in the future (I’ll probably change the template, but I still need to work more on developing those skills).

Yzabel / July 2, 2007

A Summer Update

I’m getting so great at writing updates after weeks or even months of silence, am I not?

Since there is no way I want to give up on this blog, here is one. There are just WAY too many things going on in my life at the moment for me to be able to write daily in all my blogs, and since the Y Logs are pretty much geared toward writing and writing did NOT go well in the past months, somehow it was kind of normal for me to not post here.

But don’t go running away yet! A few weeks of facing the dreaded blank page are far from enough to discourage me.

First, as I was announcing in March, one of my short stories was accepted. The three others finally weren’t, but, hey, one was! And the webzine is now out here at http://nuitsdalmor.over-blog.com/article-10920933.html (of course, the blog and ‘zine are all in French).

April was a big month of learning and revising, May was a half month of exams. Which I passed successfully. After all, it’s not every day that I can brag about getting a 18/20 at a syntax exam. 😉 I won’t even mention the ‘computer science’ exam, that was cake and a joke, and I gobbled the cake while laughing a lot.

The problems appeared after, when I found myself 1) exhausted, 2) unable to recover from those exams (and I’m still tired), 3) as a result, all the writing I had planned on doing pretty much stalled. As a result, I just said “screw it” and went to resume weight-lifting, because being so out of shape is never funny; mens sana in corpore sanao and all that.

And there is also the big move. I got very tired of living in my crappy student room, and went on the look-out for a 1-room apartment, where I could at least have a mini-kitchen AND a bathroom of my own. Talk about living la vie boheme here. Later on, the biography to be put on the back cover of my novels will probably look similar to that of a Stephen King. “This girl has lived every were and done everything save from selling a kidney to go through life”. Anyway, I will be moving in three days. Three days, and that hell hole will be behind me. Seriously, I cannot wait. It’s keeping me busy with packing and filling paperwork and running everywhere to get more paperwork to fill, but life’s good and happy.

About writing? Well, here’s a good thing as well: two weeks ago, I said “screw it again, and on top of it, I am NOT going to worry and blame myself any more”. Two days later, bam, it hit me like a brick, I got to work, and I got back into it big time. With a new short story under my belt that only needs proof- and beta-reading now. The story, not my belt. It won’t be the best short story ever, but I’m really glad to see that I still have ‘it’ in me, you see?

And this will be all for today’s update. I hope I will also have internet access soon enough after moving out, so that I can go on attempting at updating more often.