Yzabel / January 4, 2006

Schadenfreude, Perhaps, Yet Still A”Good”Read

Being a French person trying to write in English as well as in her mother tongue isn’t easy; to the usual doubts of the author regarding her ability to write well, are added the doubts about the other language, the one she doesn’t speak from the start. I don’t always have a clear appreciation of what good and bad writing in English is, and being given examples is an interesting way for me to learn and see what is being done (and what I shouldn’t do).

Along these lines, comes Miss Snark, who kindly provided her readers with a list of excerpts from stories submitted to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. Submitted, not published–yet this is already enlightening enough as it is.

Truth be told, those of you who’ve had a peek at the excerpts I’ve posted on my NaNo blog (yes, the unedited ones, these parts of a first draft that I wrote as if there was no tomorrow, drugged on coffee and gobbling down handfuls of frozen raspberries): am I right in thinking that I can’t do worse than that?

In all honesty, my self-confidence has been given a serious boost today–as well as a renewed desire to go on writing until I fall dead.

Yzabel / January 1, 2006

Happy New Year 2006 (Very Original Title)

Into 2006 we now are. It’s odd. Poof, in a snap of fingers, it was 00:01, and another year. Where has 2005 gone?

Time is a weird, weird concept.

I’m not taking any resolutions for the year. Resolutions begin to sound like saying “I’ll go to the gym every day”, only to give up comes February because I want to make it too much, too fast, too perfect. I don’t see why I should bother with resolutions–I’ll do what I have to do, but on my terms, not because January 1st is some kind of magical number that will make everything easier. I don’t need a new year to start exercising more, or write more (already doing it, anyway). Let’s see, if I hadn’t taken my “resolution” in summer, I’d have started working on my writing now, instead of six months earlier!

Alright, this is said in joke. However, I still haven’t listed any. They just don’t feel right. They sound like some compulsory task, like an automatism everybody has to go through because it’s a new year. Resolutions can be taken and started any day, and I’ll decide on mine when the right time comes.

In the meantime, I hope that 2006 wil be a good year for everyone!

Yzabel / December 28, 2005

What About The Writing During The Holidays?

I’m not proud to announce that I haven’t done as much as I could have, in the past week, when it comes to writing. On the other hand, I suppose that the whole Christmas holidays thing isn’t “the right time to write” for many people, and that I’m no exception.I’m slowly reaching my 75k goal–I should be there tonight or tomorrow at the worst, but the beast isn’t finished yet. It seems I’m really crap at estimating the length of my works. Now I hope that by 80k I can call it a quit, since I know myself well enough now, and if left to my own devices, I’ll add ten more plot twists to the whole thing, just because I have too many ideas spring to mind, once I’m within my rut.It’s weird, but the period between Christmas and New Year is always a period of “depression” for me. Not in the clinical sense of the word, I’m not sick. Just feeling tired and not motivated about anything, including writing/drawing. I bet this is the downside of the pre-Christmas hype, gifts run, housework, and then spending every day at a different member’s of the family. It’s stressful in its own ways, and as a result, I don’t have much energy left. To be honest, the most productive things I’ve done in the past two days was to install my programs on my laptop, look for UxTheme and a good free PIM software, skin my Windows XP, and play Sudoku.Ah, but after New Year I have another week of holidays. I hope that I’ll be able to use that time to its full extent, with inspiration and without tiredness. It’d be a shame to waste it!holidays, writing

Yzabel / December 22, 2005

Holidays Season

Things are becoming speedy now, what with preparing Christmas, finishing the last-moment gifts, wrapping said gifts, managing the food supplies, and related activities. I’m not going anywhere this year to see family (family comes to me) or to spend the holidays (money will be kept to finance a laptop… or more likely the next batch of taxes to pay), so I’m supposed to have time to write, but let’s not fool myself, I also won’t want to spend Christmas Eve thinking about the next blog entries to write.Therefore, blogging will be slow in days to come, or may consist in short posts only. I’m not gone, just enjoying the winter’s break.Happy holidays everyone (and whatever other wishes fit with the various countries/places/religions/beliefs) 🙂blogging, christmas, holidays

Yzabel / December 21, 2005

Launching The Vectorized Blog

Here’s a blog project I haven’t advertised heavily, since I first wanted to start it and see if I could get it going for more than just a few days. The answer to this being a definite yes, I’m therefore proud to announce that Vectorized is alive and kicking, and that everyone is of course invited to go and take a look at it, if the theme remotely interests you, that is.

So what’s the theme? Illustrations and animations done in vector-based software such as Illustrator, Freehand or Flash. What’s often called “vector art”, for reasons of convenience, is used in advertising and logo-making, among other fields, due to the scalability of the images it produces. I’ve even written entries there on what vector art is and what vector art isn’t. I use this media a lot myself in my illustrations, and I’ve come to realize that there weren’t many blogs dedicated to it (in fact, I found one only, and a handful of “personal” blogs which creators put their own works on). My resolve was strengthened. I decided to launch the blog.

The template itself isn’t totally fixed yet, but this is something I’m working on as well.

Yzabel / December 20, 2005

Performancing Extension For Firefox

I admit it, I’m an extension junkie, and I lay my hands on whatever gets out for Firefox. Nothing surprising, then, to the fact that I grabbed the Performancing extension, which allows you to blog about a page in a split window within your favorite browser (well, alright, my favorite browser). Currently testing it to write this very post, I must say that so far, it’s proved quite an interesting add-on, and worth the try, if only because one doesn’t need to bother with pop-up windows or, worse, leaving the web page one’s blogging about.

I can’t say yet how it’s going to behave with different kinds of blogs, but at least on WordPress.com and right now here on WP 1.5, it seems to be working well enough.

So, the word is out, if you want it, grab it here: Performancing for Firefox (Firefox 1.5; aye, kids, you need to upgrade from time to time).blogging, extension, firefox, performancing, wordpress

Yzabel / December 19, 2005

Manifesto Of The Point In Writing

I’m bouncing off a comment I posted earlier on, itself triggered by several posts I had read on the NaNoWriMo forums. At times, some people would ask “what did your family/friends said when you announced you were going to write a novel in one month?”. And at times, some people would answer that they got told “what’s the point of writing a novel if you’re not going to publish it?”.Perhaps this is why there can be such a rift between authors and non-authors, artists and non-artists. As odd as it can seem to me, who love what I do both as a hobby and in the hopes of taking it onto a professional path, there are people who don’t see the point of writing just for the sake of writing.Read More

Yzabel / December 17, 2005

I Love This Blog, It’s Making Me Write

You know, I wonder if, without this blog and without posting entries about this journey into writing, I’d get as much done.I know I’m a whiner, up to a certain extent. I often think too much, wonder about too many things, and “whine” about them here, because as always, writing helps me to understand my feelings better, and to define what exactly is wrong. It’s somewhat efficient, but not always. After all, if I throw my words in a well, I don’t get any feedback, and it’s easy for me to forget about it, or rather, to pretend to forget.Read More