Yzabel / December 14, 2005

What is the best method when dealing with an inspiration overload? Yes, mine is not over yet (somehow, I hope it never dries out, because too much is always better than not enough when it comes to ideas), and I’m torn between the two main choices that I see lying in front of me.One of the roads leads to dropping the novel I’m finishing these days, to jump to another idea, fulfill my desire to write that one, then come back to the previous novel—with the risk of this taking weeks or even months.The other road goes through forcing myself through finishing the work in progress first, even though this may feel very painful and end up in written crap just for the sake of “getting rid of it until the moment to edit comes”.Read More

Yzabel / December 11, 2005

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 *NaNoWriMo, novel, writing

Yzabel / December 8, 2005

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.)projects, technical+writing, writing