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.

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.