Yzabel / October 18, 2007

I have no title for such a late update

If I have to apologize each time I don’t write in one of my blogs for three months, this is going to become tiresome, because I don’t see things change in the upcoming couple of years. So no apologies. Just know that I always come back to the Y Logs sooner or later, m’kay? 🙂

Somehow, it seemed like a good idea to do a short update now, because we’re slowly nearing November and, this year again, I have finally given in and signed up for NaNoWriMo.

I’m not going to ‘win’–I don’t think so, since I have so much school assignments and personal work to complete. I’m not going to work on a completely new idea. In fact, I’m going to start from scratch again with my one-shot project. I have no intention of letting it rot after NaNo, or of taking that as a pathetic excuse to not edit it thoroughly afterward. However, the fact is that currently, I’m not writing a lot in terms of creative works (assignment and crapping out technical manuals don’t count in that regard). I haven’t been writing much at all since I’ve moved to my new location, in fact, save for a short story aimed at a call for submission (and a second one that I didn’t send: silly me misplaced the date for the deadline). Therefore, I’m placing new hopes, so to say, in the whole NaNo hype to pump me up for a time at least, and allow me to resume a more regular rhythm of writing.

I must add that my imagination pool has not dried, nor am I growing disillusioned or uninterested in writing as a whole. It’s just that when I finally have time to write, I’m usually quite tired, or feeling guilty because I’m not using that time to do more school work or go exercise or whatnot–and then I don’t write. It sucks, and I know I have to choose my priorities, but seriously I can’t make everything a priority at this point in my life. There just aren’t enough hours in a day for that! Unfortunately, what gave was writing. In three months, though, it may be something else. Who knows.

Anyway, I’m not going to post daily NaNoWriMo updates here–I wouldn’t have the time. But I wanted to bring back some life here all the same (expect a new playlist soon, too). And I hope that with NaNo incoming, I will have a couple of things about ‘writing’ in general to say. That would be a nice change, wouldn’t it…

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.

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 / June 8, 2006

The Much Needed Update!

I cannot believe that it took me so long to post here again! Somehow, my mind had managed to convince itself that it had been only a couple weeks. It’s just like me to think “I’ll post an update later on today, when I have more time to think it through”, and to… just forget. Rotten memory of mine, as I was telling a friend not so long ago.

Therefore, I’m not coming up with some witful post about writing today, but with this simple update that got delayed for faaaaar too long. I sincerely apologize to those of you who worried. There was nothing to worry about, but of course, no news-good news isn’t that accurate when it comes to the world of Internet, where it’s so easy to lose track of someone and never see this person again. I should know of this by now. Someday, I swear I’ll learn!What’s up, one might ask?Read More