Yzabel / December 28, 2006

A Few Changes a-coming

A quick update to announce two things:

  • I’ve had this in mind for some time already, and I’ve finally taken a decision: I will progressively ‘get rid’ of my WordPress blog about writing. I will probably use it again later on for other purposes, and I’m not deleting the articles currently on it, but I won’t update it anymore. Since October this year, I’ve been posting my NaNoWriMo and other writings progression on a LiveJournal, and as much as this can seem ‘unprofessional’, the fact is that 1) I’m not published yet anyway, 2) what’s the point of detailing my antics as an aspiring author if nobody ever sees more than a few paragraphs of what I’m writing, 3) I don’t want to post full excerpts publicly, not yet.I’m not a huge fan of LJ when it comes to such a blog, but at least, there, I have full control on what accounts can and can’t access my posts. Sorry for those who don’t have a LJ account. A good half of the entries will be public, probably–just not the ones containing excerpts, or going into my plots in detail).
  • I know the layout here on the Y Logs is slightly off. I’m not sure when this problem has appeared, given how little time I’ve had to look into the matter. Before doing anything, though, I first need to update my version of WP and perform a database save–and the latter being a problem at the moment, I may not be able to do that in the next day or so.

Voilà, that’s all for the moment.

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 / October 13, 2006

The Vast Lexis of English Language

As my first post here for the month of October (wow, we’re already on the 13th??), and now that I have a good three weeks of classes behind me, let me tell you that I’ve realized an important fact about English language, that I hadn’t really paid attention to before, when I was ‘only’ reading foreign books for my pleasure:

The English lexis is fricking huge.

It may strike me more now because I’m using both languages—French and English—on a daily basis, and have been for some time. It’s true that when writing in a casual manner, only looking up a couple of words here and there in the dictionary, one doesn’t need to be aware of this difference, but when one then needs to explain texts, pay attention to semantic fields, perform an analysis of a poem, or learn to recognize each and every trope, all of a sudden this ‘novelty’ becomes overwhelming.

For instance, to throw/cast/dispatch/toss… may all be translated in French by the single verb of ‘lancer’, and the latter doesn’t manage to convey all the subtilities of each of their meanings. These are only an example among many, and probably my English-speaking readers here will simply shrug and laugh, wondering what took me so long. The fact remains that it’s all new for me, in that I’m becoming aware of it now only. French language also has its strong points, of course. Nevertheless, I can very well see that when translating a text, often I find myself wondering how I need to modify the French counterpart to convey every detail of the original words, without losing any meaning, yet at the same time without ending up with awkward, leaden sentences.

At the moment, I’m definitely fascinated with this new, conscious knowledge. It seems that large doors kept closed until now are slowly opening, letting me catch a glimpse of everything I’m yet to learn, and that I will learn, being back to a study environment that actually allows me to do so without constraints.

You can bet that as soon as I get to properly master this, my writing in English will jump a good notch.

Yzabel / September 19, 2006

With September Almost Gone…

I’ve been a bad girl, I admit. I haven’t written much in the past few weeks, due to practicing English through exercises, diving back into some needed artwork, and trying to prepare for college as best as I could. Now is the week I’m finally settling down in my broom cupboard in S, and there are still so many things to worry about that, even though I had sworn to myself that I’d go on working on WoS in the next days, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to churn down. But I’m getting there. Oh, yes, I’m getting there.

College is a mess, as expected. Of course, getting listed for my classes was to clash with my work schedule. Of course, half the people I talk to send me to other people, who in turn send me to offices that are open only on mornings (or on afternoons; or on some days of the week only). Of course, I need my student card for too many things right now, when I only receive it on Thursday. It’s all good, though. As said, it was expected, and the brain manages to retain its zen attitude for the moment.

On the good side of things, people at work were oddly understanding. As long as I do my job, they don’t care if I work my hours in the mornings, in the evenings, or on Saturdays at 4 am. That’s all good with me. I just wish I had my own laptop back, since the one I’m on now is too old to run all my software properly. Ah, and I also have an internet connection. Which means no sneaky updates from cyber-cafés here and there.

I definitely want to post here more again, if only to share the latest news (I’m doing NaNoWriMo again this year; I want to test how much not having a life and being busy 24/7 will make me more productive). Maybe I’ll even have nice bits learned during classes to share, who knows.

For the moment, I’m about to head to the office for the afternoon, so I need to put an end to this post. More to come soon. I hope!

Yzabel / August 25, 2006

A Tale of Woe

[Since I haven’t been posting much lately–that’s the least we can say, hmmm?–here’s a little “fan-fiction” story. It’s nothing original in itself, and far from being my best, but it kept me writing in English all the same.

For the record, it’s set in the Warcraft universe, more precisely after WC III: Frozen Throne (I happen to like this world somehow, even though it’s quite a simple and basic one). The human kingdoms of the North have been plagued by a strange disease called “the Scourge”, turning them into mindless undead drones, and only a small fraction of them, the Forsaken, has been able to return to their “sanity” – while still remaining undead, that is. Of course, normal humans now consider them all enemies. As for Brill, it’s a Forsaken-controlled village.]Read More

Yzabel / July 20, 2006

Character Creation: Naming Patterns

We’re in summer, and I’ve started thinking again of potential story plots for the upcoming NaNoWriMo – since I’m going back to college, in a big city, and to study English on top of it, I’d like to do it again this year and lure some other students into the craze. We have nice places in the university areas to do collective writing sessions, really.

Well. Going back to NaNo means haunting the forums as well, and there I found myself posting a blurb about character names…

Does any of you have any noticeable naming patterns? Not in one novel only, but across your novels in general? And, pushing further, would such a pattern apply to other areas than novels/short stories ones (in roleplaying games, for instance)?Read More

Yzabel / July 13, 2006

The Great Disk Failure of July 2006

Time for another update, but not a happy one, I’m afraid.

One day, I’ll learn. Oh, yes, I swear it: one day, I’ll learn to make backups more regularly when it comes to my “unachieved” data, instead of stupidly dwelling in that odd pefectionism of mine that causes me to burn a CD/DVD only when I can fill it “for good”. Too bad if I end up with trash CDs, or CDs made unreadable by too much rewriting: from now on, I really need to change a couple things regarding all of this.

One of my hard disks died two weeks ago. The big one, of course, where I stored all my unachieved designs, drawings and writings, and where I used to park the footage for my videos, during those periods I was into video editing. It had warned me, poor thing, through very disturbing noises, but what I didn’t know was that it’d die in my arms on the very moment I’d start performing the needed backup, after the mandatory realization of “uh-oh, this time it seems really sick”. Aye, Murphy rules this world. Nevertheless, for once, I’d have liked a little less chaos in what is called my existence.

To tell about my disgust is the least I can do. I don’t care much for the video footage, since I can extract it again, but the unachieved and now lost artworks are daggers repeatedly thrusted in my ego. Yes, yes, I had backups. Alright. Dating back to several weeks or even several months ago. What pains me in particular is the loss of the edited version of my NaNovel (given how I loved editing it, I won’t do THIS again soon * sighs *), the latest version of the Wall of Silence (the few changes in it, I can rewrite and am doing so, though), and the previous attempts for the latter story. No matter how many times I try to persuade myself that it’s a fresh start, without these leashes hindering my Inner Editor, this is still a blow dealt directly to my heart.

Not everything is lost: we’re trying to resurrect the HDD, for long enough, at least, to perform a hard copy… However, I prefer not nurture too many illusions here–the fall would only be harder.

Ah, yes. One day, I’ll learn…

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

Yzabel / February 22, 2006

Surprise! A Better Idea Comes In

It’s not the first time I experience this, and everytime it’s like a new revelation: at some points when I’m planning a story (or rather, building its background), I come up at the weirdest moments with an idea that leaves me all excited, as well as wondering why the heck I hadn’t thought of it sooner.

Today, I was gifted with one of these. When looking at sports articles, no less. Go figure what triggers my imagination, because fitness pants aren’t exactly what I’d think of first. After this, all I could do was drive back home in haste and write the idea down before it flew away. I was lucky, it stuck, and it stuck even very well. Later on, I worked it into my story arc, replacing a certain plot that all of a sudden didn’t seem as strong as I had thought.

What’s amazing is how, this time, it unveiled an ocean of other possibilities for me, including a plan and plot for a possible “prequel novel” (I can’t call it otherwise). Not only does it strengthen the plot that goes across three volumes, but it even gives me more than that. I need to treasure this precise idea now.

And perhaps I need to go buy sports clothes more often, if they work that well in making my mind race!

Yzabel / February 20, 2006

Not Dead

No, I’m not dead, I just haven’t been in the mood for blogging much these days. Coupled with being away the past week-end, fighting with scenes from my novel that wouldn’t go my way (see the “NaNo” blog for this), and falling sick (as usual every two months or so), life’s been full. Alright, to be realy honest, I need to blame Stepmania as well, though in a good way; I definitely needed to get back in shape, and doing mindless cardio on stationary bikes really isn’t my thing at all. I was looking at fun alternatives, and I remembered having tried DDR once… The fate of this author was sealed, and a dance mat went on its way to reach me.

Things are going well with the writing so far, in any case. In spite of my battle with scenes that will go to the unused basket, replaced as they are by more appropriate ones, the ball goes on rolling. Five chapters under my belt, it’s not that bad, and for a change, they’re planned ones, not written on the spur of the moment.

I’ll love this story as much as I’ve loved creating the universe it’s set in, which is an excellent thing.