Jun 29, 2015

In Which I Am Procrastinating




So I was really planning to at least finish around ten thousand words for Dark Wave last week but that didn't happen.  I wasn't exactly procrastinating but some things caused me to deviate from my original plan.  

As you can see, there are some changes on the blog.  One might say that those are very little changes to take up a lot of time but I'm such an amateur when it comes to coding so a huge portion of my "supposed-to-be-writing-hours" was spent googling the CSS codes for this and that, not to mention that my OCness got the better of me when it came to finding the perfect word meter (just look at the left footer).  So after finding the one that will suit my site best, I have to tweak it again to make sure that it would complement Stardust Lores' theme. 

Once satisfied with the appearance of my word meters, another stuff caught my attention; my bookshelves in Goodreads.  For information, I have two Goodreads accounts: a personal account and the Vita Julii one (the reason behind this is another story to tell for another post).  As I've said in my bio, reading is one of my hobbies so I use Goodreads a lot and since I'm one of the most disorganized person on the planet, you can just imagine the state of my bookshelves.  They're just so messy!  So to make the long story short, I organized all my books according to their genres and specified my all-time-favorites. 

With the two Goodreads accounts done, I thought that I was going to finally start updating Dark Wave but unfortunately, I saw a beautiful mermaid photomanipulation while browsing the internet and I don't know what happened but the picture just urged me to create a blog mock up design.  And thus, my whole Sunday was spent scouring Deviantart and various blog resources sites to look for images, patterns, and other pieces for my mock up.  From an aspiring writer's perspective, my Sunday was definitely a waste.  However, the blogger and aspiring designer in me assured that it wasn't since I'm going to use the said design for my future self-hosted blog/s.

So that's how I spent my weekend, how about you?  I promise I'm going to focus my full attention to Dark Wave until I hit the 24k words! 




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Jun 23, 2015

Finally!



I’ve already lost count of the number of times that I’ve contemplated about starting a “my writing chronicles” blog but finally, here it is.  It really took me a while to think of an appropriate name for it since "http://www.vitajulii.blogspot.com" doesn’t really work for me. And what I really wanted from the start was something that would invoke feelings of curiosity, wonderment, and whimsy in my readers.  Afterall, I am aspiring to write novels that can give the said vibes and more so why not start with my blog’s name? Not really sure though if Stardust Lores accomplished that.  Nonetheless, I’m very happy with the name, I just wish that I was more creative when it came to the blog’s design and layout.  Oh well, my excuse for that would be that Blogger's customizing features are fairly limited (yes, I am blaming Blogger for my lack of web designing skills!) so please bear with the overly simplistic design.  I was really aiming for a whimsical and minimalistic look, I didn’t expect that the blog would turn up like a giant wall of grayness.  But anyway, I’m planning to self-host in the future once I’m 100 percent serious about this writing endeavor.  Of course, I’m serious about writing but it’s not in my top 5 list of priorities right now, if you know what I mean.

I just hope that this new journey in my life would prove to be meaningful and long lasting. Meaningful and long lasting not in the sense of becoming the next JK Rowling or something like that but it’s more of learning from the experience and having the opportunity to put my story out there. And of course, not losing the drive to continue growing as an individual through creative writing.

If you’re curious as to what kind of stories that I will be writing about, then, it’s either contemporary romance or romance loaded with fantasy (paranormal, mythology, gothic, etc.) elements.  Don’t ask me why because I couldn’t answer that as of this time.  All I know is that I’m gravitating towards writing those types of stories.  But I guess that it couldn’t be helped since romance or in a broader perspective, love, is a big part of our lives… like everything has no meaning without it.  I just wish that my way of writing can invoke that wonderful feeling in my readers.  That my stories can resonate with my readers’ experiences in love.  I think that part is the hardest challenge for an aspiring romance novelist. I’m really apprehensive that I may not be able to deliver. Heh.

So let’s see and wait. My first story would be entitled “Dark Wave” and it’s the first of five in the Darkbeat quintet series. It’s a New Adult gothic story inspired from the Little Mermaid.


Xoxo,

Vita Julii
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