Month: December 2010

  Knight Errant is available for sale. Wow. It’s hard to believe. Taro has been with me a long time, you see. More than…wow. More than fifteen years. He first appeared under a different name and far more bland aspect, in the book about his sister Eve Marcori, former Marine. It wasn’t until years later that he came alive. Oh, I tried. I changed his name. I invented a background for him, more than just “Eve’s long-lost adopted little brother.” I investigated his family, and the years between Eve losing and finding him. I changed his name again. I said he was sneaky and mouthy, but I couldn’t seem to make him be either. So I followed time-honored avoidance techniques, and I moved on. He didn’t matter that much anyway. Minor character. No big. I finished the book. Over years, I edited the book. In my new novelist happy shiny glow, I sent that book off to DAW–all 249,000 words of it. Guess what happened. It took them a week–and some of that was transit time. I got angry. I got determined. I got to writing.

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I love Christmas.  It is my favorite time of the year: family, friends, gifts, magic…the snow, the tree, the lights… What isn’t fun for me, though, is wrapping gifts.  In fact, it is so not fun that my gift wrapping skills are legendary.  Mind you, my gifts look fine, but I was born without the Gift Wrapper gene because my gifts are never wrapped perfectly.  There’s always some bumps and the seams aren’t perfectly straight and sometimes my bows are lopsided.  Sometimes, I use handmade tags (from the wrapping paper) and apparently that’s not done.  Oops.  Anyway, my mom and I were discussing what else? but gift wrapping and how awful mine is.  She and my sister have double the Gift Wrapper gene because their gifts are always wrapped perfectly.  There are no ragged seams; the bows are perfect; there are no bumps.  They’re gorgeous.  Works of art.  See, they are into the whole “presentation” thing and it shows.  And that’s really cool…if you’re them.

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  As we delve deeper into the holiday season, each one of us finds ourselves with more and more to do, and it might come to pass that you wake up in the middle of the night on a Saturday and realize that you have a blog post due the next day. Not saying that’s what happened, noooo.

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  Welcome to the inaugural post of the Turtleduck Press blog! Here we hope to divert, horrify, amuse, and shock you (pick two). We’ll be blogging for your entertainment five times a month. There will also be free short stories going up elsewhere on the site at the beginning of each month when we’re not putting up longer works for sale.

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