Month: January 2011

I’m no pretty-handwriting-in-a-pretty-journal-while-sipping-tea writer.* I like coffee in big mugs that make a statement on the side, and I use 70-sheet, one-subject, twenty-notebooks-for-a-dollar spiral-bound notebooks. And I eat pretty stationery for breakfast. (Okay, not really.) Christmas 2005, an acquaintance gave me a lovely journal. It had an iris on the cover, and music notes, and gold writing. It wasn’t my thing, but it was too pretty to give away. So when I felt the need to do something different, that journal was near at hand. On 1/15/06 I wrote inside the front cover the date and the title: Dreams to Truth Journal (Yes, I felt the need to write that it was a journal.) Below that, I wrote Because I am an excellent writer and I deserve to be published. I needed to say that, to tell myself that. I felt stagnant. Stuck. Another vacation had slipped by without my accomplishing anything I meant to do. I needed accountability. I needed to write it down. The goal was some progress recorded every day. Every single day–I felt I’d waited long enough to get my butt moving.

Continue reading

When I was a kid, I was made fun of by other kids.  I don’t know what I did to them.  I was always nice to everyone, and I was painfully shy so I kept to myself most of the time.  But for some reason, people found things to laugh at.  They also pulled some horrible pranks on me: once, they locked me in a closet (and to this day, I’m terribly claustrophobic); another time, someone tried to set my long hair on fire.  These weren’t harmless pranks, and they hurt me badly.  For years, I existed as a joke, not a real person with real feelings. As you can probably guess, my self-esteem was non-existent.  When I was fourteen, I contemplated suicide.  Going to school was traumatic and not fun.  I had no real friends, no one to talk to or to care about me.  I was nothing.  I was worse than nothing.  I was a freak. All I wanted was to be accepted.  To be acknowledged as a person and not treated like crap.  I wanted people to look at me and see me, not the girl who’s the butt of jokes or my imperfections.  I was convinced that I’d never find that, that it just wasn’t possible. Enter Job’s Daughters. 

Continue reading

Why do people let me near the blog?  They should have patted me on the head and then taken away my keyboard. Do you like the logo?  I drew it and then gave it to more talented people than me to make it pretty. Anyway.

Continue reading

This month marks a milestone that’s being celebrated all over the world: it has been six months since the idea of Turtleduck Press was first floated. Oh, and it’s 2011. Happy 2011, readers! Here are just some of the things we’ve learned in our first six months: 1. When the time is right, things start to happen very quickly. The idea was first proposed on July 8. Within a week, we had our own venue for private discussion. In less than a month, we had three (already edited) long works going through our approvals process.

Continue reading