Month: January 2012

I used to think I was lazy. I wasn’t the only one who thought so–I heard it a lot. Too lazy to do my chores, too lazy to do my homework. Too lazy to finish that paint-stripping project and so I lived without a bedroom door for months and then put the ugly thing back on, still with its layers of tainted white, dead-turtle green, and bloody-brick red. It was another two months before I found and replaced the knob mechanism. I’d restart the washing machine to avoid hanging out clothes, and you don’t want to know how I avoided doing dishes. I wasn’t too lazy to read, though. Oh no, I burned my way through the elementary school library, then the junior high library, at a wildfire’s pace. I wasn’t supposed to read the senior high books till I hit senior high, but the librarians got tired of telling me no. The day the public library gave me an adult card–meaning I could check out thirty-five real books on my monthly-if-I-was-lucky visit–was a great day indeed.

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Siri here. I’m excited to introduce our first guest blogger for 2012, Megan Crewe. Megan is, as of today, the author of two published YA novels. She’s also a cat lover, a critiquing guru, a kung fu fighter (yes, really), and a Torontonian (like me). Like Megan, many Canadian authors’ primary market is the United States, but that can lead to a culture clash. Here she is to explain… — Growing up next to the US, watching American TV shows and movies and reading American books, I saw their stories and Canadian stories as being pretty much the same.  Sure, I changed my “centre”s to “center”s and “colour”s to “color”s when submitting a story to a US magazine or anthology–to make it easier for the editors, who’d have to do it anyway if the piece was accepted. It was only when I started publishing novels with American publishers that I realized how many little cultural and linguistic differences there are, as my Canadian foibles were corrected in copyedits.  Where I’d say “grade ten,” Americans say “tenth grade.”  I use “washroom” interchangeably with “bathroom,” but to most Americans it sounds old-fashioned.  And everything from high school classes to the health care system works differently.

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Imagine, for a moment, a world where science and technology prevail.  Then, imagine what would happen if magic found its way there.  What would change?  What would stay the same?  What kind of impact would it have on daily life? This is what I’ve been pondering for a long time.  Since November 2009, to be exact.  Back then (feels longer than it is), I imagined a dystopic world devoid of any creativity.  It was called Soulfire, and it was to be my novel for National Novel Writing Month (NanoWriMo).  Long story short: life happened, and I never got a chance to write it.  I put it into my To Be Written Within the Next Decade file, promising myself I’d explore this in the near future. So fast forward to October last year.  I got hit — no, hammered — with another idea that would fuse sci-fi and fantasy. That is the novel I’m writing right now, Fey Touched.  

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Now that we’ve been in business for a little over the year, we here at Turtleduck Press have had a chance to look at how things have been going and discuss some changes that we’d like to make. Here’s what you’ll see upcoming:

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The past year has been an exciting one for us here at Turtleduck Press, and I’d like to recap some of the highlights for those of you who are just finding us. We launched our website December 1, 2010, with three book releases:

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