Month: February 2013

This week’s post is coming to you from your international correspondent at Turtleduck Press, Siri Paulson. I’m in India right now, the third country on a four-country travel adventure. For writers who work in made-up worlds, travel is a banquet of experiences — the real-life version of the research we’re always doing. It’s a way to live in the moment, to experience life more intensely. It’s a way to narrow down your priorities — I’ve got only a few changes of clothing with me, and my computer time is severely limited. And you can bet I’m snapping endless photos for future reference in worldbuilding. Travel is also emotionally intense. Which, of course, is also good for writers, if not always comfortable…

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I have always loved languages, ever since I was in middle school and took an experimental class on the basics of French and Spanish.  I fell in love with French, and continued my education up until my junior year of college.  At that point, I could speak and write it fluently.  To this day, I can still run through verb conjugations, translate short text, and think in French.  I am fascinated by languages, how they evolve and their nuances.  I should have studied linguistics.  I swear, I keep coming back to this over and over again.

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Ah, Fat Tuesday. The last day before Lent where you get to eat as much as you want, party as much as you want, whatever. I am celebrating by having pancakes for dinner. It’s probably been about twenty years since I last had pancakes for dinner, so I’m unnecessarily excited by this. Lent is sort of an interesting time of year because it absolutely does not work towards an actual personal improvement, and because it encourages ever more creative ways to get around whatever your Lenten goals happen to be.

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  I finished the major edit of my new novel Friday night. (Honesty compels me to admit it was actually Saturday morning before I sent it off, midnight having come and gone.) I re-wrote a short story introducing the main characters over the weekend, for posting March 1st. Then last night I caught up on all the homework I hadn’t been getting done through the last frantic week of the edit. Tonight I’m…not bored, exactly. I have plenty of things needing doing, and I’m working on them. I guess “restless” would be the word. There’s a reason that writers write, you see. It’s fun. It’s intense. It’s addictive.

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Let’s be frank, friends. Society, as a whole, is kind of immature. Sometimes this is annoying. Sometimes this is brilliant. But this tendency has given us some fun word games to play, some of which can be used with book titles. And we here at Turtleduck Press like books.

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