Home Articles posted by Siri Paulson

TV Shows That Are Giving Me Life

I’ve blogged before about how my spouse and I are having trouble enjoying film and TV these days — we’ve just seen too many stories, or something. But once in a while, something makes it past the analytical parts of our minds and hits us right in the feels, as they say. Right in the uncritical part of our hearts that is still 10 years old. (My inner 10-year-old loves a story about girls coming into their power, like Moana and Encanto. His loves an action story about girls who kick butt.) So it’s not surprising that our shared viewing right now is She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, the reboot series developed by ND Stevenson (Nimona, Lumberjanes). It hits many of the same things we liked about Trollhunters (him) and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (me). The writing is sharp, the dialogue on point. When any new trope is introduced, it’s not belaboured, because the show knows its viewers are genre-savvy, so the story can move on quickly — making it feel fresh. The characters and their struggles are relatable, at least one is neurodivergent (I love Entrapta so much), AND THEY’RE ALL QUEER. The worldbuilding is kinda thin if you look at too hard, but that’s not what the story focuses on, so it’s fairly easy to ignore. We’re about halfway through and looking forward to the rest. I also like a very specific type of comedy — whatever it is that The Good Place and Schitt’s…

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Not So SAD

It’s March, friends! Not only that, the first Tuesday of the month (my blogging day) went sailing by when I wasn’t looking…whoops. Somehow, somewhen, we’re already into the third month of the year and almost up to the time change (except for those lucky folks who live in places like Arizona…ahem). I’m generally surprised by how fast Time is going these days. It doesn’t help that Toronto has been experiencing our warmest winter on record, which also bodes poorly for the planet. But…I kind of hate our “normal” winters, all grey and slush and cutting, damp winds. Without those last two, the grey is much easier to bear. I tend to struggle with SAD at this time of year, between January and March. This year…I’ve been waiting for it, and for the most part, it just hasn’t turned up. Why? Well, the weather could be a major contributing factor, of course. Or the Vitamin D that I’ve been mostly remembering to take for a change. It could be the ongoing culinary experiments — I’ve been making a point of trying new recipes and ingredients. Most recently, I’ve done ratatouille, stir-fry with broccolini, butternut squash & white bean chili, and tonight, Spanish lima bean stew (I’m on a bean kick). It could even be the (shhh) writing — I spent February doing writing prompts, a few hundred words a day, and rereading one of my favourite writing craft books, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. (Bird by Bird by Anne…

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Black Histories and Afrofuturisms

It’s Black History Month in Canada and the US, friends. I would encourage you to listen to and amplify Black voices this month (and every month). Here are some I’ve been listening to and reading, and some I’m looking forward to… Listening Reading Kai Ashante Wilson, The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps. This fantasy novella is a bloody sword-and-sorcery adventure elevated by the way the author plays with language. The main character, Demane, code-switches between Black American slang and other dialects when he’s speaking, while the narration is more poetic and literary. It’s set in a secondary world based on Africa – and I do mean Africa as a whole, because there’s a lot of travelling and we get a sense of places beyond the edges of the story, too. And the characters are all beautifully drawn, from Demane’s queer love interest (no HEA, though) to the caravan security grunts they’re travelling with. One of the best books I read last year. Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby. A near-future novella full of violence, suffering, and anger about what it can look like to be Black in America, and yet it’s also about love, protection, and hope. It’s fierce in so many senses of the word. Nalo Hopkinson, Sister Mine. This is a wild contemporary-fantasy ride through complex family relationships, demigods, Toronto, hoodoo, lake monsters, cats, music, kudzu, and more…as you can tell by the wonderful cover. Brown Girl in the Ring has many of the same elements and is equally cool. N.K.…

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2023 at Turtleduck Press

You may have noticed that things have been a little quieter around here this past year. Your intrepid authors have been dealing with home repair crises (if anyone breathes the word “plumbing” in KD’s vicinity, she’ll send the piranhas after you). Also, family crises, health crises, the occasional good thing that doesn’t involve our computer keyboards, and… *gestures wildly* you know, all that distracting stuff that keeps happening in the rest of the world. The more Life happens outside our heads, the harder it is to get into our heads and make the stories happen. So it’s a wonder that we’re all still here and cracking jokes, but we are. And occasionally we’re even writing stuff! In 2023, we released one long(er) work of fiction for sale as an ebook, my own Voice of the Sea, featuring a post-fossil-fuel world, clashing worldviews, and a certain undersea fairy tale. Oh, and lots of ocean descriptions, just because I can. (Any guesses as to which ocean?) Kit kept the lights on at TDP the rest of the year by releasing a fantasy serial, Across Worlds with You. Look for the latest installment, number 8, next week! Erin has been writing (and publishing!) poetry elsewhere, and KD did NaNoWriMo for the first time in…a while…so creative things are happening — just not always things that are measurable in TDP publications. Thanks for hanging in there with the four of us. We’ll be here, plugging away, one page at a time. After all, that’s…

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Things You Didn’t Know About Me

I’m a collector of lists. I used to keep a list on lined paper of every movie I’d seen; I still keep an equivalent list for books, although now it’s on GoodReads. My TBR list is fearsome to behold. My browser tabs are equally fearsome, on more than one device. I’ve got long lists of things to watch on all my TV/film streaming services, and things to listen to on my podcast app. Sadly, all the lists are growing. It might be that I like making lists more than actually consuming the media, the way people (ahem) buy books faster than they read… Funny thing about podcasts. I always swore I was a visual learner, couldn’t do audiobooks, much preferred transcripts over training videos and online newspapers over radio or TV news. Then…well, things changed, I needed to rest my eyes more and had to get my story fix somehow. I started out with a queer SF audio drama (Moonbase Theta Out) and have been really enjoying a short-story podcast (LeVar Burton Reads…yep, I’m a child of the 80s and have been a fan since Reading Rainbow and Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I will listen to that man read anything). Most recently, I’ve added a couple of non-fiction/self-help shows about neurodivergent self-care and housekeeping (Struggle Care) and decluttering (A Slob Comes Clean). Maybe I’ll finally end up hooked on Welcome to Night Vale. An early adopter I am not! Speaking of being a late adopter, after some 7…

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The Merits of Quitting

Every time Halloween rolls around, I have a problem. See, I like some of the Halloween trappings, and Gothic tales (Crimson Peak!), but I’m a wuss when it comes to horror, whether gory or psychological. Finding movies to watch that fall in the sweet spot? Almost impossible. Especially because my spouse and I have developed a bad(?) habit of quitting. See, when we met, he was a Film Studies major and I was an English major and film buff. We’ve seen a looot of movies together. We’re also both storytellers, so what we generally do is watch a movie and then dissect it. By now, we’re having trouble finding movies that engage us. It doesn’t help that we prefer science fiction and fantasy, which is currently dominated by the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) and we grew tired of that several phases ago. So looking for spooky seasonal enjoyment, we tried: We didn’t last longer than 15 minutes with any of them. And it’s not a matter of attention span — we both read novels still. It’s just…have we seen too many movies in our lifetime? Has all that dissecting meant that we can spot the lines of the Matrix from a mile away and can’t blur them back into an entertaining tale? Every once in a while, we happen on something we enjoy enough to watch to the end. (And then still dissect, because it’s fun.) It doesn’t have to be a “perfect” film, whatever that means. It just has…

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Dabbling in Languages

I’ve always been a linguistics geek, dating back at least to Grade 8 when I did a presentation on the language family tree (none of my classmates found it as fascinating as I did). I still get lost in Wikipedia learning new things. (Did you know that Romanian has a lot of Slavic in it, despite being a Romance language like French, Spanish, and Italian?) And don’t even get me started on writing systems. One of the things I found most fascinating about India, when I visited ten (!) years ago, was that every state had not only its own language (many unrelated to the others) but its own alphabet. Northern India uses Hindi as its common tongue, and southern India uses Tamil, but if they’re going to speak north to south, they resort to English. Which is why there’s more English on the signs than you might expect, even in non-tourist areas… Unfortunately for me, I’m not a polyglot (fluently multilingual), though not for lack of trying. I’ve learned tiny bits and pieces of Klingon (really!), Spanish, ASL, and Hindi. Like most Canadians, I studied French in school and came away with enough knowledge to read food packaging (and occasionally other things) but not to converse fluently — especially in Quebec. I also studied Norwegian in university, enough for me to get by quite well on my first solo trip overseas, visiting extended family in Norway. That meant I could more or less understand written Danish and spoken Swedish,…

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Emerging

So I’ve been pretty open about how my mental health has been undergoing a beating, mostly from the pandemic but also other factors. Every once in a while, though, I catch a glimpse, a shift, something unfurling just a little bit. August has been like that. In July, work finally settled down, and I had two weeks off in a row and one of them involved unplugging at a camp on a lake. That was the reset I needed. I still haven’t been writing. But I’m reading more/faster again — I’ve zoomed through my last four books — and more deeply — I almost missed my subway stop a few weeks ago. Can’t remember the last time that happened. Last week we finished Good Omens 2 and I developed a brief obsession. I talked my spouse’s ear off about it. I thought about doing a couple’s cosplay, even though that takes waaay too much executive function. (I am so much like TV Aziraphale it isn’t even funny, though my spouse isn’t particularly like TV Crowley, thank goodness.) The song that weaves through Season 2, “Everyday” by Buddy Holly, got stuck in my head for a full week. It finally cleared out when I fell down another rabbit hole, thanks to KD — a cappella folk/trad groups. First there was VoicePlay. (That’s their YT channel. I’m not going to pick just one video to share, because I can’t choose!) Then there was Geoff Castellucci, the lead singer of VoicePlay, who also…

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What I Did on My Summer Vacation

Last time, I mentioned an upcoming road trip and dance camp (summer camp for adults!). Well, I’m back, and have just wrapped up a week of staycation immediately following that. By the time you read this, I’ll be back at work, le sigh. Dance camp was…well. It was awesome, but it was also a lot. I spent much of the time trying to manage the heat and humidity (no AC!) and deal with all the peopling (lovely people, but…). I’ve gotten a lot more sensitive to both as I get older, for various reasons. I promised myself not to feel badly about skipping out as much I needed to, and it was interesting to notice myself developing strategies and finding a rhythm as the week went on. Some favourite memories: And I managed not to get heat stroke, sunburn, or *ahem* any sort of illness, thank lork. I got home a week ago Saturday and spent my staycation (in between long walks with my spouse) gradually unpacking and making baby steps towards getting the house in order. It doesn’t look much different, yet, but I’ve had the energy to push through mental blocks on a number of objectively minor things that have needed doing for a while. So I’d say the goal of R&R was a success. Now back to real life in 3…2…1…

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Re-entry, Part 5

[CW: pandemic, mental health] It turns out there’s no clean way to exit a pandemic. Not for the world at large, and especially not for individuals who have been deeply affected for one reason or another, like me. So I’m still edging back into a new kind of normal life, still taking steps and hesitating to take other steps. I’m still wearing a mask on public transit and sometimes other places indoors, gradually getting looser (and going out to restaurants more). I have some travel coming up later this month and don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize it, but after that I plan to push myself gently to drop the mask more often. Though I have to say I don’t miss the constant colds and occasional flus…so I intend to keep wearing it on public transit. The travel I have planned will be my first contra dance trip, first non-family trip, and first cross-border travel since February 2020 (let’s just say we were very very lucky that time). It’s a road trip and then a week-long dance camp (!!!) at a summer camp venue in MA. The pandemic precautions for the camp are pretty robust, and people mostly stay on-site all week, so I felt safer going there than to a typical urban dance weekend with everyone eating in restaurants and such. Plus, it will satisfy my annual craving to get out of the city once summer hits. In the meantime, though, I’ve been gradually increasing my in-office…

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