Announcement: Making Some Tweaks at TDP

Hello readers and loyal fans! You’re getting a bonus blog post from me this month because we’ve got some adjustments to tell you about. As you may have noticed, the last few years have been…kind of a lot, as the kids say. Here at TDP, the four of us are writers, but outside of TDP we also have families, health challenges, and day jobs to juggle, on top of, well… *gestures to the world at large* So we’re pulling back on the monthly free content. Instead of a yearly output of 10 freebies (short stories, serial installments, poetry), we’re moving to 4 freebies. The weekly blog posts will stay the same. We’ve been putting out 2 longer works (novels or anthologies) for sale each year; we plan to maintain that schedule or even increase it if we can. That may mean you’ll see a range of lengths, not only full-length novels. We’ll indicate the length (novel, novella, etc.) on the marketing copy for each so that you’ll know what you’re getting, and they’ll be priced accordingly. We’re excited about these changes. Some of us shine the most as writers with stories that have more space to breathe, and we’ll be able to focus on the kind of storytelling we love best. We’ve been writing more serials lately, and now we’ll be able to explore those middle lengths even more, which in turn opens up more storytelling possibilities. And in general, writers do their best work when they’re not scrambling for…

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Vegetable Gardening, Low-Stress Edition

You might have noticed that the world continues to be incredibly stressful even as the pandemic settles down (please please please). Personally, I’m done. I mean, I keep half an eye on the news and take action as needed, but I’m trying to be ruthless about cutting out or reframing my approach to things that don’t need me to stress about them. Take vegetable gardening. My spouse and I just celebrated our tenth anniversary of being homeowners, and we’ve been growing vegetables for most of that time (thanks to my having grown up with a dad who grew up on a farm). I’ve coddled them, I’ve researched weed control, I’ve carefully staked and pruned my tomatoes, I’ve mourned when something got hit by a pest or a blight. This year I didn’t have the energy for any of that. I asked my spouse to pick out and order whatever vegetable seedlings (baby plants) he wanted, and I would help plant them. Normally we put in some vegetable seeds as well, carrots or radishes, but that’s more my thing, not his; this year, a seed mix of local flowers got scattered willy-nilly in a bare patch. (Some went into pots, too, but for whatever reason, none of those sprouted. Not stressing.) He chose most of our usual things: tomatoes (lots), green beans, various peppers, basil. Then he added watermelon, parsley, mini sunflower, and something called a cucamelon. (Despite the name that makes it sounds like a new and trendy cross, it’s…

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Coat of Scarlet: A Clockpunk Tale, Part 8

by Siri Paulson Read previous installments: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 By the time Niko’s airship approached its next port, Marius knew he could delay no longer. They had been skirting the Continent and were to come in for refuelling and reprovisioning at Porto, since Olissipona, the other major city in West Iberia, was occupied with rebuilding. Niko hid it well, but by the increasing frequency he was stopping by to ask about his coat, Marius knew he was uncomfortable without it. Whatever business he had in port, he wanted to wear the justacorps. To make himself recognizable? To project an air of authority? Some other reason Marius could not guess? Regardless, the coat was ready, and Marius was only fooling himself by continuing to work on it. He was a little anxious about how his amendments would be received. More, he could not shake the fear that once he handed it over, Niko would have no further use for him. The moments they had shared made him reasonably certain that this fear had little basis in fact, yet it proved remarkably stubborn. Gloriana’s earlier warnings about Niko would not leave his ears. He did not even know what language they spoke in Porto. Still, he could not bear to keep Niko any longer from the coat that clearly meant so much to him. So, early in the morning before he could lose his nerve…

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Clothes Make the Woman, Redux

This time last year, I blogged about how the pandemic was changing both my style tastes and my size and how I was adapting. This year…well, my wardrobe is still mostly in stay-at-home pandemic mode (as am I), but it continues to evolve… I’m still wearing a lot of athleisure, especially as the days heat up (here in Toronto we’ve had several heatwaves already). Reitmans has a wide size range and a variety of comfy leggings (and jeans); Icebreaker does the best merino t-shirts for both warm and cool weather; Tentree uses recycled polyester in their athletic line. I’m also slowly adding other items to meet my non-athleisure style needs. Really digging loose flowy tops in natural fibres — especially since I’ve at last discovered where to get tunic-length tops that are cut to skim over my decidedly not-pregnant round belly. Shout-out to Blue Sky Clothing! They also have comfy bike shorts in extended sizing. Since I have a terrible time finding shorts that fit me well and don’t pull in weird ways, I’m quite liking this leggings-meets-shorts trend (at least in my own house…ahem). To save my Northern European skin while gardening and walking, I’ve also picked up a couple of lightweight, oversized button-downs in organic cotton from MEC (last year) and hemp from Patagonia (this year). They go nicely with my straw hat. Coastal Grandma style, anyone? And I’m leaning into the colours and prints I love, that bring out my colouring and make me feel great. (Blue…

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Re-entry, Part 3

[CW: pandemic, mental health] Here in Toronto, the world hasn’t fully started up again yet. Lots of white-collar workers are still working from home at least some of the time, and downtown is still pretty empty. My contra dance group has just held its first dance since February 2020 (though I didn’t feel comfortable attending…maybe next time). And I’m tiptoeing back, one step at a time…but there are an awful lot of steps to take, somehow. (Case in point: this is my third re-entry post.) My spouse and I just got back from our first trip since summer 2020 — we took the train to Montreal to visit family for a week. It was wonderful to spend time with some of my immediate family members again, as well as hug a dear friend and pet a kitty and visit a bilingual indie SF&F bookstore. The travel and associated “new” experiences were less anxiety-inducing than I’d feared, especially since I had a really hard time with going back to the office pre-Omicron. My anxiety from earlier in the pandemic still flares up sometimes, but it’s back to being more manageable now. As long as I’m able to keep my mask on, I’m okay. (It gets harder as the hours stretch on or when I need to take the mask off in close quarters.) The part I found more exhausting was all the “peopling”, that is, spending time around people (other than my spouse, who doesn’t count). I’m an introvert and have…

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Timelines II

by Siri Paulson in that other timeline the one that made some kind of narrative sense the one we could all agree was real we got our dual shots and it was over a year and a half after it began the world resumed better than before because we learned what the universe wanted us to know in the timeline that existed in a just world the vaccines came first to the most vulnerable countries, neighbourhoods, individuals who could least afford the high price of getting sick and inequities were levelled out instead of being piled higher in the timeline that never went sideways the one that even now we can’t believe we won’t see again we still breathed on each other and moved in crowds without a second thought we never knew the fear that burrowed into the bronchioles of our lungs the invisible six-foot spheres that followed us everywhere so what then do we call this timeline we’re stuck in now a Groundhog Day of wave after wave a sea that threatens to take our breath? if we can’t undo the last two years if we can’t step sideways and disappear into another part of the multiverse where will we go from here? what is the after and how will we know when we’ve reached it?

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Writing Through a Pandemic, Two Years In

It’s been just over two years since we learned the phrase “social distancing”. A lot of the writers I know have been struggling. Turns out it’s hard to be creative when there’s bone-deep uncertainty washing away at your foundations. Related: the romantic myth of the writer in a garret. It’s also hard to be creative when you’re scrambling to fulfill basic needs like housing or taking care of your health and/or loved ones…even without a pandemic on top of that. (Here we give a nod to musicians, many of whom have been determinedly putting up livestreams and online concerts while their main source of income was cut off. Those have been a huge source of comfort to me, and I hope to the various musicians as well.) I’ve had plenty of creative struggles, too, during this time. I barely wrote at all in 2020, although I did manage two installments of my clockpunk serial (I’ll get back to that one day, I swear!) and a few thousand words during NaNoWriMo. During most of 2021, I could only write short pieces that all confronted the state of the world head-on, from pandemic-themed poetry to flash fiction. (We won’t talk about the short story I started in 2019, set at the Olympics during…a pandemic. Oops?) Then came NaNoWriMo 2021. I’ve talked before about how I made my secret stretch goal of 10,000 words on my unashamedly escapist feminist fantasy WIP. It felt really good. I had energy again for a few months.…

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Comfort Everything, Take 2

Dear readers, this quarter of the year is always the hardest for me, and I know I’m not alone, especially with all the things going on this year. (Recently it seems like we’re saying that every year, though…) So this week I’m revisiting a topic I’ve covered before in these, um, pages: where to turn for comfort. Here are the comfort reads and comfort viewing that have been helping me get through lately. Books I’ve blogged about comfort reads before, so here are some I didn’t cover last time… Epic fantasy Although I read (and write) all over the science fiction and fantasy spectrum, I read Tolkien at a formative time, so fantasy will always be my first love. For about a decade now, I’ve been taking time around the holidays in December and into January to read epic fantasy. (No grimdark either, thank you.) This year, I read the first two books in Elizabeth Bear’s Silk Road–inspired Eternal Sky trilogy, Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars. Featuring a nomad prince in exile, a princess-turned-wizard, a very interesting horse, and lots of epic landscapes and cities and cultures. (CW: there’s a plague in the second book.) Book three will be next year’s read, and there’s also a sequel trilogy. (My previous epic-fantasy holiday read was N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which is breathtakingly good but 100% not a comfort read.) Historical fantasy Still in the fantasy vein: historical fantasy, roughly defined as a past era in the “real world” with…

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The Mighty Vegetable

Like many people, my spouse and I have been rotating through various pandemic hobbies… Mind you, we’ve both been working full-time and dealing with pandemic exhaustion and a certain natural tendency towards inertia, so our hobby attempts have been pretty minimal. (Wordle is good for that.) No new side hustles or DIY remodelling here…though we did get this done: Now? It’s on to vegetables. See, cooking is something we do together, to decompress after work (or at lunchtime, while we’re lucky enough to both be working from home), to get out of our heads and away from our screens/keyboards, to spend time together, to do something hands-on and also delicious. And I’ve become passionate about eating local. A few months after the pandemic started, we signed up for a small grocery delivery service that partners with local farmers and other producers. (I first wrote about them here.) Between that and our vegetable garden, we’ve been doing a lot of seasonal eating. This winter we’ve eaten so many roasted carrots and parsnips and squash that, uh, one of us finally rebelled. To be honest, the other one (me) was getting bored of our go-to vegetables, too. So I’ve started adding one new-to-us locally grown vegetable to every biweekly order. (Full disclosure: In the alternate weeks, we get delivery from one of the big chains and buy some non-local produce.) It started with rutabaga/swede [the big yellow and purple root vegetable, not the smaller white and purple root vegetable–apparently there’s some overlap…

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2021 at Turtleduck Press: What Just Happened?

*looks around wildly* Was that a year? Or was it a millennium? Did anyone see where it went? Or are we still living in it? WILL WE EVER ESCAPE? *starts humming “Hotel California”* Regardless, the numbers on the virtual calendar seem to have changed, so here we are again, trying to take stock of, as Kit put it, a liminal year. In 2021, KD saved our necks and pulled off the astounding feat of not only writing a book during a pandemic (writers tend to be sensitive, anxious overthinkers, which does not lend itself to creativity during an ongoing crisis) but writing a good book during a pandemic. May the Best Ghost Win is a Halloween novel, but can be read any time of the year if you’re a lover of haunted houses, reality TV shows about ghosthunting, magical secrets, found family, and banter (all the banter!). We also kept writing shorter work: an ongoing ocean-based SF serial by Kit (starts here) a ghost-story serial by Erin (starts here) poetry by me (here and here) and Erin (here) and more! And as always, we continued our weekly blog posts, which are slightly easier than stories because we writers are used to processing our thoughts through words, and blog posts don’t require higher-order thinking skills or the careful coordination of right brain and left brain. (Usually.) Still, they do require some crafting, so we’re grateful to you for taking the time to read them. We made it through the deca-um, year.…

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