Time to Rest

I’m sure I speak for many of us when I say I’m tired. It’s been a long and extremely stressful winter; for some of us, it’s been traumatic. Social media is showing me memories from this time last year, when there was an outburst of online creativity and caring and memes. We poured our fear and anxious energy into action. We didn’t realize then just how long a marathon we were in for, did we? This weekend, I had four days off work in a row, for the first time since Christmas. (I’m Canadian, so we get Good Friday off, and some sectors also get the following Monday.) I was prepared to crash for two days. Which I did, and thoroughly enjoyed it. On Friday and Saturday, I lounged around in bed, finished a book (reading, not writing, alas), went for some walks, ordered pizza, and that was pretty much it. I was not prepared to crash for three days. But that happened anyway. On Sunday, my big accomplishment was dragging my own butt and my husband’s out to the backyard with a picnic blanket so we could enjoy the beautiful weather. On the fourth day, Monday, I ran around like a madwoman (I have a mental disorder, I can say that) to try and accomplish at least some of the things I’d hoped to catch up on…like housework and dealing with all the vegetables we had just optimistically had delivered Somehow it took me all afternoon to make carrot…

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Last Chance to Read…

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting tired of staring at all the same stuff in my house, where I’ve spent a lot of time in the past year. (Canada has designated this March 11 as a Day of Observance and reflection. Where I live, most things shut down between March 13 and 17 last year. It’s been both a very long year and a very short one, in different ways.) A mixture of heavy workload and pandemic depression/anxiety have meant slow progress on the decluttering front, but I am getting there, gradually. The most recent success was handing off to a neighbour some unopened condiments that I bought in the Great Shopping Panic of 2020…they hadn’t expired yet, but I knew we wouldn’t get through them before they did, and my neighbour was as happy to take them as I was to get rid of them. Here at TDP, we’re also doing some virtual housecleaning, taking down the oldest of our short works. The short stories and serials that we posted as freebies in 2014, 2015, and 2016 will be unpublished at the end of March. That will allow us to resell them to other markets (as reprints) or reissue them as ebooks as individual authors. That means you have until March 31 to read: my fantasy serial Still Waters Run Deep Erin’s horror story The Contract Kit’s creation myth When the World Was Young and more! If you want to read them all, start from here and…

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The Breath-Stealer

by Siri Paulson In a dark pandemic winter our breath is trapped in our lungs with fear of the breath-stealer “Look for the helpers” sounds stale by now “Let’s talk” sounds laughable “Thank you” will never be enough we cling to “Protect the vulnerable” but it’s a long, long road each of us walking alone or in tiny groups, bereft of the touches and smiles and tiny moments that made up our lives, once A day in the neighbourhood, going for brunch with a loved one, chatting with shopkeepers, strolling home along the sidewalk our breath easy, relaxed… A spin on the dance floor, a community moving together, stomping and twirling as one, smiling into others’ faces, breathing each other’s air as the band plays on the stage… A hug from a loved one, family or a dear friend, catching a wink or a gaze, sharing a plate across the table, a visit to a home where we are welcome, a head massage or a playful poke, breathless because we’re laughing so hard, casual platonic intimacy… A flight across the globe, an adventure away from home, new air entering our bodies as we breathe deep new smells sounds tastes sights, to carry back inside us, expanded… We never dreamed of a day when we’d lose all of those at once the little things and the big ones, crowds and theatres and stadiums casual shopping, casual hugs, bare faces and free breaths, lives more expansive than we knew… Now we are…

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Just Keep Swimming, Again

It’s now well and truly into 2021, dear readers, and we’re still here! But wait…where is the new and shining not-2020-anymore we were promised? Politics has settled down, that’s huge. But the pandemic just keeps throwing new curveballs our way, winter is still happening, we still can’t travel or even (depending on where you are) socialize in person. It’s tough being human in this environment, and unfortunately for our devoted fans, writers are also humans. Writing has gotten much harder for many of us. Unfortunately for our loved ones, we’re happier and less neurotic when we’re able to write. But being sad or anxious or stressed makes it harder to write…you can see the problem. Seems like every year around this time, I blog about going back to writerly basics: write the smallest amount possible, write something fun, trick the brain into being creative again. In November, three of us wrote 100 words a day. In December, I did it again. 6000 words in two months is not a lot, but it was the best I’d managed all year. It was going so well that for January, I decided to inch the goal up to 4000 words. Then, of course, January knocked the wind out of me, as it always does. I wrote zero words of fiction. I did, however, determinedly do a lot of brainstorming and planning for my novel in progress. (I had hit my usual wall of just-under-20K where the beginning fizzles out and I realize I…

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2020 at Turtleduck Press: A Year Like No Other (we really, really hope)

Well, THAT was a year, huh? Let’s hope we don’t see another one like that anytime soon. (Hear that, 2021? We’re watching you…) Dear readers, you might have imagined us here at TDP living the life of luxury enjoyed by illustrious authors such as ourselves, lounging on a beach in an undisclosed location with our toes in the sand, our only worry how to balance a laptop and an umbrella drink in a hammock…wait, where was I? Oh yes. Sadly, I must destroy your–ahem, my–happy illusion. 2020 sucked for us, as it did for the rest of the world. There were day job issues and health issues and politics and a little thing called a pandemic that sent all of our preexisting mental health issues through the roof. I spent most of the year alternating between comfort reads and post-apocalyptic stories that, weirdly, made me feel a bit better. (At least we’re not living in the world of Fury Road. Um, yet. And even if we were, we could still band together to overthrow the…where was I?) As you might have guessed, it wasn’t our most stellar year as a publisher. We did manage to put out The Best of Turtleduck Press, Volume II to celebrate having somehow made it to our 10th year of existence. (Here’s Volume I, in case you missed it.) We’re still publishing monthly short stories and serials and weekly blog posts. But we fell a bit short of what we did in, say, 2019 (and,…

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TeamTinyNaNo

If you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you know that all four of us Turtleduck Press authors are old hands at NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). That’s where we met, in fact–on the NaNo forums, many moons ago. (Or most of us? One of them will correct me if I’m wrong.) Most of us still haven’t met in person…but I digress. Back in the day, we were young(er) and foolish and could whip out the requisite 50,000 words in a month without breaking a sweat. (Okay, maybe a little bit of sweat.) But for me at least, those days are long gone. My brain, wrists, and responsibilities won’t let me rack up words like that anymore. Still, there’s something magical about that NaNo energy. So we were talking in our regular virtual write-in, and KD suggested that even if we couldn’t manage 1,667 words a day in November, we could surely manage 100 words a day. (Hat tip to Debbie Ohi as well.) It would get us 3000 words by the end of the month. That’s not exactly a NaNo, but it’s not nothing, either. It’s about a chapter (or two chapters or half a chapter, depending on pacing). Or it’s one short story. Or it’s several flash fiction stories. And, more importantly, it’s more than we had in October. For me at least, it was also more than I’d written in October. Spoiler: we did it. We may not have written every single day, but Erin, KD,…

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Comfort Everything

Apropos of nothing at all, I’m going to share some of the things that have gotten me through this year so far, the things I turn to when I really need a pick-me-up. Virtual concerts. Since touring isn’t an option for musicians right now, a lot of them are doing virtual concerts…which means I get to enjoy tons of live music that I’d never hear otherwise. It doesn’t make up for not having contra dance (which almost always has live music), but it helps. My favourite has been a weekly series of old-time/trad/folk music concerts (fiddle, mandolin, guitar, piano, sometimes banjo, sometimes singing) by dynamic duo Jay Ungar and Molly Mason on Facebook. The two of them have a calming presence and a rapport that’s a joy to watch. Here’s their Halloween special. Another new discovery is an a capella group called Windborne. Online chats. I generally prefer text chat over video chat, maybe because I’ve been doing it so long (since the 90s on Yahoo!). There’s been an ongoing chat with some of my dance friends, where we dip in and out to share our struggles (and boy have there been struggles) and our joys. I have an extrovert friend who (bless her) will periodically poke me on chat to see how I’m doing, and she keeps doing it even though I rarely initiate. And I’ve mentioned before how our regular Turtleduck Press chats are keeping me grounded. Comfort reading. One doesn’t become an author without madly loving books,…

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Walking Weather

I think I’ve written before about how I spent this summer either gardening or hiding from the heat indoors. (It hit 30 C / 85 F all of a sudden at the beginning of the summer, and pretty much stayed there until the end of August, when it dropped suddenly.) We had a truly ridiculous tomato harvest from early August until the end of September, so that sucked up most of my outdoors time and energy. But now the tomatoes are done (or at least all picked and ripening indoors). It’s well and truly fall…and for me, that means time to revisit my favourite nearby walks and seek out all the colours. I started walking just about on the fall equinox, and have kept it up pretty steadily for the two weeks since then…not every single day, but many of them. That’s new for me; I like walks but have never done them so regularly (not counting ten minutes here and there during the public-transit commute I don’t have right now). Most of the walks are pretty short, twenty or thirty minutes, squeezed in at random times between work and other tasks. But I’m already noticing a physical difference–I will admit I’ve been feeling pretty creaky during this time of remote working, and I’m positive I’m too young to be creaky! The walks are also proving to be an excellent stress reliever and mindfulness tool…which I knew, of course, but it’s amazing how often one needs to be reminded. I…

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Coat of Scarlet: A Clockpunk Tale, Part 7

by Siri Paulson Read previous installments: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 For Marius, deciding to make himself a place aboard ship was rather easier than the doing of it. Gloriana was friendly enough, but Marius dared not rely on her alone to be an ally among the crew; her comments about himself and Niko had been sufficiently ambivalent to give him pause, and moreover, being ship’s quartermaster kept her far too busy to nursemaid a land-rat. The other crew members tended to either give Marius a wide berth or rib him mercilessly. At least they confined their ribbing to his haplessness aboard ship; Gloriana seemed the only one brave enough to give commentary on Niko. He could have ingratiated himself with mending, but he was still working on the justacorps coat until his fingers cramped. It had been worn long enough that the lining needed mending in more spots than just the one, and the cuffs needed turning. The attempted theft at the docks had not improved matters, for it had been both torn – again – and dirtied. After all that, he was determined to return it to Niko in better condition than it had come to him. So he found himself with no spare skills to offer, nor any but the most basic knowledge of the workings of the airship. The best he could do was keep out of the way during maneuvers and drills –…

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Eating Seasonally

Apparently we’re all thinking about plants right now. Back to nature? Planning for the apocalypse? Both? I don’t know about you, but the pandemic has left me feeling very much adrift in time. What day of the week is it? What month is it? How many months has it been since the last time I walked out of my office building? (Answer: six months as of next weekend, although there are murmurs that we might be going back sometime before December. Dunwanna.) How many years has 2020 lasted? One thing that’s helped me reclaim a sense of time is really digging into seasonal eating – that is, eating what’s in season in my area (on the Great Lakes). My spouse and I have a smallish vegetable and herb garden, and we’ve been buying local more and more…(1) to help out our local farmers and small businesses during the pandemic, and (2) for environmental reasons, which got a boost due to (1). In spring (May-June here), we ate a lot of arugula (rocket), our favourite salad green, peppery and crisp. We grew radishes and ate those, mostly with the arugula. We got introduced to garlic scapes – like green onions except for garlic. If you’re a garlic farmer, you have to cut them off so the garlic head will get nice and big, so you might as well sell them… In early summer, there was basil (all links are to my Instagram) and mint, the beginning of the cherry tomatoes and…

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