Home Archive by category "Bloggish Things" (Page 5)

Category: Bloggish Things

Thoughts, essays, and comments from the writers of Turtleduck.

When the Muse Wakes Up

So it’s been a month and four days since Hailey’s passing, and we’re still grieving. We’re adjusting, little by little. I’ve been working a lot and trying to write, as I always do when I’m coping with something I’m hurting over. But this time…it’s like my muse suddenly woke up from a long slumber. Or, I just got tired of not writing. One of those two. Or both. And there is so much I am trying to do now, it’s not even funny: ~Poetry submissions to contests and literary magazines (online), often requiring revisions to existing poems or writing new ones, as they usually don’t accept poems published on social media (and most of my newer stuff is on Instagram). ~My short story for the TDP anthology, theoretically due next month, on its third rewrite. I scrapped what I was doing, rethought it, pulled Tarot cards on some things, and wrote 3,000 words on it already. Most I’ve written on one project all year. What?! It also spawned a SERIES IDEA which I am contemplating. ~Thinking about my poetry chapbook, Eterne (Esperanto for “Eternally”) — I wasn’t planning on publishing any more chapbooks, buuuuut I have so many new poems that it just makes sense. Already bought a premade cover. Just need to, write more, organize it, all that stuff. ~My Radish erotic contemporary romance — experiment to see how that goes (it’s a serial website similar to Kindle Vella) and how writing contemporary romance works for me. I’m about…

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Let’s Talk About Books!

Oof. May was A Month, friends. But it’s behind us now, and let us not dwell on the many disasters it contained (except perhaps the basement, which is still having, shall we say, issues). (Also, if you missed it, the first part of my new serial, Across Worlds with You, is now up! You’ll get a new part every month until we’re done.) But anyway, let’s talk about books. Specifically the books I have read lately. I mostly read scifi and fantasy (and my guilty pleasure, cozy mysteries) but I do try to read outside of that periodically to expand my horizons and all that jazz. We Have Always Been Here, by Lena Nguyen (2021, science fiction) I really liked this one! Aside from colony missions and strange new planets and other things you’d expect in scifi, you also get an interesting delve into consciousness, what makes us human, androids, and interpersonal relationships. I basically read it all in one sitting, which is hard because it wasn’t short. Built, by Roma Agrawal (2018, nonfiction) We have a local restaurant that uses random books for decorations, and this one caught my eye, and then when I looked it up it sounded interesting, so I hunted it down. Ms. Agrawal is an architectural engineer, and she explains how things like skyscrapers and giant bridges and what have you get built, as well as looking at historical examples and how they worked (or didn’t). I learned quite a bit! Not least of which…

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The Hailey Chronicles: Saying Goodbye

Get ready to cry, y’all, because this story is a sad one. 🙁 (TW: pet death) One week ago, we had to say goodbye to our sweet furbaby Hailey. I’ve talked about her before. She had kidney disease. We were taking her to the vet three times a week for fluids and had her on a regimen of medication to keep her comfortable and functioning well, as she was nearing nineteen and a half. We knew her time was coming to an end — but by the beginning of this year, she was still mostly stable. Her bloodwork looked okay — not fantastic, because kidney disease, but not horrendous, either — and she still had fight in her. She’d still play, get on my mother’s lap, eat, drink, get on our kitchen table when we cooked to try to get scraps (or, spend time with her favorite humans), and hung out with me when I worked at night, often battling me to be allowed to walk on my keyboard. Damn, she loved it. It’s backlit in a rainbow of colors, which I think was the attraction. I have several Google Sheets that she’d completely bork if she did her little stroll across it, so there was always this panicked, “No, Hailey, no!” thing with me grabbing her gently and placing her next to my computer, encouraging her to just sit there and let me pet her instead. Sometimes it worked, and I’d work one handed, petting her with my free…

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Family Status: It’s Complicated

Surprise! You get me this week. Who will you get next week? Who knows? We’ll figure that out later. Anyway. Due to circumstances, I’ve been thinking a lot about my family this week, so I’ve been pondering the fact that there’s a reason I love to write and read books about found family. My family is actually pretty easy to explain–I found me some. My roommate is my dear friend. We met online, then met in person, then took up residence together first because she needed a place to stay, and then because we got on really well, and two incomes are (good lork, are they ever) better than one. I’m old enough to be her mom, so sometimes just to make things easier, I say I am. Sometimes I call her my “internet daughter.” Sometimes, when I want to make bio kid yelp, I call her “my good daughter.” My second kid, of course, I found by the side of the road after a rainbow fire tornado tore through and demolished–kidding! I actually birthed her. I have the scars to prove it. On the other hand, my son is not biologically my son. He and my child have been best friends since they were 16-ish, and at a point he needed a place to stay, and he’s been here off and on since. Mostly on. It does make it difficult sometimes to talk about my family–last week I was talking to a coworker who has known me for years,…

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Comfort Everything, Take 3

A little bit of everything that’s been giving me comfort lately, because why not. Reading I’ve blogged about comfort reading before (one, two), but here are a few I didn’t mention… Becky Chambers: To be honest, I bounced off her space opera series, but I gave her a second chance with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built and her writing worked much better for me in a shorter format. Hopeful, inclusive futures that don’t have giant stakes, just quiet travels and conversations and tea. Will definitely be picking up the sequel (A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). Angel Martinez: Another author of hopeful, inclusive futures, with a good dose of humour and adventure. My favourite of the three I’ve read so far is Safety Protocols for Human Holidays, a sweet and funny queer romance novella. Elizabeth Peters: I don’t know why I didn’t devour her entire Amelia Peabody series long ago, because it’s right up my alley, but I finally read the first one this year. British lady adventurer! Ancient Egypt! Archaeology! Banter! Unreliable narrator! (Not that she’s lying, but she misses things, especially things to do with emotions. Not unlike Murderbot — another comfort read.) I grew up on a steady diet of E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and the like, along with an Egypt obsession, so it would have been a natural progression. Oh well, I’m hooked now… And I still go back to England for comfort reads like To Say Nothing of the Dog by…

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Camp and Camp Are Similarly Stuck

Last month, I took my kids camping at a lovely and beloved state park. I hadn’t taken my kids before–usually the roomie and I went camping to run away from the kids. Actually, roomie was doing it to get away from her awful boss, it turns out. And then after escaping that job, she went camping so I wouldn’t have to go alone. But eventually I found that out, and invited the kids in hopes that someone would actually want to go camping. I didn’t think it would go well. I really didn’t! They are very into video games. And TikTok. But both had a great time. Delighted, I began plotting more camping trips. The first problem I needed to solve, I decided, was that of space. Our spring break trip had packed the car full-to-bursting, and we’d had a cabin to stay in. No way no how was I getting all that stuff PLUS three tents (instead of one big one–trust me on this, the first time you go camping on a mountainside and can’t find enough flat space to put your big tent on…) and all the other things one needs when electricity and plumbing are not provided into my faithful Corolla. She’s a great car, but she cannae break the laws of physics. I thought about a roof rack, but research showed I’d have to get roof rails first. Hundreds of dollars, and getting it up there at all would be a hassle, and taking it down–well,…

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Writer’s Block Sucks

Man, I haven’t been this blocked in years. Usually, it’s when I’ve taken a bad turn in the plot somewhere, and I need to start over from that point and figure out what happened and how to fix it. Usually, I’ll use a few different methods such as Tarot cards, freewriting, brainstorming, and even playing various writerly “games” to get at my subconscious and the answer—or, at least the beginning of the answer and over the hump so I can start writing again and in the right direction. (The writerly “games” are courtesy of Holly Lisle’s Create a Plot Clinic – an amazing book that I highly recommend — and I do not make any money from this; I am just a huge fan of her fiction and nonfiction). However, I’ve had a fair amount of upheaval in the past few years. We’ve got the pandemic, of course. My ongoing sleep issues, which are getting better, but aren’t perfect yet. We’ve got my usual chronic illness stuff. My business, which is thriving, but also takes a lot of time and energy. I’m still working on that part. I think a lot of this is effecting my creativity. I wrote 6,000 words in 2021. Abysmal, but things were crap that year. Last year was much better at 20,000 words. Yay! I’d said at least double 6,000, and I’d made that and a bit more. This year? I’m at about 2,000. Granted, we’re only into April, so there’s time. And I’ve been…

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Doing Great!

As evidenced by this post being three days late. How are you, friend? Anyway, I’m in the midst of an experiment, and I shall tell you about it because it involves you too. So, every so often, we here at TDP sit down and look at what we’re doing, and whether or not what we’re doing is successful, and what we could potentially do to be more successful, etc., etc., et al. One of the things we looked at recently involved our free shorts here on the website. We’ve been doing free shorts since we launched in 2010, to middling usefulness. So we looked at the shorts and how they were doing, and the data says that serial parts have, almost across the board, performed better than the stand alone shorts. So we’re trying a move to just serials, and no more stand alones. We decided that instead of mixing and matching serials, we’d have one person who would be the serial person for the year, and they’d write and then release a serial over however months were necessary for the story. So that leads me to here. (I volunteered to be the guinea pig.) No, this ain’t my first serial rodeo. But I did decide that, this time, I’d write the whole story at once. This is new. Every serial I’ve ever written I write the needed part as necessary. I’ve never done the whole thing before parts started going live. The thing about writing a serial as you…

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No More Mugs

In a tragedy that would hurt me daily if I didn’t work so hard at not thinking about it, I’m not allowed to buy more mugs. Not one. None. That’s been the rule for years…and yet, somehow, more creep in. I don’t know how. I follow the rules! Don’t let that rule make you think we’re a houseful of mug-haters! On the contrary! We drink a lot of tea. And coffee. Hot cocoa. And we love a good soup. So naturally we love mugs. Tall and narrow, short and fat, big or small (but not too small,) we love them all. And I mean, all. Let me explain. When I need pans, I buy them new—when I need pans, that means non-stick pans, because otherwise I have my glorious will-last-a-lifetime All-Clad scratch-and-dent from my wonderful father, which you can have when you pull them from my death-stiffened clutched fingers IF my roommate isn’t already there to defend them. I’m always down for a new kitchen gadget, and those I also acquire new. For reference, see my Instant Pot, my multi-cooker, the air fryer, the stand mixer, the spiralizer, my beautiful Vitamix… But dishes? Variety is fun, and also dishes are transient. We tend to be clumsy, you see, and we don’t really care. I figure there’s enough guilt in the world—no one needs to feel bad because they broke part of a fancy set of dishes. Chips happen. So in my house, the cabinet is full of thrifted dishes. Thrifting…

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Cover Reveal: Voice of the Sea

Surprise! We have a new book coming out soon, and because we’ve been doing this for so long, we obviously remembered to post a sneak peek (no we didn’t) and tell you about it ahead of time…ahem. Anyway, our next Turtleduck Press release is a near-future fairy tale retelling by Siri Paulson. It’s a novelette (about 50 pages or 12,000 words)…because that’s how long it wanted to be, that’s why. Links to come very soon, but in the meantime, here are the cover (isn’t it gorgeous?!) and the book description. Enjoy! If The Little Mermaid were set in the twenty-second century… In the aftermath of climate change, humans have abandoned the flooded coasts. Underwater, people of another kind struggle to rehabilitate the polluted seas. After one rescues a human engineer, she realizes he might hold the key. If she can learn how to interact with the world like a human, if she can understand them, if she can become enough like them, maybe they will help. Maybe he will help. But to reach him, she may need to sacrifice who she is…

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