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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Midsize Style, Instagram, and Me

I’ve blogged here before about my evolving relationship with style. This year I decided to lean into it as a new side hobby (besides writing, of course). One reason is that I needed a new side hobby: gardening hasn’t been doing it for me, contra dancing has been scant although that’s about to change, travel has still been mostly on hold, and I like rotating hobbies but it’s been a while since I picked up a new one. Another is that [CW: weight…..] like many people, I’ve gained weight in the past few years, so I wanted to tap into ways to feel good about my body as it is now. Instagram has turned out to be a great source for that, interestingly enough. Yes, yes, the evils of social media and so on, but it’s all about who you interact with and follow/friend. I’m now following a variety of folks of all sizes, some style-related, others exercise- and outdoors-related (more aspirational than inspirational at this point, alas). I’m staying away from “how to flatter your body” and “how not to wear…” accounts, focusing instead on people with a wide range of personal styles, both trendy and not. “Midsize” is a term originating on TikTok, meaning folks who, like me, aren’t quite plus size but are near the top of “straight” sizes. Following midsize style accounts gives me a sense of how things might look on my body and encourages me to be more daring. I’m also following people who…

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The Birth of a Story

I’ve just turned in the story that will become TDP’s next long work for sale, so I thought it might be fun to go back through some of the steps I took getting here. (Good luck trying to replicate them, though! The process of story inspiration is anything but linear, at least if you’re like me.) A few years before the pandemic, I was generating story ideas by looking at calls for submission from themed short-story anthologies. How those work is that an editor and a publisher collaborate to come up with a theme, often they’ll tap a few better-known authors to headline the anthology, and then they’ll put out a call to fill the rest of the slots. I wrote and submitted a few stories that way. More often, I wrote lots of notes about potential stories, but they needed more time to percolate, so they didn’t get finished in time for the anthology deadlines. That’s okay because most anthology themes aren’t so specific that the story would work only there and nowhere else (and if they are that specific, I don’t write for them, for exactly that reason). This story was one of those that needed to percolate. As often happens, I had an image in my head and a nameless feeling that came with it, but no plot, no character, nothing I could dig into to make it a story. Then the pandemonium arrived and, well, not much writing happened for a while. In the meantime, the…

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Autumn Love

I was born in autumn, and I’ve had an affinity for the season ever since. In recent years I’ve had difficulty with the humid heat of summer, so I’m relieved when the crisp breezes blow in, even though I despise the damp cold and grey skies of winter in Toronto. It’s always a dance between being present for the few months that autumn lasts and spending them bracing myself for winter. This year, though, I’m really feeling the love, letting myself sink into the sensations of fall… My taste buds switched over weeks ago from salads to stews and roasted vegetables. This past weekend we cooked beef brisket for the first time, and it was phenomenal. I’ve started to crave tea again — in the summer I mostly just drink coffee and cold beverages. We’ve started baking again — next weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving and we’ll be doing GF pumpkin pie, as usual. I’ve been enjoying pulling out my hoodies, warmer cardigans, and plaid flannels (shout-out to Patagonia, who carry a properly thick cotton flannel shirt in lots of colourways, although I just went for blue because of course I did). I’ve even worn my down vest a couple of times already — it’s Canada, what can I say? It hasn’t been all that cold at night, so we’ve been leaving the bedroom window open a crack, which makes it deliciously cool and makes our blankets feel even cozier — a feeling I really miss in the summer. This is…

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A Queen and a Princess

It’s been a weird couple of weeks, friends. Between the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the release of the controversial new Little Mermaid trailer, the Internet has been busier than usual fighting with itself. It’s hard not to see parallels between (1) the rage against those pointing out that the British monarchy has done great harm to much of the non-European world (with a side note of “any guesses as to why the British press hate Meghan Markle so much?”) and (2) the rage against those who are excited to see a Black woman play the live-action Ariel. Let’s break those down. I’m a bit of a royal-watcher, I confess. I thought King Charles III seemed absolutely shattered, Princess Charlotte looked like an adorable Edwardian orphan in her flat black hat and coat, and it was bittersweet that Her Majesty passed away in the place where she loved to relax. The Queen did her duty to her country, for so many decades, unflaggingly and with flashes of humour that humanized and endeared her. She meant something to an awful lot of people, who have been grieving her loss as if she were their own grandmother or at least a dear family friend. I don’t wish to belittle those feelings. At the same time, she carried on an institution — the British monarchy — that has done immeasurable harm. The Queen is invoked and commemorated in various ways all over Canada, she is (was) the head of state, she appears…

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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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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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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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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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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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