Home Posts tagged "Siri Paulson" (Page 3)

Tag: Siri Paulson

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,…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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 –…

Continue reading

Week Seven

We’re into Week Seven of pandemic life here in Toronto. More than that if you count the weeks of constant hand sanitizing, before schools closed and most workplaces were declared non-essential. I’m counting from when my workplace told us to start working from home full-time, and I started living my best life as a hermit. Okay, I’m kidding about that last part. The stress is taking its toll. My will-power and short-term memory are shot. Keeping the kitchen stocked with groceries is taking way too many brain cycles. I’m turning inward – I keep needing naps at odd times, I don’t want to talk to people (except my spouse, he’s allowed…), and going outside for walks is too much effort (though to be fair, we’ve had a cold and miserable spring). Yet I have no desire to watch TV, and I’m having trouble concentrating on books (!). And no, I am definitely not spending this time learning new skills or reorganizing my house. I live with many of these symptoms from depression, but I don’t think I’m depressed now. I think it’s just freakin’ hard to live through a world-altering era of massive uncertainty. (And that’s even with all the privilege I have: I’m not an essential worker, I haven’t been laid off, my workplace is set up to allow us to work from home (just in the last few years…how timely is that?!), I don’t have kids, my home is big enough that my spouse and I and his…

Continue reading

2019 at Turtleduck Press

Happy 2020, faithful blog readers! Here’s hoping you’ve had some time off (check), are feeling rested (well, I was until I finally caught the death!cold that’s been going around, and I still can’t sleep a full night without coughing), and are heading into the new year with at least a tiny bit of optimism (check). We’ve had a busy year here at Turtleduck Press writing stuff for your enjoyment… We returned to the world of our fantasy novel City of Hope and Ruin with an anthology called Love Shines Through, featuring romance stories from not just Kit and me (the authors of the original novel) but also KD and Erin, who kept asking us hard questions about the world that they needed answers to in order to write their stories. (Note to self: next time, write a story bible or a wiki while you’re writing the novel. It’s much easier than doing it after the fact, when you’ve forgotten all the details.) The four stories have a wide variety of pairings, because that’s how we roll: two queer (F/F and M/non-binary) and two straight (M/F). Our full-length novel release for the year was by KD Sarge, a lighthearted fantasy adventure called Flame Isfree and the Feather of Fate, featuring a runaway elf named Flame, a party of adventurers on a quest for untold riches, a priest who won’t tell them where they’re going or why, and one very annoying ex-betrothed. (Free sample.) We’ve also been putting out free fantasy serials:…

Continue reading

Two Poems in Memory of Ursula K. Le Guin

by Siri Paulson A Bit of Background Ursula K. Le Guin has always been one of my favourite writers, but I had drifted away from her over the years, as one does. When she died in January 2018, I decided to go back and read all of her Hainish universe works, many of which I had missed (she wrote novels, short stories, and various lengths in between). I’m about halfway through, reading each of them in order. It was fascinating to watch her craft develop. I fell in love with her work all over again. And…well, I’m a writer, so I process things by writing… The first poem is about a (fictional) invention of Le Guin’s called the “ansible,” a way to communicate faster than light in her Hainish universe, which does not have FTL travel. The second poem is about her three early SF novels and how they led her to writing her fifth and most famous novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. (The first Earthsea book is her fourth novel, but I left that out since I haven’t reread it yet…might need to write more poetry later on!) Enjoy! Ansible vast gulfs of darknessseparate humanityeach in our own tiny orbitbridging that distancewould take years she gave us a wayto reach out,not to touchbut something greater—conversationthe yearning to hear another,satisfiedthe need to be heard,metthe wish to understandstill out of reachbut just a little closer we whirl in our orbitsknowing nowthat we can talkand for just an instantthe vast distance…

Continue reading

NaNoFail?

This year, I set out to do National Novel Writing Month for the first time in most of a decade. I’d won NaNo six times between 2005 and 2011, and then hadn’t really tried again since. Oh, I had made halfhearted attempts to use that NaNo energy to finish a partial novel or edit a draft, but I’d never come close to the wordcount and the free abandon of my six 50,000-word drafts. (No, none of them are available on Amazon. Because, that’s why.) So I really wanted to prove to myself that I still had the chops. Then Real Life hit. It wasn’t entirely unpredictable. In fact, it wasn’t unpredictable at all. I was out of town the first weekend, then back to work without a break. Then I started some new meds that gave me horrible insomnia for a week (a known side effect, so that wasn’t even a surprise). By the time I caught up on sleep from all of that, the month was half over. It’s not that I wasn’t writing. I took my laptop with me on the weekend trip and squeaked out a few hundred words each day. I came home and every day, even through the insomnia, I would put down another few hundred words. But for NaNo, you need to write 1,666 words every day for a month. If you miss one day, every other day requires more words. So I kept thinking that my daily wordcount would pick up after I…

Continue reading

Contra Dance Love

This time last year, I was writing about contra dance and all the things I love about it, inspired by a weekend of dancing that I’d just gotten back from. Well, that’s an annual weekend, so the more things change… Since I wrote that post, I set in motion a big change to make my home dance community more LGBTQIA+ friendly, and turned into a community leader (!!!) in the process. The change was painful in some ways, but it’s completed now and the community is thriving, with lots of new energy from some younger, newer dancers who would not have felt so welcome before. Right now, I’m a committee member-at-large, because shepherding that process AND doing our twice-monthly newsletter was too much. So instead I’ve been rewriting parts of our website, networking with organizers of dances in other cities, going to the occasional committee meeting, and posting dance-related memes from our Facebook page. Every once in a while it hits me that this isn’t just an activity I do, this is my community. At the dance two weeks ago, a friend and I were floor managing–doing setup and tear-down, and monitoring things during the event–and a couple of minor crises popped up. (They were both related to the fact that for a while during the event, nobody in attendance had a key to the venue.) We nabbed the other committee members who were there and solved the crises, then worked together to set up new systems so they wouldn’t…

Continue reading

Resting

On my Instagram, I’ve been following this account called The Nap Ministry, a performance art project by Tricia Hersey about how resting is a form of political resistance. She posts about how rest was something practiced by the leisure class as they exploited the working and enslaved classes (with both economic and racial inequities). Today there’s an emphasis on hustle, on being busy, on having side gigs. That’s at least in part because it’s hard for many folks to get a regular, steady 9–5 job with benefits that pays the bills without side gigs, but also because being busy is glorified in our society. Lean out, Hersey argues—lie down, and reclaim your right to rest. I’m thinking about that today because we’ve just had a long weekend, heading into a week off for me. My day job has been incredibly busy as we race to get a big project out the door. (It’s not quite out yet, but my colleagues are handling it, thank goodness.) At the same time I’ve been doing edits for the next Turtleduck Press novel, coming from KD Sarge in just a few months. And I even ended up spending Saturday afternoon working on a piece of the day-job project that arrived, naturally, on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend. After all that, I’m feeling more exhausted and brain-dead than I have in a long time. I spent the rest of Saturday staring blankly at things. Sunday and Monday I started to feel human again,…

Continue reading

The Hibernator

Surprise, it’s me again! Kit had to bow out this week, so you’ll get her twice later on instead. It’s been a tough spring around here. The weather has been cold and wet for months (my day-job boss made a crack about how we seem to have moved to Vancouver — think Seattle if you’re American, or Scotland if you’re British), the world continues to be a dumpster fire in new and exciting ways, and all I want to do is hibernate. So I’ve been hibernating. Aside from the attempts at nesting I told you about last time, I’ve been reading more, watching Netflix (our new favourite show is The Good Place), and getting constantly sucked into Facebook. Some of those things are healthier coping mechanisms than others, I will admit… On the nesting front, we’ve also been tinkering with recipes. Most recently we’ve worked out: an excellent salad — arugula, cherry tomatoes, walnuts, some kind of cheese (blue, goat, Brie, Camembert, you name it), and homemade vinaigrette (based roughly on this) our new favourite brunch dish, huevos rancheros — our somewhat inauthentic version involves layering cheese quesadillas, BBQ pork or beef (fried up with some vegetables), and fried eggs, with maybe some hot sauce on top roasted beets — why do we never think of buying beets? Roasted in the oven with a little oil drizzled on top, they’re so flavourful, as it turns out! Perhaps helped along by all this delicious food, I’m gradually coming out of this…

Continue reading