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2023 at Turtleduck Press

You may have noticed that things have been a little quieter around here this past year. Your intrepid authors have been dealing with home repair crises (if anyone breathes the word “plumbing” in KD’s vicinity, she’ll send the piranhas after you). Also, family crises, health crises, the occasional good thing that doesn’t involve our computer keyboards, and… *gestures wildly* you know, all that distracting stuff that keeps happening in the rest of the world. The more Life happens outside our heads, the harder it is to get into our heads and make the stories happen. So it’s a wonder that we’re all still here and cracking jokes, but we are. And occasionally we’re even writing stuff! In 2023, we released one long(er) work of fiction for sale as an ebook, my own Voice of the Sea, featuring a post-fossil-fuel world, clashing worldviews, and a certain undersea fairy tale. Oh, and lots of ocean descriptions, just because I can. (Any guesses as to which ocean?) Kit kept the lights on at TDP the rest of the year by releasing a fantasy serial, Across Worlds with You. Look for the latest installment, number 8, next week! Erin has been writing (and publishing!) poetry elsewhere, and KD did NaNoWriMo for the first time in…a while…so creative things are happening — just not always things that are measurable in TDP publications. Thanks for hanging in there with the four of us. We’ll be here, plugging away, one page at a time. After all, that’s…

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2024 is Coming

To piggyback off Kit’s post (because I have no creativity whatsoever this week), I’ve been doing some noodling about 2024 and what I want to accomplish. This year has been a bit of a mixed bag writing-wise, some good, some not-so-good, and I’d like to ramp it up a bit, assuming there are no horrific crises or emergencies or general ongoing unpleasantness that makes things, well, unpleasant. So let’s talk about how things went this year first, shall we? I had a few goals. They were: To publish an erotic contemporary romance novella on Radish (similar to Kindle Vella), which was a pivot/experiment to see how readers would respond to my writing in a different genre. Result: The novella, BAV, as I am calling it, is about 1/3rd done. It’s on hold a bit while I figure some stuff out. It ended up being a bit deeper than I’d intended, delving into subjects like parental control, religious cults, and BDSM. Sooo I am deciding if I want to go all in, or if I want to rein it in some. To finish my anthology story. Result: I rewrote it twice, and started yet another rewrite which I believe will be the last. It just wasn’t working the first two times. It’s about 5,000 words now. Again, on hold, but I have full intentions of finishing. This antho has had a floating deadline, so I’ve been sort of waiting for the muse to get back on board with this one. To…

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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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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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2022 at Turtleduck Press

Around this time last year, I wrote: 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” Well, here we are again, and to be honest, I still feel pretty much the same way. But some period of time must have passed, because there are more stories on this site than there were last year. Because of *gestures wildly* you know…all that…we only released one work of full-length fiction in 2022, but it was a good one: Kit Campbell’s haunted-boarding-school novella Hallowed Hill, featuring a mansion in the woods, a teenaged orphan looking for a fresh start, unsettling graffiti, archrivals, and more. We also posted lots of free fiction and the occasional poem, including new installments of: …and more! We’ve reluctantly cut back on the number of free stories in order to focus our limited energies on other things, but we’re still blogging for your entertainment every week right here at TDP. Looking ahead, we’ll be releasing a cli-fi novelette by me in the spring, and we’re working on other projects in the background that will be revealed in due time. Stay tuned!

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Gratitude

Sometimes, in the hustle and bustle of daily life, we forget to stop and give thanks for our blessings. I know I do. Frequently. It’s easy to take for granted that we’re healthy, or that we’ve got food to eat, or a roof over our heads. We forget that there are people out there who don’t have those things. And then it’s like, whoa, I am so lucky. I need to thank God/the Universe/whomever for this. Every Thanksgiving I try my best to practice gratitude. At our table, we list our blessings and what we are thankful for. It’s a small but very powerful thing. It reminds us that we should never take anything for granted. As you know, my health has never been perfect. But I am very lucky in that I’ve never had cancer or any other serious or life-threatening illness. I’ve never had to think about what happens after I’m gone in a very real way (versus abstractly right now) or actually make preparations for that possibility or say goodbyes or be faced with options that will either give me three great months or seven horrible ones. I thank God for that all the time. Yeah, I get frustrated with things — the severe fatigue, the sleep issues, the little stuff that pops up…but nothing’s killing me. I’m lucky. So damn lucky. I’m also grateful for my business, my job, which allows me to work from home and not jeopardize my health worse by having to work…

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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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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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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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Looking Ahead and Behind

So, it’s 2020. A new year. A new decade. Let’s see what I was doing in 2010: ~I launched Turtleduck Press with Siri Paulson, KD Sarge, and Kit Campbell. With that launch, I published my first poetry chapbook, Life as a Moving Target. It was my first publication, apart from poetry in literary magazines, ever. ~I had entered into my nth draft of Pirouette (now titled Death Dancer), hoping that this time it will be ready for a literary agent. This is before self publishing took over, and I ended up setting it aside on the advice of my writer friends who felt I was too wrapped up in revisions. I ended up writing Fey Touched instead (and published that in 2012).~I started writing an odd, supernatural thriller thing that to this day is still waiting to be finished. I’m close. It is important because of how the idea came to me, and how the story has warped and changed over time. It is also a new genre that’s a bit out of my comfort zone, but that’s a good thing.~I had been married for one year, yay! And we’re still going strong. ~I had three foot surgeries, the most recent this past March. I am hoping that’s the end of ALL surgeries for awhile. So, pretty major stuff going on. In the decade, I’d release another poetry chapbook, four novels, a novelette, a flash fiction collection, and a nonfiction book. Unfortunately, none of it is Pirouette or the supernatural…

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