Believe in Yourself

When I was a kid, I was made fun of by other kids.  I don’t know what I did to them.  I was always nice to everyone, and I was painfully shy so I kept to myself most of the time.  But for some reason, people found things to laugh at.  They also pulled some horrible pranks on me: once, they locked me in a closet (and to this day, I’m terribly claustrophobic); another time, someone tried to set my long hair on fire.  These weren’t harmless pranks, and they hurt me badly.  For years, I existed as a joke, not a real person with real feelings. As you can probably guess, my self-esteem was non-existent.  When I was fourteen, I contemplated suicide.  Going to school was traumatic and not fun.  I had no real friends, no one to talk to or to care about me.  I was nothing.  I was worse than nothing.  I was a freak. All I wanted was to be accepted.  To be acknowledged as a person and not treated like crap.  I wanted people to look at me and see me, not the girl who’s the butt of jokes or my imperfections.  I was convinced that I’d never find that, that it just wasn’t possible. Enter Job’s Daughters. 

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Ten Things We’ve Learned About Collective Self-Publishing

This month marks a milestone that’s being celebrated all over the world: it has been six months since the idea of Turtleduck Press was first floated. Oh, and it’s 2011. Happy 2011, readers! Here are just some of the things we’ve learned in our first six months: 1. When the time is right, things start to happen very quickly. The idea was first proposed on July 8. Within a week, we had our own venue for private discussion. In less than a month, we had three (already edited) long works going through our approvals process.

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