Year: 2012

Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets.  For a long time, I had a section of my website devoted to her life and poetry. She’s pretty well-known.  Mostly for her tragic suicide at age 30, leaving her two children without a mother.  One of those children ended up taking his own life as well.  From what I understand, Sylvia Plath suffered from depression.  She had ECT (electroshock therapy) and apparently, it didn’t help.  She had everything to live for, but apparently the darkness was too much to bear.

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Last week, Siri brought up the way fans interact with their favorite books, shows, and other media – fanfiction, fanart, crafting, and cosplay. And while I try not to always float along on Siri’s coattails, I find that, as this is a subject near and dear to my heart, Siri’s coattails are rather attractive at the moment, and on we go. I especially wanted to focus on cosplay, as I feel it is perhaps the rarest of the fan-based interactions. Fanart and fanfiction especially are things that can be enjoyed in anonymity, where you can lurk on the internet without people in your everyday life being aware that you really, really like that anime. Crafting and cosplay require more…dedication. When you dress up as someone from something, it’s pretty hard for the people around you to not realize that you like it.

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Today I want to talk about the intersection of fanfiction, cosplay, and crafting. You’ve probably heard of fanfiction – people writing unofficial stories set in the world of Harry Potter or Star Trek or what have you. You may also have heard of cosplay – people dressing up as characters from their favourite books or anime series or science fiction/fantasy movies (usually during fan conventions such as San Diego Comic-Con). The impulse for both of these activities comes from a love of the source material, the desire to stay in the world of the book or movie a little longer, to delve into the characters a little (or a lot!) more closely. There’s also a strong aspect of community or kinship with other fanfic writers or cosplayers, a kinship born of that shared love.

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Of all my characters so far, I think Joss Ravid made the best entrance. That, as you’ll see when you get to know him, is very Joss. It started simply. At some point in 2005 or maybe early 2006, I made the decision to stop letting fear make my decisions. I’d love to say that everything changed, but that’s not how life works. I did start taking some risks. I joined a gym. I took a chance on a roommate, and moved out of my affordable but yucky apartment and into a decent house. I went to Yaoi-Con. My roommate and I put it together to take an airplane (gasp!) to San Francisco, where we’d never been, to a con we’d never attended, to meet people we’d only talked to online and revel for a weekend in the wild fun of bishie-stalking.

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It’s no secret that I’m a music lover.  I was raised by parents who fed me different kinds of music for most of my life.  When I hit age sixteen, however, I discovered heavy metal…and didn’t look back.  Although I still love the music from my youth: The Monkees, The Doors, The Who…The Rolling Stones, Bob Seger, Rod Stewart…..I could go on and on.  But there is just something about heavy metal that feeds my soul, makes me happy, and sometimes, even soothes me. About three years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to the Finnish band Nightwish.  And I was completely wowed by them, so much that I went out and bought every album they’ve ever made.  For those not familiar with them, their music is symphonic metal, a kind of fusion between heavy metal and symphony style.  Typically, these types of bands have female singers, although that’s not always the case.  They use keyboards and have lyrics that explore more fantasy-like things.  They’re much more epic.  Some symphonic metal bands have dark and creepy music, which is something my muse really, really likes (this is not a surpise, knowing her). 

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Happy Valentine’s Day: I drew you a turtleduck.  

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We here at Turtleduck Press like oddities, in case you couldn’t tell from our name. We like finding things that are cool and unusual, or noticing things that might otherwise fall through the cracks. All of this isn’t such a surprise if you know us, because we’re strange people too – or at least some might think so. Take my Saturday this week, for example. I got up early (okay, early-ish) to go to a group where we sat around making clothes with pointy sticks and string. Then I did crossword puzzles with my significant other…and not just any kind, but cryptic crosswords, the kind where the very clues are puzzles to be solved. And we thought this was fun.

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I used to think I was lazy. I wasn’t the only one who thought so–I heard it a lot. Too lazy to do my chores, too lazy to do my homework. Too lazy to finish that paint-stripping project and so I lived without a bedroom door for months and then put the ugly thing back on, still with its layers of tainted white, dead-turtle green, and bloody-brick red. It was another two months before I found and replaced the knob mechanism. I’d restart the washing machine to avoid hanging out clothes, and you don’t want to know how I avoided doing dishes. I wasn’t too lazy to read, though. Oh no, I burned my way through the elementary school library, then the junior high library, at a wildfire’s pace. I wasn’t supposed to read the senior high books till I hit senior high, but the librarians got tired of telling me no. The day the public library gave me an adult card–meaning I could check out thirty-five real books on my monthly-if-I-was-lucky visit–was a great day indeed.

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Siri here. I’m excited to introduce our first guest blogger for 2012, Megan Crewe. Megan is, as of today, the author of two published YA novels. She’s also a cat lover, a critiquing guru, a kung fu fighter (yes, really), and a Torontonian (like me). Like Megan, many Canadian authors’ primary market is the United States, but that can lead to a culture clash. Here she is to explain… — Growing up next to the US, watching American TV shows and movies and reading American books, I saw their stories and Canadian stories as being pretty much the same.  Sure, I changed my “centre”s to “center”s and “colour”s to “color”s when submitting a story to a US magazine or anthology–to make it easier for the editors, who’d have to do it anyway if the piece was accepted. It was only when I started publishing novels with American publishers that I realized how many little cultural and linguistic differences there are, as my Canadian foibles were corrected in copyedits.  Where I’d say “grade ten,” Americans say “tenth grade.”  I use “washroom” interchangeably with “bathroom,” but to most Americans it sounds old-fashioned.  And everything from high school classes to the health care system works differently.

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