2016 – Page 2 – Turtleduck Press

2016 (Page 2)

Perils of an Echo Chamber (Not Actually About the Election)

So in case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last 12-18 months, I’ll explain that here in the US, we’re coming to the end of a long, painful election process. (Not that the US is the center of the universe, but I do know people are watching. I’ve heard opinions on the candidates from friends around the world, thus the hiding under a rock assumption.) As far as I’m aware, all my friends hold the same strong opinion as I do on which candidate will make a better president. Everyone in my Twitter feed, everyone whose blog I follow on Tumblr–we’re all agreed. But obviously someone out there thinks the other nominee is a better option. That’s how one becomes the nominee, after all–people vote. Lots of people voted for the other candidate to be nominated, and a whole lot of someones are planning to vote for that other candidate in the general election, according to the polls that have me checking in several times a day. (Just after typing that, in fact, I ran off to fivethirtyeight.com to check in.) Only one of those other-candidate voter-someones wanders through my Facebook timeline sometimes. That one person is family. If we were not related through my daughter, we never would have met, let alone become Facebook friends. echo chamber: any forum for communication in which all members agree with everyone else. See also preach to the choir. ~online slang dictionary In some ways, social media being an echo chamber…

10 Reasons Why I Have the Best Husband in the World — Possibly the Whole Universe

Today is my husband’s birthday, so I thought I’d put pen to paper (figuratively speaking) and tell you 10 reasons why I have the very best hubby in the world. Of course, I’m biased, but let me know what you think after reading this! We’ve been together for 10 years (one reason for every year!) and married for seven. And loving him — and being loved by him — has completely changed my life, and for the better. #1 He is always there for me. Always — after a crappy day at work, when I feel lousy, when bad things happen, when my health sucks, when I need a hug…Always. He has never, ever ever let me down. He has unending patience and kind words to say no matter what’s going on. Especially when it comes to my health. I don’t have the best health, and sometimes I feel just plain crappy, or I’m in pain. He’s always there. I have a stomachache, he’s there with Vernors. I injured my knee recently and he offered to spread Biofreeze on it, even though I could do it myself — that’s just the guy he is. He puts my oatmeal out in a bowl in the morning so I don’t have to run downstairs to get it. In the fall, he’ll surprise me with hot chocolate, because he knows I love it. He’s gotten me to wherever I needed to go without complaint (I don’t drive). I need my meds picked up, we’re there.…

We’re Going to MileHiCon!

Howdy, Turtleduck friends! It’s my birthday! ::twirls around a little flag:: But beyond that, I’m pleased to announce that if you are in the Colorado or generally Colorado area, you can come and see me at MileHiCon the last weekend of October. I shall be there with the full complement of Turtleduck titles, including new ones such as City of Hope and Ruin, and I will also have bookmarks for our anthology coming out mid-November, which is titled To Rule the Stars. (It’s awesome.) I’m excited for the convention! I learned a lot at the first one we did two years ago, and I’ve got some new displays and stuff that I’m itching to try out. Plus it’s always fun to network with other authors and publishers and see all the neat stuff that goes on at the con. (Here’s a funny story, though. If you buy a three-day pass in advance, it’s $44, but there’s a $3 service fee. If you wait until the door, it’s only $46. Someone did not think this through.) I put in my name to be put on panels if there’s a need, so there’s a chance that I could do some of that. That will be a new–and nervewracking–experience. Still, I’ve seen some really terrible panelists at various times (ones who had no clue about the topic at hand, or who were too busy revisiting things with their friends to bother to pay attention), so I will probably not be the worst. Ah,…

Mental Health Breaks and Mini-Staycations

Have you ever come back from a vacation and immediately felt like you needed another one? Or has it been a while since you’ve had one? If you’re anything like me, you fall into habit during your non-vacationing life. Maybe you have a favourite coffee shop, or a park or a restaurant you love. Returning over and over again to places you enjoy is comforting, for sure. I do it a lot. But don’t underestimate the power of novelty for R&R. Last weekend was my wedding anniversary. We took the opportunity to go on a mini-staycation, just the two of us. It was a lot of fun, and it wasn’t particularly expensive. We had dinner at a new-to-us steakhouse chain, went home instead of staying at a hotel, then the next morning, ventured into a trendy neighbourhood we don’t usually frequent, and wandered down the street and picked a restaurant for brunch at random (why yes, we are slightly addicted to Yelp, why do you ask?). Good choice, too – they had delicious house-smoked bacon! That particular street was full of fancy/trendy furniture stores, so we poked around a few and drooled at all the gorgeous reclaimed wood and designer tables. We’re not even in the market for new furniture, and a lot of what we saw wouldn’t fit in our tiny rooms anyway (giant harvest table? uh, no), but window-shopping was fun! On our way back we picked up some bright yellow potted chrysanthemums to decorate our front steps…

New Horizons

Did you hear about Elon Musk’s plans, outlined yesterday at the 67th annual International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico? He wants to go to Mars. Not just a billionaire taking a jaunt, but he wants to build a colony there. Put a bunch of stuff up there, engineer reuseable ships so they don’t have to build them again and again, send out teams every time Earth and Mars are close… He believes with SpaceX’s new rockets, they can make the trip take three months. Musk isn’t the only one. Mars One had 78,000 hopefuls in the first two weeks they were accepting applications. Mars One, I should point out, doesn’t plan to bring its people back from Mars. Their idea to cut costs is to make it a one-way trip. They plan to raise the money doing reality-tv stuff, as their astronauts train and learn to live and work together. These scientists think it’s better to send older people if it’s one-way. Apparently the thinking goes that 1) older means they won’t be having babies after the radiation exposure and 2) they won’t mind going there for the rest of their lives, since they don’t have much time left. I guess. NASA is thinking about where to start. I love the idea of going to Mars, though I can see the point of someone in my Twitter feed yesterday, who said we had no business taking and mucking up another planet instead of fixing what we’ve done to this one. Honestly, I…

107,000 words written on Ever Touched – and Deep Thoughts

So, since I’ve hit the 100k milestone on Ever Touched and went beyond it, I thought I’d talk about some things I’ve discovered or learned or just plain thought about with this novel. #1 The first draft is not done yet. Technically, I have till the end of the month, but as that is fast approaching, I may not make it. I have at least 15-20k more to go minimum. I may do what I did with both Fey Touched and Grave Touched. Start the revision anyway, and write the ending once I get there. #2 The good news is that I have a comprehensive plan for the ending. The bad news is, I had to replot it twice. I’m not ruling out a third or fourth time. #3 Usually, a book’s theme song comes to me while planning. And I usually listen to it as I write the book. With Ever Touched, the theme song announced itself last week, after writing over 100,000 words. What the hell. (For the curious, it’s “The Sound of Silence” covered by Disturbed. Once you watch and hear it, you’ll understand why. Helpful link is helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk7RVw3I8eg #4 In every book I write, there’s a scene that could be a movie scene: intense action, intense feels, heartbreak, distress, characters in peril, etc. It’s the one scene that for me, encapsulates the entire book. Fey Touched has one. Grave Touched had one. Ever Touched has one, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I almost…

Too Many Awesome Things To Do

Well, friends, if you’re interested in the continuing saga of my sewing project, I have cut out two pieces of my shirt. That was a few weeks ago. I was hoping to at least be able to report that I’d cut all pieces out, or, even more optimistically, had at least gotten the sewing machine out, but alas. In fact, I keep coming up with new awesome and fun things I want to do, but…I’ve come to a realization. I’ve been spreading myself too thin. Too many projects, too many things to do. This is a bad habit of mine, especially recently. I think it comes down to having less time in which to do things these days. Back when I was young and beautiful, I could meander home from work, get in a couple hours of something fun, throw together something for dinner, and then spend a couple more hours doing something fun. And weekends! Glorious weekends! But now I have responsibilities and weird work schedules and work that has to be done at home around everything else, and if I get 15 minutes of project time a day it’s a good day, at least right now. And I get frustrated and try to stuff more in to catch up, and then I get more frustrated because yet more things aren’t getting done. It’s a vicious cycle, my friends. I am grumpy and stressed, and that’s no way to live. Do you have this problem too? Constant stress and…

7 Lessons from the Garden

What I have learned about life gardening this year: 1. Some things take a lot longer than you think; be patient. Other things happen so quickly they’ll surprise you; be ready. We planted radishes for the first time this spring. They were ready to harvest within a month, and went to flower (meaning no good for eating) just a few short weeks after that. Conversely, we waited and waited for last year’s snapdragons and this year’s wildflower seed mix. After we’d given up, both kinds of flowers emerged and were blooming by mid-June. 2. Novelty is always more exciting, but reliability is invaluable. Every year we try a few new vegetables. This year: parsnips (very few came up), beets (yum), red onions (they stopped growing while still small), snap peas (double yum), and cucumber (it died in the summer drought). Every year we also fall back on our favourites: three sizes of tomatoes, hot peppers, herbs. (And every year we keep hoping for better luck with the carrots and sweet peppers.) 3. Some things just aren’t meant to be. We’ve tried growing bell peppers several times. What we end up with are stunted, squashed bells that don’t ripen past green. (Climate? Nutrients? Dunno.) We do have luck growing hot peppers, but everything we’ve planted turns out to be VERY hot and I can’t handle more than a sliver of it. This year we bought a sweet banana pepper plant and I was excited. Turns out? Either it was wrongly labelled or…

Brothers (A Fractured World Short)

by Siri Paulson Astrolabe started out of a nightmare, his face wet with tears. Toric had been calling for him, his brother’s voice getting farther and farther away as the monster carried him off. It was a Type III monster, the ones with the legs that stayed long and powerful no matter how their bodies shifted. He had known it was pointless to chase the thing, but he’d been trying anyway, in his sleep. His sheets were twisted and soaked with sweat, and the stump of his right arm ached horribly. It wouldn’t ease up until the doctor’s assistant came to change the dressing and administer his next dose of goatweed. No point trying to sleep again now. He got out of bed and checked for daylight in the crack between the heavy shutters of the room where he was staying in the Medical wing. Satisfied, he unbolted them one-handed and pushed them open. The night chill was already fading, early morning was seeping across the sky, and he could see the fighter trios trickling back across the rooftops and the street in front of HQ. Some were limping or leaning on each other. Was Theo among them? He didn’t even know whether she was already back on patrol with her new trio, the two young fighters who had replaced him and Toric. The fighters were only three stories down, but as Astrolabe leaned his head on the window frame to watch, they felt as distant, as unreachable, as…

Serendipity

Almost fifteen years ago now, I was a brand-new attendance technician/registrar at a middle school. There was a young lady, early in those middle school years, who wasn’t very good at getting her backside to school. As was my job, I stuck my nose in and tried to help. I remember I cajoled, I bribed, I threatened sternly with “you need an education to get anywhere!” We talked. She would tell me her problems, I would point out boys were not worth missing out on school and she was already beautiful so she didn’t need to be late because of her hair. She would blush and thank me and try a little harder. I’d tell her she was smart, and she just needed to show up to see a change in her school life, and such things. When I did see her in school, I made sure to say hi and encourage her. Eventually, as happens, she made it out of middle school and went on to high school. Sometime after that (or perhaps during, my memory is not good at timelines) she dropped by the middle school to introduce me to her baby. A few times she came by to pick up her youngest sibling, on his way through my school. I was always thrilled to see her. But then I changed jobs, and we didn’t move in similar circles anymore. This morning for some reason I was thinking of her as I unlocked the doors at my new…

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Year: 2016