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Month: January 2020

Painting in Layers

Once, not too long ago, I very rarely watched TV. Then I bought one for my room. Oops. Now I watch probably a half hour to an hour a night, after I go to bed and before I turn out the light. So I like…happy stuff. Queer Eye. Tidying Up. Wildlife documentaries (I skip the episodes about climate change because I KNOW ALREADY, I KNOW, BELIEVE ME) and sometimes conspiracy theory silliness. I save my movie watching for the weekend. Lately my go-to has been Bob Ross. Have you watched him? The series is “Beauty is Everywhere” on Netflix. It’s so relaxing, without being boring. Bob Ross has this kind soft voice, and he works magic and explains every step while insisting that I can do it too, and it’s just…lovely. When he’s doing something repetitive, he’ll show a short video of him charming wild animals, like injured baby squirrels he’s hand-raising, or an orphaned deer a friend is taking care of… via GIPHY He cracks dorky jokes, too. While putting in a shoreline in a painting, “Don’t let the trees fall in the water, that’ll make a big splash and scare that little beaver that lives here.” Note–he hasn’t painted a beaver. Or on balancing out the highlights he’s putting in, “We don’t want these trees left out. Nothing worse than an angry tree coming after you.” When he washes his brush, he bangs it on the easel to finish, and he always gets a kick out of it…

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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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A Theme for the Year

Happy 2020, friends. I hope the new year (I’m one of those no-year-zero people, so I won’t say new decade yet) is treating you well, and you’re making lovely progress on all your goals and resolutions. I got a bit of a late start, but I’m off and running now. I’ve written two short stories and am in the final edits on a nonfiction book in the last week, so hooray! Themes seem to be the trend this year, and I picked mine back in December: education. What does that mean? It means focusing on learning new things and practicing things I’m less confident of, mostly in terms of writing and drawing. To that end I’m taking an illustration class a month over at SkillShare and reading through my stash of writing books which have been collecting dust. And it means focusing on writing/drawing for the sake of writing/drawing, not always being so focused on marketing and publishing and submitting and all that jazz. Even just making that decision has been freeing. I’m feeling really good about everything. So, for this month, I’m reading The Kick-Ass Writer by Chuck Wendig (man, some of the analogies he comes up with…) and taking a class on sketch journaling. I did a practice page last night, using my drawing pens and watercolor, and I’m really pleased with how it came out. On the writing just for writing front, I decided I’m going to use up some of the pins I’ve been pinning for…

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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:…

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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…

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