Home 2022 January

Month: January 2022

KD’s Latest Escape

Say, friend…have you experienced the fun of reaction videos? You have? Yeah, I’m not surprised. I’m always late to trends and stuff (and sometimes blog posts, oops. Sorry.) But I’m still enjoying my find! It started with…okay, I’ve been having a rough month or so. I’ve known Pentatonix for a while. A dear friend basically (through the internet, very impressive) grabbed me by the shirt and made me listen to them years ago. And I liked it! Very much. But somehow I didn’t really fall in. Last month, though, I was attempting to get into the Christmas spirit by listening to all the carols I could stand. (I can’t help it. I have a low tolerance for fifty versions of the same song.) Obviously I was putting Pentatonix on that playlist, since they change, enhance, update everything they do, and I need that variety. (Aside–it will never cease to amuse me, to see Hallelujah treated as a Christmas song.) Anyway, at some point, I was using YouTube to make it easy. You know, click on two or three videos, and then let YouTube play you twenty-seven different videos of Josh Groban singing “You Raise Me Up.” …okay, the algorithm is not that bad. But it does have its moments, which I tend to forget. So there I was, listening to the seventh time through of…oh, I think I was on yet another version of Josh Groban (I do love him, but I don’t want seven in a row, thanks) So…

Continue reading

Not Dying.

Earlier this month, I wrote up a post with my goals on it for the next 30 days in a forum I frequent and I literally wrote as one of my goals “To not die.” Seriously. The past, oh, year has been particularly rough, not just because of the pandemic, but because of severe sleep deprivation. Things just aren’t going well in dreamland, and I have been feeling like crap — and my overall functioning hasn’t been 100%. Obvi. But to add insult to injury, technology has, once again, given me the finger. My phone, which is a fairly new iPhone 12 Mini, began inexplicably not returning to my home network after I was out and about. We ended up running through a whopping 75% of our data plan and got a text about it — gee, thanks AT&T — and finally I figured out the problem. Because I was the culprit, and we’d had a power outage recently, and yes, I had been checking my email (for business purposes!), but not that much. Sheesh. So I figured out that after coming home from the vet and finding myself still on cellular and not on Wi-Fi. Many hours later. Ugh. An update fixed that. But not after struggling with it for weeks. Then my battery started draining extremely quickly. I mean, lightning fast. That’s still kind of happening? A bit. It’s improved after the update, but I still feel like it’s not in keeping with my usage. And my battery…

Continue reading

Help, It’s Got Me

Man, what a year thus far, amirite? I’m actually doing pretty well so far. Hopefully that will last, though I did lose two hours this morning to the soundtrack from Encanto. Not on purpose. There’s a song called We Don’t Talk About Bruno in the movie, and it’s been stuck in my head for about a week now. So, yesterday, I tried to knock it out by playing the song over and over and over and over, which is normally how I deal with this sort of problem. And it kind of worked! But then the small, mobile ones got it stuck in their heads, and they are perfectly happy to sing the same thing over 20 million times, so now it’s back. Yay. I even found a 1-hour loop of the best part of the song, but I think that might only be aggravating the problem. Anyway, very distracting. Send help. Or listen to the song and join the madness with me. This week has actually been pretty weird. I’m waiting on the results of a COVID test I did Monday morning, which means my whole week is in limbo. I can’t go back to work until I get the results, and I can’t plan anything til I get the results, and I also can’t, you know, hang out at coffee shops or run errands til I get the results. This is the first test I’ve had to take. I’ve been lucky thus far, so I haven’t had to…

Continue reading

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.…

Continue reading