Home 2023 January

Month: January 2023

Technology, Y’all

Am I right? You know I’m right. Currently, I’m right about my fitness tracker. Which, you know, is a misnomer, but we’ll go with it. It has a silent alarm feature, which I’ve decided I don’t like. At least, not how I’ve been using it, to go off between 6:10 and 6:40 every morning. It’s supposed to be a smart alarm, but it never wakes me up because it only activates when it figures out I’m already awake. So it’s just annoying and I want to turn it off. My tracker, however, has been refusing to open the “alarm” app so that I can. So I went hunting on the internet, and the only thing that seems to work is a factory reset. Oh geez. Am I that annoyed by this alarm? Well, maybe. It’s been a long time that I’ve been meaning to fix it. The fact that I’m actually remembering at eight at night about something that happens in the morning, is a good sign that I do indeed find it that annoying. Factory reset, then. I steeled myself, and I did it. Now I’ve put my wifi password in three times, but my tracker can’t find my wifi (the router is five feet away, through open air.) So it’s updating through Bluetooth, and it keeps restarting. Currently we’re at 13% on the third try. Let us all pray to Saint Vidicon… Microsoft has been giving me similar hassles at work lately. Similar as in, not working. I’m…

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What are you manifesting?

So, if you’ve been around for awhile, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Law of Attraction. Well, I’m not talking about that. Not exactly. See, a year ago, I took a “bootcamp” in a manifestation technique through author Heather Hildenbrand that is similar, but is quite different, too. Actually, I have yet to totally finish it, as I got super busy during that period. She is running the bootcamp for a second time, and I am an alumna, so I get to take it again (and again and again…) if I want to. So I will probably do that. But the parts I did take were extremely helpful. But I’m not really talking about that, either. It’s the backstory. See, I’ve always been curious about it. Can you really manifest anything your heart desires? The one thing they say is that you have to put the work into it — you can’t just say, okay, I’m going to be a millionaire by next week and wait for the dollar bills to fall from the sky. We and the universe are co-creators — we work together. You gotta do something to help that come together. The universe does its part; you do yours. So in my Lenormand class, we touched on a manifestation technique with the cards that I tried recently with a duplicate deck I kept just for this purpose. It’s basically waiting for the right moon phase (for setting intentions and manifestation – the new moon) and laying out…

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Why Does My Brain Hate Productivity?

Howdy, friends! How’s the new year treating you? We’re supposed to have a massive snowstorm starting tonight, so that’s fun, she said sarcastically. I think I told you guys this at some point, but at the end of 2021 I sat down with myself and had a heart to heart about what I was doing with my life, and I came out of that knowing that a lot of the things I’ve been working on for the last decade have been to either avoid or to justify a story I’ve been working on for literally ever. (Decades.) Because it’s scary, to put something you’ve put a lot of time and heart into, in case it fails. Because sometimes it’s hard to separate what you create from yourself, and if something you worked really hard on does badly, you can take it as a reflection of yourself. Anyway. I have, traditionally, set many different goals, normally on a monthly basis. Writing goals, drawing goals, reading goals, video game goals, workout goals. We’re talking, like, twenty goals per month. But what I’ve found, recently, is that I do these other goals instead of working on the above story, because hey, I’m being productive still! But I’m also still avoiding the main thing for the same reasons. So, for January 2023, I set just a single goal: work on my revision. Surely putting all my focus onto my main goal would make me do it, right? Well. I mean, I am working on…

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2022 at Turtleduck Press

Around this time last year, I wrote: 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” Well, here we are again, and to be honest, I still feel pretty much the same way. But some period of time must have passed, because there are more stories on this site than there were last year. Because of *gestures wildly* you know…all that…we only released one work of full-length fiction in 2022, but it was a good one: Kit Campbell’s haunted-boarding-school novella Hallowed Hill, featuring a mansion in the woods, a teenaged orphan looking for a fresh start, unsettling graffiti, archrivals, and more. We also posted lots of free fiction and the occasional poem, including new installments of: …and more! We’ve reluctantly cut back on the number of free stories in order to focus our limited energies on other things, but we’re still blogging for your entertainment every week right here at TDP. Looking ahead, we’ll be releasing a cli-fi novelette by me in the spring, and we’re working on other projects in the background that will be revealed in due time. Stay tuned!

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