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Month: March 2023

Cover Reveal: Voice of the Sea

Surprise! We have a new book coming out soon, and because we’ve been doing this for so long, we obviously remembered to post a sneak peek (no we didn’t) and tell you about it ahead of time…ahem. Anyway, our next Turtleduck Press release is a near-future fairy tale retelling by Siri Paulson. It’s a novelette (about 50 pages or 12,000 words)…because that’s how long it wanted to be, that’s why. Links to come very soon, but in the meantime, here are the cover (isn’t it gorgeous?!) and the book description. Enjoy! If The Little Mermaid were set in the twenty-second century… In the aftermath of climate change, humans have abandoned the flooded coasts. Underwater, people of another kind struggle to rehabilitate the polluted seas. After one rescues a human engineer, she realizes he might hold the key. If she can learn how to interact with the world like a human, if she can understand them, if she can become enough like them, maybe they will help. Maybe he will help. But to reach him, she may need to sacrifice who she is…

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Happy birthday to me…in 6 days.

Technically five, actually, since it’s almost 2am on Wednesday as I am writing this, but let’s just pretend it’s still Tuesday, okay? I actually remembered to do this, then got busy with work, then looked up at the clock and realized that a whole two hours had gone by and…oops? So here we are. Almost 2am on Wednesday-pretend-it’s-Tuesday. Sooooo my birthday is March 27th (in case the math didn’t make that clear enough). Smack between winter and spring. the weather is usually crappy, but the one year it was nice, I was unable to walk due to the Great Surgery Adventure of 2019. Hoping for good weather this year! I will be forty-seven years old. Three years away from a half a century on this lovely planet. Seventeen thousand one hundred fifty five days old, not quite exactly, because I don’t feel like figuring for leap years. I just looked it up, actually. It’s 17, 165 days, just ten more. Wow. And 564 months. There are a bunch of other figures, which I won’t bore you with, but I liked this one: 15.7 years sleeping (approximately). Seriously? Wow. That’s seriously mind-blowing. So I was thinking back to my childhood. I’m sure you’re all aware that my generation is the last that never had cell phones, or internet, or any of the technology that we enjoy today. Cell phones came around — well, technically in the 80s because I remembered a friend of mine in middle school, her dad had one…

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Midsize Style, Instagram, and Me

I’ve blogged here before about my evolving relationship with style. This year I decided to lean into it as a new side hobby (besides writing, of course). One reason is that I needed a new side hobby: gardening hasn’t been doing it for me, contra dancing has been scant although that’s about to change, travel has still been mostly on hold, and I like rotating hobbies but it’s been a while since I picked up a new one. Another is that [CW: weight…..] like many people, I’ve gained weight in the past few years, so I wanted to tap into ways to feel good about my body as it is now. Instagram has turned out to be a great source for that, interestingly enough. Yes, yes, the evils of social media and so on, but it’s all about who you interact with and follow/friend. I’m now following a variety of folks of all sizes, some style-related, others exercise- and outdoors-related (more aspirational than inspirational at this point, alas). I’m staying away from “how to flatter your body” and “how not to wear…” accounts, focusing instead on people with a wide range of personal styles, both trendy and not. “Midsize” is a term originating on TikTok, meaning folks who, like me, aren’t quite plus size but are near the top of “straight” sizes. Following midsize style accounts gives me a sense of how things might look on my body and encourages me to be more daring. I’m also following people who…

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New Friend

Surprise! IT’S ME because I switched weeks with Siri. HaHA. (I have not been sleeping well and I think it’s starting to catch up to me. Does it show?) In the continuing saga of buying random crap in a sad and misguided attempt to improve my life, I have bought a new friend. (Well, technically I used a gift card from my birthday to buy a new friend. Is shopping therapy more or less affective if it’s not actually your money you’re using?) Anyway, here he is. Aw, look at that! He’s so happy to see you! OR NOT Anyway. I saw these advertised as tools to help neurodivergent children who might otherwise have difficulty properly displaying, communicating, or understanding their feelings. (They sell different expression combinations.) Now, I am not a neurodivergent child (that I am aware of) but they’re super cute and it also seemed like maybe I could use it as a writing tool. Hear me out. The project I’ve been working on has been a bit slow going, because I’ve been working on it forEVER and now it has emotional and mental baggage attached to it. And something that can help when you’re running into issues is designating a trigger object, whose basic use is to tell your brain that it is Writing Time and since the object is present it is time to Be Writing. So, I thought to myself, here is a trigger object I can use. It’s cute, it’s small, it’s distinctive. ALSO…

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