In the writing world, lots of advice gets flung about. Show, don’t tell. No prologues ever. Write with the reader in mind. One bit of dogma oft-repeated is that if you’re thinking of a genre story, ask yourself what makes it genre. Why does it need to be, say, science fiction? If it can occur just anywhere, why put it in outer space? Putting aside the implied stigma of “oh noes, don’t write genre if you don’t have to!” it’s actually a legitimate planning question. I’m all for chasing inspiration, but one should be sure it’s inspiration one follows, and not merely habit. So why am I writing SF? Especially unscientific SF, or as a friend on Twitter recently put it, “fantasy-ish stuff?” Even in the slums of genre, you see, a pecking order exists, and space opera is pretty low in the ranks. SF is about ideas, some will announce, forgetting the origins of SF in the pulp magazines. SF is about science, some will sneer. Faster Than Light travel is fantasy.* Why am I, then, writing stuff that makes me that oddest of creatures, a Turtleduck?

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I was searching for a subject for this post and I turned on music to help me think. Choosing a song from my playlist was easy–I’m currently in love with Adele’s Rolling in the Deep. I played it two or three times, then shuffle moved on to Adam Lambert’s Mad World and I had to play that a few times. Besides their amazing voices (I am so serious) and the first two letters of their names, Adele and Adam Lambert have at least one other thing in common–neither is willing to be boxed in by society’s expectations. Adele is…well, what many call “full-figure,” and she doesn’t care. Adam Lambert is gay and out and amazing. Neither is as in-your-face about their individuality as say, Axl Rose, who happens to be another favorite of mine, but neither are they hiding anything. They are who they are, and if you don’t like it then you know where the door/back button/skip command is.

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Turtleducks are oddities, there’s no getting around that. Awesome as they are, they don’t quite fit in. I would hold that they are awesome partly because they don’t fit in. As is natural for such odd creatures, Turtleducks turn up in odd places. Normal places may see them too, but odd places bring them in flocks. One such place this Turtleduck likes to flock is Valley of the Moon (on Facebook here). Billed as “an historic fantasyland,” it’s a great place to go and act odd and have people like it.

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Everyone knows that part of being an adult is the art of compromise. That there’s no “I” in “team.” Great things happen when we all work together. After all, they teach us that stuff in kindergarten–pick up, pick up, everybody do your share–and it’s reinforced throughout our lives. “Take one for the team” and all that. But there’s another part of growing up that we don’t often hear about. The art of not being a rug. To me, it’s a harder lesson to learn. At work, in our friendships, no one wants to be the high-maintenance person. No one wants to be the selfish one. We can’t all agree on everything–there has to be give and take. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.

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The first time I went camping, my dad had acquired a huge tent meant to sleep a legion, and we were dragged off to spend Memorial Day weekend living in it. I complained, whined, and muttered, and I took a stack of books a foot high. Now, understand–I grew up on a farm. I’d slept in the backyard in a sleeping bag. I’d slept in the barn in a sleeping bag. I’d slept on horses’ backs (sans sleeping bag) and in trees (also without the sleeping bag. That’s just asking for trouble.) Any time I wanted to eat fire-cooked food, I’d pester my dad into a weinie-roast. (I was twelve. Stop laughing.) So I really didn’t see the point in this camping thing. It was as miserable as I’d feared. It rained the whole weekend, one of those long, slow, soaking Pennsylvania rains. We were all–my dad, my brothers, my dad’s girlfriend, her kids–stuck in that huge flipping tent that really wasn’t big enough to hold us all day and night for three days.

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I forgot I was blogging at Turtleduck Press today. Part of that is the long weekend (Memorial Day here in the U.S.) and the end of the school year. Both together have thrown off my sense of time. Part of it is how I just can’t seem to keep numbers straight in my head. One month I was absolutely certain I was to blog on the 28th and my fellow Turtleduckers had to hold me back. Nearing our fifth wedding anniversary, I argued the exact date with my husband for an hour, till I went and got our marriage certificate and found that we were both wrong. The biggest part, though, is that my brain was elsewhere. I’m working on a final before-approvals edit of His Faithful Squire (coming August 1st; I’m so excited!), the sort-of sequel to Knight Errant, so I’ve been spending a lot of time on a luxury cruise ship in deep space far in the future. I’m also working on an excerpt from a book that took place when Taro was twelve, to post as our July free fiction offering. That book was written some fifteen years ago and the excerpt requires a lot of work and some time spent on a planet embroiled in civil war. Also, I’m writing a short story (growing into a novella, sigh) for a group challenge on Goodreads. The story is quite a stretch for me—it’s set in Italy, a place I know little about, it’s contemporary which I never…

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I’ve always preferred to color outside the lines. No matter how awesome the box, I’m not good at staying inside it. I can’t march to anyone else’s drum. (Can’t really march at all, but anyway.) Perhaps it’s no surprise I’m awful at cramming my writing into a genre. As a reader, I find genre highly useful. I know what I’m getting when I grab a space opera, a military SF, a cozy mystery, a Big Fat Fantasy. I want some surprises, of course, but I also want to know what I’m getting into. That what I’m picking up is the sort of book I’m going to enjoy. That’s as a reader. As a writer…I have a serious genre-problem. I can’t help it—I like to cross lines. At the Alamo, I’d have been doomed for certain.

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  I have a problem. No, I mean…I have a Problem. A big problem. An I-need-a-12-step-program problem, only I wouldn’t go because I don’t want to recover. It’s fun. I like it. You see…I want to know everything. Ever. Oh, not gossip, or basketball scores, or how many hairs are on my arm–I want to know all the cool stuff. All of it. Did you know there are no rivers in the northern half of the Yucatán peninsula? The whole thing is karst! Local people access fresh water from the cenotes.

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