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The Elusive Tom Sawyer’s Island

Last week, we went to the Happiest Place on Earth. (Or is that Disneyland?) It could, potentially, be labeled the most overwhelming place on Earth, but we’ll ignore that for now. I hadn’t been since I was a child, which was a long time ago. And while many things have changed over the past twenty years (at one point I stood in the middle of Fantasyland with the weird sensation of knowing that someplace should be familiar and yet failing to find anything that was at all recognizable), some things have stayed the same. One of my very favorite places in Disney World is Tom Sawyer’s Island. It’s an island in the middle of a lake between Frontierland and Liberty Square which is, as the name makes obvious, is based of the book Tom Sawyer. It’s got Aunt Polly’s house and Harper’s Mill, and secret caves, and a fort, and is generally a really fun place to explore. The only way to get to it is by river raft. And I’ve missed it the last two times I’ve gone. It closes pretty early in the day, basically as soon as there’s any hint of the sun going down, which I assume is for safety reasons. But it means that if you’re not on top of it, you’re out of luck. When I last went, at 14, we had a single day at the Magic Kingdom, and I missed the last raft. And I missed it last week, too, though we…

2018 at Turtleduck Press

Congratulations, you have survived another trip around the sun! Happy 2019 to all of you fine readers. We know 2018 was a bit of a dumpster fire for many; here’s hoping that this year is kinder. But the publishing industry doesn’t brake for dumpster fires — if anything, making art becomes even more important in difficult times. So making art is what we’ve been doing… 2018 was the Year of the Sequel at Turtleduck Press. We released two fantasy novels: In the Forests of the Night (Seize the Fire Book 2) — an M/M fantasy adventure series by KD Sarge (get Book 1 here) Fireborn (Reaper Girl Chronicles, Episode 2) — a straight paranormal fantasy series by Erin Zarro (Episode 1 can be found in our anthology Under Her Protection: Stories of Women to the Rescue) We’ve also been busy putting out free short stories every month. We have several fantasy serials going right now — “Sun Touched” by Erin Zarro, “Coat of Scarlet” by Siri Paulson (me), and “Curiosity Killed the Cat” by KD Sarge, mixed in with standalone stories by both Kit Campbell and Siri Paulson. If you missed them, you can find them all (plus excerpts from our novels) on our Freebies page. Look for another installment of “Coat of Scarlet” in February! And you can find out what all four of our authors are up to over here on our weekly blog. What does 2019 hold for us at TDP? More free short stories and blog…

The Not-Fun of Traveling

By the time you read this, I’ll be visiting friends outside New York City for a week at Christmas. Lucky, lucky me. This is not, alas, a post how awesome a time I’m having in NYC. I am (wisely, IMHO) writing this before I leave home. Which means, this is a post on what a pain in the backside it is, prepping to cross the country for one flippin’ week. I love traveling. Let me rephrase that. I love having traveled. I love being in a new place, exploring, finding cool stuff, seeing new things–but I do not love having to travel to get to new places. I do not love commercial airlines, two-hour pre-flight security check-ins, measuring my bags to see if I have the right size luggage or need to go buy something, flying Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve to save myself (a heckuva lot of) money. I do love car trips if there are cool things to see on the way and I can pull over and look closer if I want to. I do not love “you’ve got four days of vacation, three nights at awesome place NOW GET THERE IMMEDIATELY AND THEN GET BACK FASTER.” I don’t love packing. I don’t love peacekeeping between frazzled travel companions forced into close proximity for long periods of time. I don’t love the stress of being in charge when things (inevitably) go wrong. But I do love exploring new places, and to do that you have to…

Putzing About

Oh, friends, my November was gloriously productive. It was so productive I’ve gotten cocky. No doubt that will be a mistake later, but for now, I am reveling in it. So, the time goal worked out really well. I got a ton done. So I’m continuing that for December, though I’ve lowered it to 30 minutes because Holidays and so forth. So far, so good. I’m actually ahead for the month. Aside from that, I’m still working on drawing/shading/coloring classes. It’s been very interesting, though we may be getting to the point where I should stop doing classes and actually start working on projects. I’ve also started doing some vocal skills classes. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any sort of instruction on the matter–probably high school. All the choirs since then have just assumed you know what you’re doing and left you to flounder if you don’t. So hopefully that will be useful in the future. Right now, so far, it’s been pretty basic, and also I have a cold and singing makes me cough. AND I’m sewing again, making presents for Christmas, as well as putzing around with other random projects (including patching the pile of clothes that need patching). My mother and I went to Goodwill Outlet last week (where you can buy clothes for about $1/pound) so I now have stuff for other projects should the Christmas presents go well. It’s a creative monstrosity over here. No doubt eventually I will have so many options of…

Real Life Strikes Back (Again)

Two months ago I told you about my annual writing retreat and how it felt. I also shared some strategies that I was working on to keep that retreat feeling going… set up a room in my house that has NO clutter and is used for nothing but writing, reading, and other Internet-free pursuits (not a pipe dream, I’m actually working on this one) set up a writing schedule (I had one, once upon a time) — not for product, but for time spent on the process Predictably, Real Life struck as soon as I got back. Strategy number one still needs work (I am pecking away at the clutter, one itsy-bitsy step at a time) but I’ve made some progress on strategy number two. I signed up for National Novel Writing Month as a “NaNo Rebel” — doing the challenge on my own terms. Like Kit, I set a time goal for myself. My goal was 25 hours. I made it to 9. Not exactly great. But also, not bad. It got me writing for solid chunks of time again, and pushed me to do more than I would have otherwise — not a lot more, but small gains are more sustainable anyway, right? I worked a bit on the novel that Kit and I are writing, but spent most of the time wrestling with an edit of the short story that I pounded out in less than a week during the retreat. (Okay, that was first-drafting vs. editing.…

Christmas in the Movies

I’ll admit it–though in my household we celebrate Christmas, I’m not a big fan of a traditional holiday. Two of my favorite Christmas movies are Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. Every year my daughter and I spar over the purchase of a Christmas tree. I don’t bake cookies unless I really get the urge, and I don’t send cards pretty much ever (though I do buy cards on sale after Christmas, for stashing for that day I may somehow decide to send cards again…?) And–well, we live in Southern Arizona. We don’t get snow on Christmas. We don’t get snow pretty much ever. (I’ve lived here 30~ years. We’ve had snow…twice? In January both times.) I’ve never seen Miracle on 34th Street, and I’m pretty blah on White Christmas. But I’ve seen Home Alone 2. And Ghostbusters, and Muppets Take Manhattan, and Godzilla (1998), and Newsies, Sleepless in Seattle, Die Hard 3: With a Vengeance, Rumble in the Bronx, Spiderman, Avengers, Ally McBeal, Night at the Museum–what do all of these have in common? They’re set in New York City. Guess where I get to go for Christmas this year? I am So. Excited. There’s the little kid in me, who remembers watching the Macy’s parade every year. Skaters at Rockefeller Plaza, and there’s an awesome bridge in Central Park I remember from some movie, I don’t even know. There’s the young(ish) lover of every monster movie ever. “Negative impact! That’s the goddamn Chrysler Building!” There’s the writer, just drooling…

Technology Hates Me

A year or so ago I talked about the perils of technology. And eerily, I posted that on November 22, 2016. This particular week in November must be my personal bad-luck week or something. So, I’ve been working on a secret project for almost two years. The release date has been delayed so many times due to factors beyond my control. I finally finished the final edits on it last week. I was starting to get excited because I realized I could maybe swing a release before Christmas. Last night, I also realized that I needed to make a few tweaks before sending it to the proofreader (first time hiring a proofreader; usually my editing is done in-house by one of our marvelous editors). This project is independent of TDP so yeah, I had to hire one. 🙂 Anyway, I was supposed to get it to her yesterday and thought I could do the tweaks and send it off. I should really know better by now. Maybe my excitement has made me forget all the other times that technology screwed me over. So, before I get into the story, you need to know the backstory. I am obsessive about backups. An incident in college where I lost an 8-page paper right before it was due because of a rogue Macintosh made me realize just how easy files can be sucked up into the ether with no hope of return. So, since then, I have made no less than four backups…

Learning

I’m learning my friends. Last month I talked about over-committing, submitting my musical, work, and family commitments that were weighing me down, and all the grand plans I wasn’t getting to. So, for November, I decided to make no commitments at all. (Of course, some of them are ongoing–the Christmas show and concert, kid things, Christmas in general. We’re hosting Thanksgiving again this year after me boycotting doing so last year, but I’m not going to stress about it. If people don’t like how I run it, they can go elsewhere, or they can host it themselves.) What I DID do was set a time goal. 45 minutes a day on something writing related. Literally anything counts. Outlining? Counts. Research? Counts. Watching marketing videos that I’ve had open for six months? Counts. Drawing potential children’s book characters? Counts. I made a list of things it would be nice to get down or make progress on, and off we went. And it is working so well. It’s brilliant. It’s the 13th, I’ve done a little over 9.5 hours of my 22.5 goal, and I have: Updated all my metadata after the CreateSpace/KDP move Finished my anthology story (super excited about the antho!) and edited/revised it Revised a short story Wrote my serial story section for the month (and outlined to The End, a few thousand words off) Looked over the status of the nonfiction series I’ve been working on for three years and outlined the final book (which I am going to start…

Contra Dance Geekery Strikes Again

It’s been a while since I’ve written about contra dance in this space. Rest assured, I haven’t stopped doing it! I just didn’t have anything new to say. But I have attained new heights of contra dance geekery. I just got back from a full weekend of dancing in another city — Friday evening, all day Saturday, all evening Saturday, and Sunday until late afternoon. (Why yes, my feet did hurt after that. But so did my smile muscles.) I carpooled in a minivan full of dancers, along with our dance shoes and twirly skirts and snacks and other, less important things. (Here’s a short YouTube clip from the weekend so you can see what I’m talking about. There’s a “caller” who has taught us the dance before the live music started and has continued to prompt us occasionally — you can hear her now and then. Contra is all about patterns of movement, rather than footwork.) We spent a good chunk of the drives geeking out — dissecting the various dances we’d done over the weekend, or talking about the finer points of technique (momentum. It’s all about momentum. Except when it’s about patterns), or plotting the best way to convince our local group to change some of the heteronormative terminology. (That last is a debate that’s sweeping the wider contra community across North America. Short version: We’ve traditionally called the two dance roles “lady” and “gent”, but those terms no longer map very well to the genders of…

Join the Party

Do you ever have one of those moments when it hits you–wow. It’s 2018. It’s been ___ years since ___. I’m having one of those moments. I can’t quite grasp that Turtleduck Press is almost eight years old. Wow. You work and you do and you focus, and suddenly you look up and you’ve been doing this awesome thing for eight years. I’m just a bit boggled by that. In eight years, we’ve published 21 books. At a story a month, minus months we published a book, that’s 8*12-21=75 (whoops, it’s not eight years until December, so) -2 = 73 free stories. That’s a lot of meetings and emails and collaboration and friendship and joy. Siri Paulson is a delight, y’all. She’s insightful and kind and a marvelous writer, as well as a brilliant editor. She’s had lots of practice at making me, in particular, look good, along with many other writers. Kit Campbell has a dry humor that makes me snort. She’s whip-smart and knowledgeable and a force for organization and foresight. In addition to her contributions to TDP, she edits and formats books. And as if all that weren’t enough, she writes awesome stories. Erin Zarro…what to say about Erin? Her stories are imaginative and full of characters you care about. Her poetry is full of feeling and power. She also edits freelance, in addition to her work with TDP. Erin herself is fun and interesting, just a sheer pleasure to have around. Why am I babbling on…

Category: Bloggish Things