Home Archive by category "Bloggish Things" (Page 28)

Category: Bloggish Things

Thoughts, essays, and comments from the writers of Turtleduck.

Planning for Never

Have you ever spent a ton of time of a project you suspect you’ll never do? If you’re anything like me, you love the idea. You do research. You plan things out. Everything would be ready to go…if you would just start it up. Sometimes I even go so far to buy supplies that never get used. (Though I try not to get to that point, because that’s a waste of money that could be used for coffee and books.) There’s something so lovely about an idea, isn’t there? Because it isn’t real, because it doesn’t exist, the possibilities are endless. Of course, there are sometimes reasons not to go through with something–if it’s too expensive, if you don’t have the skills to pull it off, if you can’t fit anything else in your schedule, if you can’t or won’t actually do anything with it when it’s done… The nice thing about ideas is that there’s lots of them. Another one will come along. Or maybe things will change, and that idea will become a reality. I had that happen recently–I planned a short story years ago, but never wrote it. Except now I have, and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, as well. And it doesn’t hurt anything to plan. It’s fun. It’s practice. And maybe something will actually come out of it. Currently I’m poking fantasy clothing. We spend our summers at festivals–medieval festivals, renaissance festivals, Scottish festivals–you name it, and we’re game. And I don’t…

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The Gardening Saga Resumes

If you were around these parts last year, you might remember that my spouse and I kinda gave up on our vegetable garden for a year, covering it over with landscape fabric and mulch to try to suppress the perennial weeds (bindweeds) that had overtaken it. This year we’re trying again. But we’re trying to be smarter about it. Half of the vegetable bed is just plain covered over again. The other half has been divided into a grid system invented by my spouse, with strips of fabric surrounding 1′ X 1′ squares of open soil. (Think plaid.) The fabric parts have been mulched again, and the rest of the mulch will cover the open soil. That way, there will be a strong weed barrier over much of the garden, a weaker barrier over the rest. and we should be able to keep up a little better. At least that was the plan. But due to our work schedules, we can’t do much (or any) gardening during the week, and our last three weekends have looked like this: out of town; rainy; hot as Hades. So we haven’t finished the mulching, and the bindweed has popped up again in the squares. At least the fabric is holding them back for now. Despite our neglect, most of what we’ve planted is thriving. (Thank goodness for my in-laws, who water diligently while we’re at work!) The tomatoes in particular are loving the heat. We still have some squares to fill; I’m thinking…

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Best of Intentions

When I came home from work today, as I staggered in the door escaping the 100°+ heat and was met by the cat who must be greeted immediately or Bad Things Happen, the housemate called from her room, “Oh! You’re home. I…had intended to do the thing today.” She said this because I had asked her to do the thing today, as I reluctantly trudged out the door to work nine hours before. “I had the best of intentions!” she assured me. I laughed and asked, “What’s the name of that place, you know, the road is paved with intentions, but I forget…?” and we laughed and I went off to my room and sat down to do the thing that I’m supposed to do tonight at the latest–write a blog post for Turtleduck Press. And that, dear friends, is where my own intentions went astray, because instead of landing on Turtleduck Press, I got a 500 error. Well, blast. I’m not the girl who runs straight to tech support. I know my way around a cpanel, at least more than some. So off I went, looking for advice. Hadn’t touched any permissions or the .htaccess, not blinking likely too many processes were running but I checked anyway, error log blank (really?), so off I went to tech support after all. And as I sat waiting for the lovely tech support person* in the chat to check all the things I already checked, I jotted some notes about the blog…

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Gilmore Girls: My New Obsession

Back in May, I tweeted this: Why, you ask? What’s the big deal? Well, that’s the thing. It is a big deal. I totally missed it. It was never on my radar. I’d heard of it, and was curious, but never curious enough to you know, sit down and watch it. Of course, in my defense, those were the days when I was doing a lot of photography and writing. I didn’t really watch TV much. Except CSI. Because forensics. But I digress. If you’re not familiar with the awesomeness that is Gilmore Girls, let me give you a short primer: There’s this woman, Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory (short for Lorelai). Lorelai got pregnant with Rory when she was sixteen. She was a single mother. Her parents are rich and into rich-people things, and basically feel she ruined her life by getting pregnant. And have no problem telling her that to her face. Lorelai and Rory live in Stars Hollow, a literal small town where you can walk everywhere and everyone knows everyone else. There are some cool and quirky characters: Luke, the perpetually grumpy owner of the diner where Lorelai and Rory go for breakfast (and coffee!) every day; there’s Taylor, who owns a supermarket and is mostly an ass; there’s Babette who lives in a house made for shorter people (who isn’t shorter herself) and is with a really tall man and has funerals for her dead pets; there’s Rory’s best friend Lane who is awesome…

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The More Things Change

I have an actual hometown. You know, the kind you see on TV, where it’s smallish and quaint and has weird tics that everyone who lives there knows about and just accepts as something that is something that you do. Or is. And it is an actual hometown for me, because I was born there and spent most of my childhood there, and because most of my family (sibling, parent, grandparent) still live there, and still live in the same houses. So it was formative in many ways. Now, some time after I left home for college (which was quite some time ago, but I’m not going to tell you exactly how much because it makes me feel old) my hometown decided it was going to reinvent itself. It’s always been kind of a weird relic of the Old West, despite having been absorbed by urban sprawl, but it was decided to, hm, modernize it, I suppose might be the right term. Tear down some of the old things that had been there forever and make new, modern versions of the same thing that was supposed to evoke the town’s history. Pretty up the historic things that were too valuable to replace. Urbanize the “downtown” area and make it the sort of place that young people with lots of money would want to hang out. You know, that sort of thing. I’ve watched it happen with mixed feelings, as I suppose most people do/would in the situation. Sure, that 3-story…

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Fear of Change

I’m staring down the barrel of some rather scary changes at my job (the job I do when I’m not writing or editing or doing other stuff for TDP, that is). First of all, I’m in the civil service, there’s an election this week, and we’re anticipating a change of government for the first time since I started working here. Second, my office is moving early next year, and our work environment is set to change rather dramatically. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t facing both of those things with fear and trepidation. I’ve gotten…if not always comfortable, at least used to the way things are now. I know what to expect. I know which direction to turn when I get off the elevator. I know what the current government’s priorities and positions are, and how those translate to my job. I can see the CN Tower from my cubicle. Did I mention I’ve been in the same job for, um, a while? And that I’m not great with change? But change there will be. I can be dragged towards it kicking and screaming, or I can face it with hope that eventually, somehow, something better will come of it. The former is awfully tempting, but the latter involves more grace and more self-kindness. If I hadn’t taken the plunge and quit my former job and moved to Toronto way back when, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this 95-year-old brick house that I love. If I hadn’t…

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Finding the Right Book

I’m a writer. That means, among other things, that I have a To-Be-Read pile almost high enough to put satellites into low Earth orbit. It also means that I want more books. Always. Immediately. But I do try to contain myself. After all, I do have shelves and shelves of books, and nowhere to put another shelf. There’s also the guilt currently associated with buying books. A Christmas or two (or three) ago, my awesome roomie hunted down the last books of the Wheel of Time series for me. She bought me every story in the Temeraire series. She bought me two seasons of Agents of Shield, and two or three of Stargate Atlantis, several movies I’d mentioned wanting, other books she thought I would like…and I haven’t read most of them. I haven’t watched hardly any. I should! I want to! I just…haven’t. And she knows, because she lives with me. When I consider buying books or movies, she makes little barbed comments. So I was in a bookstore last week, and feeling all of the above plus the extra guilt of being in a bookstore with the person who bought me a lot of my unread-as-yet books (as well as unwatched-as-yet movies) when that person reads about a book a day or more and she works full time just like I do, and also writes… But…bookstore! You can’t go to a bookstore and just not buy books. Well, maybe you can, but i have a hard time with…

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Filling Plot Holes For Fun (and Profit)

So, I’ve been doing edits on Fireborn, our August release. This book has had an interesting life. I wrote it in January 2015 as a sequel to Reaper Girl, the novelette that was published in the Under Her Protection anthology. It was 23,000 words, too short on plot, not enough murder (lol) and I set it aside to work on other things. Then last year, it was time to work on this year’s production schedule and I thought, hey, if I just expanded it, I could have a novel to publish in one of our empty slots. Never mind that I had about five months before the deadline (January 1st) and had hardly any ideas about what precisely I would expand it with. (I’m pretty sure my fellow TDPers thought I’d lost my mind, but I saw it as a challenge). I wrote like a madwoman for three or four months, then submitted it on time, no less, on January 1st. I was supposed to get editorial feedback on March 1st, but there were some delays, so I got it on April 1st, with a revised release date of August 1st. With me so far? In late April, I had a panic attack because I was sure my next deadline was May 1st and I was pretty sure I couldn’t finish on time (for health reasons) and emailed my people and asked for a two-week extension. I believed I could finish it by then. Ha, ha. Hahahahaahahahahaaha. Nope. (But, good news:…

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That Time of Year

Oh, friends, we all have times of the year that are busier than others, don’t we? Well, this is mine. May and June–yikes. It’s almost worse than the Christmas/New Year cusp (and might be worse in some ways). Spring doesn’t really get here til May, so all season-switching things have to be done–the sprinklers, the trees, planting of gardens, digging out the lawn mower, fixing any damage that winter hath wrought, etc. I have a dead pine tree in the backyard that’s half cut down (the yard guy’s chainsaw broke when he was here on Thursday, and I’ve yet to hear from him again), the dog has eaten a full three saplings (the dangers of puppies you didn’t know about), the mulch we bought for the garden is full of nails (!!!), and other sundries. (Just…don’t have a yard. It’s probably for the best.) (Also I hate rabbits and if they don’t stop eating my flax I am going into the holly bush after them, so help me.) Plus there’s the school stuff–one school year finishing up, so there’s end of year things like collecting friends’ contact info for potential summer get-togethers, getting teacher presents together (oops, deadline is tomorrow, so…), planning “school” birthdays for summer birthdays, finishing up volunteer commitments–and the next school year needing prep, like medical forms and immunizations being submitted, confirming intent to enroll, etc. (Also there’s the end of the year stir-crazies, which are horrible and makes me just want to put everyone outside forever, but then…

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Looking Back

The other day, I made a list of all the stories I’ve written for Turtleduck Press. The purpose of the exercise was to have a handy reference to use for possible reprints (reselling the stories to other markets). But along the way, I got to reread some of them and remind myself what I’d done… Assuming I haven’t missed anything, I’m up to 18 (!) stories published through TDP. (Some of them are in our anthologies, others are freebies, and we decided to take the oldest ones down.) Yeah, that’s a lot…even I was surprised! But the math adds up. We’ve been publishing short stories since January 2011, and I’ve published 2-4 stories here every year since. (Okay, the math doesn’t quite add up. There was the serial that spanned a year, and now I’m embarking on another….) They’re all lengths, from under 1000 words up to 10,000, and all genres, secondary-world fantasy and Gothic and post-apocalyptic and steampunk and even poetry. Doing our anthologies has taught me how to write in the 7,000 – 10,000 word range (technically known as novelettes). Lacking inspiration with deadlines looming has taught me how to write very short, but still complete, stories. 😉 Oddly enough, I haven’t done much in the traditional short story length, 2000 – 5000 words, for a while. (Less oddly, I haven’t yet sold any stories in that mid-range length to markets outside of TDP, either.) Rereading my old stories has made me realize that I write with a…

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