Home Archive by category "Bloggish Things" (Page 7)

Category: Bloggish Things

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

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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KD Boldly Ran Away, Away

For various reasons, the last few years have been a bit rough for me. To make things even better, my haven for so much of my life, my writing, has not come easily. It’s a problem endemic in writing books– if you want your characters to resonate, then even sci fi and fantasy must reflect reality, and reality has really not been something I wanted to think about. I like to write hopeful, I mean. And hope has been hard to find. Anyway. So there have been various crises. There’s been All The News You Need to Hide From. And then… I’ve heard there are people out there who just use Word to write books. I am not one of them. I remember the day I gave up on Word. I’d been typing up something for work, and three times in a row I typed “7th” and Word made the “th” superscript and then crashed because it couldn’t handle its own autocorrection. When I got done swearing the third time, I went and found and downloaded OpenOffice. OpenOffice was great! I was devoted for years–but then came the siren call of dedicated fiction writing software. I wanted. But I was poor, and it was expensive, and OpenOffice worked fine… Winners of NaNoWriMo 2011 received a code for (IIRC) 50% off a Scrivener license. People on the NaNo boards loved Scrivener. I think I downloaded the trial version halfway through, and then bought a license when I got my discount. Since…

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Christmas is in…how many days?!

Is it time to panic? I think it’s time to panic. To be fair, my family’s been hit pretty hard with some challenges this year. My husband just tested positive for COVID, despite all efforts toward being safe. Three years he dodged it. Only to be hit with it five days before Christmas. What terrible luck! The good news is that it seems to be a mild case, and he’s already feeling a bit better, so we may have a chance of having our holiday celebration on Sunday. However — and here’s the tough part — we’re worried about anyone else coming down with it in between. We are quarantining, distancing, masking, and doing everything we can to avoid catching it, but you know how that works — sometimes it’s just the luck of the draw. If anyone does get it, then it’s game over. We are already having a second celebration the Wednesday afterward to accomodate my sister, who can’t be with us for Christmas due to having to work, so we could, theoretically, have the whole thing that day — if everyone’s okay. But prep-wise, which my mom and I are doing (as usual, and in some considerable pain as we both have a genetic hip/back issue that’s acting up), we don’t know what to do yet. Do we make the food as if we’re having it Sunday? Or do we wait a bit? I already cleaned the bathroom (my usual job) because regardless, that needed doing. But…having…

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Who Designed This Thing?

Hello, friends. I am broken. I slipped a disc in my lower back, and said disc is pressing on my L5 nerve, which runs down the outside of my right leg. This is such a stupid problem. My leg thinks it’s getting stabbed constantly, when in reality it’s just got a bit of…(quick break to Google what discs are made of)…cartilege or gelatinous goo or something pressing on the nerve, nowhere near the leg itself. Plus my back hurts where the disc is out of place, and now, randomly, my hip also hurts, no doubt because I’ve been doing something dumb to try and minimize the pain from the other issues. It’s been three weeks now, and, if anything, the problem is getting worse, despite regular chiropractor and physical therapy appointments, exercises, and me taking things easy. It is ungodly frustrating. I feel like I can’t do anything, like my own body has betrayed me, yet, on the other hand, I feel like I’m being a huge baby, that lots of people live with chronic pain, and here I am, with a single point of inconvenience when normally I’m fine. Who designed these bodies? I have complaints. About the brain parts too. The whole pain system is stupid. In the great scheme of problems, a slipped disc is hardly anything. It’s not actually doing anything that bad. I still have most of my range of motion. Nothing is actually wrong with my leg, despite what it thinks. And yet it…

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The Birth of a Story

I’ve just turned in the story that will become TDP’s next long work for sale, so I thought it might be fun to go back through some of the steps I took getting here. (Good luck trying to replicate them, though! The process of story inspiration is anything but linear, at least if you’re like me.) A few years before the pandemic, I was generating story ideas by looking at calls for submission from themed short-story anthologies. How those work is that an editor and a publisher collaborate to come up with a theme, often they’ll tap a few better-known authors to headline the anthology, and then they’ll put out a call to fill the rest of the slots. I wrote and submitted a few stories that way. More often, I wrote lots of notes about potential stories, but they needed more time to percolate, so they didn’t get finished in time for the anthology deadlines. That’s okay because most anthology themes aren’t so specific that the story would work only there and nowhere else (and if they are that specific, I don’t write for them, for exactly that reason). This story was one of those that needed to percolate. As often happens, I had an image in my head and a nameless feeling that came with it, but no plot, no character, nothing I could dig into to make it a story. Then the pandemonium arrived and, well, not much writing happened for a while. In the meantime, the…

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Tis the Season

To tell you the truth, I waffle a lot around this time of year. It starts at the beginning of November (but definitely after Halloween.) Gimme carols! Lights! All the pretties! Except–OMG, not that song AGAIN. What do you mean if I want lights, I have to go out to the shed and get them, and probably half of them don’t work? Look, if we put up a tree, it’s just a battle for weeks to keep the cat from eating it or taking it down. And our living room is small enough without putting a big tree in it. (My kid is convinced if it’s not scraping the ceiling, it’s not REALLY a tree. And don’t get me started on real actual go-pick-one-out-every-year formerly-live trees, and the fight there, to get one that will actually fit in the house…) I want to bake cookies! I don’t want to effort. And I really don’t need cookies around. I need to find the perfect presents! OMG, these people are so spoiled! I do everything for them and their legs ain’t broke, why would I give them presents too? I want to give everyone food and hugs! OMG, get away from me. And my bank balance weeps… Seriously. My Christmas spirit sputters like a candle in a drafty window, only it’s one of those joke candles that looks like it’s out, then comes back when you least expect it. Again and again. Christmas always wins. Then I’m that lady, looking for Christmas…

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Gratitude

Sometimes, in the hustle and bustle of daily life, we forget to stop and give thanks for our blessings. I know I do. Frequently. It’s easy to take for granted that we’re healthy, or that we’ve got food to eat, or a roof over our heads. We forget that there are people out there who don’t have those things. And then it’s like, whoa, I am so lucky. I need to thank God/the Universe/whomever for this. Every Thanksgiving I try my best to practice gratitude. At our table, we list our blessings and what we are thankful for. It’s a small but very powerful thing. It reminds us that we should never take anything for granted. As you know, my health has never been perfect. But I am very lucky in that I’ve never had cancer or any other serious or life-threatening illness. I’ve never had to think about what happens after I’m gone in a very real way (versus abstractly right now) or actually make preparations for that possibility or say goodbyes or be faced with options that will either give me three great months or seven horrible ones. I thank God for that all the time. Yeah, I get frustrated with things — the severe fatigue, the sleep issues, the little stuff that pops up…but nothing’s killing me. I’m lucky. So damn lucky. I’m also grateful for my business, my job, which allows me to work from home and not jeopardize my health worse by having to work…

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noooo the holidays cometh

Do you know what’s in a week, friends? American Thanksgiving. Do you know who hosts Thanksgiving and hasn’t ordered a turkey yet? If you guessed me, you’re absolutely correct. (In my defense, the place I always order from went out of business about two months ago, and now I don’t know what to do.) It feels like as soon as November hit everything went full-bore toward Christmas and, for the life of me, I am not ready to do Christmas. Let me enjoy November! Let us at least get through Thanksgiving before we worry about Christmas! But, alas, it seems not to be. For example, the small-ish, mobile one’s school is having their Holiday Market, where they can buy presents without us parents knowing what they’ve gotten us, tomorrow. And I don’t know how many emails I’ve gotten that are titled something like “Haven’t gotten your Christmas cards yet?” I can only imagine how irritating this season is for people who don’t celebrate Christmas. The Christmas market downtown opens Saturday, as do a number of other Christmas-themed activities. Please. Please can we just wait until after Thanksgiving. I don’t even have a turkey. It also adds unnecessary stress, you know? I haven’t done my Christmas cards or bought presents or anything, and quite honestly I won’t until after Thanksgiving anyway, but now I have to worry about it. Thanks, commercialism. Any tips for keeping Christmas at bay for another week? Any tips at all? (help me)

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An American on the Other Side of the World

One of the luckiest folk in the world, here, reporting on her return from one of the most beautiful places in the world. Did you know the Maori only found New Zealand 800 years ago? People have been in Australia for 60,000 years, but New Zealand…? Even the indigenous people have been there just eight centuries. Have another amazing fact—while scientists argue about exactly how New Zealand became so isolated, they are quite certain that only two mammals are native—and they are each a species of bat. (The fur seals don’t count, despite being super cute, as they live in the ocean and haul up on land.) So. Super fascinating, check. Astonishingly beautiful, check. Home of some super cool stuff? Oh yeah. One thing this country is not? Always on. There was a 24-hour kebab place near our hotel in Brisbane. (Australia.) I didn’t see anything twenty-four hour in New Zealand. Even the Denny’s (Yes, Denny’s) that had a “24 Hours!” sign, had a small paper sign next to it that they were open 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. holidays excluded. Also, they sold booze at the Denny’s. In Christchurch, there was a pedestrian mall around the corner from our hotel, full of cafes, bars, restaurants, and souvenir shops. When I went in search of coffee one morning, the café I’d IDed from the internet that opened at 0730 wasn’t open at 0800. I walked on, desperate for coffee—and found several more cafés, all closed. I came back…and the one…

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