Call for Submissions at Turtleduck Press

Last week I told you about a call for submissions from Turtleduck Press, and promised to tell you a little more later. Well, later is today!

Turtleduck Press began almost three years ago, when several writers (including yours truly) decided to band together and pool our strengths to start a science fiction and fantasy press. We knew we wanted to operate like a traditional publisher in that everything we published had to be:

• approved by one or more members
• edited by an experienced editor (that would be me — editing is how I make my living)
• formatted and designed to look professional
• advertised on our website and everywhere else we could get the word out

…so we’d be publishing works of quality and also look professional — both good ways to attract (and keep!) readers.

WANA Friday: Music I Love

I’m excited to be starting a new series of Friday posts as part of a writers’ community I’m in, WANA (We Are Not Alone). We’ll all be posting on a common topic on Fridays, and sharing links to all the participants’ posts so you can go blog-hopping and read the different takes on the same topic.

This week’s WANA Friday topic is a favourite or inspiring work of art — a painting, a piece of music, and so on.

Here’s one of mine:

Announcement and Three Things I Love About Norway

First of all, I am thrilled to announce that Turtleduck Press, the indie co-op press I’m a part of, is opening to new members as of today. We’re looking for novel submissions from science fiction and fantasy writers. I’ll be talking more about this on Monday, but in the meantime, to learn more, check out the announcement at Turtleduck Press!

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Second, a bit of trivia for you. Norway is my ancestral home — three of my grandparents were born there — and I was lucky enough to visit in 2001.

This Friday is the Seventeenth of May, the Norwegian equivalent of Independence Day or Canada Day. It originally commemorated the signing of the Norwegian constitution in 1814, although Norway didn’t achieve independence (from its union with Sweden) until nearly a century later, in 1905.

As a holiday, the Seventeenth of May, or Syttende Mai in Norwegian, has become a day to celebrate the country, mainly with flags and children’s parades and the singing of the anthem — “Ja, vi elsker dette landet”, or “Yes, We Love This Country”.

So in honour of Syttende Mai, here are three things I love about Norway:

My Mother, the Book Enabler

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mothers out there!

Right now, I’m on vacation, getting to spend Mother’s Day with my mom for the first time in many years. So in her honour, we’re talking about mothers and reading.

Both my parents valued reading — it was my father who told us bedtime stories about Middle Earth. But it was my mother who took us to the library and let us lug home literally as many books as we could carry (and a determined preteen bookworm can heft a lot of books, even if she doesn’t look that strong!). And it was she who hunted down her childhood favourites to share with me and my siblings.

The Amazing Temples of Chiang Mai, Thailand

Roof-line of Wat Prathat Doi Suthep

Quick note: This week I’m over at Turtleduck Press, talking about my latest “ooh, shiny!” obsession — gardening.

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It’s time for another installment of travel tales from my trip through Asia. In this episode, we’re still in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Chiang Mai is famous for more than the adventure tourism I mentioned last time. It’s also known for its temples, or wats….

Wat Prathat Doi SutheP

Detail of the naga (serpents) guarding the long flight of stairs up to the temple

Early in our stay, we took a group tour up Doi Suthep, a mountain next to the city. The main attraction of the mountain is the temple it hosts, Wat Prathat Doi Suthep. There’s a legend about its founding — involving a white elephant (sacred in Thailand) and a relic of Buddha — which you can read on Wikipedia.

This temple was our first experience with Thai religious architecture and Buddhism as practised in Thailand. I’d seen pictures, of course, but the sheer lavishness of the decoration was amazing in person. I wandered around in a daze snapping photos of everything, drunk on the beauty and worldbuilding potential.

Summer Movie Preview

It’s summer blockbuster time! As a moviegoer, I’m always on the lookout for smart SF&F films, where character development and action are well balanced, and CGI doesn’t stand in for plot. But these can be few and far between. Here are some that I think might make the cut…

Iron Man 3

Okay, I know this is out now, but I haven’t seen it yet. I saw The Avengers, but skipped Iron Man 2 because one movie starring a full-of-himself billionaire was enough — he worked much better for me in an ensemble cast. But from the trailers, this installment features a fallen Tony Stark who’s struggling to find his feet again. That’s a story I can get on board with. Add in the superhero setting and the wisecracks, and I’m there.

Managing the Internet Time-Suck

To start off today, I have to announce a new story. Still Waters Run Deep is now posted at Turtleduck Press, and it marks several firsts for me — it’s the beginning of a serial, and it was inspired by my Asia trip. To be precise, it’s a fantasy story set in a world that looks something like Thailand. And did I mention it’s free?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about something I wrote here two weeks ago:

3. The Internet isn’t that important. When I was travelling, Internet time was severely limited. What did I spend it on? Email and Facebook, to stay connected with people back home. Blogging. Travel research. A handful of other sites. Everything that didn’t make the cut is superfluous. Instead of being bombarded with a flow of information and LOLcats, I was bombarded with new sights and new experiences…in other words, with life. As a writer, I can’t stay away completely — I need to keep up with blogs and other social media, publishing news, and so on — but I can take a good, hard look at my Internet usage.

As you might imagine, it’s hard to make lasting change, no matter how good one’s intentions. The Internet is my entertainment of choice, up near books and way ahead of TV or movies or music — plus it’s a social hub and a professional necessity. So I’m finding myself getting sucked back in…and then feeling guilty about it, of course. But this time, I’m paying attention.

7 Writing Lessons from George R. R. Martin

Like many people, I’ve gotten hooked on George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire (adapted for television as Game of Thrones ). I’m reading it not only as a fan of epic fantasy, but also as a fantasy writer. Whether you like the books or not, there’s a lot to learn from them.

For example…

(NOTE: This post contains spoilers through A Storm of Swords, which is the third book of the five that are currently out. If you’re watching the TV series and haven’t read the books, you probably won’t want to read further — the current season will end halfway through the events of A Storm of Swords. I haven’t read the last two books yet, so if you have, please don’t post spoilers for the last two books.)

1. Some readers will follow you anywhere…if they trust you. Martin is infamous for killing off characters you thought were safe by the rules (or tropes) of fantasy writing. Granted, he’s lost readers because of it — dark, gritty fantasy isn’t for everyone. But he still has huge numbers of readers clamoring for more. Why? Because they’ve grown to trust his storytelling skills. He’s shown that he’s in control, that his plotting is well thought out, that he doesn’t kill characters without a good reason. More than that, he tells a story that people want to hear, despite the risks.

Levelling Up in Chiang Mai, Thailand

It’s time for another installment of travel tales from my Grand Adventure in Asia. Now that I’m no longer travelling, I plan to post these on alternate Wednesdays, interspersed with the same sort of mental-health posts and personal observations that I was writing before the trip. Mondays will continue to be about books and media (SF&F-focused, but not exclusively), as always. I’ll continue to post twice a week for now. Enjoy!

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Our first stop in Thailand was Chiang Mai, the country’s second-biggest city. It’s in the northwest part of Thailand, among rolling hills that keep the temperatures down to something very reasonable for North Americans. This means it’s a popular destination, not only for North Americans but also for Chinese tourists, whose numbers have exploded recently due to cheap flights.

We found Chiang Mai to be more intense than Malaysia, in all sorts of ways. Because we’re geeks, we quickly started to talk about this as “levelling up” — a video-game term referring to mastering a level and moving on to the next. For example…

The Traffic

The stupa in front of our guesthouse

Our guesthouse, Kamala’s, was on a tiny side street. (Note on addresses: Non-main streets are known in Thailand as sois. Thai addresses give the nearest main road, then the number of the soi, because the sois themselves don’t have names, even though they may be large streets. So Kamala’s was on Chai Sriphum, Soi 1.) Across the soi was an old Buddhist stupa, a useful landmark since it was visible from several streets away.

The soi was lined with other guesthouses and the occasional Thai massage place, but it was short on restaurants. This turned out to be a problem because the traffic was utterly terrifying…

Books for Earth Day

Happy Earth Day!

I’m a quiet but staunch environmentalist, and I suspect that books had a lot to do with this side of my personality (and most of the rest, for that matter). Here, then, are some books to celebrate on Earth Day…

Cautionary Tales

For those of us growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s, science fiction for teens (the term “YA” hadn’t been invented yet) tended to follow a few familiar tropes. Dystopian tales were popular, as were stories about aliens and spaceships. And it was almost taken for granted that our planet was going to come close to destruction, usually for environmental reasons.