World Turtle Day
May 24th, 2008 by Patricia
I’m finally ready to blog again after a couple of frantic weeks of packing and moving. It seems appropriate that I’m getting back into gear on World Turtle Day. Not only does this nicely tie into my publishing company, Green Turtle Press, and my middle-grade fantasy novel, Turtle Island, (the title of which I took from one of the Native American names for North America) but it is also a good reminder to me to keep going with my writing, no matter how slow and discouraging the process sometimes feels.
As my oldest daughter told me when she was four and first heard the story of “The Tortoise and the Hare,” the moral of Aesop’s well-known fable is “Slow and sweaty wins the race!”–a saying that has been a byword in our family ever since. Certainly writing, itself, is time consuming. Turtle Island took me a year-and-a-half to write, which seems to be about average for most children’s novels. The publishing process is even longer, usually at least a couple of years between the time the manuscript is purchased and when the book is released. Self-publishing and ebooks are faster than this, but that’s a whole different subject that we’ll get to in another blog. Back to Turtle Day.
There are many different types of turtles - the pig nosed turtle, the green sea turtle, the alligator snapping turtle, the meso-American river turtle, the leatherback turtle (the largest species which does not have a hard shell), the red-eared slider turtle, the common musk turtle (this type had also been called the stinkpot because it releases a musky and foul odor to scare off predators), the big-headed turtle that can climb trees, and the aptly named pancake turtle.
My favorite, however, is the painted terrapin, those cute little turtles that are sold in pet stores. A friend of mine gifted my granddaughter with two large specimens, and the 75 gallon tank they live in, because she (my friend) had, at the time, two cats, two dogs, eight puppies, two kids and a husband as well as the turtles and wanted to downsize her menagerie. The turtles, named Peach and Banana for their orange and yellow undersides, are surprisingly engaging and interesting critters with distinct, if reptilian, personalities. And, unlike their slower tortoise cousins, they are surprisingly energetic. They don’t have a lot of goals–getting to the top of the sunning rock, being the first to get to the turtle food, chasing guppies around the tank–but they go all out after them.
So let’s all keep going toward our personal goals, writing and otherwise, either slow and sweatily or with the darting persistence of Peach and Banana–whichever the circumstances call for–as we celebrate turtles and tortoises on their special day!
