August 2020 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
July Recap
NEW RELEASE NEWS! Check out the Release Dates section for details.
I got to do two online writing retreats in July and they were both very helpful and a lot of fun. It was great to engage with people even over video chats, and I got some good feedback on The Price of Thorns (see last month for more about it). I got a lot more words down and a good handle on what’s going on with it, so I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to complete it maybe by the end of the year. I’ll share an excerpt this month, but then I’m hitting pause on it because…
I’ve had another book bouncing around at the back of my head for a year or so, a non-furry thriller. Why not furry? Because it doesn’t have to be, I guess. I have had a soft spot for thrillers most of my life, reading Clive Cussler and Frederick Forsyth in high school and then Jonathan Kellerman later on. I’ve technically written a thriller, I guess—The Silver Circle could count as that, as well as Unfinished Business, and I’m just realizing that all my thrillers to date involve werewolves—but the idea for this one has stuck with me long enough that I want to get it down, and because I’ve finished two series this year and the pandemic has delayed publications, I’ll have time in my schedule to try something new. I’m going to be spending some of August plotting and outlining, because I want to lay a foundation before I start writing, hopefully also in August. Thrillers are generally shorter novels so I don’t think this draft will take me longer than a couple months once it gets going. As I write, I’ll share excerpts and will hopefully have one for you next month.
The Dude, Where’s My Fox? audiobook is now just waiting for some technical issues at ACX to resolve, but the work is all done! Hope it’ll be ready for you soon. Zeke’s done a fantastic job with it.
My Zootopia fanfiction writing streams have gone pretty well! I’ve been doing them Tuesdays around noon PDT for 60-90 minutes, and intend to continue them into August. Keep an eye on my Twitter or follow me on picarto.tv (https://picarto.tv/KyellGold) to be notified next time I stream.
Streaming: The second season of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (Netflix) is great and you should all watch it.
We finished Avatar and I liked it a lot, though I think we all felt the third season faltered at points and lost its way. The ending was satisfying, but I would have much preferred if the questions and actions brought up in the final hour and a half episode would have been the focus of the third season rather than being introduced and resolved right away. Anyway, it’s a fun world and the characters are pretty good and I can see why it’s so popular! Legend of Korra comes to Netflix in August so we’ll be checking that out.
And Doom Patrol is now on HBO Max and it’s great. It captures the offbeat nature of the Grant Morrison run (which is all I’ve read, honestly) and has some super interesting character work. The ending was a little bit off—for the first season—but we’re really excited to get into the second season.
Speaking of second seasons, we weren’t huge fans of The Umbrella Academy’s first season, but the trailer for the second has us intrigued, so we’ll likely check it out.
Release dates
Love Match (2013-2015) will be out August 25th and pre-orders are open now!
https://furplanet.com/shop/item.aspx?itemid=1124 There are some signed bookplates for the first people to order, so get your pre-orders in! I’m really happy with how this story turned out and I am glad to have it all available for everyone finally. E-book will be on baddogbooks.com around the same time and on other retail outlets probably in October.
The fourth and final Calatians book, The Revolution and the Fox, will come out later in the summer (or early fall), and I hope to get the “Dude” sequel out this year as well.
Audiobooks: If you don’t have an Audible account yet, check out my new Soundcloud page (https://soundcloud.com/user-710305036-429996600), which has samples and links to all my audiobooks. Those links help me get extra money especially if you use them to sign up for a new account. Savrin has been slowed by the pandemic (having everyone home always leaves less time for recording), but once Love Match 1 is up, we hope to get Titles and Ty Game out as well!
My FREE book of writing advice called Do You Need Help? is on baddogbooks.com right here: https://baddogbooks.com/product/do-you-need-help/
Appearances in 2020
My full list of upcoming appearances is at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html, recently updated (or soon to be updated).
Megaplex has been postponed, but I have been told that they would like to keep the same GOH slate into 2021. I don’t have any other plans to attend furry conventions in person, but I may pop into Megaplex Online. If you want to attend and get $5 off your registration, go to https://megaplex.online/discount/?code=KyellGoldMPO .
Spotlight: No spotlight this month.
Excerpt: Here’s a short bit of The Price of Thorns that I wrote this month.
The spinning of the great wooden wheel he was lashed to had become a familiar disorientation, rightways up and upside down blurring together until he couldn’t have pointed up even with an unbound hand. He could hear well enough, though. “Give you a penny if you get him in the head,” the slightly darker-skinned boy who’d just spun the wheel said to the slightly lighter-skinned one cupping a tomato in his hand.
Even spinning as quickly as he was, he could track the lanky farmer boy’s arm as it wound back and then shot forward, releasing its missile. It was going to miss him, no, the wheel was bringing him around to—
The tomato smacked Nivvy on the temple, bursting into juice and seeds that spun into his eyes and hair. “Ow!” he yelled as the boys laughed. “That one wasn’t even rotten!”
The wheel slowed in that jerky way it had, speeding up as the rocks tied to his feet descended and slowing as it tried to lift them around the other side. “Wasting perfectly good food like that. Y’oughta be ashamed!”
The spinner had just handed a penny to the thrower, and now they both turned to stare at him. Uh-oh. “Reckon he’s right,” the thrower said to the spinner, and stooped to the ground, rummaging in the dirt.
“No, no I’m not.” Nivvy spoke quickly, sideways as the wheel’s momentum tried and failed to make one more revolution. He started to spin back the other way, slowing, becoming an easier target. “One of my faults, you see, I—hey! You! Uh—farmer boy! Sign says you’re not to throw rocks!”
The lighter-skinned boy had straightened up with an egg-sized rock, or, if the gods were smiling, a clump of earth, in his hand. “Don’t see nobody here minding the sign,” he said.
“I’ll report you. When Kingsley comes to set me loose, I’ll tell him.” Nivvy knew that there were times in his life when it would be better for him to stop talking, but so far he had not managed to recognize a single one of them before it happened.
“Oh aye? What name will you give?” The boy hefted the rock.
Clump of earth. Clump of earth. Nivvy had a strong belief in the power of faith, but it had been sorely tested of late, and here in this backwoods frontier town with one inn and a profusion of young farmer boys with identical dirty faces, huge hands, and simple brains, he had wondered more than once if this was where faith had come to die.
He’d settled upright again, barely rocking from side to side, an easy mark now, so he sorted through the farmers’ names he’d heard in his three miserable days here. “Jorgen’s boy.”
The boy and his friend exchanged grins. “All the better. He’ll get the blame for it. Two filthy birds with one stone.” He cocked his arm back, and Nivvy squeezed his eyes shut, not to avoid seeing the stone, but to protect them.
It hit him on the nose, and it was a sharp stone as well as a heavy one. The boys’ laughter faded with their footsteps, and blood trickled down from both inside and outside Nivvy’s nose, mixing with drops of tomato juice. Faith, he thought, must be that Inira is teaching me a lesson here. Consider it learned, my Goddess! If you send someone to release me from this wheel, I’ll never again think so much of my skills that I underestimate someone’s cleverness just because they happen to be riding along Nowhere Road.
He occupied himself for a few moments with venomous thoughts of revenge against both the merchant’s wife who had felt the compulsion to check on her jewelry at sunrise, and against Kingsley, the innkeeper and de facto lawman of the town. For a theft in which all the stolen goods had been recovered, banishment was usual in every civilized town Nivvy had known. But the good citizens of Plow had built a wheel like they’d heard of in stories from the long-ago times, the kind of thing nobody in civilized towns had done for hundreds of years, if they ever actually had—stories were just stories, after all—and having built it, they were all very excited to use it, no matter Nivvy’s very sensible and logical arguments to the contrary.
The thoughts of revenge helped distract him from the tickling of the blood and the metallic taste of it. It would dry eventually, if the sun remained out, and there was no indication that it would do anything but. His tongue, in fact, was already thick and dry, and licking the blood from his lips just made it sticky and foul-tasting. Blood and tomato juice made a terrible combination.
A shadow fell over him. He flinched instinctively; nobody was supposed to touch him directly, but he’d already experienced how effective the sign was when Kingsley wasn’t around.
“So this is what I’ve been reduced to,” a harsh female voice said to his left.
He turned his head until it hurt, enough to see the red velvet dress patched with brown cotton and strips of what looked like someone’s dirty white tunic. The neck and chin above it were white as china, but not china that was sitting in someone’s cabinet waiting to be liberated from its pristine prison. They were more like china one would find in the back of some peddler’s cart, a mismatched set dusty and cracked, not worth the trouble it would take to shout “King’s Men!” to distract the peddler as you swept the pieces under your cloak. To one side of the neck, Nivvy could see strands of black hair, but the woman’s face was hidden in shadow.
“Aye, well, we’ve both been reduced, then,” he said. She wasn’t throwing anything at him, and that was a good thing.
“I had presumed that your natural state was not being covered in your own piss and blood.” Her voice had a haughty tone, but fractured with notes of uncertainty. She brought a hand to her nose. “Oh, and you’ve soiled yourself worse than that.”
The fact that she wasn’t throwing anything at him emboldened Nivvy. “You get up here for half a day and then an entire night and then half of another day and you see how long you stay pretty and clean. Anyway,” he said, “not all that soiling is mine.”
“Do you think that makes it better?”
“Depends on whether you’re asking after my predicament or my self-control,” he said. “And what business have you with either?”
“I’m in the market for a thief. I was told there was one this way, but if the people in this backwards excuse for a town caught you, then I’m sure I can do better.”
“You can try,” Nivvy said with affected confidence.
She gave a small sniff and turned. Her footsteps carried her behind the wheel and out of his sight and then stopped. She’d wanted to make a great show of leaving but wasn’t confident enough to follow through. Or perhaps it was a test of his abilities. Either way, he stayed quiet until he heard that threadbare dress rustle, and then he said, “Shall I tell you what will happen if you try?”
She didn’t say anything, but the rustling stopped. Nivvy licked blood and tomato juice from his lips and drew in a breath. “First, you’ll find that there are no other thieves in this ‘miserable excuse for a town.’ And none of the mud-headed farmers here caught me; it was a traveling Lady on her way from Garbenstock to Penuca, no doubt a journey of desperation, which explains why she owned anything worth stealing and why she felt the need to go ensure the safety of her baubles at a time when most decent travelers would be resting for the next day’s journey.”
He paused to attempt to collect more moisture in his mouth, and the lady spoke coolly. “You excel at making excuses for yourself, if nothing else.”
“No excuses. Appraising the mistakes fairly so one doesn’t make them a second time. Now…” He would have to make this quick. “You’d likely head to Penuca next, that being the nearest town with a Thieves’ Guild, and there you would find as many thieves as you might need. But if you had gold to pay a professional thief, I wager you wouldn’t be trudging through shit-strewn roads on the edge of the Wildlands looking for one. So you’d likely…” Here he paused for a spate of coughing that did nothing to help his throat. “…walk around seedy back alleys asking after unguilded thieves, and end up robbed or with that pretty throat slit.”
Nivvy smacked his lips and hoped that had convinced her. He didn’t have many words left in him.
Another farmer’s boy stormed up, indistinguishable from the rest except in that he was perhaps a little older and taller than the others. “Oi!” he yelled. “You been telling tales ‘bout me?”
“Jorgen’s boy?” Nivvy rasped.
“Aye, and what’s it to you? I never done nothing to you.” Unaware of the irony, the boy stooped to pick up a clump of earth. Definitely just a clump of earth.
“Begone,” the lady said. “I am speaking with this wretch.”
“No skin off me back,” Jorgen’s boy said. “You can speak while I teach him a lesson. He got two ears, ain’t he?”
“I said begone!”
She stepped in front of Nivvy, so he couldn’t see her face, but she stood tall and regal with one arm outstretched commandingly. Jorgen’s boy, who could see her face, stood for a moment with his lower lip sputtering rebelliously, and then threw his missile at her.
It struck her on the hip. She flinched and he laughed, at which she picked up the object (it was a rock, definitely a rock) and threw it back at him.
He watched the rock land a good ten feet in front of him and five feet to the left. “Whore,” he jeered back at her, and walked off in the direction of the inn.
The woman’s posture sagged as she turned to Nivvy. Now, with the hood of the cloak settled back, he had a clearer view of her features. Fine china in disrepair, aye, that described her well. Her jet-black hair would likely be striking when properly coiffed so that the stray hairs didn’t frame her face like grasping tendrils; her eyebrows were thicker than was proper for a Lady, at least in his experience. Her skin, pale as chalk, showed red in patches where the sun had borne down on her, and a filigree of lines on her brow and at the corners of her mouth marked her as older than Nivvy probably by two decades, if not more. That mouth, thin and severe, parted to reveal teeth that would have been perfect if not for the yellowing. “When are you due to be released?”
“Sunset today,” he said. “If Kingsley remembers.”
She considered the wheel. “If you accept my job, I’ll release you now and we can be quit of this town before anyone’s the wiser.”
Since parting ways with the Thieves’ Guild, Nivvy had found that if other people wanted him to steal something, he would much rather steal it for himself and keep all the benefit. If they could pay him its worth, they could buy the thing outright and wouldn’t be asking a thief to steal it. And in the few cases where the payment equaled the worth of the thing to be stolen, said thing was guarded by creatures that Nivvy generally preferred to meet in nightmares, because at least then a body could wake up with no more damage than sweaty nightclothes. So by and large, when people asked him to steal something for them, his response was a polite but firm “bugger off.” However, exceptional circumstances allowed for a rewriting of rules. “What’s yer job, then?”
The woman lifted her pointed chin and spoke formally, as though reciting. “My name is Bella and I have need of a good thief. Failing that, I could use a merely competent thief, and—”
Pride overrode the complaints of his throat. “I’ll have you know that I am an uncommonly talented thief.”
She arched one eyebrow up, which drew his attention to its thickness. “What is uncommon about your talents?”
“No, it’s an expression. It just means very talented.” Her eyes widened and traveled up from his to the leather bindings that lashed his hands to the wheel. “All right, yes, but look, you know the Tarisch Empire, across the western ocean?”
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“My second job for the Guild, I stole the jeweled brooch of the Emperor’s daughter from the topmost tower of the royal palace. Now, the palace itself is in the midst of a compound full of armed guards, and the tower stands two hundred feet off the ground, so I says to myself—”
“I’m not interested in the details of your exploits.”
“Well, I stole it, is the point, and they didn’t catch me.”
“It’s conveniently far away,” she said. “Which Thieves’ Guild could I apply to to find out the truth of that?”
He looked away from her. “It’d be at Copper Port.”
“I don’t know that place. Is it far from here?”
Her tone was light; she was toying with him. “Go on with what you want, then,” he said. “Maybe it’s more difficult to nick than Princess Chakali’s brooch.”
The eyebrows lowered and her feet shuffled. The confidence she’d demonstrated up to that point faltered slightly. “I need you to help me steal a kingdom.”
Deference battled with the need to set someone straight, and it was a short, quick battle. “See, the problem with that,” Nivvy said, “is that kingdoms are big. People notice when they go missing. And I’ve never tried to stash a kingdom under my cloak or cross a river with one, let alone sell one in a free town somewhere. I imagine it might be done, but—”
“Funny,” she interrupted him. “I knew a fellow once who wagged his tongue like that. I did him the favor of cutting it out for him.”
Nivvy shut his mouth quickly. His tongue might be dry and sticky with blood and tomato, but he still very much preferred it remain in his mouth.
The woman went on. “The kingdom is mine by right. It was taken from me a long time ago, but I have recently…found a way to restore myself to the throne. But I need—it will be easier with assistance.”
“Speaking seriously and not tryin’ to be funny,” Nivvy said, “T’other thing about big things like kingdoms is they tend to be guarded quite well. Steal even the princess’s brooch, you might get a flight of crows after you. No great shakes for an accomplished dodger and scarpermancer such as yours truly. Even got a cantrip or two myself. But the really important royal family things, like crowns and scepters and thrones, they’ve got end-of-days magic around ‘em. Earth splitting, dragons—multiple dragons—amassing, entire armies gettin’ turned to stone. And not even a nice stone like marble where you might at least make a nice statue; no, they say when the wizard Gibberfit was defending Ivernia from the invaders, he turned them to sandstone and they wore down in one generation.”
“Gibberfit was an idiot,” the woman said. “And anyway, that kind of magic isn’t around anymore.”
“Tell that to me mate Marzin. Was on a job stealing from a wizard and got turned into a toad.”
“How unfortunate,” she said in a bored voice.
“You’ve no idea! I carried him around in a box to make sure he didn’t get et or stepped on. Least he could talk, even though after a while he mostly talked about how different bugs tasted.”
“You won’t get turned into anything,” she said.
“I agree, but mostly because right now I don’t see as I’d be interested in tryin’ to steal a kingdom.”
“You haven’t heard what I’d pay you.”
This was the part where they named their price which was never as appealing as they thought it would be. He’d been paid three gold crowns for his part in the brooch job and never seen anything that rich again.
She cleared her throat. “I can offer you one hundred gold crowns.”
He couldn’t help it; he laughed out loud, hard enough that the wheel listed to one side and then slowly rotated back. His laugh turned into a dry cough that stung his throat. “A hundred!” he said when he recovered his speech. “Blow me, if you had that kind of coin you’d be wearing a nicer dress, milady.”
The unsure expression hardened on her face and her lips pursed into an even thinner line. “I will pay you from the treasury when the kingdom is mine.”
“Ah ha ha, payment on completion,” Nivvy said. “Aye, that’s a refrain I know well. I prefer to hold to the Thieves’ Guild requirement of half payment before the job starts.”
“If I had fifty gold crowns, do you think I would be standing here in filth talking to an even filthier wretch?”
“I don’t know, milady,” he said. “It’s a problem it is. And by the way, your feet look very lovely and you’ve sidestepped the worst of the filth, I see.”
“I’m not certain I have,” she snapped.
“All right, even if I did take your word…” He paused to cough again. The bitter tomato taste was getting worse the more it dried out. “We need horses, we both need to be cleaned up, we’ll need other supplies, I shouldn’t wonder, and where’s all that to come from?”
She drew herself up. “I see,” she said. “Well, perhaps Penuca will hold a thief willing to take a little risk for the prospect of a great reward.” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and strode back behind the wheel again.
“Wait!” Nivvy called out.
“No, I don’t think I shall,” she said. “You’ve made your position very clear. I wish you luck in finding a patron who can hold to your guild’s rules.”
“The thing is,” he said, and coughed. “The thing is, I might take immediate release from the wheel in place of some of the coin.”
“I couldn’t ask you to lower your standards,” she said. “I don’t want to hire someone who takes work that’s beneath him. I want someone worthy of the job.”
“How can you know I’m not unless you give me a chance?” he said. “How am I supposed to prove myself bound to this infernal punishment?”
For several seconds he waited, but she neither took a step away nor spoke. With every silent second, Nivvy’s bravado retreated. Don’t beg, he told himself. Nobody will respect a thief who begs. “I’ll do yer job,” he said finally, in a soft, husky voice. “If you believe it can be done by a thief, then I believe it can be done by me.”
When finally she did speak, she regained her dry, confident tone. “It appears we are both in dire straits. I fully believe that within one month, our wheels will have turned and we shall be in far better circumstances.” She walked around to the front of the wheel, gave him a not-altogether-reassuring smile, and reached for the nearest binding.
Questions From YOU
If you’ve got a question about my books or my writing—or anything else you want me to talk about—shoot me an email and I’ll answer it here.
This month’s question comes from both Gullwulf and Mino. To composite: “How do you write during a pandemic? How do you keep up your motivation when you feel consistently overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed out?”
This is going to be one of those answers where I tell you what works for me and what I’ve heard other people say, but the realest answer is that you may have to try a lot of things to find the thing that works for you.
First and foremost, you have to understand that it is okay to not write. If writing is becoming a stress for you, an obligation that you’re feeling worse by not fulfilling, then you have my permission to postpone your writing for a day or a week. I believe that it’s best not to postpone it for too long because it’s easy to fall out of the habit altogether, but these are extreme times and if it helps you, then take a day off.
If you can manage it, make writing a component of your self-care. When we’re exhausted, overwhelmed, stressed at times like this it’s because we’re fighting every day, every minute. Stress comes from being worried about a situation you don’t have control over, fearing that your voice isn’t being heard, that you don’t have any power to change the situation. Writing can give you a safe place where you have control, where you have a voice, where you can change the world.
That could mean that writing is a cocoon you wrap yourself in to escape from the outside world—for a lot of us, writing and reading are escapes. None of the worlds I’m writing in right now are experiencing the problems we are; they have their own problems, sure, but I know why those problems happened and I know how they’ll be solved. It’s reassuring, an illusion of control that I absolutely don’t have in the outside world. I know that it feels like the problems we have right now are so dire that it’s irresponsible to run away from them. I also know that there are only so many hours in the day I can think about them, and there’s only so much I can do. Retreating to my fantasy worlds keeps me balanced and saves my energy for the times when I need it.
Writing can also be a form of response. If you don’t want to retreat from the problems, then incorporate your response to them into your writing. Write about the things you see around you (at this particular time: systemic racism, government malice and incompetence, people who won’t believe information that will literally save their lives) and weave them into your world. Make your writing a form of therapy (it is that anyway) and bring into being the arguments you wish people would have. Give them a fantasy happy ending, or a realistic but positive ending, or heck, drive everything to an apocalypse, and work out the things you want to say, the scenarios you want to have happen.
You can also make your writing a way to connect with people and talk about something other than the horror all around us. Writing is a solitary activity but if you have writing groups, you can talk about your projects and your goals. I know that every conversation I have these days turns either to the pandemic or our broken country, and when I did those writing workshops in July, it was a really nice break to be thinking about something else for a change and interacting with other people.
You’re not only writing for yourself; you’re writing for other people too, those overwhelmed, exhausted, stressed people who need to read something as an escape. Sometimes they’ll want a fantasy to take them away from the world, and sometimes they’ll want to address the world’s problems in a different context. Whatever you feel like writing, there will be people who want to read it and your words will help them. You are still doing good.
And I think you need to understand that to give yourself permission to write as well as not to write. There are so many fires that need to be put out that writing can feel like an indulgence, a luxury you can’t afford. But it’s not only good for you, it’s good for other people too. A story you write can change people’s lives as much as a donation to a charity or a letter to your representative.
Take a break from writing if you need to. But if you’re asking the question, “How do I write during these times?” then I feel that it’s because you want to. So tell yourself it’s okay. Set aside time when you won’t look at news, whether that’s in the morning or the evening or lunch or whatever. Look at it like anti-depression medication you have to take, or look at it as part of the resistance, or look at it as a social activity and talk to your writing community about it.
It’s okay. You can do it.
Stay safe and wear a mask, y'all!