November 2019 Dispatch

[Kyell Gold]

October Recap

I spent October getting Titles ready for publication. Dev and Lee’s journey through two tumultuous weeks of 2017 is done and off to the publisher. Pending the artwork being finished, it should be done for Midwest FurFest. I’ll be there to sign it! We probably won’t be doing pre-orders but keep an eye on my Twitter and FurPlanet’s.

 

And yes, Titles will be the first Dev and Lee book to come out through FurPlanet! I’m excited to work with them on it. Be sure to check for the new book at the FurPlanet table at upcoming conventions.

 

The artwork is being done by AmonOmega and Rukis, and it looks fantastic so far. As we get some of the pieces completed, we’ll be sharing them.

 

So anyway, that’s what consumed most of my October writing-wise (in spare moments I poked at the “Dude, Where’s My Fox?” sequel). We went to PawCon for a short time and had fun hanging out with people there, in the atmosphere of the old days of FC. But PawCon is growing into its own thing, which is pretty cool.

 

This month, Kit got us to watch the new season of the Great British Baking Show, and Hashtag and I got hooked on it. We enjoyed the finale a lot, but there’s not a lot of plot-related commentary to make on it, so I’ll just say that I’ve been convinced to go back and watch the earlier seasons, which are apparently better.

 

We’re looking forward to Bojack Horseman’s final season, and we just started watching this show “Breaking Bad.” It’s pretty good so far. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Release dates

The Tower and the Fox audiobook is out; you can find it on Audible, Amazon, or iTunes. 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.

 

Here’s my best guess at the upcoming release schedule: Titles will probably be out late in 2019, maybe at MFF. Love Match 3 will be pushed to 2020 through a combination of beta reader availability, artist availability (Rukis is doing art for both this and the Dev and Lee book), and my own schedule and desire to get the Dev and Lee book out before it gets even more out of date. The New Tibet anthology will likely be out early in 2020—we have cover art and I can’t wait for you to see the art and the stories. The fourth and final Calatians book, The Revolution and the Fox, is slated for Anthrocon 2020, and I hope to get the “Dude” sequel out next year as well. I’ll be a guest of honor at Megaplex 2020, so maybe it’ll be then!

Appearances in 2019

My full list of upcoming appearances is at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html, recently updated (or soon to be updated).

I plan to take fall mostly off and go to MFF in December. I’ve signed up to be on some panels there and will have a reading there Friday morning at 10 am (as currently scheduled)—come get the first listen to the “Dude, Where’s My Fox?” sequel! Come 2020 I will be at Further Confusion and Texas Furry Fiesta, and of course Megaplex in August.

 

Spotlight: No spotlight this month.

 

Excerpt: Here’s a deleted chapter from Titles. I’ve been editing it and this one dropped out early on, though elements of it remain elsewhere in the text.

I get back to the team hotel by seven. The lobby’s still empty, so I head up to the room, where the shower’s running when I come in the door. “Just me,” I call, and go over to my bed to check that I’ve got everything packed.

I’ve got a new roommate this season, a rookie cornerback bobcat named Wixin. Lux, our defensive coordinator, said he hoped I could show him the ropes, and also that there’d be a feline bond. There was some stuff behind the scenes, too, but I didn’t figure that out until the second week of the preseason, when Wix told me that he was gay. Or at least bi, he said, but he’d only really been interested in guys.

So why, I asked, wasn’t he out publicly? He’d clearly told the coaches about it because otherwise it’d be too big a coincidence that the one gay rookie got placed with the one gay veteran. (Unless there are a bunch of gay rookies—no, probably not.) Over the weeks, I got a bunch of answers like, “it’s just not the right time,” and, “things are different from when you came out,” and a picture emerged. Not a surprising one, but a disappointing one.

Aran and I talked about it a bunch. In the couple years after he came out, two other guys did too. Neither of them were starters—one was a backup tight end and the other a third-string safety. Both of them were decent players, and within a year, both of them had been dropped. The tight end guy bounced around practice squads for a while; the safety didn’t play again. There was a little bit of a media stir about it, but the teams stuck close to the “football reasons” for their dismissal. From what I heard, corroborated by the one time I met him, the tight end (a beefy otter) was a jerk, and none of his teammates liked him. He tried to make his coming out a big spectacle, was constantly being interviewed, and so on.

The safety, a cheetah, I like a lot more. He still hangs out with us sometimes, but mostly he spends his time promoting sports programs for at-risk youth. But he admits himself that he wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to last in the league. Coming out when he did was partly a ploy to see if teams would hang on to him for a little longer, but also timed because he wanted to come out as a pro, and he thought he might be cut after the season anyway.

Ty still isn’t out, although his relationship is an open secret in the league, and there are a half dozen other guys I know personally whose boyfriends I’ve met. There’s two other guys out publicly and still employed, a defensive end and a left guard, both playing for the Whalers. Lee’s been good about making sure there’s a welcoming environment there and the owner is on board. At least one sportswriter attributed Yerba’s championship to the “open, welcoming atmosphere” of their clubhouse. But most attributed it to their trio of lightning-quick receivers and their pass rush, and that’s what other teams scrambled to emulate.

So when Wix says, “It’s different now,” this is what he means: that when I came out, there was no precedent. Nobody knew how it would be handled. Me and Aran, we were the high-profile guys, and we thought we could make it smoother for everyone else, so maybe a backup tight end or a third-string safety could come out and it wouldn’t be a big deal anymore. But even though publicly most people supported us, most owners are old and conservative. I know that Lee’s had one owner get up in his face and say, “I won’t have faggots on my team.” As much as we surround ourselves with support, that hard-line attitude has its adherents too, a lot of them, and as they feel under assault (which, let’s be honest, they are), they’ve dug in their heels. Firing those two guys must have resulted in a lot of back-patting around the owners meetings: those fags think they can do anything, but we still have the power. Again, that comes from Lee, probably through Peter, but it’s matched by what scant coverage I can find in the media.

Here in Chevali, though, the owner has publicly supported me, re-signed me twice, and even once tried to hire Lee away from Yerba (that was a whole thing). So shouldn’t Wix feel comfortable here? Yeah, that’s the other thing. The other defensive co-captain, the leader of the cornerbacks and therefore the guy directly in charge of Wix’s development, is Colin Smith.

Colin, devout Christian, fervently anti-gay fox who was a rookie my first year with the Firebirds. He’s grown into one of the better cornerbacks in the league—all right, one of the best, consistently mentioned in the top ten. I hate that. I wish he’d suck, or at least sign a big free agent deal somewhere else and go. But he’s happy with the team despite their support of me, and they like him despite his bullshit. He and I have a truce going where basically we completely ignore each other, but that’s been strained this year because, not to brag, Wix likes me better than him. Three times Colin’s asked to have Wix reassigned a different roommate, and twice he’s come to me and told me not to “interfere” with the cornerbacks. I say I’m not “interfering” and that maybe he should mind his own business, and we both growl a bit and then it’s over. The fact that we’re winning, that we’re in the semifinals, that helps smooth things over a whole bunch.

“Hey.” Wix comes out of the shower. Naked. Half out of his sheath. “How’s your boyfriend?”

He’s my height but not as bulky, tan fur on his back and arms with patches of brown spots on the shoulders and thighs and just above the tail. Which is a cute little tuft that I often tease him about having stolen from a rabbit. Give me a nice lengthy fox tail any day of the week.

“He’s good.” I’m checking Twitter on my phone, to see if any of the Sabretooths said anything that can get us motivated. Damien and I had a long meeting about my use of Twitter a few years ago and he gave me some stock phrases to use now and then if I really felt the need to tweet something about football. When it comes to gay rights stuff, I have a more free rein, and over the last year he’s told me to be more myself, but keep it respectful as much as I can. So I joke around with my other athlete friends on Twitter and I hire a service to go through and block anyone who’s abusive so I usually don’t have to see it.

“You guys going out again tonight? When does he go back?”

“Tomorrow,” I say absently, switching to texts.

“Cool cool. Hey, after the season, maybe we could go out sometime?”

I look up from the phone. “Sure you want to be associating with us in public and stuff?”

He flicks his ears, holding his underwear in one paw. “Aw, c’mon.”

“Sure. Lee wants to meet you.”

“Cool.” He dresses, making a show of pulling his underwear up over his sheath and arranging the bulge. Like usual, I don’t react, so he pulls his t-shirt over his head and then digs jeans out of the pile on the floor.

Gerrard sends a text as I’m skimming through the day’s news: 5m. It’s out to me and all the linebackers, and with Gerrard, “five minutes” means exactly 300 seconds, so I stand up. “Gotta get downstairs. Can you be ready in one minute?”

Wix grins at me, shoves a bunch of clothes into his bag, and zips it up. “Done.”

The elevator’s slow, so by my phone it’s just turned four minutes after Gerrard’s text when we step out into the lobby. Carson’s there along with Gerrard and the big wolf Price, the backup middle linebacker here to chase the ring he never got with the Pilots. The other backup linebackers are here too: Paxi, a cougar who’s kicked around the league, and Vic, a coyote we drafted a few years ago, chatting with the two third-stringers.

My phone tells me it’s five minutes since Gerrard’s text, but none of us move. We all stare toward the elevators to wait for the one guy who’s missing.

“Come on,” Gerrard says, walking to the door. “I’ve got a shuttle waiting.”

The guys look at me. I’m co-captain, after all. But Gerrard is our linebackers coach. There’s a line between falling in line for the coaches and sticking up for your players, and if I let Gerrard herd us onto a shuttle and we leave our starting middle linebacker behind, that has the potential to cause more problems than it solves.

“Hey,” I say. “Give him one more minute.”

Gerrard stops at the door. “It’ll take us two minutes to load up the shuttle. If he isn’t here by the time we close the doors, he can find his own way. He knows how this works by now.”

He should. Croz, the wolf we’re all waiting for, has missed Gerrard’s starting times enough to accrue twenty grand in fines over the season. This won’t be a fine, but it’ll be inconvenient for him to get his own car, and he stands a good chance of missing the start of practice, which will be a fine. For the playoffs, it’ll be another ten grand.

Wix asks if he can grab a ride with us, since the other corners aren’t even starting to assemble yet and he wants to get some time in the weight room. Gerrard makes this concession to me, so the bobcat piles in with the rest of the linebackers.

Croz does not show by the time we’re loaded. I gauge the mood of the other guys, but it looks like they all agree with me: Gerrard might be a dick about time, but he’s a good coach, and by our eighteenth game of the year (twenty-first counting pre-season), if you don’t know that five minutes means five minutes, that’s on you.

Honestly, I’m not sure Croz is even in the hotel. He was talking the night before about having a bunch of numbers to call and “tail to chase.” We’re not supposed to go to clubs the night before a game, but I stayed in a hotel with Lee and Croz could easily have crashed at the place of one of those ladies apparently so desperate to “jump on his cock.”

By the time I get into the shuttle, the last one but for Gerrard, Wix has taken a seat all the way at the back with an empty beside him. He waves as I get on, but Vic grabs me before I can get back there. He’s my backup, and I’ve spent a couple years building up this relationship, so I give Wix a look that I hope says, “Sorry,” and I sit down beside the coyote. I feel bad, but Wix knows the other guys too, and the minute we’re with Gerrard, we’re working.

So Vic and I spend the ride with our iPads out going over plays and formations. He’s quick and ambitious, much more so than my previous backup, and the coaches have already started putting him in when we go to certain defensive sets. With the new defensive coordinator came a bunch of complicated schemes that Gerrard is great at breaking down for us, and after two years of growing pains, the results are showing.

Despite Croz’s allergy to punctuality (Gerrard’s phrase), the guy is freakishly talented and when he’s out on the field, he’s almost as good at reading formations and signaling the defense as Gerrard was in his last few years. We took most of last year learning to play together and this year we feel more integrated when we take the field. That’s partly why I think he doesn’t show up to practice as much. He’s got his own routines and he thinks Gerrard’s take an excessive physical toll on people who aren’t as fit as the coyote is. He might have a point, but Gerrard’s our coach.

We get to the facility, where Wix slaps my paw and goes off to get some reps in before his group shows up. The rest of us buckle down to light calisthenics and then start drills. We’ve just gotten to the bag and cut drill, where we have to keep our eyes on Gerrard while shuffling across bags laid out on the ground, when Croz strolls onto the field with a jaunty wave. 

Gerrard knows by now that it’s not worth trying to change the big wolf, so all he says when Croz comes into earshot is, “I’ll have Kessic bill your agent.”

Croz fires off a finger-gun at him without losing a single tooth of his smile. “Worth it,” he says. “If I strain a hammy from over-exertion and can’t play in the championship, I’ll lose out on a hundred K for playing time and another hundie because let’s face it,” and here he spreads his arms wide, “if I’m not playing, we’re gonna lose.”

I glance at Price, but the backup wolf just rolls his eyes. I don’t talk that way around Vic, but then, I’m not Croz. None of us are.

He’s taller than I am, about six foot six, and he’s wearing a tight-fitting Ultimate Fit shirt over his grey and cream close-cropped fur. Croz is one of those guys who seems to be flexing even when he’s just walking around, and now is no exception, as he raises an arm with a bulging biceps and points at me, then at Carson. “Dev, Carson, where are we?”

We let Gerrard answer. “Bag and cut. Get in line.”

“Glad to.” Croz struts to the front of the line as we go back through, this time trying to avoid the bags while Gerrard’s two assistants throw more bags at our legs. We have to keep our eyes on Gerrard the whole time, because on the field we can’t look away from our targets.

The next hour and a half is all drills. Gerrard calls out players when he sees sloppy technique or something they need to work on, and today he only calls out the third-stringers. The rest of us are proud, though part of me is thinking that it took us the entire season to get to this point, and in either seven hours or two weeks it’s all going to be useless, and when we come back in five months we’ll be rusty again.

But if we’ve won a championship, that makes it all worthwhile. Gerrard would love to have won one as a player, but he never did, and Carson’s and my windows are closing fast (his a little sooner than mine, maybe). So we run through drills, work our way up to a scrimmage, and get on a bus to the stadium in time to watch the last half of the previous game.

Vic has been watching on his iPad, and we all have access, but I figure if we win and are going to have to face one of these teams, I’m going to see the film endlessly and the coaches will decide which plays are important. I don’t need to see the game in real time. That doesn’t stop me from leaning over when Vic says, “Whoa, look at that!” He’s excitable, so that happens a lot, and often it’s like a linebacker block that isn’t the main focus of the play. The full review package for all the games doesn’t come through until that night, so we can’t look at the plays as closely as we’d like, but we can watch the linebackers until the cameras, following the ball, cut away.

 Cansez plays hard, but Port City’s pretty good this year. At halftime, when we’re filing out of the shuttle into the stadium, the score is 14-10 Devils. Some people around the stadium are watching, but most are waiting for us, a red and gold mob with encouraging signs and chants. They cheer when we get off the shuttle, so we all wave to them as we walk the short outside distance. A few guys peel off to sign autographs, but not the linebackers. Gerrard’s policy is: autographs are rewards for after the game. He doesn’t want anything distracting us beforehand. Privately, Carson and I remember Gerrard himself signing autographs on the way into the stadium before games, but he’s the boss now and we don’t undermine him in front of the guys who didn’t know him in his playing days.

Crystal City’s stadium was remodeled two years ago, and among the improvements are a much more interesting design around the upper rim, a wavy sculpture that glows neon blue and green; another ten thousand seats; a new field surface that supposedly reduces the chance of concussions; and a swanky visitors’ locker room with padded benches, charging stations, free wifi (“don’t use it,” Gerrard says, “because they might be monitoring everything you do on it”), and actual hot water in the showers.

Nice TVs, too. We stretch and get dressed, and one of the assistants turns on the second half of the other semifinal.

 

 

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.

 

From Twitter user @MyDarkReality13: “What is your writing process? When you come up with a story idea do you outline the story or do you just start writing and let the story unfold without a concept of the ending?”

 

In the writing world, this is known as “plotting vs. pantsing,” because “letting the story unfold” is writing by the seat of your pants. It’s also known as discovery writing if you don’t want to talk about pants that much.

When I started out, I was very much a discovery writer. It was fun just to wade into the jungle and hack my way through it, and I found a lot of good stories that way. But I also had a lot of false starts, and novels took a while to draft. When I wrote Green Fairy, I had to outline it ahead of time because the plot was fairly complicated, and I found that that made the first draft go much more quickly, and subsequent edits much smoother.

After that, I started using outlines a lot more. Now when I write a novel I usually use Scrivener because it lets me set up each individual scene in advance, so I spend a while plotting out the novel so that when I actually sit down to write it, I always know where I’m going next.

Titles, interestingly, was an exception. I know that world and those characters so well that although I had a good idea of where I wanted the story to go, I just dove in to see where the characters would take me.

Short stories and novellas are also an exception—sometimes with novellas I’ll plot them in advance, but a lot of the time the story is short enough that I can just work it out in my head first and then go ahead and start writing. For something as big as a novel, I find it really helpful now to use an outline.

Within that outline, though, I allow myself a lot of flexibility. If the story feels like it’s pulling in a different direction, I’ll usually follow it there. It’s easy enough to go back and edit it if that direction doesn’t work out, and if I force it along a path I’ve thought of previously, that can really break the whole thing apart. The outline is still important because it tells me that I have enough of an idea that it’ll be worth my time. With some novel ideas that have been hanging around for years, either I just don’t have the time on my schedule (that should change next year as I finish the Calatians series) or the idea is missing just a little something to make it compelling to me. Writing an outline, when I get to that point, proves to me in a way that the novel will be worth writing. It also helps me envision a lot of scenes that I’ll be excited to write, which is important for keeping motivation up.

So I guess I’m more a plotter than a pantser, but it’s a sliding scale depending on the project. If you’re looking for the process that works for you, try out a bunch of different things and see what appeals to you!