June 2019 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
May Recap
May has been very busy. I got several critiques back for The War and the Fox and as of this writing am wrapping up the final proofreading so I can send it to Argyll in time for Anthrocon.
I did take a break to go to BLFC, which is my vacation con. I haven’t reached out to the writing track there so I end up selling books on Fox and Pepper’s table and just reconnecting with friends. It made for a nice weekend, and though we were apprehensive about driving over the Donner Pass with heavy snow falling, we did not run into any problems (some people did, I heard, when they went through later).
I haven’t done a lot other than The War and the Fox, but I did watch the end of a beloved series that’s been part of our lives for about a decade, and since last month I talked about Endgame, I figured this month I’d write a little about Veep.
If you aren’t familiar with it, Veep is a series about Selena Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who as the series starts is the vice-president of the United States, theoretically the second most powerful position in the country and maybe the world. But of course, we know that the office of Veep is mostly a ceremonial position. One of the running gags of the first season is Selena asking her highly efficient secretary Sue, “Did the President call?” The answer is always no.
Selena is ambitious, tolerating the indignities of the office because she’s sure it will lead to her being president one day. Over the course of seven seasons, she (and those around her) chase true power in whatever form they can find it. The cast of personalities is as strong as any I’ve seen in an ensemble show, everyone having their own arc (sometimes several).
The seventh and final season sees the characters evolving into more focused versions of themselves. It’s not uncommon for characters in sitcoms to become more extreme as the show goes on; when you’ve exhausted all the humor from moderately eccentric characters, you move them up a level and go around again. But Veep rarely felt untrue to its characters. Selena gets more nakedly ambitious, but this is a perfectly reasonable result of seven seasons of frustration. Jonah becomes even more of an asshole, but when your assholery is rewarded, why would you not? The characters are frustrating to follow at times, but it’s because they are terribly people who refuse to change, not because they feel unrealistic.
Final episodes are always tricky. Endings are very important to me with my books, and the same applies to shows. In a long-running series, it’s hard to bring it to a close when you’ve spent so much energy keeping it going, but there are ways to do it. You want the ending to reinforce the themes of the show (good shows have strong themes throughout) and provide at least some of the characters with fulfilling ends to their journeys. Some series that I feel ended very well, in no particular order (please not I have not yet seen Breaking Bad) are Adventure Time, Cheers, Scrubs, Person of Interest, and of course, the classic Newhart, the rare series with an ending that surpassed the series as a whole.
Veep isn’t among the top series finales on my list in that regard, but it’s far from the worst. It’s a perfectly fitting ending, a fulfilling cap to a hilarious and disturbing show.
(This summer I’m going to be writing the end of the Calatians series, tentatively titled The Revolution and the Fox, so endings are on my mind a little more than usual.)
Release dates
Ty Game came out at MFF! The e-book is on all retailers now.
I published a story called “Flight” (http://www.furaffinity.net/view/30236607/) and if you liked it, you’ll have a story in ROAR 10 to look forward to (though no sex in that one). I’ve got several more stories planned for Tryk, so keep an eye on my FA/SoFurry accounts.
The Tower and the Fox audiobook came out too; 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 a 2019 release schedule: The forthcoming New Tibet anthology and the new Dev and Lee book will probably be out late in 2019, maybe at MFF. Love Match book 3 will likely be later summer—I don’t think at this point that it will make it for AnthroCon. I’ve also got a story in Sofawolf Press’s New Fables, which will be out sometime this year.
The aforementioned ROAR 10 story will be out at Anthrocon, as will (fingers crossed) the third Calatians book, The War and the Fox. I won’t be there but if you go and get either of them, bring them to Furrydelphia and I’ll happily sign them.
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 do not currently have plans to go to AnthroCon, but if you’re on the east coast, come see me at Furrydelphia in August where I’ll be a GOH with Rukis! Alternately, I’ll be at Megaplex in Orlando on the Saturday and Sunday of con, just seeing friends, but if you’re around there, tweet at me! After that I plan to go to MFF in December. I’ll also be at Comic-Con in San Diego at the Sofawolf booth (1236), as usual.
Spotlight: The War and the Fox
This book is the third in the series titled “The Calatians,” following The Tower and the Fox and The Demon and the Fox. It’s the longest so far, at over 120K words, and is my first attempt at writing a full-on war book.
The American Revolution is starting in the year 1817, and Kip and his friends are plunged into the heart of it. There’s a lot for a fire sorcerer to do, but the most difficult seems to be learning the ways of the army and trying not to get on the bad side of the highest ranking military sorcerer, Master Colonel Andrew Jackson. There are battles and bloodshed and magic and animal-people, so if that’s your thing, check it out!
Excerpt: “Outsiders,” from ROAR 10.
Here’s the beginning of my story appearing in ROAR 10. If you want to read the rest, pick it up!
Tryk rode a thermal down the cliff face, the cloth wings attached to his arms and midsection providing plenty of lift for his light-boned fox’s frame. He pivoted, turning a lazy half-circle in the air, and angled his wings toward a small recess about halfway down.
As he approached, he brought his arms forward to cut his momentum, turning to glide parallel to the cliff and then folding his wings when he reached the cave entrance. His feet touched the ledge at a run, bringing him just to the cave before he skidded to a halt. The sun warmed his dark brown wind-blown fur and he gave himself a moment to reflect on his near-perfect landing before leaning around the entrance to the cave. “I’m here,” he called, and smoothed down the orange fur on his sides and chest to the black and brown on his stomach.
Movement inside, and then a fruit bat’s head poked out of the shadows. “I’m ready,” Flit said. “I was waiting for the cry of pain.”
Tryk let his tongue loll out in a smile and pulled his tail around to groom it as well, even though they were just going to fly again. “I know! I had a good landing this time.”
The bat emerged fully, adjusting the straps of a pack Tryk had made for him some months back. Like the fox, he wore little else to cover his grey and russet fur, but the two were familiar enough with each other to dispense with modesty. “Do you need a moment?”
Seeing the bat always gave Tryk a little burst of warmth, as much because of their friendship as because Flit was the closest thing to another fox down here in the southlands. The warmth faded into a mild disappointment as the bat passed over his good landing so quickly, but then he noticed his friend’s distracted posture. “Did you have a bad riberry?”
“I’m fine.” Flit moved to the outcropping he used to take off. “Mango Landing, right?”
“That’s what we said last time. They should’ve left from the plateau at sunrise.” Tryk squinted at the sun, an hour above the horizon. “We might get there before them.”
“Then let’s go.” Flit stretched out his natural wings, catching the sun so the pattern of blood vessels showed through them, and leapt gracefully.
Tryk liked to think that he was getting more graceful with practice even if his clumsy cloth and wood wings couldn’t match Flit’s lovely real ones. At least he could now keep up reliably when they flew, which was one of his favorite things to do. His arms were equal to the challenge of holding his wings level and he could steer well enough to follow the bat through the air.
If Flit hadn’t had a bad fruit, then likely he’d just come from visiting his family. It had been many days since they’d seen each other and now that Tryk thought of it, the last family visit had been close to a month ago, so that fit. That meant that Flit would snap out of it soon, and maybe a bit later would talk to him about what had happened.
So he let his mind wander as the jungle passed slowly below him, scents of fruit and animals stronger now in the rainy season. The last two visits from northern ships hadn’t brought any of the dried fruit he’d hoped to find for Flit, but if his calculations were correct, winter was drawing to a close up in Divalia, which meant that perhaps there would be surplus of apples, starfruit, and other things. The bat had to go harvest fruit about every other day, and if he had a store of dried fruit that would keep, he could rest one day or another.
Then there were Tryk’s other friends, the jaguar Silence (properly his name was “the sound of a paw crushing a blade of grass,” but he didn’t mind the shortening outside of his tribe), the capybara Sunny, and the Pampas deer Cherron. All of these southlanders had been incredibly generous, making his exile here much more comfortable, and so he looked forward to Trade Days, because it was the one time he could be the expert around them.
Ahead of him, Flit banked and slowed to let Tryk pull even with him. The bat’s ears had come up and he seemed in better spirits. Flying did that for Tryk, too. “Have you figured out what you’re going to get for Sunny?”
“He already has so much jewelry.” Tryk kept his eyes on the silver thread of the river ahead.
“Never enough, though.”
“I guess not. But I’d like to find something else for him this time if I could.”
“He likes jewelry.”
Tryk grinned. “Maybe I’ll get you some jewelry. How would some silver rings sound when you’re flying?”
Flit grimaced and fluttered his wings, making them rattle a bit in the air stream. “I don’t want to put anything through my wings.”
“I didn’t say through,” Tryk said, but Flit had already moved ahead of him again. The fox sighed. It wasn’t often, but when Flit was in these post-family moods, sometimes an innocent word could put him back into a funk. He’d snap out of it.
That left Tryk even more determined to find some dried fruit for him. At the same time, he could get some dried hot peppers for Silence, and maybe find another book for Cherron. A few weeks ago, his friends had helped bolster his cabin against a rainstorm like he’d never seen in his life, not only finding every crack in his walls and roof, but also flooding the area and nearly washing Tryk’s house off the cliff it sat next to. Without their help, he might be homeless or dead, so he was determined to get something good for each of them this time.
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.
Kole asks: “When you first began your writing career, were you afraid at first and that you believed that your writing wasn't good enough at the time?”
Oh, man. That’s something that everyone goes through. When you start out, your writing won’t be as good as you want it to be. Ira Glass has a great piece of advice about it and it’s only two minutes long and you should go watch it: https://vimeo.com/24715531
Okay. Back? What he says is absolutely true. You have to work and keep working even though your work isn’t as good as you want it to be. That’s the only way you’ll improve.
But he also assumes that you already have good taste. In writing, at least, people’s taste tends to evolve the more they learn about writing and storytelling. My screenwriting teacher said at the beginning of the first class I took with him, “I’m going to ruin movies for you.” You know what? He kinda did. But he also taught me to appreciate really good movies—at least from a writing standpoint (there is a lot I don’t know about the craft of filmmaking). So I can gush about Zootopia because it’s not only a fun, touching movie, but it’s also extremely smartly put together.
Chances are you start writing because you love stories. You read a book or a story, or maybe saw a movie, and it captivated you, and now you want to tell stories in that way. You want to give people—and yourself—the feeling you got from those stories, but you want them to be your stories and your worlds.
And the authors you admire, all they used was words. You can use words too! It’s as easy as typing into your laptop.
Only it’s not. Loving stories doesn’t mean you have the critical tools to break down and understand why something affects you the way it does. Unfortunately, acquiring those critical tools sometimes means that you’ll see flaws you hadn’t before. You’ll say things like, “It was the worst book I couldn’t put down” (me, about The DaVinci Code). But getting those tools is the only way to learn how to write the way you want to.
(And look: you won’t suddenly hate stories you loved just because you can see the flaws. Your affection for your favorites is baked in and at worst, you’ll start to call them “guilty pleasures.” It is totally fine to love them, and to understand why they affected you even though you were blind to the problems they have.)
Back to Ira Glass’s video, though: the main thing you have to do is put in the work. Everyone has gone through that phase—me too. There are two unfinished novels that nobody will ever see because, frankly, they are crap. But I had to write those before I could write a novel I was happy to show people.
Eventually you too will have to show people your work, by the way. You can start with a trusted friend or you can just post it to a site and see who responds. Other people’s feedback, at every stage of your writing career, is essential to learning how to get better.
So to your question: yeah, at first I didn’t think my writing was good enough. And it wasn’t. But I kept writing because I was bound and determined that one day it was going to be.
(Once your writing is good enough, by the way, you will continue to believe that it isn’t, but that’s called Impostor Syndrome and it’s something related but different.)