April 2019 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
March Recap
Love Match is finished. Rocky finished his first major final and if you haven’t been following him on Patreon, you’ll be able to read all about it in Love Match 2013-2015 when it comes out later this year. I’ll update when I have a better idea of the schedule.
My Midwest writing group came for a springtime retreat in California and we talked about The War and the Fox as well as all their books. I got good feedback and spent the last two weeks of March doing an editing pass to address a few issues. Good news: they all liked it. It’s off to the next batch of readers now and I feel like I’m on track for an AC release, as the artwork is in process as well.
The first Wolftown book (Unfinished Business) is underway on my Patreon! If you’d like to join up, you don’t have that many parts to scroll back and find.
April will be some editing on Love Match probably, and catching up on a few other projects. And in case you missed it, I have signed on to guest edit the tenth issue of FANG. If you’ve got an adult story in your head, get it polished up and send it our way this summer! Watch my Twitter and FurPlanet’s for a theme announcement.
That happened at Texas Furry Fiesta, which was great. They continue to put on a fantastic convention and I love the hotel. I had four panels, got to do one with the lovely and smart Jess Owen, got to hang out with a lot of my friends and fellow writers, and signed many books for all y’all.
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, it helps me out a LOT if you use this link to sign up: https://www.audible.com/pd/B07F1YRWLF/?source_code=AUDFPWS0223189MWT-BK-ACX0-120139&ref=acx_bty_BK_ACX0_120139_rh_us
I talked to people at MFF about 2019’s release schedule, and here’s my best guess at dates: The forthcoming New Tibet anthology will be out hopefully at AnthroCon 2019, and the new Dev and Lee book will probably be out later that year, 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.
Appearances in 2019
My full list of upcoming appearances is at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html, recently updated (or soon to be updated).
My next convention will be BLFC in May. I might have a little table space there but I’ll be mostly just hanging around and having fun. 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!
Spotlight: No spotlight this month.
Excerpt: Unfinished Business
This story is based on a story I had published in Heat #13 and begins with the same scene, but diverges pretty quickly. It’s being serialized on my Patreon.
The silver detector blared as I walked through the security gate into Wolftown Chicago, but I had my PI license out before the guard could go from surprised to suspicious. Most of the guards here knew me, but this new kid couldn’t have been more than nineteen, probably one of the beneficiaries of the Paranormal Guard recruitment drives in Chicago proper.
He said my name out loud as he squinted at the license. “Jae…Kim?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I have a silver implant in case I get bit. Can’t remove it.” I tapped my collarbone. “It’s right behind here. And that gun and silver bullets are mine, too.”
“That’s okay, sir. Have a good…uh.” In the process of handing me my phone and license back, he froze, staring over my shoulder.
“Oh,” I said, not having to turn to know what had appeared behind me. “That’s Sergei. He’s with me.”
“I have no silver on me,” rumbled the seven-foot tall Russian ghost bear.
The guard swallowed and turned his head without taking his eyes off Sergei. “I need a ghost check! Ghost check!”
*
“It is profiling,” Sergei grumbled once we were past the security gate. He’d gone invisible again once outside the confines of the checkpoint, even though a berserker in full bear form wouldn’t raise eyebrows (bushy or otherwise) in most areas of Wolftown, and even though nobody could tell he was a ghost by sight unless he floated or went translucent. I preferred he stay out of sight while I was working unless I was trying to intimidate someone. “All ghost are suspicious. What have I done? Why must I be subjected to humiliation? Poking and staring, never trusting.”
“I don’t trust you,” I pointed out, turning the binding ring on my finger. Security gates made me a little nervous because the spell that kept ghosts out of Wolftown had been known to scramble binding spells occasionally. The Paranormal Guard was not going to reimburse me for a lost ghost. “And unbound ghosts do some fucked-up shit.”
“Jae, you know so little of ghosts.” He heaved a deep sigh right next to my ear. “If you do not trust me then perhaps you should let me go. I will trouble you no further.”
“Get over your dead wife and you can release yourself.”
“You do not understand true love,” he said, mournful as only Russians can be. “At least, you do not appreciate it—”
“Besides,” I cut in to head off that argument, “I need you. Without you, my job would be harder.” We stepped out of the dank concrete tunnel and onto Kennelly Plaza, the big public square that welcomed tourists, residents, and the occasional visiting professional with their ghost partners to Wolftown.
Chicago houses the second-oldest Wolftown, but now the fifth-largest since Wolftown Seattle expanded a few years ago. That’s all in the United States, of course; internationally there are walled neighborhoods and cities where the werewolves and vampires and other extrahuman creatures (“extras”) can live, but they don’t call them Wolftowns. That name was coined, the Internet says, by Bo Washington, a columnist for the New York Times back in 1952 when the New York Wolftown was being built, and it stuck.
Since Wolftowns are primarily residential, they don’t have skyscrapers or even buildings that look like they might grow up to be skyscrapers one day. The tallest building in Wolftown Chicago is a fifteen-story apartment complex which stands over five ten-story complexes like a proud parent. Originally the whole thing was three-story townhouses, but in the seventies, when werewolves wrested control of their own living areas from the human city councils, they tore down a lot of those old houses and put in apartment buildings and park space. They like living together in packs, so the apartment buildings work great, and the outdoor greenspace was something they really missed.
Vampires still like the old row houses and there are a bunch of those around. They and werewolves make up the majority of the extras, but Wolftown Chicago has the second-most different kinds of all the US Wolftowns, after Wolftown L.A. There are about thirty different kinds in the world depending on who you ask. Like, are the Adze and Sasabonsam and Obayifo all counted as vampires like the European vampires? They all drink blood and can change shape, but Euro vampires can mostly become bats; the Sasabonsam have iron teeth and can also become bats; the Obayifo have glowing butts (really) and a strict pack structure and can throw their spirits out of their body into another person or animal; the Adze turn into giant fireflies and can also throw their spirits. I think those are pretty different, but some people don’t look past “drink blood, change shape,” so they all get lumped together, or maybe classified as “European vampires and African vampires.”
Likewise, there are three different kinds of nine-tailed fox spirit: kitsune, from Japan; huli jing, from China, and kumiho, from Korea. They have different cultures but a lot of people just go “Asian fox people” and leave it at that. In Wolftown Chicago, as it happens, there’s a pretty large kumiho community and I know a lot of the people there, so I skirted the tourist-trap shops around Kennelly Plaza heading for the two-block Koreatown.
The stores with big gaudy signs blaring “Garlic and Wolfsbane Bunches $2” and “Get Your Picture With a Werewolf $5” and “Wolftown T-shirts $15” had collected groups of tourists, not to mention the stands selling hundreds of little bronze and plaster sculptures of giant movie werewolves standing in a generic walled city or movie vampires with bloodshot eyes and fangs. The vendors here mostly shift to fully human because the tourists don’t feel as comfortable buying even Wolftown souvenirs from bipedal shirtless fur-covered people with a wolf head, clawed paw-hands, and a tail. More fool them.
Most of the locals wandering around Kennelly Plaza also stay in full human form for that reason, but every so often you’ll get one like this guy who was coming toward me with a Bears hat between his brown pointed ears, a wide grin on his wolf’s muzzle, wearing nothing else but loose athletic shorts so that his ivory chest and stomach fur and the brown-grey fur on his back and legs and arms was on full display. He sauntered onto the plaza and stopped as soon as one of the tourists aimed a phone at him, holding up two fingers in the “peace” sign.
Soon enough there were twenty tourists all clustered around taking pictures. “Show-off,” muttered Sergei invisibly beside me.
“Leave him alone.” I glanced back at the wolf, posing with one of the tourists. “He’s trying to be an ambassador.”
The bear chuckled in my ear. “Plus he has cute butt, no?”
“I wasn’t looking.”
“Jae. I see what you see.”
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.
Alex asks: “I’ve had a few short stories published, and I would like to get into novel writing, but I’m told they’re very different. Do you have any advice for jumping from short stories to novels?”
They are different. Some people love short stories, some love novels, some can do both. Moving from short stories to novels requires learning some new techniques and doing some experimentation, but it’s certainly something you can do.
When you write a short story, you’re most often writing about a moment in time, a short sequence of events with an emotional impact. A novel is a journey that takes a longer time, and while you can think of it as a series of short stories—and some novels are—in general the pacing is different.
You’ll want to think about your novel idea for a while to make sure it’s one you want to spend a year with. Do you love the characters, the setting, the plot? You’re going to be spending a lot of time with them. And the idea should be expansive. Will you spend time exploring a world you’ve built? Meeting a bunch of interesting characters? Following a complex but rewarding story? The more of this you can do, the better.
It’s very helpful, though, to boil down your novel to one or two sentences. For example, the first Harry Potter book could be boiled down to: “Harry discovers that he is significant in a hidden magical world and makes friends there, but the evil wizard he unknowingly defeated eleven years ago is still conspiring to kill him.” That’s the story, and you can see how most of the things that happen in the book relate to either discovering the magical world, friendship, or avoiding Voldemort. But the HP books are also very strongly about family, and that theme comes up over and over again. Harry’s adoptive family are terrible to him. An invisibility cloak is left to him by his father. Ron’s family befriends Harry, and we see in them the example of a loving family that Harry has never known.
When you’re working on your novel, if you can have the summary and theme nailed down, it will help as you go forward in your story because you’ll be able to see how each scene relates to the theme, exploring it or playing on previous discoveries. Novels are huge things and very hard to keep all in your head at once, so having a simple summary to carry with you as you write is very helpful. THAT SAID, your theme and summary will change as you write the first draft, and when you get to the end, most likely some part of them will be different than you thought when you started. THIS IS NORMAL. Just adjust for when you go back to edit.
The plot is going to be much more complicated too. In a short story, the plot tends to go: character tries something, there’s an obstacle, they overcome the obstacle. In a novel, it can go more like: character is in a stable world, something happens, they decide to leave their stability (or are pulled out of it), they try to solve their problem, they fail, something else comes up that they have to fix, they fix that, they go back to the main problem and fail really badly, another different problem comes up, they get in deeper and worse, finally they realize that they have to make a large change in their thinking, they find the solution to their problem, the world returns to stability. But you can shift that plot structure around. Tolkien started with one problem (get the Ring to Rivendell), and when that was solved he gave the heroes a bigger one (get the Ring to Mordor). The first Harry Potter book is a lot about discovery and exploration, though Rowling cleverly seeds clues about Voldemort in every chapter until that plot takes center stage. There can be more side plots, more character moments, more worldbuilding.
And ultimately, the best way to learn to write novels is to read novels and try to pick apart the structure of the ones you really like. We learn by imitation and that gives us confidence to explore and play around. Have fun and don’t be afraid to try.