April 2020 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
April 2020
March Recap
Well, that month lasted about a decade, didn’t it?
I hope all of you are keeping safe and healthy, staying home and wearing masks when you go into stores and other spaces. Between the time I write this and the time you read it, things will have changed again, but what will (hopefully) not change is that we’re doing the best we can to make it through and support each other. For my part, fortunately, my family are all used to sharing a house and working with everyone home, so it’s been an easier transition for us than for some. (And easiest for our doggo, who loves it when everyone is home.)
So anyway, in between watching the news, I’ve still been writing. I put out a book of writing advice gathered from this newsletter, called Do You Need Help? It’s free on baddogbooks.com right here: https://baddogbooks.com/product/do-you-need-help/
Love Match (2013-2015) goes off to the publisher today, and the plan is to delay it until Anthrocon. If AC is postponed or canceled, FurPlanet will release the book online (along with many other titles, I’m sure). Keep an eye on my Twitter and theirs for updated news.
The Revolution and the Fox, which was slated for AC, is now going to be a little later in the year. I expect it to be off to the publisher by the end of May anyway. I’m really happy with how it turned out and with the cover Laura’s done for it. I can’t wait for you guys to see how the series ends.
Speaking of endings…we finished Breaking Bad right as this was all getting bad, so I have some thoughts on it that I’ll keep mostly spoiler-free. The series’ reputation was well-deserved, we thought. It’s smartly written and gripping throughout, a portrait mainly of one character but also of several others.
So what I wanted from the ending was a resolution to the main character’s arc, and I got that for sure. The change in Walter White from the show’s beginning to its end is remarkable and believable every step of the way. The final season does a great job reminding us where he’s come from to contrast with where he’s arrived, and the moments of truth, when they come, feel fully earned.
I won’t say anything more for fear of spoilers, even though it’s been years since the finale aired. We’re going to move on to Better Call Saul, which we also hear great things about. We were watching Bojack Horseman with a friend so now we have to wait for quarantine to be over to finish that series.
In spare time, I’ve moved on to comfort TV, but if you’re looking for shows to check out while stuck at home, here’s a list of a few I’ve recently watched and enjoyed:
Future Man (Hulu): All due respect to The Good Place, this might actually be the smartest dumbest comedy on television. Josh Hutcherson plays a slacker recruited to save the future by altering the past. Sharply written jokes surround dick humor in a show that may be the smartest about time travel that I’ve ever seen. (third season just dropped, I’ve only seen the first two)
Living With Yourself (Netflix): Paul Rudd plays a man who is stuck in a rut until a friend recommends a “life-changing” spa procedure. Afterwards, he finds to his dismay that the spa has cloned him, creating a better version of him. (one season, second pending)
Forever (Amazon Prime): Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen are great and I don’t want to say any more about it. (complete after one season)
Fleabag (Amazon Prime): You probably have already heard about this one after all the awards it’s gotten, but it’s tremendous and I feel like I have to recommend it again. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is brilliant both as lead actor and as writer of this funny, touching show. (complete after two seasons)
The Dragon Prince (Netflix): Anime-style fantasy adventure with surprising character complexity and gorgeous creature designs. (three seasons, more planned but not confirmed yet)
Release dates
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 is working hard on new audiobooks, and once Love Match 1 is up, we hope to get Titles and Ty Game out shortly following!
The 2020 release schedule has been delayed somewhat: Love Match (2013-2015) is now targeted for the first weekend in July, hopefully at Anthrocon, but it’ll be out then regardless. 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.
Appearances in 2020
My full list of upcoming appearances is at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html, recently updated (or soon to be updated).
Who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get conventions again this year…or they might resume in August. Things are changing so quickly that we just don’t know.
Spotlight: The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper
https://queenofswordspress.com/product/the-voyages-of-cinrak-the-dapper-2/
A friend of mine started a queer indie press a little while back called Queen of Swords, and knowing my particular proclivities, asked me if I’d like to see an ARC of a book she was publishing in April called The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper, about a lesbian capybara pirate. “Of course,” I said, and was pleased to read this collection of stories about Cinrak and her adventures through a magical fantasy world that is not only quite furry but absolutely charming.
Cinrak loves the sea from an early age, and runs away from her boarding school to join a pirate ship. Soon enough she finds herself in command of her own ship, but rather than keelhauling and boarding merchant ships, her adventures run to races riding stars, meeting a lonely kraken, helping a chinchilla assume his desired gender, and sailing to the end of the world, all while balancing life and affection between her two girlfriends.
It’s a short collection and a lovely read. Check it out!
Excerpt: Here’s a little bit from the forthcoming “Dude, Where’s My Fox?” sequel.
I stuck around for lunch with Taylor and Wendell, then did a little bit of work on my laptop while we all watched the latest Rise of Dragons episode, and then a couple cartoons. They asked if I wanted to stay for dinner, but it was going to take me a while to get back to my place, and if I stayed for dinner I’d stay for cuddling after, and if I stayed for cuddling, it was fifty-fifty I’d sleep here, and then I’d have to get up at five-thirty in the morning so I could either walk the twenty minutes to my place or take a fifteen-minute bus ride to a stop five blocks from my place. The weather, plus how late I’d stayed up the night before, helped me decide between the different options.
(If I’d thought to bring my work clothes, I could go to work directly from here; it took only a little longer than my regular commute on the Green Line. A Ryde was expensive but then I could doze most of the way; the problem was that Wendell would try to give me money for it and I’d feel bad about that. But I’d come here directly from the party, so I didn’t have a change of clothes. I kept a toothbrush and fur brush here, and a hoodie and sweatpants, and a few pairs of boxers, but not work clothes.)
In any case, I could already feel myself dragging by early afternoon so I knew I’d be tired that evening, and I was probably better off just going home tonight. So I kissed the civet and fox good-bye, told them to keep in touch about the appointments, and hopped on the bus.
Which turned out to be a good call, because I almost slept through my stop. I spent the first ten minutes of the bus ride telling myself not to fall asleep, trying to find the right song on my phone to keep me awake, and then I dozed off anyway. It was only the smell of the Kumatian restaurant filtering in through the cracked window that jolted me awake.
So I got a spinach pie and taggen samak (baked fish) to go and brought them back up to my tiny apartment, and when I sat down to eat I saw that I had a Skim from Scot, sent sometime while I was on the bus, probably while I was dozing.
Nice to meet you. Thanks for talking to me.
I wrote back as I sat down with my dinner:
Nice to meet you too, hope you’re ready for graduation
He wrote back almost before I had time to pick up a fork, two messages in quick succession:
Yeah, done all my classes, just need the piece of paper.
I walked around a lot today and found a little “bodego” that sells my favorite flavor of DiviniTea.
The spinach pie was really good. Scot’s last message didn’t seem to require a response immediately, so I scrolled through my other messages and emails while eating. Toby had sent a message saying we were going to have lunch tomorrow to talk about the party, Derek had asked how Wendell was doing, Jeremy asked whether I had gotten engaged to Scot yet (ha ha), and Carlyle wanted to know if I wanted to go to a Cold Open show in a few weeks.
It’s pineapple-mango. Have you ever tried it?
That was Scot again. I stared at the notification until it disappeared.
If I responded, I was going to be in an IM conversation for a while. I was kind of tired and I wasn’t really interested in talking about iced tea, but…Scot didn’t have a lot of other people to talk to. And iced tea was harmless, right?
So I responded that I hadn’t tried it, and he told me he’d had it in one of the towns where he grew up but that it wasn’t available everywhere, and it was better than the plain mango iced tea. I tried to keep up my end, which it turned out only required a little bit of encouragement, because Scot mostly wanted to talk.
Still, I finished my dinner and went to bed and he was still talking about something or another, and even though I tried to exit the conversation gracefully, I woke the next morning to several more IMs before Scot must have fallen asleep as well.
“He’s just chatty,” I told Toby over coffee when the raccoon came to sit at my desk an hour into the day. “He’s not a bad guy and he really needs a friend.”
“Sure sure,” Toby said. “Chatty and needy. That sounds like about a thirty-five point friend. And that was the most interesting thing that happened at the party?”
Thirty was Toby’s cut-off for casual hanging out. “That I want to talk about at work,” I said. “What if Scot was a raccoon?”
“Then you wouldn’t have hung out with him.” Toby smoothed down his khakis and grinned at me over the rim of his coffee cup.
“I mean, for you. Would that knock him down to thirty if he were the same species?”
“Enh.” Toby sipped. “A lot of raccoons are really scattered. Can’t hold a conversation. I hear it’s different for wolves, though. Some kinda pack thing?”
“Yeah, there’s some of that. I think it’s harder if you’ve had it and then don’t. Like we never did the big pack stuff, but it sounds like Scot did.” My manager opened his door and peeked out. “Hey, want to grab lunch?”
“Sure. Wraps?”
“Perfect.”
And Toby slid off my desk and went back down to Engineering, and I got back to crunching data from last week’s surveys.
We met in the lobby at 12:01 where Toby loosened his tie and said, “All right, now let’s have the not safe for work version of the party.”
“Okay.” We walked toward the glass doors and the bright sunlit street outside. There were still people around the lobby whom we worked with, so I kept my voice low until we hit the doors. “My total was three, and only one I didn’t know before.”
“Paw, muzzle, or tail?” Toby asked as he held the door for me.
“Muzzle, all three.” I stepped outside and pulled my jacket around me. “The new guy was a cacomistle.”
“Nice. Good?”
“Yeah, he was real twitchy, so when he got close his tail lashed around and kept hitting me. It was—” Through the crowded street I noticed a white wolf, but that wasn’t so unusual in Port City; there were a lot of wolves. This one was dressed in a red t-shirt under a padded bright blue jacket, and he was scanning the crowd as though looking for something. When his eyes settled on me, his ears perked up and I recognized Scot.
“Hey,” I said quickly to Toby as Scot hurried through the crowd, bumping into people. “Remember the wolf Scot that I was telling you about?”
“Yeah?” He turned just in time to see Scot intercept us.
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 I put out a book that was compiled from five years of this newsletter, so I’m going to revisit a topic that is pretty important right now. From Do You Need Help? (and also this newsletter, May 2016):
“How do you get back into writing after a distracting/depressing event?”
This is related to the question of getting over writers block, which I’ve written about a couple times. I guess writers block is the same no matter what the underlying cause, but this is a little different from just having a frustrating lack of motivation to write. If you can’t write because your mind is having trouble letting go of something that’s happened recently, whether that’s connected to your writing or not, that can be worse because you know what the problem is and you can’t get over it.
My advice for writers block in general remains the same: read something if you can’t write. Reading puts you in the creative space, and after a few hours with a good book, you may find your inspiration returning. My other advice is “write anyway.” Unless you’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome, you’re capable of typing (and if you do have carpal tunnel, you can still dictate). Shorten your goals down to one more scene, one more paragraph, one more sentence, one more word if it helps. Focus on the very near term rather than trying to get your whole project done.
For people in this particular situation, though, I have an additional bit of advice. If you can’t stop thinking about this event that’s blocking your writing, then write about that event. You don’t ever have to show this to anyone, but it often really helps to get out of your head and onto the page. Your thoughts will seem so much less intimidating when they’re written out that maybe you can get over them and get back to the business of writing. And maybe you’ll come out with a good story!
(There’s gonna be a ton of pandemic/quarantine stories coming out soon.)
Stay safe and stay home, y’all.