September 2020 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
We are all still sheltering in place here, and though we're breathing more smoke than we used to, my family is safe from the fires. Not everyone has been so lucky, though, and a few furries out there could use some help. I encourage you to help out where you can.
Love Match 3 came out finally! FurPlanet organized a release party on Picarto with me and Rukis where I read a scene from the book and then we took some questions. We had a great time hanging out with all the people who showed up, and the book is now out and available if you want to find out how Rocky’s story ends.
I finished up some edits on Dude, Where’s My Pack? and have negotiated the art, so I’m still hopeful we’ll get that one out by the end of the year.
The rest of the time in August I spent writing the mystery/thriller I was telling y’all about last month, and I’ll have an excerpt this month so you can get a feel for 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 September. Keep an eye on my Twitter or follow me on picarto.tv (https://picarto.tv/KyellGold) to be notified next time I stream.
Streaming: We finished up Doom Patrol and liked it a lot, even though they ended the second season one episode short because of the pandemic (they added some plot wrap-up to make it work. It has a modern take on superheroes, that is to say it addresses a lot of mental health issues.
In August we also finished watching The Dragon Prince (for me, the second time through the first three seasons). We appreciated how maturely the characters are handled while still keeping it nominally in the purview of a kids’ show. There’s a lot of complexity specifically around the idea of how far you’ll go for your beliefs and how that can drive someone to evil.
We also watched through the first two seasons of “The Politician,” the latest Ryan Murphy (“Glee,” “American Horror Story”) show, which is maybe a great show for these times? I’m not sure. We liked it a lot, though—a lot of great characters and whiplash plotting that keeps you on your toes. There’s even a poly relationship in it! We’ll be awaiting the next season (not officially confirmed but it’s hard to imagine Netflix saying no to Ryan Murphy at this point).
Lastly we finished Aggretsuko season 3, but I’m sure those of you who are going to watch it have already done so. It was good! We liked it.
Love Match (2013-2015) is out! This series has been a ton of fun to work on and I’m really proud of how it came out. E-book is on baddogbooks.com in both ePub and Kindle formats and will be on other retail outlets probably in October.
The fourth and final Calatians book, The Revolution and the Fox, will come out January 15, 2021 so that we can try to get some reviews up for it. It’s currently being serialized on my OTHER Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/timsusman).
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! Still hoping to get the DWMF audiobook up soon!
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 until then.
Spotlight: Love Match.
Properly speaking, Love Match is a single story split over three books. I wrote it in serial form on my Patreon from December 2015 to March 2019, and the whole story is just a bit under 400,000 words (book 1: 125K, book 2: 105K, book 3: 159K).
Rocky was inspired by over two decades of watching tennis, but perhaps most directly by Japanese tennis player Kei Nishikori, who came to a US tennis camp at a young age to study here. The idea started with the image of two gay tennis players who had dated (and might still be dating, no spoilers) and also playing each other in a high-stakes match. This was partly inspired by the Williams sisters meeting in finals and the speculation (never admitted by either one) that Venus didn’t play her hardest because she knew Serena needed the wins more than she did. Personal relationships for sure play into tennis matches, and I thought this was a great thing to explore.
Rocky, the main character, was going to be generally a sweet, happy character, so I needed his foil to be cranky, abrasive, and driven, and fortunately (or not) the tennis world abounds with borderline unpleasant personalities to draw from. Braden is a composite of many of them, but also his own thing (and he is not named for tennis coaching legend Vic Braden, though had I uncovered that name earlier he would have been).
Tennis was a fun contrast to football (in sports books to write about) because it is such an individual sport. A player has a team to back them up—coach, trainer, and more the more successful they are—but out there on the court it’s just them. The appeal of a match between current or former boyfriends was that isolation, that there’s no awkward explanations to your teammates or being able to avoid contact (if Dev was dating another football player who played defense, they’d never meet on the field, and even if the player was on offense, Dev wouldn’t be tackling him every play; when Lee is working for another team, there’s no direct contact). There’s just the internal struggle: how much does the game mean to me? How much does a personal connection mean to me? Rocky and Braden have different answers to those questions, and finding their relationship in the middle of those answers was one of the joys of writing this series.
In the last book, in fact, in the very last scene, they grapple with those questions, and the answers aren’t easy but they are worth exploring. That’s one of my two favorite scenes in the last book; the other involves Ori showing Rocky something on her phone (if you’ve read the book, you’ll be able to find it). I hope that as you come to the end of this story you’ll enjoy the journey as much as I did.
Excerpt: Here’s a short bit of The Curse of Lone Pine Gulch, a non-furry mystery/thriller.
“There are three reasons a group might choose to go camping in Lone Pine Gulch:
1. A remote old mining camp in Northern California sounds beautiful, and they haven’t heard about the curse.
2. They’ve heard of it, but don’t believe in it.
3. They’ve heard of it and believe in it, and they think they can solve it.”
—From “The Curse of Lone Pine Gulch,” by Syd Jefferson (unpublished)
Asher’s pretty happy with how the camping trip is going so far. He and Beth have been fighting, but the fifteen-mile hike from Bobcat Creek up through the pine forests hasn’t left much energy for fighting. Besides that, there’s something about the fresh scent and relative silence of the wilderness that makes them feel like their fights have been left behind with the rest of civilization. They haven’t been—this is an illusion, the way all four of them stood on the ridge and looked back down at the trail and felt like they were miles above Bobcat Creek, even though the peak here is a modest 3,800 feet—but the illusion is comforting.
Lone Pine Gulch sits between two ridges, with a stream running through it and two wooden skeletons that used to be cabins in a gold mining camp. The austere gray and ponderosa pines they hiked through for most of that first day gave way to amiable bigleaf maple and a few rustling willows as they reached the moister soil of the gulch, and the smell grew earthier, though the pine never really went away. The shadows were thicker, more complete than the dappled sunlight under the pine needles, and their footsteps were softer, hushed on rotting leaves and wood.
The sun was an hour from setting when they stomped into the camp, quiet at first as they’d been the whole day. There’s no need to yell in the forest, no traffic or crowd to be heard over, only the scurrying of squirrels and chipmunks and the screech and chatter of Stellar’s jays. They stopped for the hoarse croak of ravens, and once saw an eagle, or maybe a vulture—Samir and Syd argued over that for a good fifteen minutes since neither could get a signal for their phone to look up an image, or even which of the birds was more likely to be seen in a northern California forest. At first, upon seeing the two ramshackle wooden buildings, one missing the better part of two walls, the other more intact save for the roof (if you could dignify the few inches of wood jutting out from the top of each wall with that name), all four of them sighed and grinned. Beth and Asher hugged, and so did Syd and Samir. And then Beth let out a whoop that broke the stillness, and it was okay to talk at a normal volume. There was nobody to hear them for miles, after all, unless you believed in a spirit that carried out a curse.
They fried up some steaks by a campfire, which had been delicious, and then Samir and Beth took the dishes down to the stream to clean up, well below the campsite. Asher, now, is sitting in the more complete cabin, which he and Beth have taken by virtue of their status as the married couple. There’s a window through which the sun is just disappearing over the treeline, looking almost like a movie explosion in reverse as it flares bright red through the jagged teeth of firs, subsides, sinks, and leaves them standing stark and untouched against the gold and crimson clouds.
There’s such a thing as too much quiet, Asher said earlier that day, and now he takes his headphones out and plugs them into his phone. Nature is all well and good, but when he wants to relax he’s got to be listening to something. Hip hop makes him feel like he’s in a crowd, in a club, so he puts on Tupac, or maybe Suge or Snoop—he was born in the Inland Empire east of L.A. and he’s a West Coast boy through and through, no matter that Beth dragged him off to Connecticut. He finds the best space for their groundsheets and contemplates the tent, but it doesn’t look like rain tonight and Beth’s mentioned sleeping under the stars. He doesn’t love the outdoors but doesn’t hate it, and small concessions like this can add up to bigger ones when it’s his turn to ask. Remember the camping trip? he imagines a future Asher saying. Remember how we slept under the stars?
After a few minutes clearing the ground of old leaves and debris, he lays the groundsheet out. He’s facing away from the door, so he doesn’t see the man come into the cabin. Syd is getting ready over in the other cabin, and Samir and Beth are down at the stream; there’s nobody outside to see either.
Curses happen as they are meant to.
The man who comes in is about five and a half feet tall. He’s got a mane of wild silver hair and a long beard to go with it. The dark eyes set in the wrinkled, weathered face are unreadable, especially in the twilight. He wears a brown overshirt and olive green army surplus pants, and in his right hand the blade of a knife gleams.
Asher doesn’t see it. He doesn’t hear the footsteps behind him, doesn’t have any idea that the man is there. If he did, perhaps the next minute would go differently. Perhaps Asher’s six-foot-one, two hundred pound body could wrestle the knife away from the intruder. Or perhaps he could smile that easy smile of his and say something like, “Hey, buddy, sorry, we ate all the steaks already, but if you hold on a minute I can fetch you some trail mix.” Or perhaps the man, losing the element of surprise, would simply run.
But Asher doesn’t turn, not until the last minute, not until he senses something—breath, perhaps, or the tread of another pair of feet on the ground nearby. Then, too late, he turns, and his face registers only surprise, no fear, as the man’s right arm swings forward and drives the knife into his heart.
He lives for a few seconds after that, not long enough to make a sound. He drops to his knees and then to his side, and his blood spills out onto the groundsheet and collects there, pooling around him as though it’s loath to go too far from him.
The man in the army surplus pants doesn’t linger to make sure Asher’s dead; he leaves to go to the next cabin. That’s how the curse goes.
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 TJ. “Have there been characters you've wanted to revisit but haven't had any story idea come up yet?”
Absolutely yes. Way back when my Patreon started I gave people a chance to suggest side characters who could get their own story, and the collection Twelve Sides is the result of that year. By the end of the year, people had run out of suggestions and I didn’t have very many others. There’s been time since then and there are definitely a few candidates.
I think a lot about the characters from the Dangerous Spirits series and wonder what they’re up to, but I think mostly I miss that world, where the membrane between reality and other forms of existence stretches a little thin. But that world would be difficult to get back to. Perhaps more than any of my other series, Dangerous Spirits feels like it came to a definitive end. I have the beginnings of an idea kicking around for a sequel of sorts to Camouflage, and that might scratch the “supernatural” itch for the time being.
I also think about Volle’s cubs, Yilon and Volyan, probably all grown up and lording it up now. I don’t really know what they’re doing, though. The current Argaea story I’m working on, Return From Divalia, isn’t situated definitively in time although it is nebulously after Pendant of Fortune but perhaps before Shadow of the Father? So the cubs probably won't make an appearance in that one.
There are a bunch of characters from the OOP series that would be fun to write about. Hal got a short story but I think he has potential for more; Lightning Strike would be great but I’d need to have something really good for him to do; Lee’s father and aunt; Vonni, Charm, and some of the others. Wix and Mike (from Titles) haven’t been around long but they might get stories in the future.
A lot of the Cupcakes also make me think about their characters. In Lonnie’s case, I’m writing another story with him, but though I still have great affection for them, I don’t have any plans to revisit Jackson (Losing My Religion) or Vaxy (Science Friction), though Vaxy did get a Twelve Sides story.
In general, I love all my characters and I think they deserve their own stories, but stories come about because of things I’m thinking about, and sometimes I need to make up new ones, and sometimes characters jump up and tell me they should be in stories. When I wanted to write about a bisexual character, Ty basically sat on my desk (and so did Tami) and said “this story is about us.” Unless characters do that, they’ll mostly sit around in their existing stories. And, I like to think, they’re happy there.
Stay safe and wear a mask, y’all.