October 2019 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
September Recap
Well, after August, it was nice to spend a month at home. I worked mostly on editing FANG, and we had a lot of good stories to read, so that was a pleasure. The tough part was deciding which to keep, and then going through to make notes for edits, but I also enjoyed that. There’s something I like about helping an author (including myself) get their point across more clearly.
For my own work, I did more work on the fourth Calatians book and waited for beta readers to get back to me with Titles feedback. I’m really happy with how the Calatians book is coming along, and I got some good direction to edit Titles, ways to get my point across better. I’ll be spending most of October working on that.
I had a little bit of distraction when our dog had to get a tooth out, requiring a couple visits to the vet and some TLC afterwards. He’s doing much better now and is anxious to be chewing things again.
Our show this month is something that isn’t quite as high-profile as the other ones I’ve talked about. Undone, on Amazon Prime, is an animated show in the style of the movies Waking Life and Scanner Darkly, created and written by the showrunners of Bojack Horseman. It’s not animal people, but it’s really smartly written and you can see some of the Bojack DNA in the family interactions and the writing.
It’s about a young woman, Alma, who gets in a car accident, whereupon she starts seeing visions of her dead father. He tells her that he has to teach her to use her time travel powers so she can go back in time and fix the accident that killed him.
The show plays around with time; Alma relives the same moments over and over again until she learns to stabilize herself, but these moments aren’t just played for gags. They teach her how to navigate her relationship with her family at the same time as she’s learning to control her powers. There are complicated questions of relationships here: Alma’s boyfriend is more devoted to her than she is to him, but her accident changes this dynamic, and they both have to learn how to adjust to the new, acknowledging the old without being tied down to it. Alma was closer to her father than her mother, and as her sister’s wedding approaches, the pressures of that date put stress on already-strained bonds.
As with Bojack, the show is good at leading you along a path and then spinning you around and pushing you in another direction. It’s a show that left us thinking and talking about it well after it was done. I can’t think of anything close enough to it to give you a comp, but if you liked the writing in Bojack (less the animal puns), give it a shot.
I promised on Twitter to talk about a new book coming out. I’ve had an idea for a little while about a continuing story from one of my other books, and this month I finally started writing it. Like the original, it’s a stylistic break from what I’ve been working on. I’m working on a followup to “Dude, Where’s My Fox?” Kind of a sequel but not really. Anyway, it picks up Lonnie’s story a couple years down the road, with some of our favorite characters returning. Well, some of mine, anyway.
I’ll post an excerpt in this newsletter at some point, but if you want to hear it read aloud, and you’re going to MFF, come to my reading/Q&A (tentatively Friday morning at 10 am) and there’s a good chance I’ll read from it.
Release dates
The third Calatians book, The War and the Fox, came out at Anthrocon, as did ROAR 10 with two of my stories included. E-books are up on all major retail sites.
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 a 2019 release schedule: The forthcoming New Tibet anthology and 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 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 probably have a reading of some sort, maybe with other FurPlanet readers. Might hit our local PAWcon in November for a day or so. Come 2020 I will be at Further Confusion and Texas Furry Fiesta, and of course Megaplex in August.
Spotlight: Furry Book Month!
Every October, furry publishers offer discounts on their books to celebrate Furry Book Month. You can find them by looking at the #FurryBookMonth hashtag on Twitter, and here’s a link: https://twitter.com/hashtag/FurryBookMonth?src=hashtag_click
There are a lot of great deals and great books out there! Check out an anthology maybe, discover some new writers, and meet your next favorite character.
Excerpt: No excerpt this month since I spent so much time editing.
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 @Nobuyuki_awoo: “I want to start writing, but I have no idea where to start or what to focus on, so what is the most important concept a new writer should focus on?”
This is a great question and takes me back to my early twenties, when I had a drive to write stories but I didn’t know what I wanted to write about. My solution was…to not write for a while, like many years. I don’t think that’s optimal necessarily, so I’ll tell you what I wish someone had told me back then.
(It’s entirely possible that someone did. Writing advice often takes a number of iterations to sink in.)
We write in order to communicate. We want to make other people feel something. As we start out, we try to emulate the things we’ve seen other people write (this includes the writing in movies and TV for the purposes of this essay). The problem is that when we first start out to write something, we’re drawn to the shiny parts: the emotional kicks of the climactic scenes. We want to write Luke blowing up the Death Star, Harry Potter shouting “EXPECTO PATRONUM” across a lake to save his godfather, the shock of the Red Wedding. Or, if you like, Mr. Steven’s rumination on the pier at Weymouth, in The Remains of the Day (the book, though the movie is also very good).
But for a lot of us, when we set out to write our versions of these moments, they feel like insubstantial reflections. They’re not connected to anything inside of us except the emotion we felt when we experienced the original moments—but we’re not writing about that. We’re not telling the story of how “Star Wars” changed our lives; we’re doing the literary equivalent of telling someone the story of the movie so they can experience the same moment.
These moments had power because they represented the climax of ideas: that even someone supposedly unimportant can be a hero, that love makes you more powerful than anything else, that your title doesn’t make you immune to villainy, that someday you may find that your life wasn’t what you thought it was. The stories built to these moments, laying out the characters and the stories and investing the reader heavily in the question so that the payoff resonates.
If you want to create stories, it means that you want to communicate with people. You just aren’t sure what you want to say yet. So think about the things you want to tell your friends about. They don’t have to be earth-shaking; they just have to be important to you. How you kept trusting this one friend even though they let you down over and over again, and when you realized that enough was enough. How you saved your relationship by realizing that you were the one being unreasonable. How you didn’t think you’d be good enough for that job, but someone convinced you to try anyway. There needs to be a time when you had a problem, figured out something about yourself or about life, and either solved the problem or didn’t, but changed yourself in some way.
That’s a story. You take that core, you dress it up in whatever outfits you want—fantasy, horror, comedy, whatever you love—so that your unreliable friend becomes a fellow vampire hunter, that job you didn’t think you were good enough for becomes a legendary task, that relationship becomes an amusement park that your main character and their partner are trying to build. The mechanics of taking your “message” and building a story around it are things you can learn and play with over and over, but the key is to have that core.
Your first efforts aren’t going to be great (see the June 2019 Dispatch's question for more on this). But the more you work and the more you practice, the better you’re going to get. It’ll also get easier to find those messages. My writing buddy K.M. Hirosaki and I used to write short little fluffy porn stories, and as we kept writing, we found that meaning and plot and message started sneaking into our stories. We weren’t happy just writing “fox A meets otter B and splashing ensues”; we wanted to show that fox A had a hard time trusting people and how he got over that, or that otter B had to overcome his preconceptions about foxes, or that their families didn’t approve of a fox dating an otter, and so on and so on. There wasn’t anything wrong with those early stories, but the ones that stick with me are the ones that do have something more to them.