April 2021 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
I got a vaccination appointment! First shot comes this weekend and then we’ll see when the next one rolls around. Wolf is getting his too and we hope cat will get his soon and then maybe by like June we’ll all three be vaccinated. I hope wherever you are, you’re able to get an appointment too, if not now (a lot of my friends already have) then definitely by the end of April. I’ve been working on revisions for a lot of this month but hope to get back to Price of Thorns in April.
“Squeak Thief,” a heist story about a posh rich college mouse who needs to go find a jaded fox to help him steal something, is live and ongoing on my Patreon now. I’m enjoying how it’s going and I hope you are too!
Ty the Knot, the sequel to Ty Game, is also being serialized on Patreon but not through posts. To avoid piracy, every month I send people a message with a link to the part in the dropbox. If you sign up now, we’re well into the book, but drop me a note and I’ll catch you up at least back to the beginning of the most recent part.
My 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. I’m now working on a Pokemon fanfic with sex in it and I’m having a lot of fun.
Streaming shows: I finished Sneaky Pete (Amazon) and liked that one a lot. It helped as research for “Squeak Thief,” of course, but I really got attached to the cast of characters. Giovanni Ribisi has been a favorite of mine since he played Phoebe’s brother on “Friends,” and of course I love character actress Margo Martindale. The rest of the cast more than keeps up with them and creates a combination confidence game/family drama show that actually came to a pretty good conclusion after three seasons.
Speaking of “Friends” alums, I started watching “The Morning Show” since a free year of Apple TV+ came with my new laptop. I knew almost nothing about it going into it apart from “Steve Carell and Jennifer Aniston,” but it is a really interesting look at a MeToo scandal and at the world of celebrity TV. Everyone’s great in it and the writing has been pretty good, too.
(“Ted Lasso” is also on my list but I’m waiting for when all three of us can watch it.)
Dude, Where’s My Pack? is currently available from FurPlanet! The e-book is on all sites now.
The fourth and final Calatians book, The Revolution and the Fox, is out! It’s on ArgyllProductions.com and available on all major retailers. If you liked the series please do leave reviews and tell your friends!
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! Dude, Where’s My Fox is now available as an audiobook too!
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 2021
My full list of upcoming appearances is at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html, recently updated (or soon to be updated).
Megaplex appears to be going forward and I will hopefully be able to be part of it in some capacity. More news as I have it!
Spotlight: A Chorus of Canines, by Laura Garabedian
Many of you may remember Laura as the incredibly talented artist who illustrated my Calatians series and has created a number of beautiful pieces of artwork. She sells her work at conventions and online, and had previously released a book of her artwork.
Now there’s a new book coming out from Argyll this month! Laura has collected many of the pieces celebrating her love of dogs into one 30-page volume; I have seen many of the works inside and they’re as beautiful as anything she’s done. If you like Laura’s art, or dogs, or both, check out this book! You can pre-order at the link below in paperback, hardcover, or PDF:
https://argyllproductions.com/product/a-chorus-of-canines/
(Spotlight bonus! Ryan Campbell’s “God of Fire,” the conclusion to the Fire-Bearers series, comes out April 16th from Sofawolf Press! I’ll have a full spotlight on that next month but keep an eye out for it.)
Excerpt: No excerpts this month since I’ve mostly been working on revisions.
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 or reply when I ask for questions on Twitter and I’ll answer it here.
From Miles: “I always wanted to know how do I make the world in my story feel real and alive? This is something I've noticed whenever I reread Out of Position. The world feels real, beating in its own rhythm, a foreign world that I just sort of know or feel like it's a memory. I know that some characters can help with that and putting in details like events and things we would recognize from our own daily life can help, but what is this magic that I seem to fail to describe?”
Worldbuilding is a complicated thing, but the thing to remember about it is that a world is defined and created by the people who live in it. This is, tangentially, one of the problems with the way history is often taught in schools. We receive history as though it’s a series of dates and events and we rarely get a glimpse into the people who shaped the world—or, rather, we receive the lives of those people often as folksy narratives: George Washington was the father of our country, Ben Franklin the brilliant eccentric inventor, Teddy Roosevelt the bull moose of American politics. But rarely do our mandatory history classes (in public schools) have the time to really dig in to the forces acting on people and the reasons those historical figures acted and reacted the way they did. “Hamilton” is brilliant because it shows Hamilton as an actual figure with all his brilliance and all his flaws. He could’ve been president; he could have died in the Caribbean. His world feels real because we see it through his eyes, we feel its effect on him and in turn, we understand his motivations to change the world around him.
When I’m building a world, I rarely do it top-down. That is, I rarely think, “Okay, how was this world created?” I start from the main character and the story and I ask myself what needs to exist in the world for the story to exist. I ask myself how the character interacts with the world, specifically the details of the world that matter to the story. In Argaea, one of the key features of the world is the church, and very early on in the first story, we hear that perhaps the church in this new country will be antagonistic to our hero. Later we see the church as a source of comfort to him. This is a more organic way of building the world than having someone describe the church at the beginning of the book; it makes the world real because the character interacts with it as though it were real.
I know there are people who love to spend all their writing time worldbuilding, and this kind of method does not satisfy them. I’m sure there is a way to build your world first and then explore the world you’ve built using your character, but I haven’t tried that yet. If you prefer it, though, give it a shot! I think the key is not so much how you build the world but how you reveal it to the reader, and revealing anything through character interaction is always preferable to revealing it in the narration.
Beyond that, I think a lot of it comes down to the details of the world (as much writing does). When your character interacts with part of the world that you want to tell the reader about, think about how that interaction would go. Is this the character’s first time doing this? Tenth? Hundredth? What little things jump out about it? Use all five senses when you can as well as things like heat and cold.
For example, let’s say your world has flying cars. Here are a few ways you can tell the reader about them:
Narration-heavy: “In 2029 WolfPro motors had pioneered the first flying car. There were accidents and detractors as there would be with any new technology, but people loved the convenience of being able to take off and land wherever you wanted to go without worrying too much about roads. Since they were all auto-piloted, crashes were very rare, and within ten years flying cars were the most common form of transportation. Jane had a used WolfPro Skimmer ’41, which she hopped into now to go to work.”
Character-focused: “Jane hurried out the door to her WolfPro Skimmer ’41. Someday she’d get herself a new car, but until then, this one got her where she needed to go. She slid into the front seat and activated the autopilot, then sat back to check her email as the car’s jets warmed up. In under two minutes, it lifted off the ground and merged into the mass of cars shooting by overhead.”
With extra details: “Jane slid into the front seat, which was supposed to activate the autopilot, but the screen remained blank until she poked the power button with an impatient claw. Then it lit up with a flicker, as if she’d woken it and it was yawning, and displayed the half-dozen autopilot settings from everyone in her family who’d owned the car at various times: her mother’s “slowest possible” settings (one with “avoid tolls” and one, incongruously, with “fastest route”); her brother’s “fastest possible” and “most scenic” settings; and hers, which she had named “just get me there.” She tapped that one now as the hovers warmed up, and a minute later the car had heaved itself up off the ground. It merged into the crowd of flying cars over the city, all miraculously avoiding each other, and Jane sat back to check her email. The car still smelled of the fast food meal she’d carried home in it three nights ago; she made a mental note to pick up an air freshener at the corner store.”
Maybe you don’t want to spend so much time just on the car, but when you put some thought and extra details into it, we get to see not only the flying car, but the way it’s handed down through the family, the effects of how old it is, a little bit about Jane’s mother and brother, and a lot about Jane. The sensory details help bring it to life in a way that just being told, “she’s in a flying car” don’t.
Hope this helps you think about your world and bring your future worlds to life!
Stay safe and wear a mask, y’all.