May 2021 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
Second shot done! I escaped without bad side effects (48 hours on now so I think I’m out of the window) and so did wolf, and in a couple weeks we’ll be able to see other vaccinated friends again. It’s a nice feeling. I hope that all of you have been getting your shots and someday, maybe late this year or in 2022, we can see each other at a convention again. I’ll be wearing a mask and I won’t shake hands but it’ll be nice to say hi.
Other April news: the new narrator for The Demon and the Fox completed his work and I have reviewed it and submitted it for distribution! When it’s out for sale I will let you know and will put a sample up on my Soundcloud page.
As I alluded to on Twitter, I’m going to start expanding the reach of my audiobooks. I know most people use Audible, and the books will always be for sale there (unless they decide otherwise) but I want to give people an alternative to Amazon if they want one. The new service I’m using distributes to 40 different audiobook platforms and I’ll also be able to sell them on furry-owned Bad Dog Books, so keep an eye out for that!
Because it doesn’t make sense to just have the second book in the series out on all those platforms, I’ll also probably widen distribution on Tower and the Fox. The reason I haven’t before now is that ACX (like Audible, an Amazon property) gives me larger royalties if I distribute it exclusively through their retail outlets (+ iTunes). At the beginning, Audible was the largest audiobook retailer by far, so I didn’t think I was missing out on a lot by being exclusive to them—and they included iTunes so it didn’t seem like a real monopoly. But I’ve become less comfortable with being part of an Amazon-exclusive arrangement, and I think there’s a lot of that going around now. I can potentially get better royalties in other places while offering the books more cheaply (Audible inflates prices to drive people to their membership model, but I don’t get royalties off the list price if people buy the books with credits; I get royalties based on some arcane formula around the average price everyone pays for their Audible credits, which works out to around $4-5 per book).
Also, this may only be feasible right now with titles I paid for outright. If I’m doing royalty shares on ACX then I’m not sure how I would continue to do that on other stores without a lot of headache-inducing paperwork, but I will talk to my narrators about it and we’ll see.
“Unfinished Business” is the next book I’m aiming for release. I’ll start editing it this month and hope to get it out by late summer/fall. After that I’ll work on Return From Divalia. I’m also still writing Price of Thorns.
“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 just finished season 2 of “For All Mankind,” continuing my Apple TV+ watching spree, and liked it a lot. I love alternate history anyway, and this adds a lot of really well-done character portraits to it. The second season in particular has been like a reminder of a lot of the things that happened in the eighties, a few of which I’d forgotten.
We’re watching the second season of “Barry” on HBO finally. We’d put it off because the first season was a little intense, but it was also fantastic and funny, so we pulled up the second season when we were ready for the intensity, and we haven’t been disappointed. The fifth episode though…that was something else. I don’t want to say anything about it, but if you can stomach a funny show about an assassin, it’s worth watching (it stars Bill Hader and includes such funny people as D’Arcy Carden and Kirby Howell-Baptiste (both of “The Good Place”), Henry Winkler, Stephen Root, and Anthony Carrigan, whom I knew as Victor Zsasz from “Gotham” and who is, despite having fewer previous comedy roles than the others named here, consistently the funniest guy in the show.
And we finished the first season of “Central Park” on Apple TV+, which I cannot recommend enough. It’s like a little Broadway musical in each episode, with “Hamilton” alums Leslie Odom Jr. and Daveed Diggs as well as Josh Gad, Kristen Bell, Titus Burgess, Stanley Tucci, and Kathryn Hahn. It’s funny and well done and even though it is very New York-centric, there’s enough there for even us west-coasters to laugh at.
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: God of Fire, by Ryan Campbell
Ryan is a good friend and trusted member of my writing group, as well as a co-instructor at previous RAWR workshops. I’m thrilled that his Fire Bearers series is finally concluding, and he was kind enough to do a little mini-interview with me EXCLUSIVELY for this newsletter. You can find God of Fire and the rest of the series at Sofawolf Press here: https://sofawolf.com/products/god-of-fire?sku=GOF
1. Apart from just “having finished it,” what are you most proud of about this book?
I think that when I began the planning stages, this was a book I couldn't write. I'd barely finished one full-length fantasy book, and now I was planning a epic-length saga with interweaving main plotlines and points of view. I had no idea how to handle any of that and had to learn over the course of writing the series. So I guess what I'm most proud of is not backing down from that. I think that's how you grow, by attempting things that you know you can't do, and keeping at them until you can. A lot of books I have personal doubts about after I finish them, but not this one, because I know I put everything I had into it and told the story I wanted to tell.
2. It took a while to write. How much did the story change between your initial idea and the final draft? Is there an example of something that influenced a change?
Well, when I was shopping God of Clay, the first book, Sofawolf wanted to know before accepting it how the whole trilogy would go. Fortunately I had book two (Forest Gods) already pretty well outlined, but I only had loose ideas for how the third book would go. I knew the series ending from the very beginning, I knew the big plot reveals that were yet to come, and I knew that Cloud and her group of exiles would travel to Bogana to learn lost secrets that would help with the fight against Ogya, but at that point I had only rudimentary ideas about what the internal stories would be. The biggest change is Mirage's story. I hadn't planned that plot arc at all, but by the time I'd finished Forest Gods, I knew he had to be a point of view, because he commits one of the really evil acts in that book, and that needed to be reckoned with. I really didn't want to write Mirage's story, but whatever instincts I have as a writer kept insisting that it was necessary. And I think those instincts proved to be reliable, because Mirage's story is, to me, perhaps the most satisfying of the book. And it ends up a narrative illustration of the theme of religion's "echoes" becoming twisted and harmful for younger generations.
3. This book is long. What measurement or comparison do you think best conveys how long it is?
God of Fire is more than twice as long as God of Clay, if that gives you any idea. It was all supposed to be one book originally, called The Fire Bearers. Then I got over 100k words and was a third of the way through the planned story and realized there was no way it was all going to fit into one book. So I broke it up into a trilogy. The problem is that as soon as you do that, each book needs its own set of complete narrative and character arcs, so again that increases the length. Then I kept peskily adding more POVs to the books: God of Clay is just Clay, Doto, and Laughing Dog; Forest Gods adds Cloud's story as an ongoing arc and POV; then you get to God of Fire and you have arcs and POVs for Clay and Doto, Laughing Dog, Cloud, and Mirage, with a few other POV chapters thrown in for story or character reasons. So suddenly God of Fire is twice as long as the first book, and the entire series beats out Lord of the Rings in length.
Excerpt: Here’s a little bit from Price of Thorns where Nivvy, with the aid of a breathing spell, fights an eel underwater.
Behind the throne there was a doorway, and through the doorway was a small set of apartments, as empty as any of the other rooms but darker. Nivvy swam through them, navigating by his whiskers and the faint shadows that his night vision could pick out of the murk around him. Movement spooked him even though he knew it was likely only the algae waving with the ripples of his passage. And then, two rooms in, a shape lunged out of the darkness at him, mouth open, gleaming white teeth showing.
Only the warning his whiskers had given him saved him, as he’d sensed the movement and hesitated, then dove so the great eel’s momentum took it just by his ears. He swam frantically downward, knowing there was no way to out maneuver the eel in the water, hoping only to find a place to hide from it.
His paws met stone floor, soft algae and mussel shells. The water around him rippled unsettlingly and then he felt the same warning pressure on his whiskers and fur that he’d felt a moment before, only this time it was behind him. He used the mussels to pull himself along, but the eel was coming on faster, too fast—
The next thing his fingers found weren’t a mussel shell but a piece of wood half as big as his body. In one quick motion, or as quickly as the water allowed, Nivvy turned himself around and swung the piece of wood.
The eel, emerging quickly out of the darkness, grabbed the wood away from him and bit down, carrying it away. Heart pounding, Nivvy kept pulling himself forward, trying to find a small place where he could hide, or—
Another piece of wood under his paws, around the same size. He used it to push himself along the ground, hoping that would help him go faster, but it didn’t, not especially. And it wasn’t even that strong; the third time he planted it in the floor and pushed, the wood twisted and splintered in his grasp.
He made it through a doorway, keeping to the wall, but the water rippled around him with the warning that the eel was coming back. Paddling as fast as he could, Nivvy probed at the algae and stone with the piece of wood left in his paw, but nothing opened up to him. All the hiding places had been eaten away by time and water and there was nothing left but algae and mussels as big as his head.
And then his wood stick pushed something that moved: a broken mussel shell. Nivvy dropped the wood to seize the shell, thicker and solid and with a jagged point at one end. It didn’t fit easily into his paw, but he found a place he could grip it. It served as a makeshift paddle, but more importantly, that point at the end drew his eye. Not much of a weapon, but he’d made do with worse.
Holding the shell steeled his nerves against the rippling of the water. Just let that eel come back, he’d show it who was prey and who could bite. In the meantime, he’d keep going…ah, forward? In his haste to get away from the eel, he’d lost his bearings. How had he left the previous room? Had he swum forward or had the doorway been to his left? He was supposed to swim forward, easy run all the way to the back of the suite of rooms, but now he couldn’t say whether the eel had turned him around.
There was nothing for it but to go forward and hope he hadn’t been diverted. So he swam on, and the rippling of the water died down the farther he got from that door. Maybe the eel had its own hunting grounds and he’d left it behind now. That made him feel better as long as he didn’t think about whose hunting grounds he might be moving into now; what was fierce enough to scare the eel?
Whatever it was, he was fortunate enough not to encounter it, but not fortunate enough to have followed the correct route. He reached the last room along this path and looked for the open trapdoor Bella had told him about, but the floor remained smooth and unbroken—or at least unbroken; the algae were smooth but the mussels and crumbled rocks definitely were not—all around the room.
He would have to go back and face the eel. Clutching the shell in his paw, he paddled back through the rooms to the place where he’d been diverted. How long did the breathing spell last? Thinking about being trapped down here with no air and no way to get back to the surface in time made his swimming more like thrashing as his heart pounded and panic jolted his muscles.
Quiet, calm, he told himself. If that happens, it happens, and there’ll be no helping it. First fight the eel, then get to the trapdoor, get the crown, get out. Easy. Maybe the eel will still be chewing on that piece of wood.
Making his way back cautiously along the wall and near the floor, he tried to move slowly enough that the eel might not notice him, if indeed it was still there. The doorway loomed before him, a large space of open moving water, and the change confused his senses so that he couldn’t tell if anything were moving toward him. He froze, letting ripples wash over him, and when he couldn’t detect anything the size of an eel moving toward him, proceeded slowly forward.
If his mental map was correct, this must be the big room where he’d been attacked, so if he kept to the wall, he’d find the next doorway and hopefully that was the correct one. It wasn’t too much different from making his way through a building at night, if you ignored the “moving in slow motion” and the “giant eel wanting to eat him” parts. And the slimy algae getting all over his paws. Fine; it was very different, but it was alike in the way that mattered, which was that he had to go by the map in his head and remember where he’d been.
He came to the corner, then a little while later to the next doorway. Here, emboldened by the quiet, he left the wall and pushed straight ahead, aiming for the doorway he hoped was on the other side of this room.
That’s when the eel came at him.
As before, he had a moment’s warning, but either it moved faster now or it had learned his movements, because even though he moved to evade it, its mouth seized his arm. Teeth sank into his flesh, although he had the reflexes to twist his arm so that its jaw couldn’t completely close, his fingers pushing up against the roof of its slimy mouth. His other paw, the one holding the mussel shell, flailed against its head, a huge carp-like face with flat staring eyes and slit nostrils.
The eel thrashed, trying to get a better grip, while Nivvy kept swiping at its eye with the pointed shell. His paw slipped and the eel’s mouth closed over it, but before it could bite down harder, Nivvy scratched at its soft palate and the pressure eased. He tried to bring up his hind legs and kick against it, but his claws slid across its slippery skin just as the shell was doing. Inira, help me, he cried out in his mind.
It clamped down again. Pain shot through his front leg and, desperate, he slashed across its face with the shell. One, two, three strokes and then, miraculously, the eel thrashed harder and let go of Nivvy, sending him floating off into the water. Looking back, he saw one of the flat eyes ruined, blood seeping out of it to join the stronger trail coming out of its mouth, but he didn’t feel much satisfaction in that moment. His front leg throbbed painfully and was also leaking blood, and it didn’t do one much good to stand and gloat over an enemy when you didn’t know how many more were out there. Also, an eel with one good eye could still probably catch a weasel with only three good legs, especially if it wanted revenge for the lost eye, so he paddled as fast as he could. Thanks be to Inira, he prayed. Knew you’d come through, good lady. Never a doubt.
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.
Rukis and I did a panel on Writing Long Series for Fur The More, and because maybe not all of you got to see it, I figured I’d answer one of the most central questions, which boils down to “how the heck do you plot out and write a series?”
As we talked about this, we realized that there are two poles between which most series fall. One is Rukis’s “Off the Beaten Path” series or my “Love Match” series, where it’s one long story and we’ve just had to figure out ways to break it up into manageable books that our publisher can sell. The other is my “Dangerous Spirits” series, where each of the novels is a separate story that you can read by itself, but they’re linked thematically and involve the same characters, or at least some of the same ones. In the middle you have my “Out of Position” series, which is kind of one long story but is broken up into episodes more successfully, and my Argaea series, which is several stories along a chronology that keeps moving the characters with it.
Not surprisingly, the process is different between those two extremes. In the case of the “Dangerous Spirits” books, I didn’t even know it was going to be a series when I started out. I just liked the way Green Fairy came out and I wanted to write more stuff like that. With “Love Match,” because I was writing it on Patreon in serial form, I could let the story be as long as I needed it to be and then worry about breaking it into books when it came time to publish.
So for the “Love Match” kind of book, you’ll be breaking the story down into parts and chapters anyway. What you’ll want to do if this is going to be multiple books in a series is try to find good break points in the story. For instance, the first Love Match book ends with Rocky making the decision to leave school and go professional. The second book covers a lot of relationship trouble and ends with him deciding that tennis is going to be his relationship (in a conversation with Braden, foreshadowing the cross fox’s involvement in the third book). If you plan out the structure of your long series, you’ll find these points in it, where a character’s arc comes to a new stage. You’ll notice that the second book is short while the first and especially third are longer; sometimes that happens. Don’t get hung up on how long the books are if the story breaks feel right.
You can also build your book breaks around a plot arc. Often on their way to the larger goal, your characters will have smaller goals that move them on their way to the main goal. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a famous example of breaking up a series in this way.
If you’re at the other end of the scale, then plotting out the series presents a challenge from a different angle. You’ve got all the individual books, but how to tie them together? What I did with the “Dangerous Spirits” series was make each of the different books about the main character trying to find something in their life: a relationship, a family, a purpose. The ghosts they meet end up symbolizing their struggle and helping them resolve it, one way or another. In addition, the final book in the series sort of explains how all the strangeness happened, so it provides a nice capstone.
There should always be that unifying theme in the books of your series (otherwise why are they a series at all?). Find it and figure out how each book is a variation on it, and then you’ll have an idea of what will make for a satisfying ending.
So I guess the real answer is to plot the series out ahead of time as much as you can, or at least have an idea of the story you want to tell in your head. As you write the series, the breaks should become apparent to you.
Stay safe and get vaccinated, y’all.