July 2020 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
June Recap
It has been really heartening to see people continue the momentum of protests and reform around the country. The reforms being proposed by a few communities are striking; in other places they are watered down but still happening, and the awareness of current prejudice as well as the horrible actions that are part of the foundation of our society is growing. By “reform” I’m referring not only to the change in the way we regard and employ and manage our police, but also to change in the ways communities recognize POC and attempt to celebrate diversity and everyone’s contribution.
As many people have observed, Independence Day is a great time to think about the founding of this country and how “independence” didn’t apply to many of the people living in America at the time. There’s a really good thread on Twitter (which is where we all go for our serious reading these days) about recognizing the racism of the founders as part of their legacy. That doesn’t mean they didn’t also do good things, just that people are complicated. I suggest reading it here: https://twitter.com/michaelharriot/status/1279888558581579779?s=20.
On the writing front, I put a lot of big projects to bed in June. I finished two editing projects I undertook and sent The Revolution and the Fox off to Argyll, thereby finishing up the series The Calatians. I might go back to that world in time, having done all that work to set it up; you never know.
With all that done, I went back and did some revisions on Dude, Where’s My Pack? and I’m pretty happy with how that’s going. I hope you guys will be able to see it by the end of the year, but the way things are looking, it might not be until early 2021. However, the Dude, Where’s My Fox? audiobook is nearing completion! It’s been a while, but I have now listened through to the whole thing and I can confirm that it exists! When we submit it to Audible, I’ll let you know—I’m excited for you guys to hear 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 June (though I’ll be skipping 6/2). Keep an eye on my Twitter or follow me on picarto.tv (https://picarto.tv/KyellGold) to be notified next time I stream. I will not be streaming the middle two weeks of July because…
I’m going to be attending two online writing retreats in July. Each one is a week long and they run back to back, from July 12th to the 26th. These aren’t intensive workshops (most intensive workshops I know, including RAWR, have made the decision to push their dates back a year, because the face-to-face component is a really critical part of them), but rather gatherings of writers who have attended the same workshop and want to spend a week together working on projects and occasionally consulting each other for help, checking in, etc.
The project I’m taking to both of those is one I haven’t talked about on this newsletter before, so here goes: it’s called The Price of Thorns (tentative title, as always), and it’s my attempt to cash in a decade late on the “real stories in fairytale world” craze (in my defense, I’ve had the idea kicking around for probably about that long). The story: a disgraced thief hired by a self-proclaimed former queen to help her get her country back discovers that she is the evil queen of fairytale legend and must figure out whether he should stop her or join her. The world is a generally human fairytale world with magic, and the furry angle is that right around the time he finds out his employer’s real nature, early on, it’s through a misadventure that leads to him being turned into a weasel. There are snippets of this that I’ve written from years and years ago so I’m excited to finally make a novel out of it.
Streaming: We are very excited by the second season of Kipo (Netflix) though we haven’t finished it yet. It’s just got so many neat characters, and the art style is really appealing. Like The Dragon Prince, Kipo seemed to take a couple episodes to find its footing, but we’ve grown very fond of it.
We’re also finally watching the original Avatar cartoon, which has gone from “cute” to “wow, this is interesting and emotional.” I probably don’t need to tell y’all that, but if you haven’t, it’s also worth watching.
And I’ve been watching Schitt’s Creek. I was wary of it because I didn’t think I wanted to see obnoxious rich people, but it turns out that the rich people aren’t that obnoxious, and they eschewed the simplistic storyline of “formerly rich people find what life is really about in a small town,” because the small town people have their own host of problems as well. Most importantly, though, the show has real affection for all of its characters, and while it dances around the comedy of cringing, it leaves you feeling good about nearly everyone in the show.
Also, obviously, “Hamilton” is still great.
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 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!
The 2020 release schedule has been delayed somewhat: Love Match (2013-2015) will hopefully be out this summer. I’m working with FurPlanet on how to do pre-orders for it and we might be able to offer signed bookplates to go with pre-ordered books, since I won’t be able to sign any in person. 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.
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.
Spotlight: No spotlight this month.
Excerpt: Here’s a short bit to whet your appetite for “Dude, Where’s My Pack?”
After having met Scot at a party and befriended him to help introduce him to the community, Lonnie heads to work where he tells his friend Toby about the party.
I stuck around for lunch with Tay 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 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 (depending on the weather).
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 the work clothes I’d brought over a few months ago had all been worn to work and ended up back at my place, and I kept forgetting to bring more over.
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 fruit bat 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, tugging at his cutaway shirt that had bunched up when he sat (a “cutaway” shirt was basically a sleeveless shirt slit down the side to leave room for the wing but with fasteners at the bottom of each side so they didn’t flap around, “definitely not designed by bats,” Toby said, but he had to wear a collar and tie for work and this was the only option). “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 fruit bat?”
“Then you wouldn’t have hung out with him.” Toby 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 fruit bats 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 boss, a big cougar who liked to “walk the floor,” opened his door and peeked out. I turned quickly back to my computer and said, “Kevin’s coming. 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.
“Two muzzle, one paw, but that was Geoff, so neither of us finished.” 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 with a jolt. What the heck? Coincidence was hard to buy in Port City, and besides, he’d clearly been looking for me. Oh right, I’d told him where I work.
“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.
“Lonnie? Hey, I’m glad I caught you. Hope you don’t mind. I didn’t have anything to do today so I looked up where the Geological Survey is and thought if I ran into you, maybe we could have lunch together?”
“Oh, uh.”
I looked Toby’s way, but the fruit bat had already stepped back. “Don’t worry, Lonnie, we can catch up later or tomorrow.”
Scot, ears perked hopefully, said, “Oh, I didn’t mean to…I mean, if you want to come along…”
“No, it’s totally fine, I’ll see Lonnie later this afternoon,” Toby said, and leaned in to whisper “foooooooorty” in my ear as he power-walked away.
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 Howl, regarding Titles and the OOP books in general: “How do you make the two characters' plots so well paced that they do meld well together?”
This is one of those things that’s generally pretty easy except when it’s not. The first thing to do is to make sure that your characters both have thick and engaging plots. A lot of the time when I run into problems switching POVs it’s because one character’s plot is much denser than the other.
If both/all your characters have enough to do, then it becomes a matter of timing. One of the really fun things to do with switching POV stories is to set up dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the character does in a scene. More than once I arranged chapters deliberately so that we’d see half of a scene from one point of view and then later see the other character approach the scene, so that the reader knows what’s going to happen. The inverse of that is to show a dramatic scene and then in a subsequent chapter go back and reveal the other character’s motivations in the scene. Both of these are fun reasons to have multiple POV characters in a story, and if you keep these kind of narrative devices in mind, it can help you plan the chapters so that each character’s storyline gets a good pace.
That leads into another thing you can do, which is to make the characters’ plots interact with each other as much as possible. That ensures that you’ll always have something going on that both of them have a stake in. (As a note, in Titles I deliberately did not do this because part of the point of the book was that Dev and Lee sought each other out even when the things they were doing didn’t directly interact.) It’s perhaps easier to interleave chapters if the plots don’t interact at all, because then you don’t have to worry so much about what the reader knows when you switch; if you do that then you have to make sure that you leave each plot at a point where there’s still tension so the reader is anxious to get back to it—but not so much tension that they don’t care about the plot you’re switching to. This is a delicate balancing act and is made more difficult because there’s a natural tendency to close chapters with resolutions, so I recommend resolving a minor plot point while adding to tension of a larger one.
Lastly, you may come up to a point where the plots naturally mean that one character is more involved and active than another. You have two choices at that point, and I’ve done both at different times: you can either write two consecutive chapters with the same character, or you can jump around in time. (In Titles, I had two consecutive Dev chapters late in the book and then switched it to move some of Lee’s plot around in time so that a bit could go in between the two Dev chapters.) Either of these solutions is a departure from your normal narrative flow, so you have to make sure to signal them to the reader. I put the POV character into the header of each chapter, which helps with that, but if you don’t do that, make sure you start the second paragraph with something that definitely establishes who the POV character is. If you jump around in time, you can put the date and/or time at the beginning of the section, but I find that readers rarely keep a calendar in their head unless it’s integral to the structure of the book. More effective is to refer to a memorable event so the reader says, “Oh, this is happening back when that was happening.”
Hopefully this helps you plan out your stories! Remember, a lot of the way you learn these things is by doing, so try it, and if it doesn’t work out, do it better the next time!
Stay safe and stay home, y’all.