January 2021 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
The theme of the last week that I’ve seen has been “we made it!” Indeed, there are a lot of hopeful signs as we turn the calendar page into a new year: there are currently three vaccines approved for COVID-19, and what’s more, two of them were created using a relatively new process that is pretty cool (mRNA vaccines, look ‘em up) and all three were created in what is basically record time. Here in the United States, we’re set to return adults to the White House and executive branch in general on January 20, which will make 1 ½ branches of our government that include some kind of empathy in their decision-making (maybe up to 2-ish pending the election results in Georgia tomorrow). The California wildfires are mostly out. Australia’s wildfire season is (so far) not as bad as last year’s.
We should definitely celebrate turning a corner! But this doesn’t mean we can relax. We stayed indoors and wore masks to reduce the impact of the pandemic (at least, I hope you did if you’re reading this); we voted and donated to political groups and relief funds and friends with medical bills and strangers with medical bills and so on. But America, like Australia, like much of the world, has a long way to go on climate change, which exacerbates fires and hurricanes and cyclones and other extreme weather events. The police in the United States are still enablers of disproportionate violence toward people of color and way over-militarized. Most Western countries have a sizable population who prefer fascism to democracy, even if they won’t say it in quite those terms (but again, here in the United States, if you are trying to throw out a legitimate election to install your preferred candidate, what else would you call it?).
So we need to keep working. I hope that my readers broadly share a vision of an empathetic, tolerant, equitable world, and are willing to do work to get there, whether that’s supporting progressive politicians, doing volunteer work for progressive organizations, donating, attending town halls, or whatever else needs to be done. I look back on how furries supported progressive policies at conventions over the past few years, and you may not think of that as “work,” but it was. It made a real difference in creating a welcoming, inclusive space at conventions because we spoke up and let the convention runners know that that’s what we wanted. We can do that again. It’s less rewarding because the scale is so much bigger that it’s harder to see the effect of our individual contribution. We’ll lose some fights and then it seems like wasted effort. But it’s not. Even if we lose a fight, the work that we do will inspire others to join us, and maybe we’ll win the next one.
Let’s make 2021 the year we all help each other recover and improve, the year we start building something we can all be proud of.
So anyway, with all that said: I hope you all had a lovely holiday, whatever you celebrate (even if it’s just “I got days off work”), I hope you got to see family members on Zoom, and I hope all the best for all of you going into the new year. Thank you all for continuing to read this and keep up with my words and for supporting my career. Give yourself a big hug from me.
In December, Dude, Where’s My Pack? came out! I’m pretty excited about that. I always liked Lonnie and his friends, and it was a lot of fun going back to their world. Plus I got to write a sexy fruit bat in there.
I’ve mostly been working on The Price of Thorns this month, as well as getting stuff ready for the release of The Revolution and the Fox. And of course, doing holiday stuff—sending cards, decorating the house, buying gifts, trying to make this feel like a holiday season and more or less succeeding.
Return From Divalia (over on my Patreon) is even closer to wrapping up. Next story will be “Squeak Thief,” about a posh rich college mouse who needs to go find a jaded fox to help him steal something. It’ll start soon and I’ll make some announcement about it when it happens, so keep an eye on my Twitter for that if you’re not a Patreon member.
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. It stars a Growlithe and a Krokorok.
Streaming shows: The second season of Hilda (Netflix) is just as weird and charming as the first one, at least so far.
The Undoing (HBO) came with a great deal of fanfare but ended up being, as Kit put it, “basically an extended Law & Order episode.” There were great individual scenes and performances—Donald Sutherland has a great “cocksucker” monologue—but at the end of it we were left wondering what the point of it all was.
By contrast, we knew nothing about The Flight Attendant (also HBO) when we started it and loved it from the first episode. There isn’t as much Acting or Writing but the show has a much more complete core and is engaging from the jump, with clever cinematography, a sense of humor, and a neat but not overused gimmick that turns what could be a standard thriller into something much more enjoyable. Kaley Cuoco (The Big Bang Theory, Harley Quinn (2019)) does a fantastic job keeping Cassie, the heroine, relatable, even as she screws up her life. The less you know about this, the better, so just watch the first episode, and if you don’t like it, well, you won’t like the rest of them either. (Bonus: most of the main characters with agency in this show are women, and a diverse cast of them too.)
Also, if you’re a tennis fan or have a passing interest in it because of Love Match, it’s worth watching “Borg vs. McEnroe” on Hulu. Their 1980 Wimbledon final was considered one of the best ever (and still is, though I think most would put 2008 Federer-Nadal ahead of it). This movie focuses more on Borg but gives insight into the history and character of both players, and why this final was such an engaging contrast.
Release dates
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.
Dude, Where’s My Pack? is currently available from FurPlanet! The e-book is on baddogbooks.com and will be on the other sites probably come February 1.
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. E-books will be available everywhere AND you can pre-order e-book or print book RIGHT NOW if you want to. 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! The DWMF audiobook has been sent to ACX and should be 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: The Revolution and the Fox
It was over a decade ago that I came up with the idea for what became the series The Calatians. At the time it was only going to be two books: Kip, a fox-Calatian, enters the College of Sorcery and along with his friends, solves the mystery of the attack on the college (which left its ranks so decimated that they were desperate for new students; this is how he got admitted in the first place); then Kip goes to London to investigate the disappearances of Calatians there. The first book grew far too long and unwieldy, and ended up being split into two. This was slightly to the detriment of the first book, as its “climax” is really the midpoint of the larger narrative arc, but I think greatly to the advantage of the second, because I was able to fill it out with Kip traveling to London and meeting new characters there to expand the world of sorcery. I hadn’t intended to write a book about the revolution itself, but it became clear by the time I finished the second that I would have to, and that one is not this book, but the third in the series: The War and the Fox. That one seems to bring to a close the story of Kip, his friends, his race, and their country, but I still wanted to write what was originally the second book, now the fourth, in the series.
The Revolution and the Fox bears little resemblance to the original outline of that second book. There are Calatians disappearing; that’s about all. Because we’d already visited London (in book 2) and other European countries (in book 3), I wanted to open up the world further in this book, so here Kip and his friends travel to an International Exposition of Sorcery where they meet sorcerers from Persia, China, and India, among others. The premise of this series all along has been the parallels between an adolescent coming of age and a country coming of age, and both those arcs seemed to end with the third book, but what I realized was that a coming of age can also be a beginning. When you’ve achieved your independence, what do you do with it? So the reason this fourth book exists is because I wanted to explore not only that Kip and his friends come of age, but what kind of people they decide to be in the future. In the process, I got to reveal a few other things I’ve always known about Calatians and sorcery, and ultimately I think this book is a satisfying end to the series, at least as far as I’m concerned.
Excerpt: Here’s an excerpt I’ve probably shared before, the beginning of The Revolution and the Fox:
Kip stomped into Emily’s office in the Lutris School brandishing a small bound pamphlet, his fox’s ears flat back against his head, his tail bristled out despite his efforts to control it. “Have you seen this?” he asked, and threw the pamphlet down on her desk.
The large raven on the windowsill behind Emily jumped and fluttered her wings at the noise. Emily didn’t react to the pamphlet until she’d finished adding a column of numbers, and then she pushed aside the ledger she was working on and turned the thin booklet to face her. “‘The Softest Fur,’” she read from the cover, which featured a crude drawing of a man with a fox’s head and tail embracing a human woman. “Is this supposed to be you and me?”
“Yes.” Kip stared down as she flipped to the first page and read. “Abel brought it back from London. It’s—embarrassing.”
“Oh, I don’t know. ‘His claws traced the milky-white her breast.’ Apart from the hideous grammar, it’s actually not bad.” She set the pamphlet down and slid open one of the drawers of her desk. “Have you seen the one about me and Abigail Adams?”
Kip’s ears came back up as she handed him another pamphlet, smaller than the one he’d brought. “‘The Comfort of a Beast’? Am I in this too?”
“I think that’s meant to be ‘breast,’” Emily said. “My former husband gave it to me when he came to one of Abigail’s lectures.”
“Did he write it?” Kip searched the pamphlet for an author’s name but found none.
“Honestly, it’s too inventive for Thomas. Besides, whoever wrote it, I don’t think he’s seen a woman’s body. He has a very curious idea of where things are and how they work.” She picked up ‘The Softest Fur’ again. “Does this one have sorcery in it?”
“Yes,” Kip said. “But they have no idea how that works either.” He gave her pamphlet back to her. “You may keep it if you like.”
“I shouldn’t let it worry you,” Emily said as she slipped both pamphlets into the drawer and closed it. “Thomas wanted me to be embarrassed and it quite took the wind from his sails when I accepted the thing cheerfully. It’s a sign of respect. Not everyone gets made into the subject of a penny dreadful, you know.”
“I think it’s another tactic of Victor’s.”
Emily tapped fingers on her desk. “I would think he would at least know how sorcery works.”
“I’m serious.” Kip slumped into the chair on the other side of her desk. The warm breeze from the window brought scents of flowers from the peach trees that had given the town its name. Usually he enjoyed the sweet smell as a reminder of the territory owned by Calatians, but today he was more than usually aware of how precarious their school and that territory were. “He won’t give up, ever.”
“All we know for sure that he’s done is write some columns in the Boston papers that were not very well received.”
“Enough people talked about them.”
“I know you think he was behind the protests against the Lutris School and the movement to deny us the Master rituals—”
“I’m certain of it. The language in the complaints was the same as he used in the columns.”
“—but you have to admit that he’s hardly the only one who thinks we don’t deserve to start our own school.”
“When Alice and I went to visit her parents, I paid a visit to Master Jaeger and I asked him, and he said he doesn’t believe anyone at the American school was behind it, and Victor is in London now. Who else would do it anonymously? He knows he has no position of authority.”
“Even if it is him,” Emily said tiredly, “what are we to do about it? Go to London and have a stern talk with him? Believe me, I would love to drop him in the ocean somewhere and be done with him, but if he’s under London’s protection, that could—”
“I know, I know.” Kip’s tail lashed. “It would almost be worth an international incident to be rid of him. I just worry about what he’ll do next. It’s been two years since the war ended and he hasn’t stopped.”
“If his best remaining tactic is a penny dreadful, then I think you can sleep more soundly. About him, anyway.” Emily pulled the ledger back toward her. “Did you come up here just to show me that? I’ve got several more pages of numbers before I can officially tell you whether we’re going to run out of money in three months or four. And that has nothing to do with Victor.”
“I know that.” Kip craned his neck to look at the figures. “No, I came to tell you that Alice is expecting, so she won’t be coming with us to the Exposition of Sorcery.”
“Oh!” Emily brightened. “Congratulations. Are you nervous at all?”
He shook his head. “I’m anxious to get back to Amsterdam. I know not all the Calatians there like me, but—what?”
Emily was glaring at him. “I meant, are you nervous about her health, or about becoming a father?”
“Of course I’m worried about her health,” Kip said. “In New Cambridge we always had a healer nearby for the births. It’s not just as a teacher that a healer is lacking here, so we must find one at the Exposition. If not, we haven’t any hope. Unless you want to reconsider allowing Peter to teach.”
“We can’t risk the school’s only guardian,” Emily said. “And I’m not sure he would agree to teach anyway.”
Kip nodded. “As for becoming a father…” He smiled tightly. “I will be the best father I can, but Abel will be there, and my father and mother, and Aran and Arabella, so Alice and I will have plenty of help. Her parents are talking about coming down from New Cambridge, but they would have to sell the farm and buy a new one, and I can bring them back and forth as they like, so they may settle for extended visits. They’ll be here for the christening, at least.”
“Better you than me. This tedious work gives me a new respect for our disgraced Master Patris. I’d never be able to do it and then tend to an infant as well.”
“What, Malcolm wouldn’t help?”
Emily looked up over the rim of her spectacles. “My dear Irishman has many excellent qualities, but progressive ideas about the responsibilities of child care are sadly not among them.”
“I suppose nobody’s been reminding you every day about your duty to produce offspring.”
“No, Mother gave up on me when I ran off to become a sorcerer, which she equates with becoming a man.” Emily tapped the ledger. “And if she could see me now, she would be even more convinced of that. Speaking of…we should discuss how we intend to approach nobles at Amsterdam, now that it’s only a couple days away.”
Kip nodded. “Can we just tell them we need money to keep the school open?”
“Abigail says that it’s not wise to confess how much you need money. It puts them off.”
“How does one approach them, then?”
“You talk about how you’d like to do more for the students, but sadly, you haven’t got quite enough, and while you don’t need their money, it would certainly help. Even though we only have four masters technically employed by the college, that’s four masters we have to provide room and board and salary for—stop, I know you don’t want to take money, but Alice isn’t working and you have a family to support. So unfortunately we will probably have to offer sorcery in exchange for money.”
“That doesn’t feel right.” Kip got up and swung his tail back and forth.
“What, selling sorcery for money? You did as much with Old John.”
“That was different.” He stopped and stared past Emily, as though they were in New Cambridge and he could see down the hill to the Founders Rest Inn. “I was doing work, little jobs, and John was giving me a place to live. What sorcery could I do that would be worth the amount we need? These moneyed people should be contributing because they want to invest in American sorcerers and help make us great.”
“They’ve got the New Cambridge school for that.” Emily made a face. “I guarantee you that Master Colonel Jackson, the great hero of the Revolutionary War, has no trouble getting his friends to contribute.”
“Hasn’t Mr. Adams said more than once that these two colleges are his best hope for keeping the confederation of states from all going their separate ways? That everyone needs our protection?”
“I suppose one college fills that need as well as two. At any rate, whenever I’m invited to meetings, which isn’t often, I have to speak up to remind them that we exist, and I’m afraid that this government of men has come to think of me as a nag. Mr. Madison advised me to seek money closer to home, but did not offer to provide any of it, naturally.” She scoffed. “Virginians are very quick to propose solutions that do not involve them doing any work.”
Kip tapped his foot. “I asked Bryce again about money yesterday. He said that until we get a harvest this fall, they won’t have much to spare, but after that the East Georgia government might be able to contribute a little.”
“That’ll help. But it doesn’t sound hopeful to keep us going even through the winter.”
The fox shook his head. “And with no promises from our country, even though we helped end the war—”
“The position that East Georgia was our reward is a not unreasonable one.” Emily smiled.
“I know, I know.” Kip heaved a sigh and stood, then walked over to Emily’s window and set his paws beside her raven, looking out over the entrance to the school, where large wrought iron gates leaned against the nearly-complete posts, waiting to be hung. Beyond the gates, a short brick path led to the town of Peachtree. Already the memory of the village when he’d first come to visit his parents felt disconnected from the large, sprawling town below him.
“Hallo, Sleek,” he said to the bird, and she bobbed her head in response. He half-turned back to Emily and said, “The school went up quickly and we’re all established here, and I have to admit that it’s been more peaceful than I’d imagined possible.”
“Then don’t worry. Come with me to Amsterdam and find some healers to pay with the money I’m going to raise.”
He lowered his head, looking inward now. “Do you think Victor will be there?”
“It’s a place only for those who can do sorcery,” Emily said. “Of course he will find a way in. And so what if he is?”
“It’s Victor. I know he’s up to something. He won’t stop until—”
“Kip.”
The fox turned from the window. Emily had turned sympathetic eyes on him. “We all know who he is and what he is. Need I remind you that Albright is gone?”
“‘Gone.’ Nobody will say whether he’s dead, in prison, or simply living at the King’s pleasure in hiding somewhere. Perhaps still instructing Victor.”
“If you keep obsessing over him—either of them—then they’re winning a battle without lifting a finger. Let him go, Kip.” Emily waved at her ledger. “Now, if you don’t mind, I do need to finish this.”
Kip leaned back against the window. “Did Malcolm decide whether he’s bringing the students to the Exposition? If he’s not going, I don’t mind sharing a room there with you if it would save the school some money. We’ve done it before.”
She raised an eyebrow and pulled out the drawer from her desk, where the pamphlet he’d brought in still lay. “Have you forgotten this so quickly?”
“Oh.” His ears flattened, and he shook his head. “You’re right.”
“Not that I’d let a penny dreadful stop me from saving the school money if it was important,” she said, closing the drawer, “but for one, Malcolm and the students are going, and for another, I rather suspect Alice will want some privacy even from me.”
“Alice isn’t going.” Kip went on in the face of Emily’s growing smile. “She’s pregnant. She can’t. What?”
“Oh,” Emily said, “I was just wondering whether I should send Sleek to follow you home so I could watch you try to tell her that.”
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 one isn’t from you, but from my own brain after watching “Wonder Woman 1984”: “What makes for a compelling villain’s arc?”
You can probably guess from context that I did not think that WW84 had a compelling villain’s arc, no matter which of the two antagonists you consider the villain. I’m not going to spoil the story by talking about it, don’t worry. Instead I’m going to talk about what I think makes for a good villain arc and you can figure out how it does or doesn’t jibe with that film when you watch it.
I’ll start off by saying that you don’t need a villain to have an arc in your film. Villains are most effective when their aims directly conflict with that of the hero, but you don’t need for them to have a whole backstory showing how they got to that place. Darth Vader wants to crush the rebellion for the Emperor so that the Emperor can rule unquestioned; we don’t need a whole backstory showing how he came to that conclusion. Biff wants to sleep with Lorraine while Marty needs Lorraine to go out with George; again, we don’t need to watch Biff develop a crush or understand how he became the kind of person who doesn’t consider the needs of others.
If you are going to develop the villain as a character, though, their arc should be at least somewhat related to the hero’s. Many people didn’t like the sixth Harry Potter book, but I thought it was a very nice treatment of Tom Riddle’s childhood and growth, and the development of the obsessions that led to Lord Voldemort. Harry, who was also an orphan despised by his own family, gets to watch as someone makes different choices than he did. I don’t think that arc was paid off as well as it might have been in the final book—Voldemort reverts to being an “obstacle” villain—but the arc was well done.
But the key to developing your villain as a character isn’t just making the arc relevant to the hero. If you’re taking time away from your story to show your villain’s development, you need to make sure that there’s plot work going on at the same time. If all you’re doing is suspending the main story to show the villain, you’re going to lose momentum on the main story.
This is where I think Harry Potter succeeds at least somewhat: the retrospective on Lord Voldemort is, we’re told, key to defeating him. So at each stage of his past, we’re looking for clues, and after each one, Dumbledore debriefs Harry on what they’ve learned and where to go next. The momentum of the main story is preserved.
Most Marvel movies don’t bother developing the villain too much (“they hate Tony Stark” seems to be most of the motivation), but Black Panther did a good job of developing theirs, giving him some scenes that were compelling because they were related to the main plot of the movie, both when we thought he was just a supporting villain and when he is the main villain. He is trying to solve the same problem as T’Challa but goes about it with a different perspective.
Whether you’re going to show your villain’s arc or not, it’s always worth thinking about it. The villain needs to be an effective foil to the hero, to push the hero to challenge their beliefs and change for the better. If you want to explore how they got to that place, great; just don’t sacrifice your main story to do that.
Stay safe and wear a mask, y’all.