March 2020 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
February Recap
Progress keeps happening! First off, Love Match.
The third book, (2013-2015) is done, edits are done, the cover is done, and it is on track to be launched at BLFC (yay!). If you’re going to be there, come find me at the FurPlanet table to get a signature. I’m also working on trying to get some fun promotion to happen there.
The fourth Calatians book is also done! A first draft of it, anyway—I’m going to be working on edits for it this month. The cover is in progress and Laura has the first draft, so interiors are going to start soon. It looks like it’s on track to be out at AC, though I likely won’t be there.
I’m working on three other stories right now: the sequel to “Dude, Where’s My Fox?” as well as the sequel to Ty Game (tentatively titled Ty the Knot, ha ha) Return From Divalia. The latter two are being serialized on my Patreon and I’m having a good time with all three of them.
At the end of the month I went to Texas Furry Fiesta, one of my favorite conventions, and had a great weekend. I enjoyed meeting people at the table and people seemed to enjoy my panels, which is always nice. I also got to talk about books with Fuzzwolf, Teiran, Zia, Ajax, and Rukis (whose table was adjacent to FurPlanet) and have good chats with other friends I only get to see at cons. I missed most of the con activities but these days I mostly go to see friends and talk upcoming projects anyway, so it was successful on that front.
I don’t have any endings to talk about this month! Kit and I are watching through The Wire, and all three of us are watching through Breaking Bad, both of which are excellent, but also it means I saw the end of s3 of The Wire on a Friday night and then the end of s4 of Breaking Bad on the following Saturday night, and as those of you who have seen those shows know, well, let’s just say that season endings are heavy and it was a lot to take back to back. I think we will finish Breaking Bad this month, so next month I will have things to say about it.
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 is working hard on new audiobooks, and once Love Match 1 is up, we hope to get Titles and Ty Game out shortly following!
Here’s my best guess at the 2020 release schedule: Love Match 3 is targeted for BLFC (paws crossed). 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 2020
My full list of upcoming appearances is at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html, recently updated (or soon to be updated).
I will be at Texas Furry Fiesta, and of course Megaplex in August. Also planning on BLFC and hopefully MFF!
Spotlight: Love Match!
I started Love Match many years ago when I started the Patreon. November 2014 was when I posted the preview, right around the end of the month, and from then I posted a part a week nearly every week (I might have missed one week for Christmas) until March 2019. That’s 222 parts, a little over four years, and about 389,000 words in the final count (probably a bit more than that counting the ones that got cut in edits). I broke it at 126,000 words for the first book and 105,000 for the second, and the third one (coming out in May) is a chonky 158,000.
Why, you may ask (and well you may), if I finished the story in March 2019, is part 3 taking over a year to go from first draft finish to book in your paws? There are a number of answers to that, and the main one is that last year at this time I was frantically trying to finish the third Calatians book to come out in the summer. Had I picked up Love Match right away, The War and the Fox would have been delayed until the fall. That’s not necessarily bad, but I’d been on a yearly schedule with it, and for the sake of my publisher and the fans of that series, I wanted to keep to it.
I was also trying to get Titles written so that I could release it that year. It had originally been conceived as “Dev and Lee 2016,” and then the working title was “Dev and Lee 2017,” so when the calendar flipped to 2019 without a working draft finished, I was rather annoyed with myself.
Lastly, I figured that my patrons had been able to read the ending, so it wasn’t like everyone was being left in suspense. If people wanted to read it, they could sign up to the Patreon and for less than the cost of buying the book when it comes out they could read all the remaining parts.
So when I finally got Titles out the door last fall, I thought it was about time to turn my attention to Love Match. I read through it again, made a few edits, and sent it off to my writing group. They got it back to me with suggestions, and now it’s almost ready to be out in the world.
I really like this story. I knew the general shape of it when I started it but I didn’t know a lot of the characters in it. Aliq in particular turned out to be more important than I’d thought he would be. In a sense, the idea of discovering friends as you move through a story and keeping around the ones who most appeal to you has a kind of life-like feel for me. I also didn’t know how things with Braden would get to the point they did, only that they would get there. There’s a scene toward the middle of the last part of the third book with Rocky and Aliq and two other people at Wimbledon that is one of my favorite scenes I’ve written, and it’s followed immediately by another scene I really like; these two are sort of the heart of the book—not just the third book but the series overall.
It’s a strange feeling to be ending two series in the same year—for the second time (Over Time and Black Angel both came out in 2016, also within two months of each other). But I’ll be glad to see Love Match finally out on the shelf spanning all seven years of Rocky’s story, from 2008 to 2015.
(Will there be more of Rocky’s story? Maybe. It has certainly happened that characters stick around and nose me to write about them after their first series is over, so we’ll see, but for the next couple years I have novels enough to keep me busy.)
Look for Love Match 2013-2015 at BLFC if you’re there, or on the FurPlanet website in May if you won’t be.
Excerpt: No excerpt this month as I’ve been writing mostly spoilery things at the end of books.
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. But this month—no questions!
QUESTION from @Fruitso1, via Twitter: “Do you have any tips when it comes to revision and editing? Specifically, what do you do when you find you have too many words and you need to cut down the length?”
Revision and editing are areas I can give guidelines in with the caveat that you know your own style best of anyone, and the more you do it, the more you’ll be doing it by feel and memory. So practice it, practice it more, and keep at it.
To start with, though, I always try to get some distance from the story. How much depends on how long you’ve been thinking about it. If it’s a novel you’ve been writing for a year, then let it sit for at least a month. If it’s a short story you’ve worked on for a week, then a few days is probably enough. When you come back to it, hopefully you’ll have fresh eyes, with most of your preconceptions about the story cleared out.
Then you’ll need to read through it and keep a critical eye. Look for scenes that go on too long, for characters repeating things they’ve already said or giving unnecessary information. Look for places where your story drags a bit, where you find yourself skipping ahead to the next scene or re-reading the same paragraph over and over. You can probably cut a lot of stuff from there.
That’s the easy pass. Next, look for things that you think are necessary but might not be. Extraneous worldbuilding falls into this category. Do you have a section where you explain how something works and then the characters interact with it, where you thought you had to explain it so the reader would understand the interaction? You can probably cut the explanation and just show the interaction, maybe adding a little bit here and there. Any kind of big expository section can probably be trimmed down if not cut completely; give the information through character action.
If you’re facing a hard word count (this is probably a short story) then you may have to figure out how to simplify your story. For this kind of edit, I’d read carefully through the story and try to summarize each scene with a sentence. For example: “(1) At the pool, Kory swerves to avoid a fox and bangs his head. (2) The fox, Samaki, takes Kory to Starbucks for hot chocolate. (3) On the way home, Kory wonders whether the fox was being flirty with him.” You should end up with a scene list. Now try to read just that scene list without thinking about your story. See if all the scenes matter. There might be one or two that you liked, but which don’t advance the story and can be cut or combined with other scenes. There may be scenes that are part of a side story or which give your main story some complexity that you just don’t have room for.
(I do this with novels too, breaking it down into chapters and then scenes within chapters.)
The trick at this stage is to try cutting the scene. Pull it out of the sequence and imagine the story without it. Does it still make sense? It’s hard to do this, because you’ve conceived of the story with all these scenes and you get attached to them, but it can make your story feel tighter and more dynamic. This is also where a beta reader can help if they know what to look for.
If you still can’t get your story under the word limit, then maybe you just wrote too long of a story. Time to get back to the drawing board and start a simpler idea, and meanwhile, find a different home for this one!