November 2020 Dispatch
Kyell Gold
Before the recap: tomorrow is Election Day here in the U.S., and if you are a U.S. citizen and have not already voted, PLEASE GO VOTE TOMORROW. It’s too late to send in a mail-in ballot at this point (though maybe if you have a drop-off location you can do it), so go in person. Even if you (somehow) feel this election is a choice between the lesser of two evils, VOTE FOR THAT LESSER EVIL. Why would you not take any chance you can to reduce evil? I mean, come on.
Ahem. Now to the actual recap:
Just yesterday (so technically in November) I finished the final read-through for Dude, Where’s My Pack? Once the artwork is finalized, I’ll be able to send it off to the publisher. I’ve also finished up that secret project thing and sent that off.
I also hung out at the Furry Writers Guild’s online convention, Oxfurred Comma, and did a few panels for them. That was fun and the whole thing seemed to be well run from my perspective! Hope you guys managed to take in some of the stream.
This month I hope to finish up that mystery (finally) and then get back to Price of Thorns maybe—it’s been hard to decide what I’m doing even one week in advance. I have also, no surprise this time of year, have had the urge to write something spooky again, but I don’t know exactly what that would be. We’ll see if anything crystallizes.
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. The Zootopia story is almost over, and my plan after that is to write some Pokemon fanfic that may (gasp) involve some adult scenes.
Streaming shows: I actually liked The Boys season 2 more than season 1 through to the end. They set up the climax kind of transparently but it worked anyway.
We watched The Haunting of Bly Manor, which has generated mixed reviews from what I’ve seen, but put me down firmly in the thumbs-up camp. I liked The Haunting of Hill House as well, more than some did, but I think this series was better. It has plenty of scary moments, but not all of them are generated by ghosts. Many of them come from the plights of the characters and the choices they make. I loved the show’s conception of memory and the execution of several of the episodes, and the finale felt like it wrapped up the story better than did the finale of Hill House, small stumbles in the framing device notwithstanding. Highly recommended.
We’re also watching the current season of the Great British Baking Show, which has made me want to go back and watch the early seasons (I’ve seen this season and the previous one only). It’s such a pleasant show, not just because of the baked goods that feature in every episode, but also because of the personalities and format of the shows. This has all been written about extensively already; chances are you are either already a fan of the show or have decided you don’t need to watch it. But anyway, we’re watching it and enjoying it a lot.
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. E-book is on baddogbooks.com in both ePub and Kindle formats and will be on other retail outlets very soon.
When I have more info on Dude, Where’s My Pack? I will let you guys know! If I get it to FurPlanet this month, it’ll likely be available in December. Usual timeline with the e-book as well (on baddogbooks.com first).
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. 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! Still hoping to get the DWMF audiobook 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: No spotlight this month.
Excerpt: Here’s another bit from The Curse of Lone Pine Gulch (again, non-furry mystery).
Bobcat Creek is about four to five hours from Stockton, depending on whether you’re trying to go at during rush hour or not. At the beginning of a long weekend you can get caught up in Tahoe traffic and it could take six, but starting out around eleven on a Saturday night was going to get me there right around 3:15, according to Google Maps. I threw a few days worth of clothes into a bag, stopped at a 24-hour drive thru Starbucks for a venti coffee and hit the road.
I cued up a podcast so I could have some human voices in the car on the way up. I wanted to call someone, but Samir was dead and it was past midnight for Beth, which made it easier for me to decide not to break our silence. Pamela was the only realistic option, but calling your ex to tell her you were diving back into the obsession that led to your divorce seemed unwise at best.
So I was forced to do nothing but listen, which Dr. Farrell says is good for me anyway. Half an hour into the drive, though, I shut off the podcast because I wasn’t processing any of the things I was hearing. I wanted to talk to someone.
There was a trick I’d learned after college, when I had a dilemma and I didn’t have the rest of debate club to argue either side of an issue. I’d invent a person to argue with and give them the opposite side—kind of like playing yourself at chess, if you play chess, which I don’t, I mean, not well.
Samir might be dead, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t imagine him in the passenger seat staring into the blackness of the night ahead of us, shadows cycling over his craggy brown face and warm smile as we passed under the highway lights. “Why am I doing this?” I asked him.
“I should be asking you that.”
“Because it’s something to do? It’s better than staying home all weekend.”
“Is it, though?” His voice would get this dreamy tone when he spun out ideas. “What if…it’s possible to push yourself too far?”
I gripped the steering wheel tighter. Ahead of me, a pair of red taillights appeared and grew brighter as I caught up to the car. “You think I should just pretend it never happened?”
“I’m saying that keeping a healthy distance might be…healthy. And I’m not the only one who’s said that.”
He wasn’t; Pamela and Dr. Farrell had both said that in more and less direct ways. “But Dr. Farrell also said that there wouldn’t be any way to get closure on this without creating it myself. Here’s a way to get closure.”
“If you can find the body. What state would it be in after five years?”
“There’ll still be a skeleton, anyway. How many skeletons would be lying around in the woods up there? If we’d had just one more day I know we could’ve found it.”
“The sheriff searched too.”
“Then what happened to it? You saw it too—didn’t you?”
Imaginary Samir had no answer for this. “Dammit,” I said, “we both saw it.”
“Did we?”
“That’s what we both told the sheriff, so I sure hope so, otherwise we submitted false testimony.”
“What do you remember?”
Heart-thumping adrenaline. The scattered thought that this was what war must be like. The weight of the gun in my hand, the warmth of the barrel when I touched it. The darkness, Samir’s phone light bouncing like a will o’wisp on meth ahead of me, the looming shapes of trees and the soft earth. The smell of the gun, still. The smell of the forest. The crashing of our footsteps. And then Samir stopping, crouched. The silence broken by fast, rattling breaths, and then not broken by anything except Samir’s and my soft panting. Olive army surplus pants stained with blood and piss.
“I remember the body,” I said definitively. “It was there. There was a real guy.”
“Then why do you need to find it?”
“Because…” I caught up to another car, passed it, drove forward into darkness. “Because I don’t think the sheriff believed us. If we’d just told him the guy got away, lost in the wilderness…”
“That’s what he ended up reporting.”
“We should’ve told him that in the first place.”
“So,” Imaginary Samir said, “you want to find the body to convince the sheriff.”
“No. Not just that. I just, I…I need to see it again. I need to know I wasn’t imagining it.”
“Because if you were imagining it, then what?”
I stared ahead. The thought was there in my head, but I didn’t want to pretend to say it. Imaginary Samir went ahead. “It’s perfectly normal to lose some memory around a traumatic event.”
“You got that from Dr. Farrell.”
“You did, anyway.” Samir had a nice smile when we reached agreement on an idea that it calmed me to remember. “You know that it is practically impossible that you killed Asher. Not ‘practically’ as in ‘almost,’ but ‘practically’ as in ‘in any practical way.’”
“I know.”
Imaginary Samir remained quiet for another moment and then said the thing I didn’t want him to say, but I was thinking it so he couldn’t help saying it. “What do you think I was imagining when I took a bottle of sleeping pills?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what you were thinking because you never told me. And a Shakespeare quote is a really pretentious suicide note, by the way. I’m still angry at you for that.”
“I am as God made me,” was another thing he’d often said and said again now.
“Did God make you kill yourself?” I asked. “Or did you make yourself do that?”
“You’re living on the edge right now. What happens if you push too far?”
There was nobody on the highway ahead of me. It was after midnight now and I still had three hours to go. “Then I fall. But I’m tired of the edge. It’s exhausting. I’d rather fall.”
“I know what you mean,” he said.
Sadness clutched at my heart and for a moment the road ahead blurred, the lights smearing into refracted stars until I wiped my hand across my eyes. “I’m done,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
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 I forgot to ask for questions, so I’ll wrap up—if you’ve made it this far—with another reminder/request to go out and vote. If you already have, encourage or help others to vote.
Stay safe and wear a mask, y’all.