April 2022 Dispatch
First off, I had a blast at TFF. Nearly everyone was good about wearing masks in con spaces, and apart from the masks it felt like…a normal con. I helped out behind the FurPlanet table for the weekend and got to reconnect with those guys, as well as lots of my vendor friends and many fans who came by. I did not make it to any panels, but honestly I didn’t have time. Evenings were taken up with socializing and daytime with dealer den, and the weekend flew by. It was fantastic to see everyone and I hope to see you all again in less than two years.
Sadly, I’m not sure when my next furry con will be. BLFC is unfortunately timed right before a wedding, and so I don’t think we’ll want to take the (slight) risk of catching something there and bringing it to the wedding. I’m also not quite up for an East Coast con just yet, so that leaves DenFur and MFF. We’ll see which of those might be more likely—traditionally we do enjoy going to MFF, and my other two-thirds have been missing cons longer than I have (they did not go to TFF 2020 so their last con was FC 2020), so that’s a real possibility. If not, we’re pretty sure to be at FC 2023.
I had been hoping to get to finish revising the Argaea novel in March, but the audiobook of The War and the Fox got finished (meaning I have to listen to the whole thing and proof it) and a friend’s novel I’d promised to beta read also got finished, so Return From Divalia has been temporarily shelved while I take care of those two priority matters.
Unfinished Business, which sold well at TFF, is getting some nice attention outside the furry fandom. I’m excited to see it connecting with non-furry reviewers and hope it’ll find an audience when it launches officially in July. In the meantime, if you didn’t get to it at TFF, you can pre-order it in print or e-book form! I’ve had sequel thoughts in mind for it and I might have to push those up on the queue, which is fine because my other potential Next Books aren’t quite clamoring to be written yet.
The Price of Thorns is with beta readers now and I expect to have it for sale by TFF next year, maybe sooner than that (though I won’t get the cover until summer and if we want reviews, there’s a six-month lead time). Return From Divalia, which is more of a niche furry book, will hopefully be out by MFF, depending on how long the revisions take.
Because someone asked about audiobooks last month: apart from The War and the Fox, above, I’ve got The Mysterious Affair of Giles in the queue to listen to and hopefully post soon. The rest of the Love Match series and Titles are with Savrin, and as they have time and circumstances to record, they will, but I don’t have any schedule for those yet. I’m in process of getting Unfinished Business into audiobook form and I’ll update y’all as that happens.
Streaming: We have watched one episode of “Moon Knight” and are looking forward to the rest. The mind-fuckery in it is pretty good so far.
I watched “Somebody Somewhere” (HBO), a short series about a woman who goes back to her hometown in Kansas to take care of her sister, and the series starts after her sister has died and she’s still trying to find out how to fit in. It’s a very earnest series, often sweet, and it’s got a lot of great characters, so it was right up my alley.
We started “Human Resources,” the spin-off of “Big Mouth” (which we are fans of) and are enjoying it so far. It’s fun to take the world of personified urges out of the fertile but limiting world of puberty and into adulthood—after all, not all of us outgrow our hormone monsters. I will confess that I miss Duke Ellington’s ghost, but maybe he’ll make a cameo.
On the flights to and from TFF, I watched two Oscar-nominated movies, King Richard and House of Gucci. Both featured some great acting performances, but overall I liked King Richard better (which I would not have predicted). House of Gucci started kind of strong, but then shifted gears in a way I didn’t think it had set up properly. It suffered (I think) from biopic problems, where they’re trying to craft a cohesive narrative out of a messy collection of real-life incidents, and on that scale it did pretty well. But you can’t just say “here’s a happy couple and then they turn on each other” if you don’t start out exploring the stresses that exist even when they’re happy, or the personalities of the two of them that lead them to turn on each other.
King Richard, by contrast, is about the flaws and strengths of its main character, and those are on display early on, so when they threaten to destroy his relationships, you can see how that would come about. I hadn’t thought I would want a movie that focuses on the father of two incredible women rather than the women themselves, but Venus and Serena were producers on this movie, so I suppose they wanted this story told. And ultimately it’s a good one, about a guy desperate to control his world—including his family—and finding out the limits of that control.
It’s springtime now and the days are warming up, so we’re hoping to spend more time outside with our doggo. What are you all planning for spring, whether it’s getting warmer or colder where you are?