August 2023 Dispatch

Followup to last month: I’m on Mastodon (@kyellgold@furries.club) and now Bluesky as well (@kyellgold@bsky.social). I’m still on Twitter, too. Most of my personal stuff will continue to be on Mastodon, because there’s a good furry community there and I like the vibe. Bluesky and Twitter are going to be more for business announcements and book stuff (for now—there seems to be a growing furry community on Bluesky as well and maybe that’ll change how I interact with it, but I’m still leery of jumping on a ship captained by the guy who was steering the last one, even if he didn’t sink it personally).

July was busy! We spent a lot of the month preparing for Comic-Con and a week actually there. It was fun! We got to see a lot of cool comic projects and meet some furries, and we sold a few books. Price of Thorns did well enough; we sold most of the ten copies, which is good for a prose book at Comic-Con. And the three of us do love spending time in San Diego.

I got some alpha reader feedback on Wolftown 2 and will be trying to revise that in preparation for workshopping it next month. That’s mostly what August is going to entail down here in the word mines. I’ve got a lot of cool projects coming up that I’m excited about and I can’t wait to share them with you all—but I’ve got to finish them first.

I hope you’re all staying cool out there in the northern hemisphere! Summer’s almost over, hang in there.

Books:

Audiobooks: Winter Games is done and available now! Check it out. We’re very happy with this new recording and hope you’ll enjoy rediscovering that old title. As Kit read through it, he kept coming back to me with little bits we’d both forgotten about and enjoyed remembering.

As for the others: We are working on getting The Mysterious Affair of Giles and Titles done and available to you. All three have been recorded and are now under our review to send back to the narrators for minor corrections. Return From Divalia is available everywhere now. If you have read and liked it, writing a review is one of the most helpful things you can do for it, and it’s free! (It doesn’t have to be on Amazon, but that’s still where most people go for their books.)

Other upcoming releases:

The Price of Thorns: Scheduled for November 2023, some pre-release copies available at conventions, pre-order at Amazon. In a fantasy world where stories are woven into the fabric of magic and life, Nivvy the thief is hired by a mysterious woman, and this job will change his life in ways he could never have anticipated.

Squeak Thief: Complete but not scheduled yet, maybe late 2023. A rich mouse hires a fox thief to steal from his own family, but the job quickly spirals out of control.

In progress: Robin Hood fanfic and Ty Game sequel (on Patreon), Wolftown 2, horror novel, untitled fantasy world project.

Streaming stuff:

Winning Time (MAX) —Okay, I’m a sucker for basketball and drama, and this series has enough of the first and more than enough of the second. Lots has been written about how the series plays fast and loose with the truth, and honestly, there are one or two places where that bothers me. But overall we all love the show. The acting is so good and the stories—even if they’re only partly true—are fantastic. I go back to what Elton John said about Rocketman, when it came out: “It’s obviously not all true, but it’s the truth.” There are plenty of places to go find out the facts; sometimes it takes fiction to get at the truth of the emotions.

TMNT: Mutant Mayhem (theaters) — I’ve read the comics, I’ve seen the first movie, I’ve seen the cartoon, I’ve seen the reboots. This movie does for the Turtles what Into the Spider-Verse did for Spider-Man. Not only is the animation style refreshing and perfect for this universe, pretty and messy all at the same time, but the story is also just a ton of fun. The biggest thing for me is that I’ve never seen the Turtles as believable, relatable, distinct teenagers before. There’s some great writing and some great voice work to go with the animation, and so even if you aren’t a fan of the Turtles, I’d recommend giving this one a shot.

I’m still rewatching old Columbo series, and while there are good and bad in the first three seasons, season four is excellent all the way through. Columbo early on relies a little too heavily on him uncovering one lie and then the murderer confessing, but later in the show they do a better job of having him find actual proof. The pacing is very 70s; these are 1h45m and they could be an hour easily, but living in that world at Columbo’s languid pace is part of the storytelling. If this were more efficient, it would be a different show. I do very much enjoy how in some episodes, they simply follow Columbo around the murder scene as he hones in quickly on the detail that’s going to lead him to the murderer and eventually the solution.

I also started watching “Based on a True Story,” a Peacock show about a middle-class couple who meet a serial killer by accident and convince him to star in a podcast where he tells his story. It was fine, but somehow wasn’t compelling me to keep going. I’ll eventually go back to it, but in the meantime there are new seasons of Central Park and The Afterparty and Winning Time and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to watch, among many others.