First off! Here’s a freebie for all of you lovely subscribers. I recorded one of the fairy tales from Price of Thorns and we’re using it through BookFunnel to get people to sign up for this here newsletter. But SINCE you, smart and virtuous people that you are, have already signed up, you can just download it. Enjoy my voice! (And a welcome to the new people who signed up through BookFunnel! Thank you!)
Second, but still Price of Thorns-related: if you’ve enjoyed it, please do review it and recommend to friends. It’s a good book for people who aren’t furry or who are furry-adjacent, if you want to show them the cool stuff the fandom does. And related to that, there are awards opening soon! If you enjoyed the book, please do nominate it. Here are a couple awards whose nomination periods close at the end of the month:
Otherwise Award Put in a recommendation before December 31, 2023
Queer Indie Awards Closes December 31, 2023
Award Categories: Best Overall Fantasy, Best Epic Fantasy, Best Contemporary / Literary Fiction, Best New Adult (NA) (ages 18-25), Best Lead Character (the marvelous protagonist), Best Supporting Character (the side character who steals your heart), Best Villain (the antagonist deserves love too), Best Friendship or Platonic Relationship (your fave pairs of guys being dudes), Best Worldbuilding
Furry’s own Coyotl Awards will open next year, so keep an eye out for those as well!
Phew! All right. Just got back from MFF (spent 13 hours traveling home yesterday, which is why this is a day late). It was a tremendous amount of fun! Got to see a whole bunch of lovely furs, both at panels and at the FurPlanet table, sold a bunch of Price of Thorns (and other books), and ate some deep dish pizza.
The panels went really well! I did a live reading, talked about novels with Rukis (if you haven’t caught me and Rukis at a panel, you really should, we have so much fun), and talked about historical fiction with Domus Vocis and Fruitz, who were lovely people.
It’s always a pleasure to hang out with the FurPlanet crew behind their table—in this case Teiran, Zia, Buck, and Wu Wei—and I really enjoyed chatting with the fans who came up to get books and signatures. I promise I don’t try to conceal my identity, but there’s always at least one person who comes up and talks to me or someone else in front of me about my books without realizing who I am. They usually say nice things. :)
Anyway, other than MFF, November was full of travel. We also went to Colorado, the conclusion of the trip I told you about last month, came back, had a Price of Thorns release party at my home bookstore that was fantastic with tons of fursuits, and then drove off to spend Friendsgiving with some lovely people, which gave us almost two whole days to pack for MFF.
In the meantime I’ve been working hard on The Azure City, the add-on/spinoff of the Dangerous Spirits series, where we follow Athos as a spooky book comes into his life at a critical time. I’m trying to get a first draft done in December but we’ll see how it goes.
December is going to be all the usual holiday stuff but also cranking hard on that manuscript. And I had the idea after doing another novel writing panel that maybe I should write a book on how to write a novel. What do you guys think? Would that be useful? Let me know in the comments. Maybe there’ll be time next year to do that.
Books:
The Price of Thorns: OUT NOW, buy at Argyll and review at Amazon or GoodReads. 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.
Audiobooks: The Mysterious Affair of Giles is the latest audiobook to hit the stands, as it were. I’m thrilled that you finally get to hear Huskyteer’s lovely narration of this Agatha Christie-like story.
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.
Several years back I sold a story to Lightspeed for their Queers Destroy Science Fiction anthology, and I just today learned that there’s an audiobook of it out! So cool. No idea who narrates my story, but it’s a good collection of queer stories, so check it out!
As for the others: We are working on getting Titles and Love Match 2 done and available to you. Both have been recorded and are now under our review to send back to the narrators for minor corrections. And we are working on a Price of Thorns audiobook! Because we have been traveling so much, production has paused, but we’re eager to get going again and hope to have this out early next year.
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:
Squeak Thief: Complete but not scheduled yet, maybe early 2024. 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:
My mind is a blur and I can’t remember all the stuff we’ve been watching, but here are the series we’re sort of in the middle of. December we will also have to catch up on movies, because I haven’t seen a movie in weeks. But that’s ok, last month was movie-heavy.
The After Party (Apple +): Season two of the comedy-mystery series where each episode is told in a different genre format is back and hasn’t missed a step. Adding premier comedic talent like Zach Woods, John Cho, and Ken Jeong, and bringing back the incomparable Sam Richardson, Tiffany Haddish, and Zoe Chao makes for a fantastic reprise. Enjoy a Wes Anderson-style episode, an Oceans 11-style episode, and a 90s thriller, among others.
Captain Laserhawk (Netflix): Okay, I admit that I’m really unfamiliar with the majority of Ubisoft’s games, so this felt to me like a standard futuristic animated series with rebels and heists and explosions and funny dialogue, but it also has a gay romance and a French assassin frog and has been a lot of fun so far.
Scott Pilgrim Takes Off (Netflix): The movie “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World” is one of my favorite movies, and the same goes for a lot of other people, it seems, because Netflix got the entire cast back to voice their parts in this new animated series. If you also like Scott Pilgrim, my advice is to go into this knowing as little as possible. It is a show that is very aware of the movie and comic it comes from, and uses that knowledge in interesting and fun ways. Enjoying it a lot through three episodes.
The Other Black Girl (Hulu): This is a tense, dramatic series that’s slowly sliding into horror (it gives you enough indications in the first episode that that’s where it’s going that that isn’t a spoiler). Nella is the only Black assistant at a prestigious New York publishing house, until Hazel is hired. But Hazel isn’t quite what she seems to be, and Nella’s world gets a lot more interesting very fast… I’m really enjoying this one four episodes in. (*EDIT: fixed Nella’s name, sorry, it’s been a couple weeks since I watched it!)
I hope everyone has a very happy holiday, whatever you celebrate! What Christmas shows are you looking forward to?