Inaugural Newsletter
January 2013
New year, new newsletter! Thank you all for subscribing. I will keep this as content-rich as I can. If you have suggestions for things you would like to see in the newsletter, send them to my regular e-mail address, ky...@kyellgold.com.
Recap of 2012
To save space, I will just link to the recap post I wrote on my blog: http://kyellgold.com/wpblog/2013/01/03/looking-back-at-2012/ You can read it there if you’re interested.
Looking Forward
This coming year, I have a number of goals: Finish OOP4 (untitled yet), finish edits on the second Calatians book and the sequel to Green Fairy, titled Red Devil (I would like to release Red Devil this summer perhaps, but I will have to coordinate with Rukis on the art and Sofawolf on the publication). I will hopefully write at least one more novel draft and maybe two, but I have a lot to choose from and don’t know which I’ll take.
I also have a cupcake to write, and I want to write some more short stories to publish inside and outside the fandom. Being a full-time writer means I want as many people as possible to see my work, and while that doesn’t mean changing what I write to suit new audiences, it does mean looking for new venues for my work.
I will be a Guest of Honour at Confuzzled in the UK in May/June, which will be really exciting, and I will be at several other conventions—you can always see the upcoming appearances at http://www.kyellgold.com/contact.html.
Spotlight: Divisions
January will see the release of Divisions, the third book in Dev and Lee’s saga which is now planned to span at least five books. You can pre-order it at Sofawolf.com now, or just pick up your copies at Further Confusion, where I will be happy to sign them.
Tip: On the hardcover, Blotch’s beautiful art is minimally obscured; on the softcover, the blurb and barcode and Sofawolf logo cover up much of the back cover. For my money, that’s worth the extra $20 right there. If you need more convincing, the hardcover also contains the Isolation Play bonus story “Heart.”
About the story…Divisions continues Dev and Lee’s story after the incidents of Isolation Play. It begins on Thanksgiving Day, and you can read Chapter Two on my FA account or on my website (http://www.kyellgold.com/stories/story_divisions_ch2.html), and you can see Blotch's illustration that accompanies that scene here, but only here in this newsletter can you get a sneak preview of the beginning of Chapter One:
Chapter One: Fracture (Lee)
From the other side of the menu, Father says, “I filed for divorce.”
I lower the laminated page slowly. He looks gravely over the tops of his glasses at me, his paws resting on his own face-down menu. His ears are flat, but not down. “I asked if you want wine,” I say.
He nods. “Yesterday. I thought you should know.”
“So,” I say. “That’s a ‘yes.’”
This has been coming for a while. A month or so ago, Father told me he and Mother weren’t spending so much time together any more. She has new friends, a Mrs. Hedley and a poisonous anti-gay religious group called Families United. Mother was never a churchgoer, but she is a crusader. My aunt Carolyn has told me enough about their strict upbringing that if I look at her as a fictional character in an Edith Wharton novel, church sort of fits, if not hateful propaganda.
But I still want to know how they got to this point. Did he suggest it? Did she? I think it makes a difference. But I’m not quite sure how to ask that, so I keep quiet and flick my ears to the bland Christmas music, looking around the big dining room.
I’m spending Thanksgiving afternoon in a country club a few hours north of Hilltown, about midway between where my parents live and where I live until Saturday. Thanksgiving dinner is just me and my father instead of with both parents, instead of with my boyfriend, who is at his own family’s place thirty minutes away in the small town of Lake Handerson. Father and I are going over there for leftovers tomorrow, not dinner tonight, but even though my activist brain reflexively yells at being shuffled to the side, really, it’s fine with me. It’s an enormous leap forward just to be invited there around a holiday, and it’s hard enough for me to handle three tigers when just his parents are home. I don’t need to confront ten.
Now, though, that would seem like a relief. I wouldn’t have thought that the word “divorce” would hit me as hard as it has, but I can’t focus on the menu at all. Fortunately, the Thanksgiving menu is much less about choice and more about what you’re going to get, like it or not. When the waiter comes, I just say “two” to whatever my father orders.
Then the menus are gone, and I can’t escape his gaze. “Nothing really changes for you,” he says.
Nothing? I flare my nostrils, taking in the scent of fifty-year-old people and decorations under the bland kitchen smells of a Thanksgiving cooked to appeal to every species, rather than some of our fox-specific dishes. There’s no sweet scent in the air from Mother’s raspberry sauce, just the barely-sour cranberry. There’ll be nothing crunchy in the stuffing, I’m sure; I’ve had bland stuffing before. It’s not that the food won’t be good. It just won’t be what I’m used to.
When I look back at Father, ending my exaggerated sniff, he takes my meaning. “Holidays aren’t about where we have them. They’re about being together. So we come here instead of going home.”
“Where’s home?” I say, as he reaches for his drink.
The glass of water was halfway to the end of his muzzle. He lowers it and takes his glasses off, rubbing them on his napkin. “There’s an apartment building close to work. I signed a lease yesterday. Anyway, you have your own home now.”
The warmth of that remark doesn’t stop my tail from curling under the chair. “You know, they always tell us gay boys not to come out to the families at dinner. Don’t you have like a troubled marriage forum that tells you not to announce a divorce at Thanksgiving?”
“It seemed more logical than going through the holiday with it hanging over our heads.” He replaces the glasses and drinks the water. “This isn’t easy for me.”
“No, I know.” The tablecloth’s fabric is rough under my paw pads, bunching as I rub it. My whiskers twitch as someone walks behind me: a mouse, from the scent. I look around at the other tables, seeking a distraction. “Hey, you think that whole family there just didn’t feel like cooking? Or are they having their kitchen redone?”
“Wiley, I don’t want you to look at this as something that’s about you.”
My ears fold down. “Well, I hadn’t been.”
Writing Tip
I’m going to include one of these with each newsletter until I run out of them or you get tired of them. So your tip for January is this: one of the unsung qualities of writers is patience. When you decide you want to be a writer, it is very tempting to believe in the quality of your first drafts (“all those other people have to edit”), to expect that other people will recognize your brilliance immediately, to look at the success of other writers without seeing the years of work that went into it. You must get past these beliefs and find the patience and perspective to see the flaws in your first drafts, to look at how you discover new writers and realize that everyone else is trying to sort through thousands of writers clamoring for their attention, to talk to other writers about how long it took them to reach the level you see them at. I began writing over twenty years ago, and began writing seriously about fifteen years ago. My first novel was published eight years after that. My “breakout” novel (Waterways) was published three years after that.
A career in writing, whether it is your only career or your sideline, develops over a long time. You may release a book you are proud of, only to have it sink relatively unnoticed. Get to work on the next one. If you are doing your job well, you will reach more people with each new book. Be patient. You have your whole life to write.