Welcome to the shortest month of the year (slightly longer edition)! Last month I got done most of the things I told you I was hoping to do—the writing retreat went very well and I have feedback for Azure City, and I’ve started edits on Dead Right. I also went to Further Confusion and led a few panels, sold a few books, and did not stand in line for the Night Market. I hear it was great and I’m glad it keeps getting bigger! Maybe next year. I was also glad to meet so many of you there, and thanks to everyone who bought a book. I need to stock up on gold pens again!
February looks to be a month of revisions in between convention months—I’ll lay out my convention plans at the end of this section. I want to get Dead Right finished this month so it can go off to the sensitivity reader and trade reviews and such. And we’ll be watching the Super Bowl, of course, with the Niners (for the second time in five years) and the Chiefs (for the fourth time in five years). We’ll probably be rooting for the Niners because they’re our home team, and isn’t everyone tired of the Chiefs by now? Nothing to do with Taylor Swift, I promise you.
I talked last month about my Patreon plans, and they’ve firmed up some. On my Kyell Gold Patreon, I’m going to finish the Robin Hood story this week, and then the next three weeks will be devoted to each of the Dangerous Spirits books, to get people back in that mood prior to starting the serialization of Azure City in March! Can’t wait for y’all to visit with Meg and Athos again. There are about three chapters of Ty the Knot left to go, so that’ll end in April, and in May, $20+ patrons on that site will be able to start reading a new book! Maybe a gay basketball book. We’ll see—that’s a long way away.
On the other Patreon, I’m coming up on the end of Dead Right (first draft), after which I will be serializing my writing advice book on how to write a novel, tentatively titled Let’s Write A Novel. I would love to do an alternate version of this book under Kyell’s name titled Let’s Write A Furry Novel, with an extra chapter about making your world furry, but we’ll see if that’s too ambitious when I get around to it. It’s a fun idea, though, isn’t it?
Upcoming conventions! You all expect to see me at TFF by now and I plan to be back there again this year, helping at the FurPlanet table and being on some panels. But also, it’s been seven years since I visited Pittsburgh in the summertime, and I kind of miss that stuffy, sweaty, moist heat, so Kit and I will be back at AnthroCon this year. Expect me to be, y’know, at the FurPlanet table and on some panels.
Lastly, there’s some awards going on for 2023 books. The Leo Literary Awards are accepting nominations, and if you feel like nominating The Price of Thorns, I’d sure appreciate it!
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.
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.
Other upcoming releases:
Squeak Thief: Sometime in 2024. A rich mouse hires a fox thief to steal from his own family, but the job quickly spirals out of control. (Novella)
Azure City: 2024-25. A book full of blank pages might be the key to another world, but the more Athos reads, the more he disappears from this one.
Dead Right: Late summer/fall 2024. Jae gets tangled in the life of a ghost activist who endangers his relationships and his future.
In progress: Robin Hood fanfic and Ty Game sequel (on Patreon), untitled fantasy world project.
Streaming stuff:
I finished the last season of Slow Horses (Apple+) and I can’t recommend this show enough. From the theme song to the cast to the cinematography to the writing, it’s top-notch all the way through.
Finished the most current season of For All Mankind (Apple+) and while it continues to be very soap opera as much as space opera, I gotta say I love it. We get new characters joining old this season, and they do a great job weaving together the storylines.
And while I was on Apple+, I caught up with The Morning Show, also highly melodramatic but compelling. This third season features Jon Hamm as a Silicon Valley billionaire at the head of a space company interested in buying UBA, The Morning Show’s network. Why would a forward-thinking tech billionaire who is definitely very handsome and not a complete twat (you could almost feel the pivot away from the original model for this character) want with a legacy media company? That is the question this season. Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Billy Crudup continue to be excellent here, and there’s a welcome appearance by Tig Notaro as Jon Hamm’s executive assistant who is maybe more ruthless than he is.
We’re hoping to catch some of the Oscar nominated movies we missed this month, which is most of them. Top of the list: Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, The Holdovers.
Hope you all have a wonderful short month!