July 2021 Dispatch

New home, same old content (sort of)

Hey all! Welcome to the new home of the newsletter. It’s going to be pretty much the same as the old one, but easier to access and hopefully with more options for y’all to control your email preferences. And you can comment on these posts too! (I think!) I’m going to break it up into sections, so you’ll get a recap at the beginning of the month, and then excerpts/spotlights/advice as the month goes on. You can ask for

Anyway, June was fun! I taught an online RAWR, which was, as you might imagine, not quite as immersive as the in-person version, but was still engaging, and our students did great. We hope to go back to in-person workshops next year, so if you’d like to spend a few days in Dallas learning about writing, check out the workshop at rawr.community.

After that, I spent a week at the RAWR alumni writing retreat, ReRAWR, which was also online, but I still got a lot of words written on The Price of Thorns. That novel sits at 120K now and still has a chunk of second act and all the third to go, so…it’s gonna be long. But I’m excited about it and am really having fun with it. Can’t wait for everyone to be able to read it!

Unfinished Business came back from a sensitivity read (for its Korean-American protagonist’s culture) and I’m very happy that I did that. The suggested changes will make the book better and, I hope, will help provide some representation in the proper way. It’s now out to my critique groups. Argyll would like to do some advance publicity for it, so it’s looking like maybe spring/summer next year. It’ll likely come out under the Tim Susman name because it has humans in it and there’s no explicit sex.

And The Curse of Lone Pine Gulch is done enough to send out. Because it’s a non-furry, non-spec fic mystery, I need to find another place to publish it, and that probably means finding an agent. So I need to write a synopsis and query letters and then do a lot of research.

Now that those are done, the next one I want to work on is Return From Divalia, the first Argaea novel since Shadow of the Father in 2010. Like Unfinished Business, it probably won’t make it out in 2021, but it might be out sooner than that one.

This month I’ve got two more online writing retreats, in which I’m hoping to finish up The Price of Thorns. I’m starting to accumulate a list of ideas for next novels, including a fantasy/SF piece that might fit into the Price of Thorns slot, a sequel of sorts to Camouflage, and a new sports-themed furry book.

I’m still writing Squeak Thief and Ty the Knot on my Patreon, and enjoying both of those!

Streaming: I recently re-watched all of Arrested Development and can report that it mostly holds up. There’s some dated humor that doesn’t work well in 2021 (including some from the recent seasons), but overall the writing stays sharp, even at points in the remix of the fourth season.

Apple TV+ has a half-hour documentary series called “Earth At Night In Color” that is exactly what it sounds like. Using new highly sensitive night-vision cameras, they film animals at night more clearly than ever before, often revealing interesting new behaviors. Each episode follows a little story, often a single animal through time, and then has a short making-of segment after it highlighting the crew and biologists that worked on it. The photography is stunning and it’s narrated by Tom Hiddleston so…check it out.

At the recommendation of a friendly yeen, I checked out the first two seasons of “Final Space” (on HBO Max) and really enjoyed it! Like many TBS shows it has a crude veneer over a heart of earnest emotion. It plays around with some SF-y tropes, and while it doesn’t quite put the thought into time travel that Future Man does, it still has a lot of interesting situations and fun characters. I’d recommend it if you like Rick and Morty but wish it would sometimes be not quite so dark.

Release Dates

I talked about some of the books above, but here’s where things stand, in approximate release order:

My FREE book of writing advice called Do You Need Help? is on baddogbooks.com right here: https://baddogbooks.com/product/do-you-need-help/

Dude, Where’s My Pack? —it’s available in print from FurPlanet and on e-book everywhere!

The Revolution and the Fox —it’s available in print from Argyll and on e-book everywhere!

Audiobooks: If you don’t have an Audible account yet, check out my new Soundcloud page, which has samples and links to all my audiobooks. Those links help me get extra money especially if you use them to sign up for a new account. The second Calatians book, The Demon and the Fox, is now available!

Return From Divalia —I need to do an editing pass and then get it out to my critique group, as well as arrange the cover art and so on. I’m hoping to get it out this winter.

Unfinished Business (as Tim Susman) —out for critique. Will be coming out from Argyll in spring 2021 or maybe early summer.

That’s it for now! Thanks for following me over to Substack and I hope you enjoy the dispatches from their new home. More coming later in the month!