June 2023 Dispatch
The month of May saw a lot of getting back to what now passes for normal hereabouts. I got back into writing Wolftown 2, and as of this writing I’m pretty close to finishing a first draft! I’m excited about how it’s going, even if it’s a little shorter than I’d hoped. I was aiming for 70-80K, but it looks like it’ll settle in closer to 60K. It’s being serialized on my other Patreon, if you’re interested in supporting it there.
The Robin Hood fanfic and the Ty Game sequel, both serialized on my Patreon, are also coming up on their final acts. This is exciting but also a little intimidating, because, uh, what do I write next? I have a few options, and on the Patreon I will probably offer a poll, but there’s one new one that has come up in the last few days that I’m excited enough to talk about.
I was reading some horror and talking about it with friends, and as we went through what we expected from a horror structure and what tropes we liked, I got a really strong urge to write something using an idea that I’ve liked for a while. James Blish wrote a story called “More Light,” in which the protagonist is trying to read through a script a friend gave him, a play called “The King In Yellow.” It’s a famous work that is the center of some horror stories by Robert Chambers, who was kind of a bridge between Poe and Lovecraft in the American horror writer continuum. In the eponymous collection of short stories, Chambers only includes excerpts from the play, but Blish tries to write out all of it—the hitch being that nobody has been able to read through it all in one sitting.
As I played around with this idea, I tried to figure out where in my canons it could fit, and thought immediately of the Dangerous Spirits books, and poor Athos, who never got his own story. This could be his story: not something like the original trilogy, but his own adventure. And in the process we can check in on Meg and maybe Sol and Alexei, see how they’re doing a few years on.
The idea has grown from there and I can’t wait to start it, so I think after the Robin Hood story, this will be the next thing I serialize on my Patreon—but maybe I won’t be able to wait to write it, and I’ll just start writing it as I serialize something else. We will see. Anyway, even though Wolftown has significant supernatural elements, it feels good to get back to something spooky. I’m looking forward to it and hope you will enjoy it too.
Other exciting news! With Hashtag’s help, I’m going to start doing some live readings this month. We’re going to start with Camouflage, with the idea that I’ll be making an audiobook recording. I’ll be reading from the book on a live stream, with the text showing so you can follow along if you like, and then afterwards we’ll do a short Q&A. The first one will be this week or early next, and I think we’re going to link them to the Patreon, so I’ll make an announcement there and on Mastodon when we start.
About that: I recently switched my Mastodon server to furries.club because vulpine.club went away (sad face). So you can follow me at @kyellgold@furries.club for thoughts and updates on events. I haven’t been posting a lot because I haven’t had much to say these last couple months, but I hope that as “normal” kicks in, I’ll be a little more active. I’m still technically on Twitter in that I haven’t deleted my account and I still monitor it for mentions and stuff, but I’m not posting there much if at all anymore. Its owner is actively spreading transphobic propaganda and I don’t feel like contributing to his site’s engagement.
The furry community on Mastodon is pretty good, and you don’t have to skip an ad every third post or feel like you’re in a right-wing transphobic asshole’s house while you’re reading your posts. If you would like to start on Mastodon but are feeling intimidated, start here and pick a server. It’s pretty easy to get going, and pretty easy to switch servers if you want to.
I think that’s all the news from May. Hopefully in June I will finish one or more of the current projects and get started on that horror book. Hope to see some of you at the live readings!
Books: Nothing new on the audiobook front. 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 fall 2023. 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, untitled fantasy world project.
Streaming stuff:
We’re watching the third season of Barry (Max (ugh)), and like the first two seasons, it is fantastic, funny, and also intense and dark. It is a story of a guy struggling to be something other than what he is and failing.
We also watched the first season of Schmigadoon (Apple+) finally. I wanted to like it more than I did through the first 2/3 of the season—it’s a charming, skilled, funny take on musicals of the 1950s and maybe 60s? I dunno, I’m not familiar enough with a lot of them to know. But I got some of the references. Anyway, Cecily Strong and Keegan Michael-Key are great, and the supporting cast (esp Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth) are fabulous. And in the last two episodes, it really did come together for me. I’m excited to check out season 2, Schmicago.
We’re going along with Central Park (Apple+), which is kind of like a sweeter Bob’s Burgers and also includes music in every episode as that show has begun to do. The cast are all fantastic and the shows are a ton of fun. It centers around Owen (Leslie Odom, Jr.), the lead curator at Central Park, and his family, who live in a castle in the park. The mean edge, if you’re missing that from Bob’s Burgers, comes from Bitsy Brandingham and her personal assistant Helen (voiced by Stanley Tucci and Daveed Diggs, respectively), who are scheming to achieve the unlikely goal of buying Central Park so she can tear it down.
And we went to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, which fulfilled all the promise of the first film. I don’t want to say much about it, but it was great, not only from a story perspective, but in the way it really utilizes the medium of animation in many different ways to tell its story. Highly recommended.
Also really good was Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3. Better than the second one and maybe not quite as good as the first, for me? But enjoyable all around and bring some tissues because hoo boy there are feels.
We’re currently watching through the John Wick series, which posit an interesting world in which New York is mostly populated by international assassins apparently. Anyway, they are fun shoot-em-ups and the stylization works well for me. If you like those movies, I’d recommend also checking out Gunpowder Milkshake (Netflix), which posits a similar underground world and has similarly stylized elements but a bit more so, kind of like if John Wick were a live-action anime.
Hope everyone is having a great summer!