June 2024 Dispatch

It's the Summer of Love (and Heists)!

Squeak Thief is off to the publisher, hooray hooray! It should be (paws crossed) ready for you to grab at AnthroCon, and if you come by the FurPlanet table while I’m there, you can get me to sign it!

I’ll talk more about it next week, but I’m excited to have this out! It was serialized on my Patreon back in 2021-ish, so it’s fun to have it done. Now I can wrap up Dead Right (Wolftown 2) and get to work on Azure City (also serializing on Patreon right now!).

So anyway, a lot of May was finishing up that novel (it is a novel, just under 80K words, even though I incorrectly listed it as a novella earlier), and now comes a busy couple months on the schedule. Longtime followers will remember the writing retreat in Kansas I used to hit every other year or so; this year I’m heading back there to spend two weeks working on…something! Most likely it will be the third Wolftown book, because I have the broad outline of that one (Jae goes on a mission!) but am very sketchy on details or what I want it to accomplish. The retreat is really good for generating work, but it will also be a nice chance to reconnect with other writers again and get a running start on the rest of the year.

(There is also Unnamed Fantasy Book, which is starting to feel like Price of Thorns in that I have a few scenes that are strong enough in my head that I want to get started writing them, and that might snowball…but I don’t know if I have time in the schedule right now to just sit down and write that one. But let’s get a few scenes under my belt and maybe I’ll feel differently.)

I get back from that retreat and then turn around and go to AC three days later. Who’m I gonna see there? I’ve got a few panels on tap: Novel Writing, Description and Scene, and I’ll be doing a live reading with Q&A, too! Probably I’ll read from Squeak Thief—there’s a bit of the opening that I really enjoy reading. When I’m not there, I’ll be at the FurPlanet table selling and signing and seeing a bunch of people I haven’t seen in seven years or so.

Later in July, we’ll be going to San Diego Comic-Con and doing the usual there. Also hoping to see people there, and more on that next month!

We’re getting the Kickstarter for the next audiobook(s) ready to go and hoping to launch it in mid-June. I’ll send out a notice on this platform when it’s ready, and if you’re interested, I hope you’ll check it out close to launch date. It’s really helpful if it gets a lot of attention early!

That’s what my summer looks like. How’s yours? Who’s traveling?

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: AC 2024. A rich mouse hires a fox thief to steal from his own family, but the job quickly spirals out of control.

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: Fast Break (on Patreon), craft book, untitled fantasy world project.

Streaming:

We finished Shōgun (Hulu) and loved it. It has the feel of early seasons of Game of Thrones, with the politics and maneuvering and the way small personal problems explode into huge ones. But it is also its own thing, relying very heavily on language and not only the meanings of words, but the way we choose our words. It is about 75% in Japanese, and one of the main characters being an Englishman, he relies often on others to translate his words—notably one of the other main characters. Fantastic stuff throughout, highly recommend.

Similarly, I got through Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix) and was impressed at the craft all the way through it. It borrows from a lot of samurai anime (I’m told; I don’t have the experience to see it), but it puts the tropes to good use in a compelling, engaging story, beautifully animated. Also highly recommend this one.

We finished season four of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon) and while we aren’t quite sure about the direction of the show, it is still delightful to watch every time. The characters sparkle, the dialogue sizzles, and the sets and costumes are gorgeous. In this season, Midge emcees for an illegal strip club, and it was delightful to watch her effect on the club: standing up for the performers and improving their conditions backstage, drawing a crowd of other women to the audience, as the stage acts get progressively more elaborate throughout the season. It ends with a good push to the final season, which we’re looking forward to.

Happy June, everyone! Stay cool and have a lovely start to your summer (or winter)!