November 2023 Dispatch

Whew! Another spooky season in the books. How was yours? Ours was pretty busy.

I finished a revision of Dead Right, the next Wolftown book, appropriately enough for October, which means I can turn my attention to the spooky book story I’m excited about writing. Maybe it’ll be far enough along next month to post an excerpt from…

But a lot of our attention is also taken up with The Price of Thorns, releasing in just two weeks (on November 14). If you’ve been reading one of the advance copies, thank you! This week is the time to get your review up on Goodreads and/or Amazon. Some instructions should be coming through the email that you got the ARC details from, if you want more specifics.

We had our first bookstore signing, at Under the Umbrella in Salt Lake City, which was just a delightful experience all around. The staff were wonderful and the bookstore itself is not only a pleasure to walk through, but is obviously a center for the queer community in SLC. I signed several books and got a lot of thoughtful questions from the crowd.

If you’re in the Bay Area, the next signing will be Thursday, November 16 at Books, Inc. in Mountain View, at 7 pm. A couple weeks after that, I’ll be at the FurPlanet table at MFF, and in 2024 I’ll be at Further Confusion. Hope to see you at one of those events!

My hype rat is constantly collecting reviews and trying to come up with new ways to promote the book! If you want to see what he’s up to and get sneak peeks at things like commissioned illos for the story (the first one is gorgeous), join our Telegram channel!

We had a launch party with the lovely Huskyteer for the Mysterious Affair of Giles audiobook, and that was fun. I love the tone and class that she brings to the story. And now you can all listen to it!

Toward the end of the month, we headed to BLFC, and once we got over the weirdness of the con starting on Monday instead of Thursday, it felt very much like an ordinary furry con. There were lots of people, my panels were well attended, and the dealer’s room was huge and usually crowded. All the events were fun and we appreciated that there were fewer non-furries around than we’re used to at a big casino on the weekend. We’ll hope to head back next year if scheduling permits.

And at the end of this month, we’ll be headed to Chicago for MFF. I’ll be doing some panels on Novel Writing (with Rukis) and Historical Fiction (with Domus Vocis and Fruitz), as well as a reading/Q&A session. Check the schedule or keep an eye out on my socials.

Books:

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.

Several years back I sold a story to Lightspeed for their Queers Destroy Science Fiction anthology, and I just today learned that there’s an audiobook of it out! So cool. No idea who narrates my story, but it’s a good collection of queer stories, so check it out!

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! It looks like it won’t be at the print release date, but maybe in December or January.

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 November 14, 2023, some pre-release copies available at conventions, pre-order and review at Amazon. 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 early 2024. 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, horror novel, untitled fantasy world project.

Streaming stuff:

If you haven’t seen Bottoms yet, oh my goodness, you must check it out. It’s kiiiind of like Superbad or Booksmart, only with a different tone and spin on it. A terrific cast of characters, sharp writing and performances, and more violence than you would expect from this kind of movie. We’ve seen it twice now and I’m sure we’ll see it more often as we show it to more friends.

We were excited for Mike Flanagan’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and it didn’t disappoint. It’s more a works-of-Poe fanfic than a straight-up adaptation, but it’s gorgeous and spooky and you get to see rich assholes getting murdered in a bunch of ways, a dynamic the show plays heavily into.

We watched No One Will Save You, and while I liked all the individual parts of it—many of which I thought were very effective—I didn’t think it cohered into a whole at the end. If you just want some spooky horror and personal anguish, though, it’s pretty good.

I’d never seen The Exorcist (the original 1970s one), so we tossed that one one weekend, and I was impressed. It was creepy and well acted, and there were only a few parts toward the beginning where I wasn’t sure how it was hanging together. It all worked, though! Reputation definitely deserved.

Hope your spooky season was spooky, and if you’re doing NaNoWriMo this month, best of luck!