Kyell Gold's Blog, page 16

Further Confusion Approaching!

Hey! If you weren’t aware somehow, Further Confusion will be here in just over a week (!!). I will be at the Sofawolf table for a good chunk of it, so come by and say hi and I will be happy to sign books or whatever. It looks like the best day will be Friday, or Saturday afternoon. Sunday I am in panels pretty much all day, as you will see…

Fri. 10-11:30 pm. Adult Furry Fiction. This panel is always a hoot, and I’ll be joined by K.M. Hirosaki and Not Tube, so you know it’ll be fun.

Sat. 11-12:30. Historical Furry Fiction. I’ve done a bunch of historical work, between the Dangerous Spirits series and Camouflage, so here you can hear me with Huskyteer and Watts Martin, two other wonderful authors, as we talk about our process.

Sat. 6-7:30 pm. Beyond the Furry Horizon – selling work outside the fandom. If you’re interested in that.

Sun. 9-10:30 am. Sofawolf Presents – readings from three upcoming books. I will be reading from Black Angel, and you can hear excerpts from Ryan Campbell’s upcoming “Forest Gods,” as well as Michael Payne’s “Rat’s Reputation.” If you’re interested, please do try to show up. I know it’s early, but we want to have a good audience there.

Sun. 1-2:30, 3-4:30. Writing Workshop – reading and critiquing four stories with the authors. The stories have been selected and the authors notified. The audience won’t be participating in the critique, but if you would like to sit and watch how a critique session happens, please do.

Sun. 5-6:30. Write Now! – start a short story. Bring something to write with and on, and Franklin Leo, Jakebe, and I will help you get your short story started.

Sun. 9:30-11. Unsheathed Live! – Live podcast. At the very TAIL end of the convention, so there should be some good convention stories. K.M. Hirosaki and Not Tube will again be joining me for fun times!

 

Welcome 2015!

For the last few years, mostly what I hear around the December 30s is “fuck 20xx” from people who didn’t have good years. I heard that again this year, and certainly 2014 had its share of tragedies and terrible news, from Gamergate to Ferguson to Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, from ISIS to missing airliners to domestic violence stories. Personally, I had a pretty good year, with lots of travel and book releases and a Patreon launch, and I’m looking forward to 2015 as a year of opportunities to continue having a good year.

I hope that we’ll continue to talk about the problems our society is growing through; I’m encouraged by the fact that there IS a dialogue around them, even if the language is sharp on both sides. I hope that all of you reading this will achieve some personal goals and make some lovely memories in 2015 and that in 360 days I won’t be hearing so much “fuck 2015.”

Want Me To Read Your Story at Further Confusion?

Hey, time is running out to get your story in for the Further Confusion writing workshop I’ll be leading! It’ll be Sunday afternoon of FC and we will be workshopping up to five stories by anyone who emails their under-8000-word story to workshop (at) kyellgold (dot) com by January 1, 2015. If I get more than five entries, I’ll pick the five we will workshop.

Make sure you are free from 1 pm to 5 pm the Sunday of FC and send in those stories!

 

Into The Woods: It’s Time To Go

I was a fan of “Into the Woods” when it came out and I saw it on Broadway back in the day. At the time, none of the big Broadway musicals were being made into movies, really. Cats was never a movie, Phantom wasn’t a movie until 2004, Les Miserables wasn’t a movie until a couple years ago. So it wasn’t really a surprise that Into the Woods, which despite its pedigree wasn’t in the same league as those big hits, never got a cinematic treatment. There was a DVD of the stage production, and it seemed like that would be enough for the fans.

My friends and I at the time were huge fans of the show, not so much for the fairytale setting as for Sondheim’s wordplay and the themes of right and wrong, good and nice, of responsibility and community. As I met new groups of friends, I found Into the Woods fans in many of them (of the five people who went to the movie, four of us had seen the play or knew the soundtrack). With the success of “Once Upon A Time,” of course Into the Woods was a logical property for Disney to roll out in movie form.

Being a Disney production, you’d expect them to pull in stars for the major roles, but the stars of Into the Woods are mostly terrific singers. The major roles go to Emily Blunt (the Baker’s Wife), Anna Kendrick (Cinderella), James Cordon (the Baker), and Chris Pine (Cinderella’s Prince). Cordon, a Tony winner, does well, and though you might know the other three primarily from non-singing roles, they all perform terrifically. Meryl Streep, playing the Witch, starts weak but finishes strong by her last scene. And Daniel Huttlestone, who plays a young Jack, sounded so much like Gavroche from Les Miserables (the movie) that it wasn’t a surprise to find out that he was.

The movie is two hours, so they’ve removed an hour of the play, but honestly it wasn’t until afterwards that we talked about what scenes had been missing. It felt seamless, very true to the spirit of the original, and it was beautifully shot. I found the moral ambiguity of the characters a little more immediate in the movie because I felt closer to them than when I was observing them on a stage, if that makes sense.

The one misstep, I felt, was with the Wolf. Johnny Depp isn’t a great singer, and because he’s a Name, the wolf’s makeup is very theatrical so you can see that it’s Johnny Depp As The Wolf. In a movie with giants and beanstalks, with mice and pumpkin carriages and pitch on the stairs, they could certainly have gotten a Broadway-caliber singer and made him a CG Wolf.

But that’s one scene, and the rest of the movie is so good that it’s easily forgiven. If you’re a fan, you’ll enjoy this interpretation. If you don’t know Into the Woods, go see it.

The other movie we saw this weekend is also based on an old property. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is the third movie in the underwhelming series, and disappointingly, the weakest. You might think that with a third of the series devoted to a tenth of the book, this would be the movie in which most of Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh’s additional material (made up or gleaned from other Tolkien works) would appear. You would be wrong. There is a brief appearance of the Nazgul, cameos from some Lord of the Rings actors, and the Necromancer a.k.a. Sauron (also voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch). But those scenes take up maybe only ten minutes of the sixty-eight thousand hours of TH:TBOTFA. What comprises the rest? Battles. Fighting. Arguing about fighting. A short bit of dwarf angst. The scenes that might have made the movie more engaging are cut short so we can get back to the swinging of hammers and swords, of the heroes slashing and smashing their way through hordes of anonymous CG armored foes. Despite the armor, anyone without a visible face is vulnerable to a swipe from a dagger, a hammer to the back, or even a rock thrown by hand–as long as the attacker is one of our heroes (I’m not kidding about this: Bilbo fells three or four orcs by picking up small rocks and throwing them).

Even the ending, in which Bilbo returns to the Shire to find his property being sold off, is cut short. There would’ve been a great opportunity there to show how he’s been changed by the adventure, how he is at once accepted by and alienated from his community. But no; he just stops the proceedings and then runs into his home and then there’s a bridge to the Fellowship of the Ring, just for that one person in the world who is unaware that the Hobbit is a prequel to the Lord of the Rings.

I’ll be honest: I’m a completist, and so even had I read all of the above, I probably still would’ve gone to see TH:TBOTFA, and I’m sure many of you will too. I just hope you’ll be prepared for two hours of pretty but flawed fighting and half an hour of story.

FC Writing Workshop!

Hey, I’ve announced this already but not gotten much response, so let’s try again. I’m holding a writing workshop at FC that’s open to up to five participants. If you will be attending Further Confusion (sorry, cannot do this remotely) and would like to have one of your short stories (under 8,000 words) workshopped by me (and four other people), send your story in before the year rolls over to 2015 to:

workshop at kyellgold dot com

If you have already sent it and not gotten a response, please e-mail me at kyell at kyellgold dot com and let me know.

Bonus Story Coming Up!

Well, when I sat down to work out the milestones for the Patreon with Rukis and Kenket, I figured a lot of them were pie-in-the-sky–like basically most of them after the first one. But you guys have now supported us enough that I will have to write a bonus story! (This of course hinges on the actual pledges being processed next month, but I have confidence in the honor of my fans. ^^).

So if you’re a $40 or more subscriber, there’ll be a chat next week to talk about where I should actually visit to write about this story…among other things. And if you’re at the $20 or more level, next month there’ll be a stream to watch Rukis work on her pic! And if you’re at the $10 or more level, there will be art. I posted today some sketches that Kenket did, which are pretty lovely. Great expressions.

Thank you all for being so supportive! I’m really excited to write something new for everyone.

Lovely review of “Red Devil”

It gets listed in the Rainbow Awards Honorable Mentions, which as Elisa specifies, does not mean it didn’t win; it just means that one of the judges gave it a 36/40 or above. She includes the judge’s comment (as a judge, I know that she asked us to comment if we rated a book over 36), and the person who reviewed Red Devil said some very nice things about it: http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwid... and scroll down.

*wag*

Happy Thanksgiving!

If you’re celebrating today with friends or relatives, then best wishes and I hope you have plenty of good company and cheer. If you’re not celebrating, or are just spending the day quietly, then I hope you have things to be thankful for in your life.

The list of things I have to be thankful for is long, and I think about them often over the course of the year. But it’s nice to have one day when we specifically sit down and reflect on the good things in our lives, so here is a partial list.

Of course, I am grateful for all of you reading this, and all of you who have read this blog in the past but aren’t reading it today, who have read my books and sent me e-mails and notes and who have shared the worlds I’ve imagined. You’ve made me very happy and have in many cases made my stories better, and simply by being so enthusiastic about my writing, you’ve encouraged me to keep going, to keep doing this thing that makes me happier than any job I’ve ever had.

And your financial support also pays my “salary” in this job. As of this posting, I have held this job of full-time writer for just about four years, which is (amazingly) longer than I have held any other full-time job in my life. I don’t get free snacks in the office and I don’t get a 401(k), but I get to work on the things I love. So thank you all for buying the books, some of them multiple times!

I’m thankful for my parents, who gave me endless supplies of books to read and encouraged me to imagine.

I’m thankful for my friends, who are really the most amazing bunch of people, and for my family; they have all helped me be who I wanted to be, wherever that journey took me.

And I’m thankful for my Kit, my husband, who has made this life so much better and so much more exciting and fun, who is the best of travel companions, dinner companions, and life companions all in one (and is a sexy woof to boot).

Are you thankful for something? Feel free to comment. And have another slice of pie. Tell them I said it was okay.

State of the Fox

You guys are being awesome in support of the Patreon so far. Thank you so much! I am optimistic that I’ll be able to keep Rukis busy for at least a few months next year. Maybe as the story gets more racy, people will start wanting more art, too…

I’m still editing manuscripts, but I just finished a pass through “Camouflage” and will be moving on to “Over Time” next. Maybe. It seems like it’ll be appropriate to do it during football season, and “The Tower and the Fox” is going to be more work which I’m sort of putting off in a lazy-fox kind of way.

And I’ve revamped the book pages on my site so that the series are more expressly laid out and you can actually see all the books at once. The pages are new, so if you find any problems with them, please let me know.

So that’s what’s going on with me as the year winds down to the holiday season. 2014 has been a good, busy year, and thank you guys all for being a part of it!

Patreon is live!

I’ve activated my Patreon page and you can now go and see a preview of the story as well as sign up to follow the novel as it goes along. I’m really excited to get going with it and I hope you guys will be too! In the days coming up I will be posting sketches and a blog for patrons, and starting in December I will kick off the novel, tentatively titled “Love Match.”

I know, I know. But it’s a tennis book. What did you expect? Anyway, depending on how much support we get, you may also get artwork from the amazing Rukis and Kenket, and I might write bonus stories just for patrons set in other worlds of mine…so you might get a Dev and Lee story, or a League of Canids story, or a Sol and Alexei story, or maybe even a Kory and Samaki story…

*wag* Thanks in advance for checking it out, guys!