Kyell Gold's Blog, page 30

September 3, 2013

Back from WorldCon

As those of you following my Twitter feed will know, I am back in the Bay Area after a very fun WorldCon. It seemed more relaxed overall and I got to meet up with some of my F/SF friends and make a few new ones. There’s a post a-brewin’ in my head about why more furries should pay attention to the Hugos; it keeps shifting around a little and I am trying to pin it down and also wait for when I have time to work on it. But the main points I’m kicking around are:


* The furry fandom does not need the SF fandom. We have a pretty good community.


* The SF fandom doesn’t really need the furry fandom, but it needs something.


* There are furries who are into all kinds of speculative fiction, and the SF fandom is indisputably the center of that universe.


* There are F/SF authors who would write furry fiction and fans who would read it.


I think the point is that the fandoms could have more overlap than they do. Specifically, furries could get involved in the Hugos, help nominate really good furry works but also read the really good mainstream F/SF works and cross-pollinate, as it were. Some furry authors have sold into mainstream F/SF already (me, Renee Carter Hall, Mary Lowd, Michael Payne at least all have pro sales and there are likely others).


Anyway, this is not going to be that post. This is about how WorldCon was fun. We saw the FurPlanet guys and Ursula Vernon and Kevin, hung out with people we last saw last year, and generally enjoyed being part of the scene. Next year’s WorldCon is in London and you UKFurs should plan on getting together there in August, to see the con, and to say hi to me because I will be there too. :D (And EuroFurence starts two days after WorldCon ends, so we will likely be hitting that one too, yay!!)

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 03, 2013 17:15

September 2, 2013

Happy Labor Day!

Happy Labor Day, folks! If you are one of the people in our community who puts countless hours and energy into making conventions happen for the rest of us to enjoy, thank you thank you thank you. You guys are awesome and if I have neglected to thank you for a convention, it is only out of forgetfulness and frazzledness. You other guys, don’t forget to thank your staff at the next con. They work very very hard and often get little praise.


Also, let’s not forget about labor unions, which this holiday is really meant to celebrate. I like unions and I think they’ve done a lot of good; yes, there is corruption, but on the whole my view is positive, mainly because whatever else they are doing, they are trying to stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves.


Peace, y’all. Have a great evening.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 02, 2013 18:49

August 28, 2013

Green Fairy Audiobook For Sale Now!

The audiobook of Green Fairy is now on sale at Audible (to be on iTunes and Amazon soon)! I’m really excited about this one; it was a challenging book to read, and I think Jay Maxwell nailed it. I enjoyed listening to it for review and the people who were with me also thought Jay did a terrific job of it. I only know him through ACX, where he contacted me when I opened the project to auditions, but I’m delighted he was interested and I know you guys are going to love the interpretation he brings to the text and the characters. I’m already talking to him about doing the second book, but…don’t want to get ahead of myself. :)


The book is up! Go listen to a sample, and if you like it, please please rate and review (and thank you, all you guys who have done that for OOP!).


Now I have to get on an airplane to go to WorldCon.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 28, 2013 06:39

August 26, 2013

What’s Keeping Me Busy?

I haven’t posted here in almost a week! What gives? Well, you know, sometimes there just isn’t news. I have been working on stuff, though.


* I’m really excited about “Camouflage” and where the story is going. I’m almost up to 50,000 words now, giving myself another cushion so I can keep posting segments in case I have to spend September going to conventions and polishing up “Red Devil.” But it’s honestly a lot of fun, not least because I am discovering a lot of things I can tie into imagery.


* I have been discussing “Red Devil” artwork with Rukis and am very excited to see some of these scenes come to life. She did a fantastic job with “Green Fairy” and this next book promises to be even better. The text itself is being gamma-read, maybe? Second round of edits and comments, anyway. I expect to spend a good deal of September polishing it up, leaving October free for…


* OOP4, which I have not paid much attention to, but I hope to actually spend the fall finishing up major edits on it while also…


* …writing up a first draft of OOP5, but that is a couple months away.


* My Cupcake for next February (at TFF, the launch of the very first Cupcake), “The Mysterious Affair of Giles,” my Agatha Christie homage, is in edits right now and I’m working on getting the artwork nailed down. Sara Palmer, artist of the Argaea books, will be illustrating (hopefully)! I’m very excited to be working with her again.


* And I leave in two days for WorldCon in San Antonio! Any of you guys going to be there?

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 26, 2013 11:16

August 20, 2013

Judges Needed For Rainbow Awards

Hey all,


If you are interested in reading one of the following categories:


Lesbian Fantasy

Lesbian Historical Romance

Lesbian Mystery/Thriller

LGBT Sci-fi/Futuristic


Please see this posting and contact Elisa!


 

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 20, 2013 14:42

August 15, 2013

Unsheathed Announcement

Hey, so Unsheathed has been kind of on hiatus even from the Livestreaming, and part of that has been because of my travel, and part of it has been because K.M. is taking a bit of a break from writing stuff to deal with life. But I’m home and itching to talk at y’all again, so I’m lining up some guests to fill in until K.M. returns.


(Please don’t bug K.M. by asking when he’ll be back. He will be back when he’s back.)


First Livestream will be Friday afternoon PST, probably around 3 pm (although watch Twitter for details) at www.livestream.com/unsheathed as per usual, and I will have Keovi as my guest/co-host on the show. We will possibly do another one next week and maybe will try to do one from WorldCon as well if we can. And then at RainFurrest we will have a more traditional Unsheathed with mikes and stuff that will go directly into the feed.


(I still have a bunch of the Livestream eps to drop into the feed–Trickyena has done many and I have been slow to add them.)


Anyway! Come by the LiveStream tomorrow and chat with me and Keovi. It’s been a while!

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 15, 2013 20:25

August 14, 2013

Now It’s Over

Today the California Supreme Court denied the last petition attempting to keep Prop 8 alive. So the thing is officially dead now. Raise a glass, folks.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 14, 2013 20:05

A Thought For Writers

Instead of saying, “Well, that piece of writing advice clearly doesn’t apply to me,” how about trying, “What if that piece of writing advice did apply to me?”


Or: it never hurts to try to get better at something, even if you think you’re already pretty good at it.

1 like ·   •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 14, 2013 10:00

August 9, 2013

5 Things About Characters

I read a book recently that made me think about the relationship a writer has with his or her characters. Combined with the uptick this year in people asking me about a Waterways sequel (again), this has made me think about some things and then write them down in a list. You know, like you do.


1. The primary thing on my mind is this: make your story worthy of its characters. I write character-driven fiction, and so my stories usually center around a character learning something or experiencing something. If the story isn’t doing anything for the character, I usually can sniff that out and either I change the story or abandon it. The character has been created out of nothing to go through this story, and if the story isn’t worth it, then I might as well just let the character go on and live his life (or her life) and not bother them.


(How do you decide if a story is worth writing? That’s up to you. The way I think of it is: is this experience something the character will be telling his/her friends about in ten years? Preferably in a “this changed my life” kind of way? Then yeah, it’s probably worth it.)


2. The story must also be worthy of the side characters. The main character isn’t the only one in any story. This goes back to something I’ve been saying for years, which is: imagine the side characters are the stars of their own book. How would they act? Is it significantly different from how they’re acting? Then something’s wrong. They are just as alive and just as important as the writer’s main character, and even though they don’t have as much screen time, they have to feel alive to the reader.


3. “Make your characters suffer” is not an adage that exists in a vacuum. One of the reasons I liked Heretic so much is that yes, Rukis is terrible to her characters. But she is not arbitrarily terrible. That’s an important distinction. You want your characters to suffer because stories are about change, and it is fucking hard to get people to change–just think of your friend who drinks too much, or won’t quit smoking even though they have trouble climbing a flight of stairs, or won’t try to meet other people despite complaining about being lonely…these are just small examples and maybe not worthy of stories, but in them are the reasons we write stories: to teach us to change. The characters in the stories suffer so that we don’t have to. They go through the extreme circumstances that would make us change our ways, they come to the realizations we would come to in those situations, and they pass that knowledge along to us. When Isolation Play was published, I got several letters from people saying that after reading it, they took steps to mend a broken relationship with their parents–in the cases where I heard the results of those attempts, they went well. Those people didn’t have to get into fights with their boyfriends’ fathers; they learned from the troubles of the characters in the book–as did the characters themselves. That suffering meant something, both to the characters and to us. What does arbitrary trouble teach us? We try to weave meaning and lessons into the events that happen in the real world, the suffering we see around us: earthquakes and tsunamis, car accidents and cancer. Stories are a way to wrap hardship in meaning; without the meaning, what’s the point?(*)


(*) Yes, there are wonderful books like The Bridge of San Luis Rey and others whose point is attempting to distill meaning from the random events of life, and they are related to this. The characters in The Bridge of San Luis Rey who suffer are not the ones killed in the fall; they are the ones left behind, and from their grief, we understand the message the writer is conveying. What? You haven’t read The Bridge of San Luis Rey? Go do it. It’s short and it’s worth it. Plus, then there’ll be one more movie where you can say, “Pssht, the book was so much better.”


4. Characters do not require a happy ending. Change and growth are often painful. I tend to view endings where the character has learned a lesson and is ready to embark on a better life as happy, even if the character is still smarting from the wounds incurred in the learning of the lesson. Some people don’t see it that way, and that’s fine. There are all kinds of stories and all kinds of readers, and as long as readers believe the characters, they will be engaged with them. Having a reader hate the story because the writer was so mean to the characters is, in a way, a success: the writer created characters the reader engaged with and cared about, and didn’t want bad things to happen to. But ultimately, the writer’s only obligation to the characters is to end the story well.


Yes, this is almost the same as making the story worthwhile, but I wanted to call out endings in particular because they are so important. The ending has to leave the character in a state where the lesson has been learned or not, where the story has been brought to a close or left open in an acceptable way. Wrapping everything up neatly, giving someone a happy ending when it isn’t earned by the story, those can be as bad as an unworthy story.


5. Characters will let you know when they are ready for their story to be told. Just from my own cast, we have Dev and Lee, and while I think Dev is dragged unwillingly into book after book, Lee is a drama queen who wants the spotlight even as he protests that it’s too bright. They continue to bother me to write about them, finding stories to put them on stage with, demanding attention. Kory and Samaki, by contrast, seem worn out by their experiences, and are content to just go on with their uninteresting, happy lives. They had their moments and now would like to just shut the door, thank you very much. Believe me, if there were a story to be told with those two, I know there are people out there who want to read it. You write me and come up to me at conventions and make wistful comments on forums and Facebook, and I appreciate all of that, really. I love that you love them so much that you want to see more of them. It’s just that they don’t want to be in a story right now. See above: stories are about conflict and growth and change and suffering, and those kids just want to get through college.


Lee, on the other hand, would say, “I’ll live happily ever after when I’m dead.” So you know, those guys have two more books coming, and probably one more after that, and when I’m ninety I’ll be writing about them arguing about the holovision volume in the retirement home and whether to get a prosthetic tail or not. Unless they get worn out. Unless they stop coming to me and demanding attention. And then I’ll turn to someone else (what up, Sol?).


Because that’s the other thing about characters, the thing every writer has to remember: if the character isn’t right, you can always make a new one.


Just do it with care. Because if you don’t care about your characters, how can you expect your readers to?

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 09, 2013 09:21

August 1, 2013

Divisions and Winter Games now on Amazon

In case you were waiting for that.


It is sort of magical how I got an e-mail from Amazon last night asking me to verify my rights to the two books, logged into their site, verified the rights, and sent them on for processing–all with my phone while standing in line to check into a hotel. It didn’t FEEL magical–partly because we were in line for 50 minutes–but that is kind of the magic right there, that it is such an ordinary thing. I’m old enough that my first reaction to the e-mail was ‘well, damn, I won’t have wireless access until tomorrow night,’ and then I remembered, oh, wait, I am typing this ON A COMPUTER WITH INTERNET ACCESS. The only question was how well the Kindle site would come up on the phone, and it worked well. So some of those fifty minutes were put to good use.


(So were the others, in conversation with my road-trip friends, but that magic is old and well-known, if slightly endangered by the newer one.)


Anyway. The books are on Amazon. Other sites to follow at their own pace. Happy Thursday everyone!

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on August 01, 2013 07:44