Kyell Gold's Blog, page 35

Unsheathed Live Now Less Live

Thanks to the wonderful and delightful Trick, we have converted the Unsheathed Live episodes into MP3s and I have dropped them into the podcast feed for the regular podcast! Well, the first four, anyway. I had to listen to them a bit and figure out what we actually talked about, even though most of them don’t have themes.

Trick even added our bumper theme to the beginning! Thanks, hyena!

What Do Hockey And France Have In Common?

They both support gay rights.

France is poised to legalize same-sex marriage, adding to the list of countries ahead of the USA.

And the NHL is leading the USA’s professional sports in putting together a network of support in anticipation of gay players coming out soon–which is now in more sports than football.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court continues to think about it, and Time Magazine says that no matter what they decide, the country has already made its decision.

April Fools, Or Not

I posted an idea for my next cupcake a little while back (an Agatha Christie-style mystery with a lesbian romance), and the reaction to it was amusing. I did intentionally post it on April 1, and got the following general categories of responses:

1. Hooray mystery! Hooray lesbians!

2. Hooray for one but not the other!

3. Ha ha, funny April Fool’s joke, Kyell.

4. Wait, is it an April Fool’s joke?

The answer is: yes, it was an April Fool’s joke–but not in the way you are probably thinking (“I am going to propose writing a story I have no intention of writing!”). It was an April Fool’s joke because I was posting a story I do intend to write on April 1, thereby ensuring that some people would immediately disbelieve it as being no more than a joke.

Come on, I’m a fox. I can’t just do a normal April Fool’s joke.

Anyway, I wanted to thank all you guys who said you would love to see this, because, well, it’s happening. Fuzz and Teiran over at FurPlanet apparently get asked on a semi-regular basis why they don’t have more lesbian fiction. I’m not sure what my qualifications for writing all-female romantic fiction are, but if I’m judging by the commenters, apparently a lot of lesbians have sex with scissors or something? That sounds painful and I will not be writing about it.

The funny thing about going back and reading Christie is that there are lesbians all over those books. This one I’m reading now, “A Murder Is Announced,” has a middle-aged pair of women who live together, one of whom is constantly described with the adjective “manly.” Two women living together happens all the time in her books, and in one (“A Caribbean Mystery“), Jane Marple’s nephew Raymond assures her that her house will be looked after properly while she is away by this fellow he’s found:

“He’ll look after the house all right. He’s very house proud. He’s a queer. I mean—” He had paused, slightly embarrassed—but surely even dear old Aunt Jane must have heard of queers.

Whereas Miss Marple is quite amused at how sheltered he believes her to be:

Though really rural life was far from idyllic. People like Raymond were so ignorant. In the course of her duties in a country parish, Jane Marple had acquired quite a comprehensive knowledge of the facts of rural life. She had no urge to talk about them, far less to write about them—but she knew them. Plenty of sex, natural and unnatural. Rape, incest, perversions of all kinds. (Some kinds, indeed, that even the clever young men from Oxford who wrote books didn’t seem to have heard about.)

I firmly believe that if Dame Agatha were alive today, she would be writing gay relationships into just about every book, and in fact, would likely have gotten rather bored of them by this point. So I’m not really treading new ground, just, you know, furrying it up a bit.

Anyway, it is loads of fun and I am very excited about it and I hope all you guys are too. ^^

Divisions Fan Art

Some pretty nifty stuff by xtrent968 & his friend rhyno on FA (SFW)–go check it out!

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10319...

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/10206...

Deleted Bits From OOP4

So yeah, as I mentioned somewhere, the first-edited draft of OOP4 is being read by other people FOR THE FIRST TIME, which is always a little nerve-wracking (I have daymares about people coming back holding the paper and shaking their heads and saying, “this needs…a LOT of work” or “I dunno, it took me forever to get through it”), and anyway, I thought I would dip into the file of stuff I have cut OUT of the book and toss a few random lines up here. You can read whatever you like into them, but remember, these were all discarded from the actual draft going forward.

(Oh, and if you haven’t read “Divisions” yet, then there may be some minor spoilery things. Very minor. Probably more “confusing” than “spoilery,” to be honest.)

“You’re not makin’ life easy on yourself.”

“Not everyone on your team thinks the same.”

He laughs. “What, eighty-three? Ah, he’s a fuckhead. They were talking about how to get into your head. We told ‘em, he’s used to it and all you’re gonna do is piss him off.”

“Thanks.” I grin. “It’s been pretty surprising so far.”

*

“Well.” I gather my thoughts again. “There’s a pretty good chance that if I just call her up, and we start talking about Families United, she’ll hang up on me.”

“Agreed.”

I know he knows what I want from him, and he’s just making me say it. “So I want your advice on how to not make that happen.”

“You mean, on how to not come off as completely judgmental of her choices?”

“Her completely wrong, bigoted, hurtful choices. Yes.”

He clicks his jaw. “Well, I think I have a suggestion on a place you can start…”

*

And after that, I don’t feel like saying much. Even when I walk back into the sandwich shop, I stay pretty quiet. Dev tries to draw me out, but I remind him about focusing on football and he shifts topic, to yet another commercial he has to do, another interruption in his football schedule that has nothing to do with standing up for the people who really need someone to stand up for them. I know it’s not his fault, I know Ogleby signed a shitty contract, but I still want to yell at him, “Why can’t you take just an hour and do an interview with Equality Now? Take two hours and film a spot they can use?”

*

I get a glimpse of some tighty whities as the shorts come down and past the towel-wrapped ankle, but I don’t try for any closer a look.

*

I shake my head. “Wow, all these things going on I never knew about.” I look at my paws and wonder how my blunt claws would look with glowing purple claws. Or rainbows. “Can you turn them off?”

“Oh yeah. The light-up ones, they’ve got a magnet switch or something, you just wave ’em to turn them on and off.”

“Specialized market,” I say. “But I guess he’s got people willing to pay for ‘em.”

*

“Just so you’re good on the field. Hey, you know, Colin has this pre-game thing he does to calm down. I could ask him about it…”

“I don’t want anything from that prick,” I say as we walk out of the restaurant. “He can keep his prayer-circle meditations to himself.”

There you go!

Roger Ebert, RIP

I don’t make movies, but I did grow up watching them and watching people review them–Roger Ebert among them. As I have become a writer, the process of critiquing a story, even a cinematic one, has become more interesting. Few people do it well; few people do it for long. Ebert was the rare person who did both. I would read his movie reviews for movies I had no interest in seeing, just to see how he understood the story and what the filmmakers were trying to do. I would read his reviews of movies I loved to see what he loved about them, and often came away with a better understanding of the movies. I have spent hours just reading his reviews for the sheer pleasure of reading them.

His battles with cancer are well-chronicled, but what I find more remarkable is how he refused to retreat into private life, a move nobody would have faulted him for. He continued to see movies and write his thoughts long after cancer had taken speech from him; he penned long, thoughtful blog posts on any variety of topics.

What I admired most about him was his ability to judge a movie based on what it was trying to do, not on some universal standard that ranks Important movies above comedies, period dramas above musicals. He recognized that we need stories that make us think, stories that make us laugh, stories that make us cry–stories for every aspect of the human experience.

There’s nobody like him. He will be sorely missed.

Green Fairy – Behind the Scenes 5

[NOTE: Apparently I posted this on FA, but not here on the blog, as a friend just pointed out. Oh well. Here it is now. Sorry!]

And now, Niki.

I have something of a reputation for cross-dressing male foxes now, it seems, so apparently it only takes two to make a reputation. And that one short story. Whatever. Niki was different, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

As I mentioned in previous posts, when I decided to create a parallel story to Sol’s, I started out with “cross-dressing dancer at Moulin Rouge who has to hide his sexuality.” The name “Niki” just came to me; I can’t recall deciding on it. But “Niki” was a good gender-ambiguous name that could be short for Nikolai, and so Niki became Russian, just like that, a dancer pursuing his dreams and fleeing an abusive home life. He roomed with a painter, of course–what is the point of writing about bohemian Lutece if you don’t have a painter–and his roommate is a fanatical “art at any price” sort of person. That is what Niki thought he was, too; after all, to pursue dance, he left his family and friends, all the people who cared for him.

But as it happens, perhaps it was not art Niki was seeking. He finds himself unable to dance anywhere but in cabarets (though admittedly the Moulin Rouge is a pretty good cabaret, if you’re going to have to dance in a cabaret), earning extra money with private performances and becoming the practical one in his marriage-of-sorts with his roommate.

(Niki and Henri, in my mind, don’t have sex and don’t think of each other as “boyfriends” or anything like that. They are just partners in life. Perhaps the story of how they met would have been an interesting one to write… as it happens, the book is a ways from 1,000 copies so I don’t know that there will necessarily be a bonus story. Although I did just write an extra story years later for “Shadow of the Father,” so you never know.)

When I started to write Niki, I found an odd thing happening. His first appearance is dressed as a female dancer, and somehow he kept that femininity throughout the book for me. Maybe that’s just a question of him being less aggressive, more emotional, more romantic, but it was strange in that often I would find myself thinking about him as a her. I just had to make sure the pronouns remained masculine. I think it made him a well-rounded character–at the very least, it made him really interesting to write.

A lot of people seem to latch onto Niki in the book. The fact that he’s trying to help Sol makes him sympathetic; the fact that he has nearly no control over his life, no good choices to make, also engenders sympathy. The last scene with him and Jean was one of the hardest to write, both from an emotional standpoint and because I wanted to walk a line with it. Niki was desperate, yes, putting more faith into a long-shot hope than perhaps he should have, but he also believed that he could redeem Jean, that there was good there as well. And so in that final scene, though we see it objectively, Niki becomes ever so slightly the unreliable narrator as well. It hurts him to leave Jean, even though he knows he has to.

The other thing I thought of with Niki was the line from Othello, “He loved not wisely, but too well,” also about a character who comes to tragedy. And that is where Niki aligns with Sol, and maybe why he chooses to help the young wolf. Like Niki, Sol craves love desperately. His parents aren’t quite as abusive, but then, Sol isn’t growing up in the late 1800s in Siberia. Kids still do get thrown out of their homes, but the world is much larger and there are places they can go, friends and other family. In Petrograd, when Niki faced the choice of staying to join the army or leaving to be a dancer, it took much more courage than Sol’s attempt at running away did. But their situations have enough similarities that I could justify Niki being drawn to Sol, and that is really what is at the heart of the book.

(But don’t worry, Sol isn’t going to start wearing dresses.)

Another Cupcake Idea

I have been wondering what I would write for this year’s Cupcake, and through a variety of influences, I have been thinking. You guys would be into a British manor-house Agatha Christie-style mystery with a lesbian romance, right?

Like A Barrel Of Metaphors

Okay, today we are going to talk about metaphors and similes, together*. Metaphors and similes are a powerful part of your writing, because they help build up the feeling the reader has about your work by associating your characters, settings, and actions with images the reader already has feelings about.

(*) The difference: a simile uses a direct comparison, as in “he ran as fast as a cheetah,” and therefore usually uses the words “like” or “as.” A metaphor uses associated words to create the image, as in “he ran with great loping strides and feral intensity.”

But in order to be effective, metaphors and similes should be unified, and used judiciously. Don’t compare something to something in every sentence, and don’t just throw out whatever random comparisons you think of. Here’s a famous example from a song I had cause to think of again recently:

Come gather ’round people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you

Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’.

Now, this is a song, so everything is more compressed, and Dylan goes on to other metaphors in the next verses, but look at how beautifully everything comes together in this one. Public opinion is rising like a flood–soon you’ll be ‘drenched to the bone’ in it–and if you don’t adapt (“start swimming”), you’ll be left behind (“sink like a stone”).

In prose, you don’t generally want to hammer a metaphor home this hard. A little goes a long way. But you do want to look at the unity of theme. Imagine in the above if Dylan had looked at each of those aspects individually, and had thought, “Well, public opinion is spreading like a wildfire. What’s happening, like the weather, affects everyone, even if you can sort of hide from it for a bit. And as society moves forward, like in a big marathon race, the people who can’t keep up will be left behind.” Each of those is a valid metaphor in its own right, but put them together and you just get confusion. Using the same image throughout for the same things gives your prose power**.

Don’t overuse it, but don’t be afraid of it. Understand the comparisons you’re making and think them through, and you’ll add depth and meaning to your prose.

(**) Vary the words you’re using, of course. Those of you familiar with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will no doubt remember that the word “toad” is used in conjunction with Dolores Umbridge approximately ten million times over the course of that book, and even though Rowling does occasionally mix it up with words like “squatting,” which evoke toads without directly calling them, it is a fairly limited metaphor and it gets beaten into the ground. If she’d been able to link it to other themes in the book, it would have worked a little better, but it doesn’t jive well with Voldemort’s snake imagery, and nobody else is really compared to animals much, so it sticks out.

I Think You Can

Over FWA, I was approached with the following question: Did I think that people were born with the talent to write, or did I think anyone could become a writer with enough work?

Well, those of you who know me probably know how I answered. I believe strongly that anyone who applies him or herself can become a good writer. I do think that there are people who by virtue of their upbringing are more disposed to writing, and those people tend to have an easier time of it. Catherynne Valente, who says she was basically raised in a library, has an extraordinary facility with words, AND has studied enough to know how to use them. But there are certainly a good number of storytellers out there who are not artisan wordsmiths, and yet their stories are engaging and popular and enjoyed by many. You can be one of those people, yes you can.

I don’t know if there is a genetic predisposition to want to read, or if we are products of our environment. I grew up in a house with two English majors and a huge wall of books, isolated from neighbors. Another kid might have spent all his time climbing trees (something I rarely did) or exploring, but I grew bored with that quickly and instead explored the worlds found in books. I can’t say why I gravitated to science fiction and fantasy, given that neither of my parents did, but I devoured book after book, and they were happy enough with that.

But is that how I was born? Or was it because I was isolated in a house of books? If my father had been more sport-minded, if we’d grown up in a suburb with sandlot baseball and football (I was, shall we say, a little too vertically-challenged for basketball), would I have spent more time playing and less time reading? Who knows?

It doesn’t matter, really. Even if you didn’t spend your childhood reading and learning how other people tell stories, it’s not too late to start. You can train yourself to read, or if you have trouble with reading (perhaps you are dyslexic), you can listen to audio books. What you need in order to be a writer is to experience a lot of stories, and make a continuous attempt to tell them. You can train your brain to be a storyteller, but it isn’t easy, and you will be tempted to give up when you do not immediately succeed.

This is what I tell people all the time: you have to read, and you have to write. Reading exposes you to all the wonderful things other people are doing. Writing makes you examine the guts of storytelling, the gears and cogs below the surface, so that you can make your own contraptions work. And reading and writing both keep your mind in that state where you are open to stories, which is the most important thing.

The cool thing about writing is that you can start at any age, and you can write for as long as you can tell a story. Nobody makes you retire, and someone who started writing ten or twenty years before you will not necessarily always be better than you. There are successful writers who started in their thirties or forties and write well into their eighties. All you need is the drive to succeed, and something to write about. And that’s something you don’t have to be born with.