Kyell Gold's Blog, page 41

Happy Holidays!

Whatever you celebrate at this time of year, I hope you’re having a joyful celebration with the people important to you. Kit and I had a lovely Christmas with family and friends and Les Miserables (I haven’t cried in a theater that much since “West Side Story”), exchanged gifts and hugs and cards and generally counted ourselves lucky to be able to have so many wonderful people in our lives.

Kit got me a nifty little Apogee USB microphone (“MiC”) that can connect to a Mac or an iPad, so hopefully I will be able to do some podcasting/livestreaming from remote locations, and maybe the Livestream audio quality will get a little better. We’re excited to try it out.

We watched “It’s a Wonderful Life” with Kit’s parents, as it had been a few years since any of us had watched it all the way through. It made me think about the impact real people leave on the world, and how either George Bailey is a rare case, or Clarence was only showing him the bits where he made a positive difference–very few of us leave nothing but positive marks on the world. But I do think that most of us can strive to leave a net positive, that we make sure that the mistakes we make are outweighed by the good we do. I don’t think anyone really intends to go through life doing harm, so the lesson to take from this is not so much “don’t be a dick” as “be aware of what your actions mean.” The people who do harm to us often do it unintentionally because they are thinking mostly/only of themselves in that moment, not of how their actions are going to affect anyone else. So keep other people in your mind and, well, yeah. Don’t be a dick.

What’ve you guys got going on for the holidays?

Get Gold In Your Inbox!

Are you tired of missing those ephemeral tweets with critical information about when my books are coming out? Tired of having to go hunt down journal entries online when all you want to know is a title? Hate wondering if Kyell Gold is going to be at the convention you’re planning on next month?

Well, there’s an easy solution. I’m starting a mailing list that will deliver directly to your inbox, once a month, news about my books, appearances, what I’m working on, and so on. The mailings may also include snippets of works-in-progress that I won’t post elsewhere and letters from fans–oh, the possibilities! If there’s something SUPER-EXCITING that I can’t wait to tell you about, I might send out one additional e-mail in a month, but probably that won’t happen often, and anyway, that’s why I keep this blog.

So if you’d like a little informative mailing from me once a month, pack up your Google info in an old kit bag and head on over to https://groups.google.com/d/forum/kye... to sign up. It’s free and I promise not to spam you. And the more people who sign up, the more my tail will wag.

“Winter Games” review!

Hey, if you haven’t yet picked up “Winter Games,” if you just aren’t sure about it, you can read a review of it on Flayrah.com. It’s quite positive, even if Fred is rather frustrated that he can’t reveal anything about the plot without spoiling it. I will say that “extremely literate mystery” is a description I like quite a bit and will probably steal.

Also, you will be able to get it at FurPlanet’s table at FC, if you’re going, and I will be around to sign it!

More New Books in January

You guys might be aware that I have a little book coming out at FC, but once you’ve bought that, what else are you to do? Well, our friends over at FurPlanet have a couple lovely titles that I have high regard for, and you might want to check them out…

First off, of course, there is my ottery co-host‘s book “Summerhill,” which I promise you is unlike anything else you’ve ever read. You will fall in love with the title character and the imagination of the worlds he moves through.

Second, there is a guest Cupcake* coming out! Watts Martin, who goes by Chipotle on some places (like FA) has written a tense little novella called “Indigo Rain.” It’s a thriller with romantic and social commentary undertones (and overtones in parts) that will keep you glued to the page until you get to the end. Also, it is illustrated by the fabulous Sabretoothed Ermine, and you know that is worth a look. He has a sample up on FA that you can check out if you still aren’t sure.

*We do not have a submission policy for guest Cupcakes, btw, so please do not ask me, Rikoshi, or foozzzball about whether you can do one. We happened to come across this story and decided it would be a good addition to our line, so we approached Watts and asked if he would like it to be published under that label, and he agreed.

Another Novel Draft Finished

The sequel to “Green Fairy” is now drafted. It was difficult to follow up a stylized book without doing the exact same trick, but also without just abandoning the conceit. I think I have reached a reasonable middle ground with it.

It needs a lot of editing work, because it is a first draft, but I wanted to get that done before the end of the year, and so there it is. Next year I will be editing it, and once I have a feel for how long that’ll take, I will be talking to Sofawolf about publication dates. Until then I don’t know when it will be coming out.

But it feels good to have it banked. So I have three novels drafted to edit next year: this one, OOP4, and Calatians book 2. It’s gonna be a good year.

Home Again

After two weeks in Australia, I am back home finally. On the one hand, it is good to be back, sleeping in my own bed (even if I woke up Tuesday morning thinking muzzily, “hey, this hotel has a lot of my stuff in it…cool”). On the other, the trip was amazingly cool. Kit and I rode ferries all over Sydney Harbour, ate fish and chips on the beach, had dinner in a harbourside restaurant during a spectacular lightning storm, went up the Sydney Tower for a 360-degree view of the city and harbour, met some super-cool folks who took us to places like the Royal Botanic Gardens, Lord Nelson’s Brewery, the Blue Mountains, and Newtown, and saw water dragons in the wild. We fed kangaroos, stood beside koalas, petted dingoes, watched wild kangaroos hop through vineyards, watched flying foxes and possums roam around at night, ran across a park to get pizza before a restaurant closed, met cool furries we hadn’t met before, got to know furries we did know better, met more cool furries, saw fursuits as different and diverse as the Australian wildlife, attended a moving commitment ceremony, went to one of the tallest buildings in the southern hemisphere to look out over Melbourne, were hosted (twice) by an excellent mainstay of the furry fandom, and in general made a lot of new friends–or, as I said many times, met a lot of previously unknown family. (Australians in general seemed more friendly and helpful than we’re used to in the U.S.–twice while Kit and I were pondering over maps in Sydney, random people came up to us to ask if we were lost, and happily recommended things for us to do. In the Melbourne airport, when I wandered near the gate agents to see if our plane was visible, one of the agents came over to me with a smile to ask what I wanted, and when I said I just wanted to see the plane, he turned and looked and pointed out the tail fin where the rest of the plane was hidden behind the jetway.)

I will post more about MiDFur in the coming days, I hope, although I am really busy this week, and so in case I don’t get to it for a while, here is the takeaway: this is a super-cool con, very well run. The furries there are like furries everywhere: warm, funny, creative, and social. MiDFur benefits an exceptional charity, the Dingo Discovery Centre, which brought a couple of their charming dingoes to the con; MiDFur also hosted an Australian furry comedian (Anthrax), some kick-ass dances, an amazing charity auction, a one-man light show, and the Furry Hall of Fame, which was really cool. In short, if you have a chance to go, in the words of Ferris Bueller, I highly recommend it.

OOP3 Title!

Well, you have waited very patiently, and the cover is now ready to be posted! So I can tell you the title of the new book.

Titles are always difficult. You will remember that Isolation Play took me months to come up with and I only really figured it out the August before release. This one I found a little more easily, and I think it works well for the book, and it has the added bonus of being short and sweet, in keeping with the rest of the series.

The third book in the OOP series will be titled Divisions.

On vacation, and. . .

FYI everyone, I am currently on vacation in Sydney and then heading to Melbourne for MiDFur. Internetting here is mostly accomplished thru the phone where I have wi-fi, so updates and responses to e-mail will be sporadic until I return home in mid-December. I still love you all, I promise. Yes, even YOU.

Follow me on Twitter (@KyellGold) for oddly-timed (to you) updates, and follow @KitSilver for even more updates!

The exception is…the title of OOP3, which I will be announcing in conjunction with the cover release sometime in the next 36 hours…

Elisa Rolle blog birthday party!

Awesome reviewer and founder of the Rainbow Awards Elisa Rolle has been doing her reviews of gay romance for six years, and she is having a party and treasure hunt! If you like books, go on over to her blog and check out the hunt–you could win an e-book as a prize! I have offered one of my books as one of the many prizes…

Congratulations to Elisa on six years and here’s to many, many more!

Here’s how her entry starts…

So another year is gone, and my Journal is now 6 years old Since end of November is also really near the time when the Rainbow Awards will wrap up nicely (on December 8th) this year I want to have a joint party! So I asked to many of the authors in this year contest to be generous and donate a book or two… and the answer was overwhelming: 243 among print and ebooks!

But this time you have to “earn” your prize and so there is a “little” treasure hunt: nothing complicated but you need to complete a chain made of Title-Word-Definition-Cover-Number. How? I will try to explain…

Happy Thanksgiving!

No big post today. There are a lot of things I’m thankful for–you guys are on the list, as always, of course–but I just want to remind you to take a moment and be thankful for the good things in your life.

I’m off to Australia in a couple days, so updates will be scarcer. Keep an eye on Twitter as I will try to post photos and short updates when I can.