Kyell Gold's Blog, page 47

Mountains, Fires, and Dogs

I am back in the Bay Area now after a two point five week trip roaming around the Western U.S. seeing all kinds of amazing things. It was a lot of fun, but also tiring, and I have to thank Kit for his patience in handling my insistence on writing for at least part of it. One of the things about being a full-time writer is that you don’t really get many vacations, or at least, I don’t, because I always have the laptop with me, and if I don’t, I always have the stories with me, and they will keep growing even if I’m not paying attention to them. So every now and then I have to stop and write some of them down. There are also deadlines to be met and projects that aren’t going to write themselves, and so yeah. Two and a half weeks will have to include some stops to write, and Kit, who took the whole time off work, was very patient with me.

But anyway. We started our trip by seeing a couple good friends in Sacramento, good friends and fun folks, and then drove on to Reno for the night. The next day was all driving, but northern Nevada wasn’t as hot as we’d feared; the bad heat came when we hit Utah. We got to Colorado that night, and to a little place in the mountains the next afternoon, where Kit’s family was all gathered for the wedding. It’s a big family and they always make me feel welcome. The wedding was beautiful and we got to catch up with a lot of people we rarely see, so that was a fun few days. Also I got to eat a sandwich at 10,000 feet.

Sandwiches at Ten Thousand Feet

For the Fourth, we found a little condo to rent in Vail that allowed pets, and joined a couple friends plus dogs for a very Amercian couple of days. We got little stars and stripes flags and everything. The parade was funny–kind of an attempt to be a Small Town U.S.A. parade as put on by a rich mountain resort. Still, it was all good, and there were kids running around in plastic bubbles on water and good Mexican food and a beer pavilion.

July 4 Parade

Following that, we moseyed our way down to Denver for more family and friends visitations. The fires were mostly contained by that time, though we saw several black scars marking their passage. Kit’s mom said she’d often smelled smoke and could see the bright glow on the mountains from their Colorado Springs house–luckily, they were never in any danger from the fires. We visited with her and also got to attend a gallery opening in a bar! One of our very talented artist friends had a show of her art in Bender’s Tavern in Denver, and it will be there through July. If you missed it, you should go check it out–it is quite awesome.

After the weekend, we fled Colorado amid the thunder and lightning and pounding rain of an amazing storm that had me soaked in about a ten-second frantic run from the supermarket entrance to Kit’s car. We drove south and south and farther south, to a remote mountain outpost somewhere in the wilds of New Mexico, where a friend’s family took us in for a very quiet calm before the storm of Comic-Con. We watched wild horses and played with dogs of many sorts and played Cards Against Humanity and generally had a nice relaxing time.

New Mexico Hills

Then it was time for us to cross the desert and make our way west, to the lawless mass of seething humanity that is… San Diego Comic-Con.

New E-Book: Science Friction

And the winner this time is…the Apple Store, which posted the book on the stroke of midnight on July 1. Amazon probably would have gotten it going sometime this afternoon, except that due to quality assurance, they had to ask me to go back and check the box that says I have the right to publish the book again. Because, you know, someone who’s pirating a book will check the box once, but not twice. And B&N is creeping along at its usual pace, and Google is doing what Google does, which will undoubtedly be brilliant when their store is finished.

Anyway! You can go buy a pine marten’s gay sex farce on Apple, soon on Amazon, and that should cover your ePub and Kindle needs for now. Come on, Vaxy’s counting on you! Don’t make the pine marten make a sad face.

Incoming Pine Marten

You guys have all been waiting for that naughty happy pine marten Vaxy to invade your Kindles and Nooks, right? Well, your wait is almost over. “Science Friction” will go on sale on July 1, or as close to there as I can manage while attending a wedding. Yes, I know. There’s a certain irony in that. I’m uploading it now to Apple, will probably do the others on Friday (and it doesn’t seem to matter when I upload to Google because they’ll put it on sale at some time X days from now where X = “whenever the hell we get around to it”–like, they still don’t have “Silver Circle” up). Anyway, it will include the delightful interior art by Cirrus Kitfox, so don’t miss it!

For Grown Ups

In this whole thread of “you should not be ashamed of the fandom,” one recurring thread comes up: what about the adult stuff?

Well, that’s kind of the crux of the whole problem, right? Furry is this unusual mix of things both adult and non. Nobody has to decide whether to tell their co-workers about the one night a week they spend in the dungeon; nobody has a problem telling their co-workers about their love of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (the series, not the character…that’s a different thing). But furry is both. It’s a community of people, it’s completely innocent pictures of you as a fox person (a little weird), it’s stories with animal characters…and…it’s pictures of dog-people ****ing (h/t Knotcast). So how do you tell people you’re into the fun stuff while leaving off that you may or may not also be into the stuff you don’t want to tell them and, frankly, they don’t want to hear about?

One objection I hear is that “the fandom is [insert ridiculously high invented percentage] sex.” Well, the blog [adjective][species] did a little survey that is relevant to that. Turns out that most people in the fandom think sex is a lot more important to other people than it is to them.

Huh.

Yeah, we all have this perception that everyone else is just in the fandom for the porn. “Most” of the art uploaded to FA is porn (really, it’s closer to a quarter, even counting “mature” and “adult” together as adult). “Most” of the coverage of the fandom in the media revolves around the sex (truer about ten or fifteen years ago than now); as if it’s a surprise that the media would focus on the most sensational and tawdry aspect of anything they cover. Sure, some of the most popular artists (and authors) in the fandom are known for their adult work. But there are a lot of great artists and authors who aren’t, and even the ones who are also produce non-adult work (mostly; Rukis’s defiant defense of her adult work is worth reading too).

The main point I want to make here is that if you believe that the fandom is mostly about the sex, then you are contributing to the image that it is. Objectively, there is plenty to enjoy in the fandom for people who don’t want to see anything adult. As I wrote in an earlier post, focus on what you enjoy about the fandom. Yeah, if you log in to FA just to look at the porn and go to conventions for sex parties and that’s your entire exposure to the fandom, then maybe you shouldn’t tell people about it, unless you would tell them about your private life anyway (e.g. a serious romantic partner). But if you hang out with friends, and had a cool picture of your character drawn with clothes on, and built a fursuit to go bowling in… then you don’t have to tell people that you also got a commission of your character without clothes. You can tell them that the fandom is pretty open and sex-positive, and so yeah, there’s a certain amount of that floating around. But it’s not what we’re about.

And since I’m on the subject: yes, the fandom is more sex-positive and open than mainstream society. I happen to think that’s a good thing. Listen to Dan Savage sometime if you want to hear how full of screwed-up relationships the mainstream is. Here in the fandom, kinks are not only accepted but almost expected (after all, we like animal-people), and overall people have a much healthier view of sex and sexuality than I find in the mainstream. K.M. and I were in a writing group at one point where we were discussing a story that treated sex rather frankly, if euphemistically, and the majority of the class could not stop giggling about it. It was unsettlingly like being in a room full of sixth-graders. And here we were, the two authors who write about sex fairly explicitly, acting the most mature about it. It was an interesting experience…and one that just made us love the fandom even more. Then again, when I showed “Isolation Play” to my non-furry former boss, I warned her about “certain pictures” in it and then left it on the table while I went to the bathroom, leaving it to her discretion as to whether to look… and when I came back, the first thing she said was “those weren’t so bad!”

For my money, the adult side of the fandom is a positive. But I know it can also be a shock to people not used to it, so when I say “you don’t have to mention it,” I mean that it might be politically more sound to leave off that part. But hey, you never know. Your co-worker might turn up on the next Rarakie Iron Artist list…

More Tomorrow

I’m thinking about writing about adult material and the fandom, but I want to think about it a little more and right now I have about exactly an hour free. Since I’d rather not rush it, I’ll put off that posting.

But Rukis has some thoughts (of course she does) which are worth reading, and which has five hundred or so comments already. Check it out, think it over. That’s not exactly what I’ll be talking about, but what I’m mulling over is the internal and external perception of the fandom as sex-obsessed, and the fandom’s reaction to it.

I will say that things that have been keeping me busy today include editing books and writing new books and also sending a birthday card to my grandmother. I will also be working this week to get “Science Friction” up on various e-book stores, and prepping to go down to San Diego Comic-Con. You guys are all coming to that, right?

Heartening Response

I have been quite waggy at the response to my last two posts about being proud to be a furry. People in general have appreciated them and the most negative responses I’ve gotten have been “I don’t know if that applies to me.”

Most of the questions have been around how to deal with the adult side of the fandom when talking to others, and yeah, that’s something that deserves its own post. I didn’t post today because I wanted to finish crossing things off my to-do list, and now it’s five o’clock and the weekend’s started. Maybe tomorrow, or Sunday, or Monday.

But in general, I want to add this one little thing, which came out in conversation today about those posts: when you hide something you enjoy because you’re afraid of ridicule or negative reactions, you are undermining your own decision to keep doing that thing you enjoy. You are, in effect, saying, “you people are right to be negative about this thing I like.” And that makes you feel worse about yourself–and, of course, the fandom.

(Again, this doesn’t necessarily apply if you’re underage and living at home in a conservative family who might kick you out or who has the power to punish you; it doesn’t mean you have to bring your fursuit to work to be completely honest with the co-workers you don’t really want to be close friends with; it doesn’t mean that you have to be completely open about all aspects of the fandom with everyone, or even with most people. It means that if there is someone important in your life who isn’t aware of the fandom but is aware of the fandom-sized hole in your accounts when you tell them what you’ve been up to, then maybe you should think about filling in that hole.)

I Am A Furry

(There, no punctuation in the title this time.)

In response to yesterday’s post, I got a thoughtful question on FA about “coming out” as a furry. Namely, why bother? It’s just a hobby, right? Do we “come out” as a stamp collector, or a Man United fan, or a Jane Austen fan?

I said in the original post that I didn’t necessarily want to compare coming out as gay, a preference coded into us at birth which dictates many aspects of how we live if we choose to live with a partner, with coming out as furry, a not-fully-understood aesthetic appreciation for animal-people that can range in degree from a guy who likes to talk about Looney Tunes cartoons with his friends to a woman who makes a living designing fursuits and wears her own every chance she gets. But it’s telling that when people talk about telling their friends and family that they’re furries, that the phrase “coming out” is more and more commonly used.

It’s understandable. It means “revealing a part of ourselves that was hidden,” and because gay people were the ones most commonly hiding important parts of their lives well into adulthood, it’s been associated with revealing one’s sexuality. I think that its use in talking about furry is not so much connected to the “hidden” part as it is to the “important” part.

For a lot of people, furry is more than just a hobby; it’s a home. Some people don’t have any other homes; some people are perfectly happy with their family in one setting, with their office “home” in another, with furry in their spare time. What I mean by “home” is a place where you feel safe, where you feel sad to be away from, where some of the closest people in your life reside.

When I was first getting into the furry fandom, I had a friend who came out to his parents and was kicked out of his family. To a lot of guys in their early 20s, that would be devastating, and he was pretty broken up about it. But he had a boyfriend, and he had the furry fandom, a great support network that made sure he always had a friend around and an ear to listen to his troubles. That’s what I mean by a home.

Right now, I have a family who aren’t furries. But most of my closest friends are furries, and when Kit and I got married, the furry stuff was pretty much all over our wedding (because our wedding planner, a non-furry, fell in love with it). I have a furry image of myself as the lock screen on my phone, a furry pic of me and Kit as my phone background, so literally a day doesn’t go by that I don’t see some furry art, and now that I’m making my living from writing–largely in the furry fandom–most days I end up talking to other furries or talking about furries.

If your life is like that, if you have a group of close furry friends, and yet you’re not sharing that part of your life with other people close to you, then you’re hiding something from them. You’re not sharing all of who you are. And that’s fine, honestly; if anything, people these days tend to overshare. But if you want to tell them, and are simply not telling them out of fear that they’ll jump to conclusions, then you’re doing them a disservice and you’re selling yourself short.

That’s who my post yesterday was aimed at, people who cited the primary reason for hiding their furriness as “I don’t want to be associated with those people in the news.” If you’re a casual furry, or if you’re distant from your family and non-furry friends, then sure, they don’t have to know. But if one of your family, your co-workers, or your friends is trying to get to know you better, and they ask “why’d you go to Pittsburgh?”… well, before you automatically say, “just to see friends” and change the subject, pause for a second and think. Maybe that’s a good time to “come out.” Maybe that’ll help you get closer to the other people in your life. You might have to take a little teasing, but take it with good humor, and it’ll be fine. As I said before, as K.M. and I have said on the podcast and Rukis has said in panels over and over: if you act like it’s something to be ashamed of, people will pick up on that. If you act like it’s a cool thing, fun, and a positive part of your life, which I think for most of us it is, people will pick up on that too.

[The subject of "isn't that fandom all about sex?" is one that probably requires a lot more words. I'll just say here that generally people will not run immediately to their computer to look for that naked pic of your character. Your family and non-furry friends do not want to see that. And if they ask you "isn't that all about sex?" just laugh and say, "that's all the damn media want to talk about, isn't it?" and go on to tell them about furry dances, about all the non-adult comics out there, about the ice cream socials and charity events. And say, "yeah, there's adult stuff--we're adults, we like sex too. We just don't shove it into dark corners like they do out in the real world, and the media and repressed right-wingers can't handle that."]

Getting To Know You … Mormons and Furries

Two possibly related things: Mormons and furries.

Okay, so back in 2008 there was this ballot initiative here in California that you might have heard of: Prop 8, to amend the California Constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. One of the stories surrounding it (and there were many) was the heavy involvement of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, spending money, sending volunteers, and possibly swinging the outcome in a vote that was ultimately decided by two percentage points. In the wake of the election, I and others criticized the church and had a pretty sour feeling toward Mormons in general.

But in the intervening almost-four years, I’ve met several Mormons (and ex-Mormons), and today, as coincidence would have it, I read this article about the church’s softening stance on homosexuality. What stuck out to me is that the people in favor of being both gay and Mormon are not leaving the church, not sitting quietly and letting the elders guide their policies. They’re marching. They’re talking about it. They aren’t protesting violently or acting as though what they’re doing is shameful. They’re creating groups (“Building Bridges,” which makes me retroactively glad I dropped the “Building” from the title of that one book). They are marching–as Mormons–in gay pride parades! Can you imagine a Mormon group trying to march in a gay pride parade in 2009?

Also, I found out something else I didn’t know: The church leaders in Utah “supported a 2009 anti-discrimination ordinance in Salt Lake City that protected people on the basis of sexual orientation.” So by talking to friends and remaining open, my opinion of Mormons has, dare I say it, evolved. I’m still critical of the church leadership and still think that what they did in California in 2008 was wrong, but I’m much less inclined to say “Mormons are evil.”

Also today, I read a journal post regarding the fallout from the criminal behavior of a couple furries at a furry event sponsored by and benefiting a rescue worker group (to which several of the furries belong). Among all the other stuff, I saw a few people saying, “This is why I don’t tell my friends I’m a furry.”

There’s a movement to collect money to make up for the financial fallout, and I think that’s great. It certainly will help repair the image of furries. But I think more important than that is the lesson of the gay rights movement(*) and the lesson of the Mormons, above. I think we need to be unashamed of being furries.

(* The furry fandom has a lot in common with the gay community, but I don’t want to equate the fight to live equally in a relationship we were born to prefer with the right to have people not make fun of us for liking animal-people. They’re different in degree, and I realize that. But at the core of both is the fight to be respected as people no matter how we are born or how we choose to express those feelings we are born with, or how we choose to live our lives as long as we aren’t harming others.)

Because:

1. If we act ashamed of it, then the people who don’t know anything about it will assume that it’s something to be ashamed of. Really. This is a thing. Imagine that you’re doing a Google search, and this kinda weird cult-thing comes up that you don’t know anything about, and you’re like, “hey, wait, I recognize that symbol–my friend has it on her laptop.” So you go ask her about it. How would you feel if she replied with:

* “Oh, yeah! It’s kind of a fun thing a few of us do. Sorta weird, but I really have fun with it.”

* “It’s nothing. I only kind of like the symbol. I’m not really that INTO it, not like a lot of OTHER people are. My God, you didn’t see that CSI episode, did you?”

If you act like it’s no big deal, then your friends will think it is–wait for it–no big deal. If they saw the NJFurBQ thing, and ask you about it, then you just say, “There’s like fifty thousand furries in this country. Some of them are bound to be inconsiderate assholes. Me and my friends all donated money to cover the cost of what those idiots did and people are talking about banning them from future furry events.” That’s it. End of story.

2. If you don’t tell people you’re a furry, then all they will know is the people who get the publicity. This includes the CSI episode, the NJFurBQ, the panda guy… The lesson of the Mormons, above, is that despite some pretty bad publicity, you can change people’s perceptions a little at a time. Yes, you are not going to be written up in the paper for being a guy who does NOT have illegal public sex. But you know what? Your friends know YOU. They don’t know that guy in the paper. And associating YOU with the fandom gives them a hell of a lot more reason to have a positive impression of it than the publicity surrounding the few idiots/criminals who surface every so often.

When I mentioned this on Twitter, I got a couple responses that I think merit addressing. One is “I can’t come out as a furry at work; I’d lose my job.” Well, okay. Personally I think there are far fewer of those situations than people think, but that’s not my judgment call. I want to emphasize that I am not saying that you should wear a fursuit to work, or jump up on your desk and shout “I AM A FURRY.” I’m saying that if a friend asks you about the con t-shirt, or about your Lion King poster, or why you went to Pittsburgh last weekend and did it have anything to do with that convention thing, that you should not be ashamed to say, “Yeah, I hang out with this fandom that’s pretty cool.”

The other response was that “the bad apples get all the press and we’ll all be tainted by association.” That’s what I was trying to get across above, that if you’re just talking to your friends, well, they know you. They trust you, if you’re not a dick (don’t be a dick). They don’t know that guy in the paper. I’m sure if you reach, you can find an example of an asshole in some group they belong to–churches, sports fans, whatever–to give them an analogy. The best way to say it is “that guy in the paper is an asshole/criminal/idiot, and he’d be an asshole/criminal/idiot no matter what he was into, but because he’s a furry, he was an asshole/criminal/idiot in a furry way, and because people don’t really know a lot about furries, they assume that that’s typical.”

And the fandom is doing so many cool things. We give thousands and thousands of dollars to charity every year. We have a vibrant, flourishing artistic and literary community. We cherish and foster creativity and independence and self-expression. We are tolerant to a fault. We are good people. This is a fandom that I am proud to be a part of, and I tell people about the cool things we do ALL THE TIME. When I brought a couple non-furry SF writers to MFF last year, they were thrilled, and they said, “Next year, we’re coming back with costumes.”

So be proud of your fandom. Be judicious about where you talk about it–don’t get fired or disowned or whatever. But give people a chance to hear the good side of the fandom.

And if you hear about people doing shit like at this NJFurBQ–speak up and tell them that’s not okay. If you see it happening, stop it. This is your fandom. Take ownership of it.

Ups and Downs

So after spending most of the winter and spring writing, I am starting to get feedback on things, which is generally nice. I wrote a short story novelette for the Gaylaxicon conbook that the writing group liked; waiting to hear back from the con people. I wrote a short story for the OklaCon conbook that the other GOH (FA: uglylilmonster) quite liked, using three characters she originated and is drawing for the con. I wrote a Cupcake for September and approached an artist about it, and she just responded today to say that she really liked the story and is enthusiastic about the drawings, so that caused much wagging.  I will definitely be telling you more about the story and the artist coming up to the release in September at RainFurrest (in print; e-book naturally will follow later). And early feedback on OOP3, what little there is, seems mostly positive. At least, people are interested in the story enough to be reading it (and K.M. messaged me to say that I am a bad fox, by which he means a good fox).

And then a friend who is reading OOP for the first time called to say that he is almost to the end and wanted to tell me how engaged he is with the characters, which was really nice and made me happy.

On the downie side, as many of you know from following Twitter, the trusty MacBook Pro has been out of commission since about June 3rd, when it suffered an unfortunate liquid contact issue (MacBooks do not like beer, it turns out). Well, you know, these things happen. I got it back on the 12th and excitedly went to set it up again (because they had to replace the HD–we got all the data off, though, don’t worry, and my writing is all on Dropbox, so pretty safe against accidental loss). It restarted itself once during the setup process, and I thought that wasn’t a great sign, but whatever, it was starting to work…only it kept restarting, screwing up the copying process in a couple cases. I started to worry, and then it behaved okay that night…but the next day it crashed and froze, restarted itself within a couple minutes of logging in, and just generally was unusable. So I took it in to the Apple Store, where of course it behaved angelically. Long story short, a friend who works at Apple came over and helped me diagnose the problem (we’re hoping it’s the Airport Card), and I took it in to the Apple Store today to get that replaced. Paws crossed.

But the thing about that, apart from it taking up a lot of time running back and forth and diagnosing and all, is that I, being brought up Catholic, have this kind of tendency to feel that bad things are My Fault. The liquid spill–whatever, accidents happen, no biggie. But with the thing not working right when it came back, I start to feel like asking “WHAT AM I BEING PUNISHED FOR?”

However, the visit today went much better, and I hope to have it back tomorrow or Tuesday, in time to take on the trip. And the number of parts they replaced versus the cost of the repair makes me feel good, too–yeah, it was an expensive repair, but we got about 80% of a new computer out of it (everything but the display, essentially). So all in all, it’s not been too bad, and I still have the PC laptop I use at home that I can work on.

But it’s been a stressy week, and I’m still nervous about what my critiquers will say about OOP3 in a week.

Anthrocon Things!

Specifically, three of them. I have three new things that you can check out at AC this year, and sadly, I will not be there to sign (but you can bring them to RMFC or RF and I will sign them there!):

* Green Fairy has been out for a few months, but it’s new to most of you AC people. If you liked Waterways, you will be happy to see me go back to a high school protagonist. If you like a dash of supernatural in your gay, you will be happy to find a ghost in the book. If you like second-base-playing wolves, snappy coyotes, sarcastic otters, sinister chamois, slinky foxes, or starving-artist rats, well! Is this a book for you! It’s already getting some terrific response from people and has been nominated for the ALA’s Over the Rainbow end of year list, AND I am planning out a sequel. And if all that wasn’t enough, you get some gorgeous illustrations from Rukis and an eye-popping cover. It’s available at the Sofawolf table–run and get one! (And of course, if we sell a thousand of them this first year, I’ll write an extra story in that world for free…)

* While you’re at the Sofawolf table, pick up Heat #9. The adult anthology magazine returns for another go-round, and I have a story in it that I’m quite happy with. It calls back to the League of Canids (third LoC story to appear in Heat), but with a different twist. Also, it has some beautiful work by Nimrais to accompany it. And you know, you also get a whole other magazine full of beautiful stories and illustrations. Such a deal!

* Anthrocon also marks the debut of the print edition of my short werewolf novel Silver Circle, over at the FurPlanet table. The e-book has done well and people have said nice things about it, even my die-hard gay furry readers who wouldn’t normally pick up a book starring a female human. But hey: werewolves! I’ve been most pleased that people like the werewolf mythology I created for the book, because it was something I put a good amount of thought into and thought it felt right for the world.

That’s not too much to keep an eye out for, is it? Hope you guys all have fun at AC and maybe I’ll see you there one of these days. You know, when they move it to California.