I'm actually re-working Basecraft Cirrostratus without the sex scenes and with a much longer, more involved ending originally written as its sequel for many of the reasons you've mentioned here.

I would read that. Gay romance is fine and Cirrostratus had an intriguing summary/plot of what I read, but too many sex scenes and I do get uncomfortable. Some are okay so long as they're not too explicit, though.

Seems to be the consensus; the story was just a little too short and the sex scenes didn't add much.

Again, though, some sex is okay. Sex can be used to show the level of intimacy to which people/anthros/whaever take a relationship to or other things about the personality depending on the emotions and body language shown. It's when a writer focuses either too much on the act of sex or treats sex merely as the action that it gets tiring.

*whatever

I know personally the thing that attracted me to your books was the story. Character development and the flow - especially when reading the OOP series and Waterways.

The sex in these books was never something I seeked to read, but they do play a role in the story to show the characters bonding and being closer (In the case of a Tiger and Fox, getting them to momentarily stop fighting)

I feel you have a good balance between Sex and Story from what I have read - enough to keep a lot of people interested.
Never read Volle however - after reading that blog I'm curious to pick it up now.

Volle is a very good book. It alsonhas the good balance of sex emotion espionage spies and medevil style time period. Volle is the first furry novel I ever read and really one of the only books I couldnt stop reading till I had finished inhonestly cant wait to get the next books and see how short amount of time it takes to read through the story lines. Kyell is the first author I would recomend any new furry to honestly. The story lines are amazing an like I said the valance between love sex and the story is perfect for any furry and even those who arent a part of the fandom and jiat like a good story

I do like a good story, but the sex is like really tasty candy - I want sprinkled in the story here and there to leave that good taste in my brain!

My favorite thing about the OOP serious is the fact that is literally isn't just another typical furry book/comic. It's built off the characters and the story arc, and now by whose fucking who and how much sex they are having. As you implied yes there are sex scenes here and there, but that's the same as life. You have other popular furry books that's all about sex and it's extremely exaggerated. I always look forward to the OOP series since it's the only book series I've chosen to read rather then being forced to. For the LGBT community, no comment because I don't go around to find out xD

Keep up the great work =D

I only just started reading your work with the Ursa Major Awards Anthology, but I like it so far. I need to write more and i plan on having sex included (not the main part of course), but i'm very inexperienced writing sex. Do you have any advice?

For all the talk of furries being sex-crazed, this is a refreshing account! Thank you for sharing.

There will always be someone out there saying there isn't enough sex, or that there is too much sex. I enjoy it as much as the next guy but there are times where I will skip passed the sex just to get more out of the story.

I see sex in fiction as merely a part of the plot. People call it "porny" or whatever, but it's common that characters have sex. People have sex. I think the problem is that a lot of adult erotica writers will specifically write to their pace. If a erotica writer is in hormone overdrive, chances of their characters having sex more frequently increases; the plot takes a backseat. When it comes to sex, my advice to writers is that you need to let the sex come naturally (no pun intended). Readers will know, right away, when you're forcing the sex to happen. When the sex is delicately and naturally woven into the plot, the act has more meaning -- enough meaning for the audience to immerse themselves in the experience. If you play your cards right, the sex can be integral to the plot as a whole and pose no threat to the consistency of your narrative.

Hm, I find it quite interesting that a non-furry gay audience would be more interested in the sex than a furry gay audience! I definitely didn't expect that.

Personally, I am not ashamed to admit that I love all the sex you put into your stories, and that my general stance is that the more gay sex there is, the better! :p

In interest of full disclosure, I would even go as far as to say that I haven't read your non-explicit work yet.

That isn't to say I don't enjoy a good plot, I most certainly do!. Shadows of the Father was great despite being relatively tame. The reality is though that when I pick up and reread stories, I tend to naturally gravitate towards the yiffy bits first and if there aren't any yiffy bits.. well.. shucks.. that's no fun!

So suffice to say I'm pleased as punch that while you continue to expand your audience, you aren't forgetting your more.. lascivious fans!

That's actually quite interesting. I know that I enjoy both the sexual and non-sexual portions of the OOP series, and Volle was a fun romp, but I'm not sure I actually have a preference one way or another. I mean, there's fap fiction, and then there's literature. Even literature can have sex in it, in my humble opinion, and you can learn much about characters when they're at their most vulnerable or in the heat of the moment.

Interestingly enough, I actually tried a bit of an experiment about that here on FA. I wrote a novel called Merge (http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8626678) where I ended up having a couple chapters with sexy time in them. I also simultaneously posted the same chapters, but in PG form, with the sex no more than implied (Chapters 7, 9, and 16 for those inclined to take a gander at the differences). A quick glance at viewing numbers show that the sexytime version of a given chapter has anywhere from 2:1 to 3:1 more hits than the PG version. Now, on it's own it doesn't prove very much (perhaps most of those initial hits were really just looking for fap fiction, which this novel was not, and immediately ran off to other more immediate returns), but it's definitely interesting. I wish that these sites had better breakdowns of statistics so I could draw better conclusions.

The thing to remember about view counts is that is just indicates how many people clicked on your submission, not how many people read it.

A red-bordered submission in the Recent Stories entries probably gets clicks, but no actual readers.

Agreed, hence my comment on furs searching for fap fiction. Metrics like how long someone stayed on a page would likely be a better indicator, but nobody provides that information. Creep factor on that would be pretty high.

Well, metrics like that don't necessarily show anything terribly useful.

For instance, a couple years ago, FA released the list of their top ten search times on the site, and number one was 'vore.'

Now, that doesn't mean that vore is the most popular thing on this site, or that this is primarily a vore site or anything like that--just that the people who are looking for something specific are going to go out of their way to look for it, whereas people who are content with 'just regular stuff' can just take what comes without extending extra effort.

I dunno, I find stuff like that kind of fascinating.

That's an excellent point as well. I'm a software developer, so I just like metrics, but understanding what you're measuring precisely isn't easy :)

Wow - I now know that I need to give the OOPS series a chance. I will admit - I'm one of those furs that would rather there be less explicit scenes in the books, though I will admit that Volle was well played. It really did flow well, and the explicit bits fit into the story well enough that I read them through (I'm straight, so gay scenes don't do me any good anyway). But the way it was written makes those scenes important, and I didn't object at all to them. That said, I was under the impression that OOP was much more explicit, and haven't picked it up to try yet. But now that I know the background of it, it definitely sounds like something I'm going to check out. I'll get through the first half of the book as long as it's as well written as Volle, and then I can get my 'story fix'.

I also am surprised that there was such a response from the LGBT community. While I've heard it several times, it's funny to see that not all furries are as sex crazed as we're painted to be. Nuka keeps trying to tell us, but it just never sinks in...but the sentiments you encountered are funny. Furries - "more story, please", then 'mundanes' - "More sex please". Just makes me laugh. My opinion - keep writing what you want to and just let us enjoy it - it seems to have been working well enough for you so far.

K Fox (now very much looking forward to Green Fairy and it's sequel, from the sound of things)

**stares in wonder at the rouge S in the first line** I'd swear that was OOP when I typed it... where'd that S come from??!?'

K Fox (grumble grumble...when're they gonna get an 'edit post' function in here...it's awfully overdue)

I must admit I originally experienced the sex in your stories as outside-my-reality, but the stories where so good, I glossed over the sex. But the more I read, the more I saw how your sex senses are part of the character building. Later I realized you opened my vision to a wider world of understanding (and more accepting) of gay sex in literature.

As for the different audiences and their focus or non-focus on the sex parts of the stories; I believe there are as many ways to be gay as there are ways to be straight. Some are sex focused (ei: skirt chasers) and some are sex hostile (ei: sex only for procreation) and most are somewhere in the center. I believe it is the same for the sex in your stories. Most of us read your stories for the wonderful stories. The sex is part of the characters, not the reason for the story.

Thank you for expanding my vision and for the your wonderful stories. Education and entertainment, a nice mix.

Interesting to read about that.

I've only got four of your books [waterways, prisoner, volle and pendant] but it's always impressed me how well balanced the books have been.

Your sex scenes [to the best of my memory] have always felt like a completely natural part of the story, they were used to progress both story and character as well as to just extend the natural feel of their reality.

I've not once felt that they didn't belong, whereas on the other hand I've read White ninja by Eric Lustbader and that had one sex scene in it which was extremely forced and didn't fit in with the story at all for me, it felt tacked on like a desperate attempt at getting attention for what was a very poor story.

Or to make a reference closer to the fandom, ASB. I like the comic and think it has some good story and great moments but that could have done without any sex at all so that it could have been shared with a wider audience [though I do understand the reasoning behind it, the whole thing about comics containing gay stuff automatically receiving an 18 rating so (as far as I'm aware) they just went with it.]

Leave sexytime gaps all you want. . . I will fill them in with art. Canon or not! (that is both a promise and a warning)

Cuz y'know. . . I'm totally one of those shallow sorts that WANTS the sex in every single book. I say this completely, utterly unashamedly, by the way.

well i do agree with waht you said on the blog
i gotta say "watch out for spoiler" too hehe but makes me even more wanting to read the next ones

Informative. Very informative as well as helpful to someone who has been wondering if -in a book that basically consists of a strung-together series of short stories- too many explicit porny scenes will be a bad thing.

I'd tip my hat to you if I was wearing one.

In the football series, I came for the porn; but stayed for the story. I was dissapointed at the lack of porn in the 2nd book, though. Haven't read the 3rd book yet.

porn + good story = happy me

Hey kyell. Heard you were doing some talk panels at MFF "the importance of erotic or gay fiction in furry novels" or something like that. Dunno if you have anyone recording your panels but if you do please link me. I'm very interested in this. If i could go to MFF I would but for now i'm relying on someone to hopefully have a camcorder and getting this.

Curious where you heard that from! It wasn't me, as I'm not going to MFF. :)

Oh darn. wish i could go back and read the original post but unfortunately I don't remember where I read that -_-
Seemed like a interesting topic i was really curious about.

It's interesting to me that you've gathered from from your experience that a large portion of the furry audience seems to want less sex in their stories. I think I can understand why, because there isn't a huge variety of furry novels or stories out there that have done their own world building, or can stand on their own merit if sex were removed from the story. In this way, that's why I don't think there's a lot of stories with anthropomorphic characters outside of the furry fandom with an adult audience in mind (the most popular was Redwall, which was YA and had a very black versus white world going on.) So that's maybe why furries really want the plot more than the sex-- we currently don't have much.

But for myself as a reader, I can already read ten thousand stories that don't focus on sex (or simply remove it altogether) on my kindel. I don't just want sex in a story. I want interesting sex, and if I wanted to watch Gay characters never do anything erotic I could go watch an episode of Glee. I'm not going to be aroused by Khal Drogo mounting Dany, but I wouldn't want it taken out of the book or skim it, because that was important character building for her that makes her feel like a real person.

I'm delighted to see that Furry is one of the few genres where that kind of open exploration is embraced without rudeness, so I'm probably more in-line with the bent-con folks.

As can be seen from the comments, there exists a subset of furries who want sex in their books. I think your comment about "we don't have much" also explains why the gay fiction crowd wants sex, at least in part. I mean, the number of books where you can find straight sex is astounding. It's in everything, have you noticed? So if you're gay&!furry, mostly you're like "where's all the gay relationships and sex?" If you're gay&furry, then you're like, "where's all the gay relationships and sex and also all the furry characters and the furry worlds and..." So there are people who want both, and again, I want to emphasize that this is based on two decades in the furry fandom (one decade writing, more or less), and one weekend at BentCon. I'm sure there are gay&!furry readers who are delighted to have stories with gay protagonists (I have talked to a couple online, so I know they exist). It is even possible/likely that the people who came to our table looking for sexytime books are a similarly proportional subset as the furries who come to our table looking for sexytime books, and/or that my fans in particular have remained my fans because they enjoy the stories I tell as well as the sex; I'm sure there are sex-focused furry authors whose fans are all of that "yeah, I'm here for the fuckin'" type.

Maybe I should point some of the BentCon people to those guys too. ;)

Yeah, definitely. I didn't mention that we're smothered up to our necks in straight sex all the time because I feel that that horse has been beaten well enough (and that the only solution is more gay sex and more acceptance of gay sex in pop media-- and I mean sex, because "look at the adorable gays who only hold hands on screen" now has its place in subtle homophobia). What's even more frustrating too is that an author can write well-developed characters, and then spend an egregious amount of time on the straight relationship, and the romance, and then you get this twisting feeling, the eye-roll, the "dear god not again," not because of the straight characters, but from the familiarity of a book's universe where this is going to be the only recognizable form of human compassion this particular writer can make. (Dumbledore was gay, sure, that's nice, but it was too little too late after all of the straight horny teen romance we got decked with.) What I'm saying is-- I would be happy to write a story about straight characters, but I know that if I don't write about Gay characters as they are, including the sex and the very personal, then nobody else will.

But as an aside to the lack of interest in the sex for some, I think what alarms me most in stories is that more people complain about sex than violence, or torture. A lot of people will lap up the gore without a pause whereas two dicks rubbing together can make them put a book down immediately (and yet, again, breasts are almost assured in any mainstream horror story nowadays whereas the men will be covered).