I should probably try and use this more often again.

As usual I'm doing a terrible job updating this, sorry.

2018–19 hasn't been a great period for writing in my universes here, as it were; I've kept up with some other projects, but they've taken up more time and mental energy than expected. We'll see what 2020 holds.

While Kismet didn't win the Ursa Major, it did win the Cóyotl Award for best novel! It also received some nice reviews along the way both in and out of furrydom, from the late Fred Patten, Nebula nominee (and fellow Cóyotl winner, for Barsk: the Elephants' Graveyard) Lawrence Schoen, God of Clay author Ryan Campbell, and even from old-school SF magazine Analog, which called Gail, my rat protagonist, "as smart and feisty as a C. J. Cherryh heroine." (This is a good thing.)

My 2018 story "Saguaros" was published in ROAR 9—and won the Cóyotl for best short story, which was gratifying and frankly a little shocking.

I also published a story called "An Orange by Any Other Name" in The Rabbit Dies First at the start of this year. It's a sequel to "Fixer," my short story from Inhuman Acts, a furry noir anthology.

I'll see about getting all of those stories up here sometime soon. In the meantime, most are already at my web site, Coyote Tracks.

My novel Kismet was nominated for an Ursa Major Award! This is the award that's voted on by all furries who take the time to nominate, so I have to thank all of you. It moves onto the final voting now, and if you're reading this, you're an eligible voter. The Ursa nominees look like a pretty solid batch this year across the board, too.

http://ursamajorawards.org/

Also, administrative note: a month or so ago I deleted the oldest uploads I had here, PDFs of various stories. I thought the only ones I'd deleted had already been re-uploaded as pure text files, but of course that turned out not to be the case; I've re-uploaded the missing "Travelling Music."

I've been pretty terrible at leveraging this site to build an audience, which is a little silly given that this is still basically where the furries hang out, even while complaining about FA. (I have complaints about FA, too, but, y'know.)

First off, updates: I revamped my personal web site and moved domains; now it's at coyotetracks.org.

Kismet has been getting some positive reviews, including in Analog, which wrote "It’s a fun, action-filled story set against a fascinating and well-realized background, and Gail is as smart and feisty as a C. J. Cherryh heroine. Below the surface, there’s enough social commentary to make for a fairly complex morality tale, with plenty of echoes of today’s world." If you haven't read it, and you'd like to, I'm just saying, it's pretty good.

Amazon store link for Kismet

Speaking of that, the Ursa Major Awards nominations are now open. I think Kismet is the only thing that I published last year that's eligible, but if you're reading this, you're eligible to nominate it! And I'd be honored if you'd consider doing so.

http://ursamajorawards.org/nominations.htm

Lastly, a question. I'm considering reordering my "gallery" here, deleting a few of the oldest pieces and possibly re-uploading them, and possibly uploading more of the stories from Why Coyotes Howl that haven't appeared online before. I'll be candid and say this is mostly just to see if it'll attract more attention to start regularly updating here. Make sense? Make nonsense? What do you think?

Yes, I'm still alive. :)

I went back to the University of Kansas for a week toward the end of June. My novel Kismet came out of a writing workshop there, led by Kij Johnson, the Nebula/Hugo-winning author of The Fox Woman and current award-gathering novella The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe. This time I attended the "Repeat Offenders" alumni workshop, to try to hash out some details about whatever the sequel to Kismet is going to be. I have more ideas now than when I entered, so, that's good. I would love it to be out in 2019, but absolutely no promises. I have other things I'm also attempting to work on, including the long-overdue sequel to Going Concerns and a couple other shorter stories.

As for Kismet, it's doing...well, I think? It isn't burning up the sales charts in the totally unrealistic way that I hoped, but I'm pretty sure it's doing well for Argyll/FurPlanet. If you've read it and you liked it, and you haven't left a review on Amazon and/or Goodreads, please consider doing so. Or just tell a friend, even if they're not a furry! And, if you haven't read it, please consider buying it. :) It's only $5.99 in ebook form, and it's on all the major ebook retailers at this point -- and, of course, if you go to furry conventions, there's an excellent chance you can pick up a print copy there, although at most of the cons it's been to in 2017 it's apparently sold out.

And! And and and!

Along with Makyo, I will be representing the Furry Writers' Guild as a Guest of Honor at Furry Migration in Minneapolis at the end of August!

Furry's "Annual Anthropomorphic Literature and Arts Award," the Ursa Majors, are taking nominations currently for works published in 2016. I have three works that qualify this time around:

* "Wit's End," from HEAT #13
* "A Day With No Tide," from GODS WITH FUR
* "Trade All the Stars," from FRAGMENTS OF LIFE'S HEART

"Trade All the Stars" is a story about Gail and Sky, two of the characters from KISMET, set about twenty years before the novel. The anthology it appeared in didn't seem to have very good distribution, but its exclusivity period has also expired--so I've made the story available online here.

Anyone can nominate for the Ursa Majors; the nomination period runs through the end of February. For the record, my favorite novels this year include Kyell Gold's BLACK ANGEL and Malcolm Cross's DOG COUNTRY; for short stories, there's a lot of good stuff out there in anthologies including GODS WITH FUR, CLAW THE WAY TO VICTORY and ROAR 7.

http://ursamajorawards.org/

Kismet is now available!

---

The River: a hodgepodge of arcologies and platforms in a band around Ceres full of dreamers, utopians, corporatists--and transformed humans, from those with simple biomods to the exotic alien xenos and the totemics, remade with animal aspects. Gail Simmons, an itinerant salvor living aboard her ship Kismet, has docked everywhere totemics like her are welcome...and a few places they're not.

But when she's accused of stealing a databox from a mysterious wreck, Gail lands in the crosshairs of corporations, governments and anti-totemic terrorists. Finding the real thieves is the easy part. To get her life back, Gail will have to face her past--and what's at stake may be more than just her future.

---

There are two cover editions. From FurPlanet, there's the furry cover...

FurPlanet - Print

Bad Dog Books - DRM-free ebook

And, the alternate cover is from Argyll Productions and Amazon:

Argyll - Print and DRM-free ebook

Amazon - Print and Kindle

The trade paperback edition is $17.95. The ebook is on sale for $3.99 until the end of the month, then up to $6.99.

My novel Kismet has been through a hopefully-final round of editing, although I'm doing a line editing pass myself before sending it back to Fuzz and working on the print/ebook-ready versions. (I'm expecting to play "ghost typesetter" myself for this project again, which is something I enjoy, although that's not a 100% given.) With any luck things will keep moving forward apace…

I also released Going Concerns as a 99¢ ebook. This was mostly an experiment to see how publishing worked through Pronoun, a new Smashwords-style competitor (spoiler: pretty well). If you're here, there's a good chance you've already read that novella, but if you want an ebook copy, well, it's not a bad price. You can find links to the book's page on Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Google Play and Kobo here:

https://books.pronoun.com/going-concerns/

And, it's also available on Bad Dog Books in ePub and Mobi form:

https://baddogbooks.com/?product=going-concerns

(Bad Dog's stuff is always DRM-free; I can't guarantee that with Pronoun.)

By the way, if you've already read Going Concerns and liked it, it would be great if you could leave a review on its Amazon product page. As I understand it, the more reviews a book has, the more likely it is to be automatically promoted by Amazon to people who buy "related" books, and so far my novella only has three. (And one of them is a two-star review from someone who just wanted to kvetch that the characters were animal people, not that I'm bitter.)

https://www.amazon.com/Going-Concer...../dp/B01GN1QALM

Anyway, hi! How are all of you?

So it appears I have three stories premiering at Anthrocon 2016 (which I will not be attending, I'm afraid).

"A Day With No Tide" will be in the anthology Gods With Fur, edited by Fred Patten. In addition to my novelette, the anthology includes stories by Alice Dryden, Kyell Gold, Jefferson Swycaffer, Michael Payne, Mary E. Lowd and many more--23 stories in total. The cover art by Teagan Gavet is also amazing. It's published by FurPlanet, and it's available for preorder now. (And as a reminder, you can read an excerpt of the story here.)

"Trade All the Stars" will be in another anthology, Fragments of Life's Heart, edited by Laura "Munchkin" Lewis and Stefano "Mando" Zocchi, published by Weasel Press. Rabbit Valley will have some copies to sell at AC. (It should have distribution on Amazon and other online booksellers, too, including in ebook form.) This anthology has a loose theme of love in all its forms--not always romantic. My story is a prequel to both the earlier story "Tow" and the forthcoming novel Kismet. You can read an excerpt of the story here. Other contributors include Renee Carter Hall, Jess E. Owen, Ocean Tigrox, Kris Carver, and M.C.A. Hogarth.

And, last but not least, my story "Wit's End" will appear in Sofawolf's next issue of Heat, their annual adults-only fiction and comics periodical. They tend to have plenty of issues to sell at cons; you can also order them from Sofawolf's web site or, eventually, from Rabbit Valley. No excerpt of this one yet. :) It's a somewhat comic story set in the 1970s, about a straight-laced young businesswolf who, following the advice of a coworker who told him to "loosen up," finds himself in a bohemian coffeehouse and gets swept up---almost literally--by a whirlwind of a jackrabbit woman.

Fred Patten's next more-or-less biannual anthology will be released at AnthroCon this year, Gods With Fur, and the theme is, well, gods. Apparently he got a lot of submissions he considered good this time around; it's going to be a big book, and include stories by Kyell Gold, Mary Lowd, Sam Conway, Kris Schnee and others.

And, yes, one of the others is me, with a story at 11,000 words -- long enough to be a "novelette" by some standards -- called "A Day With No Tide," a tale of the goddess of Love giving a gift to the goddess of Death. I'll post a preview soonish.

"Tow" made the final Ursa Major Award ballot! Amusingly, four of the five short stories on the ballot are from The Furry Future, I suspect because -- like "Tow" -- the authors were able to put them online for free. (If you haven't read Huskyteer's "The Analogue Cat," it's really short and an amazing piece of writing.

I don't have a schedule update on Kismet, the novel that "Tow" is a prequel to, but it's been accepted for publication, and is going through a bit of editing. (I've made some changes based on Fuzzwolf's proofing, and have to run it by a couple other volunteers.) As things get firmer, I'll serialize a relatively long preview -- probably the first four chapters. (There are 27 chapters in the book. Or 26 and a chapter-length epilogue, depending on how it gets organized.)

It's that time of year again. And again, this year I have things eligible for nomination! Unlike past years, I have no longer works, but I have two short stories.

The first story is "Tow," from The Furry Future anthology and now posted here. If you'd like to buy the full anthology--and it's got a few terrific stories in it---you can read more about it and find links on my for sale page.

The second story is "Fixer," from Inhuman Acts. While the full story isn't online (the anthology's pretty new), you can read an excerpt in my gallery--and, again, you can buy the anthology by following links from my for sale page. (Both anthologies are available in print from the publisher and Amazon, Kindle ebook from Amazon, and DRM-free ebook from Bad Dog Books.)

Last but not least, Teagan Gavet's cover for The Furry Future is also eligible for an Ursa Major! It's terrific artwork, and I'd say that even if it wasn't an illustration of Gail, the protagonist of both "Tow" and Kismet. (But it is, which makes it that much more awesome.)

Ursa nominations page

My story "Trade All the Stars" will appear in a forthcoming anthology from FurPlanet, Fragments of Life's Heart. The anthology has a theme of different kinds of love -- not romantic, necessarily, and my story isn't romance. Like "Tow" (from The Furry Future), it's a standalone story in the world of Kismet, a science fiction novel I've been working on. While "Tow" and Kismet have the same main character, Gail isn't the protagonist in "Trade All the Stars" -- her adopted sister Sky is. And at the time of the story, Gail and Sky are 12 and 18 years old, respectively.

I'll have more about this when the anthology gets closer to release (I believe it's scheduled for July 2016). And, I'll have more about Kismet later, too.

According to FA, the first chapter of "Going Concerns" has 452 views; none of the following chapters have more than 64. But some middle chapters have fewer views than some later chapters.

(For comparison, over on SoFurry, the first chapter only has 105 views, but following chapters have roughly comparable views to FA.)

Yeah, I don't take advantage of FA very much. Trying to change that. Famous last words etc.

My novella "Going Concerns," which appeared in Five Fortunes, is up for a Cóyotl Award this year. The Cóyotls this year are really interesting, by the way: they're demonstrating an engagement with the "outside world," and to some degree that's being reciprocated. Two of the three nominated novels are from mainstream publishers and non-furry authors; two of the three nominated short stories -- from furry authors -- appeared in mainstream magazines. (One of them, Ursula Vernon's "Jackalope Wives," won the Nebula Award this year and is up for a World Fantasy Award.)

My novel Kismet is through first draft and will be entering the rewrite phase (twitch) in a few weeks. After that I get to figure out a publishing strategy.

And, speaking of "Going Concerns," I've started serializing it here and over on SoFurry!

FurPlanet will be premiering a new science fiction anthology at Further Confusion 2015, The Furry Future, and I'll have a story in there: "Tow." It introduces the world of The River and a new heroine, Gail Simmons, a rat totemic.

Gail does have a bigger adventure planned ahead of her: a novel called Kismet I'm working on. Earlier this year, Kyell Gold and I were accepted to a by-invitation intensive novel writing workshop at KU's Center for the Study of Science Fiction, led by Kij Johnson. (If you're not familiar with Kij, she wrote a terrific kitsune novel called The Fox Woman years ago, has done some amazing short stories that often have animals -- anthropomorphic and otherwise -- and has won every major genre award at least once. Seriously.) This is the novel I workshopped. And after the workshop I started over, but that's kind of what the point of the workshop was. :)

And, as a nice footnote: "Indigo Rain" won the Cóyotl Award for best novella of 2013.

I'm very happy to say that Indigo Rain made the Ursa Major ballot this year!

If you haven't read it, "Indigo Rain" is a novella in FurPlanet's CupCakes line. It's got a bit of fantasy, a lot of suspense, and a helping of romance.

There's a free two-part preview:

* Part 1
* Part 2

You can purchase it from several online stores in both print and ebook:

* FurPlanet (print)
* Bad Dog Books (ebook, DRM-free)
* Amazon (print)
* Also available from Rabbit Valley, iTunes, and Lulu

And, of course, if you like it, please cast your vote in the Ursas. There's a lot of other good stuff nominated this year, from several works by Mary (Otters in Space) Lowd to the Hugo-winning Digger omnibus by Ursula Vernon. (The first issue of Claw and Quill was also nominated, which is immensely flattering, but I'd really like to get the damned second issue out. I didn't know it was going to be a biannual. Mea culpa. As long as it doesn't turn into a biennial.)

FurPlanet has recently released an anthology of five novellas called Five Fortunes, with stories by furry luminaries Phil Geusz, Renee Carter Hall, Mary E. Lowd, and Bernard Doove -- and (ahem) me, with a new Ranea novella called "Going Concerns." It's edited by Secret Master of Furry Fandom Fred Patten. I'll see if I can get together a preview to post shortly.

While I assume an ebook will be forthcoming, as far as I know it's only available in print so far.

Five Fortunes @ FurPlanet

Nominations for the 2013 Ursa Major Awards are open through February 28th, and my novella "Indigo Rain" is eligible! This is the first time I've had something in the running since *Why Coyotes Howl* in 2005.

The nomination form is online; the process is a little clunky, but still fairly fast. This is for *nominations only,* not the the final voting; the top five stories will be on the final ballot.

You can read the first few thousand words of "Indigo Rain" in a two-part preview:

* Part 1
* Part 2

(You can also read the preview in my gallery here.)

And, you can buy the whole shebang here:

* FurPlanet (print)
* Bad Dog Books (DRM-free ebook)

The ebook is also available from Amazon, Apple iBooks, the Nook Store, and Lulu.

And, last but not least, Sabretoothed Ermine's cover art is also eligible for a separate Ursa Major nomination as a "published illustration." Just, you know, saying.

Sorry I've been quiet -- the good news is that I'm mostly quiet because I've been writing. I have Upcoming Things.

First, the one with an actual schedule: Going Concerns is a new Ranea novella that will be part of an anthology called Five Furry Fortunes to be released in January. It's a story of an uneasy partnership between an unorthodox Guard detective and a wolf woman who longs for a safer, more boring life than the one she's found herself with, and the trouble they get into investigating a company she used to work at--a company that seems to want both of them dead.

Second, a shorter piece--although still over 10,000 words--called A Day With No Tide, about the goddess of death being granted her wish for "a brief respite" by the goddess of love. That's tentatively to appear in the next issue of New Fables, but that hasn't been scheduled yet.

And, lastly, the shortest piece is a romantic period piece called Wit's End. No, not like Jane Austen--the period is the 1970s. That's been submitted to an anthology, but I haven't heard back yet.

I'm also still working--slowly--on a science fiction novel tentatively titled Kismet and have recently started a superhero story that I'm still tugging on the threads of to see where they lead.

I'll try to post more stories here soon-ish as well as start working on some more ebooks.

Oh! Speaking of ebooks, the ebook edition of Indigo Rain is available for $7.99 from all the usual suspects as well as FurPlanet's new ebook store, Bad Dog Books, and Rabbit Valley carries both the print and ebook versions. And, the ebook version of Why Coyotes Howl, my older shory story collection, is now available from Rabbit Valley and Bad Dog also.

Also speaking of ebooks, while I'm usually loathe to nudge people about this sort of thing...if you've read either of these books, consider posting a review on one or more of the sites they're available at. That has a greater effect on sales than you'd think.

"A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood" originally ran in 1990 (!) in YARF! and was, for its time, very popular. While I wouldn't claim it was the most popular bit of "furry" literature in the early fandom, it's probably safe to say that the only stories with a better claim are considerably longer/larger bodies of work, like Bernard Doove's Chakat stories and G. Howell's The Human Memoirs. (Thank you, FA, for being incapable of letting me either italicize the title or even put it in quotes when I make it a link.) At one point, one of the novella's main characters--Revar Desmara, the vampire bat--rivaled Erma Felna for "most popular furry character" in a poll that I swear I didn't rig. (Yes, I know if you came into the fandom much past the mid-'90s you don't know who Erma Felna is, either. Shut up.)

So why revise it? Well, you learn a lot about writing in twenty years even if you're not doing it as regularly as you should be. As good as a lot of things about "Gift of Fire" were, a compelling enough main character hides a lot of small sins. Or, in this case, a compelling enough influence character.[^1] (People have actually argued with me when I say that Revar isn't the main character, but she isn't. Sorry!)

None of the changes are "big" in terms of affecting the story's outcome or even any of the major plot points, but there were a few logic holes and a few characterization issues, and occasionally dialogue problems. (Revar in particular sometimes sounded less like herself than, well, a young college dropout with literary pretentions.)

The changes

Nearly every sentence has been tweaked to some degree, but here's what I changed specifically. Naturally, if you haven't read the story there are spoilers here. (And if you haven't read the revised version, here are reasons you might want to!)

1. In my head Dahlu was not only an attractive woman but a smart and capable one, but on paper she was--as Revar unkindly referred to her in the first version--kind of a pastahead. She's a lot stronger in this version. Mika's choice is not only supposed to be tough but to not have a definitively "right" answer.

2. While the story always contrasted Revar and Dahlu in terms of social class, I realized that was not only a big theme that I didn't accent very well, there are actually three classes: Mika is caught between Dahlu's explicit desire to pull him into her world, and Revar's viewpoint in which he and Dahlu are both "high class." Dahlu is more of a true socialite in this version, and--while she's still well-spoken and occasionally poetic--Revar speaks with a coarser rhythm.

3. In the original story, I didn't use the word "Derysi" for the bats! I didn't come up with it until later. Logically, though, that doesn't make a lot of sense, and it creates an interesting side tension for Mika to know the word before Revar.[^2]

4. The villain's name has changed from "Scat" to "Skit," because I have no idea what the hell I was originally thinking. He has a bit more screen time and is hopefully a bit less two-dimensional, although still pretty hateful.

5. While the outcome is the same, the Guard's portrayal is changed throughout the fourth chapter in particular. The dilemma the Guard has with Revar is neither incompetence nor regulatory stifling, but the near-impossible situation of trying to take humane care of a prisoner whose needs require inhumane action.

6. Mika's picture of Revar has been changed from an ink sketch to an actual painting. I suspect originally I was making a nod to Zjonni's artwork for the story, but paintings make more sense for the gallery.

7. Mika now sells those paintings, because it makes more sense thematically.

8. While the farther along you go in the story the more the scenes match up to the old version, there are new scenes in Chapters 1 and 2. Most notably, in the original version we didn't actually meet Dahlu until after Mika met Orlonda (and we didn't learn Orlonda's name until the last chapter!); the second scene where we meet Dahlu, Jack and Skit is all new.

What about the sequel?

Old-time readers will certainly remember there was one: "The Lighthouse." It takes place very shortly after the end of "Gift of Fire" and is written primarily in first person, present tense, from Revar's point of view.

Well. Again honestly, I don't know. I haven't read it in years and I don't know what will and won't make me cringe. I recall a few bits that do make me cringe, though, ranging from a comic relief character--one of the only insertions of someone else's character into my work that I ever did--to the handling of legal matters.

That last bit isn't just idle kvetching. See, the Ranean Guard is also rather undeveloped--they seem to be kind of a police force and kind of a judicial system and kind of a military force and kind of a civic organization and for all I know they also bake mean chocolate cakes. What I'm saying is: they need more definition. As I recall, they play a big role in the next story, and I need to figure out how to make them "work" to my own satisfaction before undertaking that.

What now?

I'd like to get an ebook version of the new "Gift of Fire" together, ideally with some new illustrations. That's not because I dislike Zjonni's "old" artwork for it, but I not only don't have the rights to those, I don't think I have copies of most of them. This is a minor challenge in that getting some good illustrations will likely cost more than I'm likely to make back from book sales. I may try something nutty like seeing if I can "crowdfund" it, if I can find an illustrator with enough of a sense of whimsy to go along with that. (The observant will note this is an idea I'm brazenly stealing from Kyell Gold, who did that with a recent short story of his.)

# # #

[^1]: "Influence character" is a term I'm pretty sure I borrowed from story-plotting software called "Dramatica"; as they put it, "this character is responsible for shocking the Main Character out of their malaise and challenging them to grow and develop over the course of the story."
[^2]: The idea that Melifen means "cat person" and Vraini means "fox person" and so on seems to confuse some readers, but do you say "human" or "ape person"? It's weird not to have words to distinguish the sapients from the non-sapients. Also, they're all independent races, with their own native--if sometimes rarely-used--languages.

Starting tomorrow and continuing every Monday for four weeks, I'm going to be posting the revised version of A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood on Fur Affinity, SoFurry and Weasyl.

This is a novella originally published in (gack) 1990 in YARF! about a frustrated feline artist who has a chance encounter with a vampire bat, leading to a curious friendship. It's been revised a few times over the years, but this is actually the biggest such revision, fixing a characterization issue that's bugged me for quite some time (and tweaking another major one, albeit more subtly), rewriting some clunky dialogue, and correcting some typos (and undoubtedly introducing new ones). As they say--well, someone must, right?--stay tuned.

...are, for the record, available here, from FurPlanet.

The book looks very nice, I think (granted, I'm biased).

I'll likely be giving a reading at a FurPlanet showcase panel at Further Confusion in January, where the book will premiere. Now I just have to figure out what a good section to read is . . . .

 sabretoothedermine has put up the cover and one of the interior illustrations for "Indigo Rain":

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9466435/ ("Silver Bells at Sunset," the cover)
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9466485/ ("Private Dance")

The scenes they illustrate are, not entirely coincidentally, in the two preview pieces that I added earlier...

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9170564/
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/9206210/

I mentioned a while ago that I'd finished a new Ranea novella, Indigo Rain. I'm pleased to announce slightly more officially that it's going to be released in print from FurPlanet for Further Confusion 2013, with illustrations by sabretoothedermine (which are, from the sketches so far, going to be awesome).

I'm likely going to post the first few sections of the story here as a preview over the next few weeks, starting in a day or two. (If Sabretoothed Ermine posts preview art, I'll link to it, too, of course.)