Or, "Where I actually blog about writing":

http://cprints.ranea.org/

For those of you who are more LiveJournal types, http://chipotle.livejournal.com/ is the same content.

To fill in a few details here instead of making you go click over there, though:

I've finished a new Ranea novella, "Indigo Rain," which is about the same length as "A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood" and which I think is one of the best things I've written;

I'm working on a science fiction novel, again, but no ETA;

I have a couple other things in the pipeline, some of which may be bound for here and SoFurry and some of which may, well, not be.

Meanwhile, thought exercise for the day: in a world like Ranea's, full of both humans and anthropomorphic animals, would calling someone a "furry" be insulting?

As distinct from mere "ebook." Yes, I've now managed to shove the book out in the more standard ePub format, otherwise known as "What just about everyone who isn't Amazon uses." Like the Kindle version, it's DRM-free and $3.99, and is available from Lulu:

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/chipotlecoyote

In theory, Lulu should push it on out to Barnes & Noble and the iBookstore this week.

At long last, my collection Why Coyotes Howl is available as an ebook -- at the moment exclusively through Amazon, in Kindle format. It's a collection of sixteen stories, some of which I've had here on FA before, some of which only appeared in earlier forms in long-last fanzines, and some of which haven't appeared anywhere else. The collection is $3.99, which I'm hoping sounds like a bargain!

For more information, and the ordering links, you can visit my web site, Coyote Prints:

http://cprints.ranea.org/2012/04/why-coyotes-howl/

Yep, from all appearances I still do.

(Somewhat) seriously, I expect to repost a few "old" stories here in text-only form, so bear with me if you're one of the few who already saw them here as PDFs a few years ago. (I'll leave the PDF versions up, unless the same folks favorite the text ones to be completist nerds. And yes, this means I've finally come down on the "stop screwing around with PDFs and just do text" side of the PDF-or-text question. As much as I love typography, the truth is that I don't generally want to read short stories that way anymore, so it's kind of silly of me to expect others to.) Other stories may be on their way, mostly from the lost archives of Yarf! and FurVersion.

But wait, are you ever doing anything new?

Magic 8-Ball says: "Signs point to Yes." We'll see.

In the meanwhile, I've actually been posting on a competing web site, which I'm sure I shouldn't mention but it rhymes with FoSurry. Why? Because basically, I think they care more about writing over there. I've had my kvetches about their predecessor site--and even the current site, as of this writing--but the beta of SF 2.0 looks pretty nice, and I'm hoping to actually start making it better once it gets into 2.1 or so. And I won't lie: I got more page views over there in about three months than I've gotten over here in five years, without doing appreciably more work to get it. Stories are also a lot more readable there. And it integrates gracefully with Readability, will soon support exporting to ePub, and on and on.

Also, an ebook version of Why Coyotes Howl is on the way, with two new stories that weren't in the print collection ("Carrier" and "The Narrow Road in Morning Light"--yes, both of them are also here and on SoFurry).

I realize I've put myself in a Catch-22 with this FA account: I'm not posting because I have few viewers, but because I don't post there's not much reason to watch me!

As much as I like PDFs for reasons I've stated before, I've concluded through other experiments that they're just not very good for FurAffinity. It's easy to say that it's just one more click for the reader, but that one more click puts a surprising amount of people off. As a web designer I actually knew this, but also as a web designer I also hate the presentation FA gives stories. I let the "artiste" side win the debate, but frankly, it's the UX side that should have won. In part this was because I expected to have a better site up for stories well over a year ago, but shit happens. (For the record, that site--Claw & Quill--still isn't dead, because as terribly slow as I've been with it, nothing that's come along in the last couple of years has quite filled the gap.)

What I'm considering doing is re-uploading stories here in formats you can read online--possibly breaking longer stories into chunks to avoid the Wall O' Text look. What I'm also considering doing is deleting the submissions I've already made and starting over with these new versions. I'll save the PDFs that are already made and have them available as links.

Does this strike people as a good idea? Bad idea? Entirely neutral idea?

Actually, I like PDFs -- they can be nicely typeset, unlike the BBCode-style display I'd get from just uploading them as text files here, and unlike Word documents they're pretty much cross-platform and they'll (usually) display in your browser when you click on them. I don't think there's another format that's "lower friction" that meets my own slightly persnickety aesthetics.

However, it's worth asking what you think about me uploading stories as PDFs here. The idea is, after all, for the stories to be read. Should I switch to another format? Just have them be plain text files? Maybe stick with PDF but have some of the text available to read in the description as a teaser? (I don't know what the description size limit here is, but I don't think I'd want to put more than a few hundred words in there anyway.)

Thanks to those who've done both with my little "gallery" so far; I haven't gone off to do 'shouts' to those who've watched/faved me, although I suppose I should get into the habit! (FA's "culture" is somewhat new to me in actual practice.)

I may see whether I can get old existing illustrations for my stories uploaded here (this is easier said than done, since some don't exist in digital form, and I'd need permission from the artists regardless), and/or get new art done. This is somewhat easier said than done both in terms of available funds and finding artists who are willing to do such work (and right for a given story), but we'll see what happens down the road.

While I've been lax in mentioning this because I tend to be fairly bad at pimping myself out, I have two stories eligible for the Ursa Major awards this year -- "The Narrow Road in Morning Light" (which is now in my FA gallery) from Sofawolf's New Fables #2, and "Carrier" from Will Sanborn's "Alone in the Dark." (Both first appeared in, and were written for, con books: "Narrow Road" at CF 2008, and "Carrier" at EF 2008.)

While I'm still working on the eternally late Claw & Quill site, I'm breaking down and trying to put some more material up here on FA. "Carrier" may appear here soon, and I may dig up some older material that's been out of print and clean it up a bit, migrate material from the Belfry Archives, and so on.

While I haven't updated FA with anything recently (you noticed!), I did have a couple stories published in 2008:

"The Narrow Road in Morning Light" appeared in the Further Confusion 2008 program book, and then again in Sofawolf's New Fables #2. This story is set in a version of feudal Japan and may be the start of a new occasional series about its main character.

"Carrier" was written for Eurofurence 14's program book and was reprinted in the anthology Alone in the Dark, edited by Will Sanborn, with an illustration by Heather Bruton (see my favorites for the link to the picture here on FA). This is a modern horror piece reminiscent of films like 28 Days Later, but very specifically furry.

Beyond that, in 2008 I started idly plotting the resurrection of Claw & Quill, which is moving past the Idle Plotting stage into the Bits of Working Code stage. Whether "Quill," the application I'm writing for it, gets finished and online before "Ferrox," the rewrite of FA's application, is anybody's guess at this point. (Ferrox is much farther along, though, so despite the Duke Nukem jokes people make, don't bet against it.) For more information on that you'll need to check my LiveJournal (chipotle.livejournal.com) -- and you'll need to actually have an LJ account and be on the C&Q filter list to get work-in-progress updates soon.

Zjonni asked the reasonable question of "what would a gallery that treated prose 'properly' look like?"

Well, while this is starting out by answering the question in the negative -- what you probably *shouldn't* do -- here's what's mildly irksome about Fur Affinity's approach here (taking it as relatively common):

* While this sounds obvious, you can't generate a thumbnail from prose. Yet it's going to be the thumbnail on a gallery site that attracts people's attention. This is the least solvable problem because in the use cases gallery software is designed for -- image management/display -- it isn't actually a problem at all. Stories and poems are going to be served better by a different display paradigm.

* For stories, your option appears to be either to upload them in a file format which can only be downloaded (i.e., not viewed within the browser), or in plain text. This again isn't entirely the gallery programs' fault; the vast majority of web apps really suck for displaying long swaths of text, in part because so few people designing them really have much clue about typography and layout. This leaves two sub-optimal options: upload stuff as PDFs, like I am, forcing people to download the file and then come back here if they want to comment (significant groups will drop out at both 'stages' there), or upload it as plain text. And I know I sure wouldn't want to read 10,000 words laid out the way this journal entry is. :)

* Something that's easily fixable, but it's a frequent oversight, as it is here on FA: the only tagging taxonomy available is keyed toward *art* subjects only. It'd be easy for me to tag a picture as "female cat macrophile mature audiences," but "romance comedy" or "horror mystery," not so much.

As to a positive answer, hmm. Off the top of my head:

* Have descriptions on the front page (not tool tips, thanks).
* Allow grouping of 'chapter' files into 'books.'
* Allow association of illustrations with books.
* Allow reading online with attractive typography.
* Have a meaningful tagging system.
* Allow searching within stories.

While I'd originally planned to move all my writing to "Claw & Quill," a new webzine project, that project has the minor drawback of still not existing. So I'm going to, at least for now, put stuff up occasionally in this FurAffinity Account. For better or worse, this is The Place™ right now. For writers, that's a qualified "worse"; all gallery software I've seen treats prose as an "oh yeah" afterthought, and FA is no exception. They're not *worse* than most other galleries for this, mind you.

It'd be nice to have "thumbnail" images that actually have something to do with the stories, so I'm working on little "mini-covers." I'd prefer actual art to go with the stories, but we'll see. (I'll admit that's a kind of low priority for me for the time being.)