What's that? A new Furry Survey? Aw hell yes there is:

http://klisoura.com/furrypoll.php

Remember, a new one runs every year, so even if you've taken it before you should take it again. It should only take a couple of minutes. Plus, it's delicious and nutritious.

I have been doing some thinking, and I would like to amend my previous statement regarding my CC licensing. Since I don't post journals often this will probably still be fairly apparent for any readers, and hopefully the creators of derivative works who sometimes E-mail me:

Unless noted otherwise, all of my work on FurAffinity, including my drawings, stories, and journal posts, is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

This means you can do whatever you want with it, including reposting it and remixing it, presuming three things, in increasing order of importance:

1. You provide some attribution. I consider "by Klisoura" sufficient, if the attribution is coupled to point 3, below;

2. The work is noncommercial. I will readily waive this if asked;

3. You must preserve the license. If you are reposting my work elsewhere, you must include the CC licensing note with a link, where possible, to the full license. If you are creating a derivative work that draws substantially on something I've done, it must be licensed identically. You can ask me to waive this. I might.

tl;dr:

* Take my stuff, pull it apart, rework it, I don't care and you don't have to get permission—if you ask, I'll try to help you; if not, do what you like;
* You can't sell the results, and you can't release them with a more restrictive license;
* That means if you get to cut and mix my work, other people get to cut and mix what you did with it;
* Unless you ask and I specifically say you can do these things.

I am not terribly concerned with the supposed status of publishing houses, and while I wouldn't be opposed to it, my web-published oeuvre is also non-eligible for general publication, since it's already out in the wild. It's also true that, while I have not explicitly declared it, I have stated on a few occasions that I general consider my work to be copyleft-published under a CC-BY-SA license.

However, as the owner of a) a number of e-books read on my phone and b) an iPad, I've also become an increasing fan of electronic publishing (as much as I like killing trees). It's also come to my attention that both iBooks and Kindle would allow me to put stuff out there in their own formats, for consumption by the general public. iBooks requires me to have ISBN numbers, which is a small outlay; Kindle does not.

I've been meaning to dust off my old work for some time. As long as I'm headed down that route, should I give it to Amazon, too? Should I put a price on it? Does anyone else have experience in this field?

After I first mused on "what makes a story furry," writer Wirewolf, who ought to be trusted, had this to say:

When I saw someone put forth the idea that 'for a story to be furry the characters have to have some reason to be furry, otherwise you could replace them with humans and it wouldn't change the story,' I basically agreed. And more to the point,I tried to write my own stories that way. But eventually I came to realize there is no such thing as a character who can't be replaced by a human, because all stories are human stories.

This is more or less true. With exceptions so rare as to be negligible, any story must contain essentially human characters, because otherwise we have little means of relating to them. Anthropomorphisation is frequently considered as a way of distancing the "human element" from fiction—at times even of creating a trans- or post-human environment—but its actual role is nearly the inverse. It is, as D. McAreavy once said, the "worship of the human form".

So what is our role in employing the anthropomorphic meme? The suggestion, I believe, is that there is no good or right way to do this.

One way—as I said last time, one of the more interesting ways—is to employ the "animal traits" of your animal-like humans to some dramatic end. Phil Geusz considers Niven's 'Pearson's Puppeteers' to be perhaps the ne plus ultra of this archetype, and—given that the Puppeteers are completely invented, without reference to terrestrial species at all—they probably do represent one of the purest translations of this basic idea. Also accomplishing this, I suppose, are the animal assistants of people in Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog," and Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon".

This latter provides an interesting counterpoint, however. Smith's "Ballad of Lost C'Mell," one of his most famous works, concerns a cat-person, but her 'catness' is less important than her 'otherness.' It's one of the earliest examples of the "oppressed animal-people" trope, and I'd venture to say that "Ballad of Lost C'Mell" is a 'furry' story, but it doesn't spend every other paragraph talking about C'Mell's cat-like ways. The narrative progresses apace without it, and aside from the periodic references to dog-people and so on, everyone might just as well be human. Say, black (this may have been Smith's point; I admit I don't know).

Therefore we can suggest that it probably is sufficient to write about humans with ears and a tail, if this suits you, so long as it's reasonably clear to the reader that this is, in fact, what you're writing about. In a practical sense this is more or less where I write from; it is not integral to the story in Sympathy for the Devil or The High, Untrespassed Sanctity of Space that the characters be animals, or that they are the animals I have assigned to them—but neither would it be possible to convert the story to one about humans without substantial editing. One of my favourite reviews of my work goes like this:

Sympathy for the Devil I think is oftentimes held up as the choicest morsel amidst a tumultuous sea of amateur fap pap and schlick fic, but even it didn't really seem to me like anything other than genre work in a genre so handicapped by its defining elements as to make its chances of achieving recognition or relevance beyond the special interests of animal-obsessed autism-tinged manchildren... well, dwindling, to say the least.

Which is probably true, but I don't mind.

In the event, my initial point in my first essay was in addressing a view of anthropomorphism that I would describe as teleological to the point of ridiculousness—that the elements of the character must of necessity point back to the innate animalness of said character, and that an author who creates 'furry' stories wherein the character might as well be another animal, or human, has failed. This is misguided. I am pretty sure that C'Mell could well have been, say, a fox—so near as I can tell she was a cat only because Cordwainer Smith had a fascination with them.

Authors wishing to write within the fandom should probably be cognisant that their characters are animal-like in some fashion—and this should be clear enough to the reader. However, at the end of the day, all stories are essentially "human" stories, and the definition of 'furry' is completely at the author's discretion.

(crossposted here from Alexandria2 because this is really more of a polemic)

What makes a story "furry"? This is a somewhat contentious issue, and people can get a bit tetchy about it. There is a continuum of sorts, situated between two diametric propositions:

A. It doesn't matter at all; any story with anthropomorphic characters in it is "furry";
B. There is an intrinsic furry character to stories, pursuing it should be the goal, and stories in which the characters do not, ipso facto, have to be anthropomorphic are not "furry".

The traditional literary view of the fandom cleaves to the latter point of view, and this is also the perspective advanced by the fandom's leading writing demagogues. In this line of reasoning, stories in which the characters are furry but do not have to be for the plot's sake are labelled as "human in fursuit" or "zipperback" stories.

There is something to this point of view. In particular, given that furry stories tend to exist within their own little ghetto, it's plainly apparent that someone who writes furry characters when they could be using humans is making their life a lot harder for no good reason, if their eventual aim is publication or appeal to a general audience.

Too, the history of anthropomorphic writing is broadly characterised by anthropomorphism as a trope—that is to say, by people using the non-human nature of the characters to make a point, or to draw on the established semiotic value of the species. This is true from Kipling to the Kzinti, and it suggests that anthro fiction does and can be inherently furry, such that losing that aspect changes the work substantially.

But should it? And, more to the point, must it?

The "B" end of the continuum would answer both of these questions as "yes". On the other hand, there is a certain... high-mindedness to this notion. It creates a "no true Scotsman" scenario in which anthro fiction is somewhat arbitrarily defined—how much characterisation is sufficient? Any? Is it important only that the characters not be human, or must they also be locked in by self-definition to their individual species, as well?

It helps that, to be brutally honest, much if not most of the furry writing community may profess to be in camp "B" but is actually camp "A". The bulk of the fandom's work, sampled at places like FurAffinity and Yiffstar, is only debatably intrinsically furry. Most of it is simply declaratory: "these characters are anthropomorphic, the end." Want to argue with it? Take it up with the author. Is this good enough?

I'm going to start by advancing two moderately radical answers. Must the characters in a "furry" story be inherently furry? No. Should they? Not necessarily.

Why mustn't they be? I propose three reasons.

One, it imposes an absurd double standard. I'm not aware of any serious artistic thread in the furry community that suggests that furry artwork depict characters engaged in activities that are inherently animalistic, or that artists who choose to depict animals in human settings might as well be depicting humans instead. Why? Because that would be a ridiculous imposition, that's why. How is it any different with the written word?

Two, it blatantly disregards author intent. In the absence of a top-down Anthropomorphic Standards Board, if an author chooses to identify their work as furry, and it contains anthropomorphic characters, any attempt to extrinsically redefine the work either has to rely on some objective standard or be illegitimate. The standard of "a furry story contains characters that are not human" is an a priori logical truth. Anything else is non-objective, which would be fine, except that...

Three, it is fundamentally circular. The notion that a story is not furry if the characters could be replaced with humans just isn't sustainable, because at some point it requires an arbitrary line to be drawn. A story in which male bipedal lions shoot the children of their lioness girlfriends before marrying them is decidedly anthropomorphic (on the other hand, what if this doesn't occur? Is it a strike against the "furriness" of the story?).

But what if I have a scene in my story in which the sole reference to someone's species is that they have to fill out a census form, or that they look for clothes that match the colour of their fur. Is that enough to make it furry? Or would the "B" side of the continuum suggest that I remove these scenes from the story? Suppose we assume that Abraham Lincoln is the same species as the central characters in the story (which is generally accurate). Suppose the statue in the Lincoln Monument depicts a fox? Suppose, in Da Vinci Code fashion, some plot point hinges on one of the statue's ears pointing towards a small inscription in the edifice. This has nothing to do with anthropomorphism per se, but the story would be fundamentally different without furry characters even if they are never mentioned as such.

To some degree I am arguing against a straw man, here, because there are comparatively few people who would argue that a story must be intrinsically anthropomorphic to be a "furry" story. But what of the second concept? Should it be?

First off it should be said that there is a lot to be said for anthropomorphisation. It is a powerful tool and I'd certainly not caution anyone who wants to employ it against doing so. Memorable anthropomorphic characters in science fiction, like the dogs in City or the Kzinti in Ringworld, are so because the trope is skilfully employed.

However, I don't think it is something that you should employ just because you feel it's expected of you. There may be places, for instance, where it distracts from the narrative, or becomes a gimmick. If your point lies beyond characterisation—say, in plot—then anthropomorphisation might not help you at all. That, or you get the opportunity to join the several thousand other furries who have tread the well-worn path of "how would humans deal with furries?" where the answer is generally "some form of apartheid."

There is a certain elitism associated with furry writing, and in particular the notion that people who aren't making it as anthropomorphic as possible are doing it wrong. I think this is inaccurate. Anthropomorphism is useful in furry stories, and possibly to be encouraged—but by no means required. One can be a good furry author without using those elements and, indeed, I would argue that it is entirely possible that the best furry stories may well not be heavily anthropomorphised—not because a lack of anthropomorphisation is helpful, but because its presence is not required.

In sum: all that is needed for a story to be furry is that the characters are non-human. Anything else is gravy. Enjoy writing; that's what matters. Don't let anybody else pigeonhole your stories for you.

As far as stories are concerned, has anyone an idea of what the general content restrictions are for general vs. mature vs. adult?

I find that my stories are starting to grow hair in unusual places, and perhaps their voices are starting to drop and they're taking an interest in girls for the first time, but they still seem on the cusp between "general" and "mature." There's some cursing. There is some very lightly implied sex. Sometimes.

Is that mature? I don't know.

It's definitely not adult, but it appears that there is no fundamental difference between "mature" and "adult" as far as FA is concerned? I am so confused.

/a

In my spare time, such as I have it, I've been working on creating a somewhat more specialised writing website, provisionally titled "Alexandria II" (alexandriaii.org). Examining FurAffinity's method for posting stories does little to suggest to me that I'm making a terrible decision.

However, as this gathers steam, I've decided if nothing else to shift away from the shambling wreck that is SoFurry — I should be quite honest that I got my start on Yiffstar and would not be here today without it, but it's just not the kind of website I can really be affiliated with anymore.

And I like FA, so.

Hi guys.