When you have abrupt life changes forced upon you and those you love, you take a step back. Not just to take stock of the mess, but to orient yourself to pick your next direction. Two weeks ago I lost my job of eleven years to downsizing and my father was rushed to the hospital with pneumonia at the age of eighty-one. I have nine months to find new work. My father and mother now have to find new living arrangements in potentially far less time as they’re no longer able to sustain their household independently and I’m an hour and a half away from any emergency.


So life goes up on the board and you look at it, at what’s important and where you need to go. I’m helping my parents wrap up aspects of their life to move while I take stock of mine and well, you reflect a bit. An update in my former company’s app confirmed what I’d suspected. I’d lost my job due to a chatbot making a third of the department surplus to requirements.


Writing has been the professional and emotional center of my life for as long as I’ve been passionate about anything. Even working in finance, getting a glow from somebody who finally had a detailed concept explained to them in a way that finally made sense gave me satisfaction. Going home and getting characters to express different musings in hypothetical situations closed the gap. Writing for me is endless free therapy in the way that reading is my introvert’s laboratory. In tandem, for my many foibles, I’m a complete person thanks to the very existence of this medium. It’s just that amazing.


It still holds in some circles that some see reading as the introvert’s quick escape from the world, but in actuality its quite the opposite. For many of us divided by geography, class, ideology and a thousand other things, literature puts us in rooms and heads with the inner workings of stranger’s ideas, their triumphs and their follies. What’s more, it connects us to what others think those very concepts even are in a world where the collisions of deep-felt convictions drive pretty much everything. You get to deeply, truly know too few people in a life, but the things people write help us with that deficit, and in so doing reveal their greatest reward.


Stories are lovingly curated windows into how others see the same world we live in, made unique by all the particulars that distinguish one human being from another in places we’ve never been. Even the most speculative settings, the space opera, the ancient horror, the epic quest for the magical thing can be turned over by a million different storytellers and yet have intrinsic individual value because the person who took the time to write it had that particular, uncompromised lens on worlds better or worse and felt compelled to express whatever the hell made their heart beat faster. Literature and visual art are languages for dreams to be voluntarily transferred. That’s the foundation of the agreement. It’s why I read anything at all.


I write this immediately after reading a chapter of a novel in progress that had a spiritual undertone in a simple scene, a metaphorical use of water that a linguistic model would never conceive of because it doesn’t feel the connective essence of symbols, doesn’t understand the emotional journeys of people who are in turn the extensions of wants that excite or haunt someone real, someone tangible. That someone is sharing the earth with us right now, while others are taken back to it and gone, but they shouted and were heard and can be heard again by people not yet here. That’s art’s gift, any art, but for me this one in particular.


As I sit here, I’m not angry at the AI that took my job or the AI that’s after other’s, I’m just sad. I’m dismayed that the deeper mystery of a human being communicating the innermost part of themself to passers-by is seen as just one more swappable component in the mass content-push that art and literature is transitioning to…to sell more content and have more content to sell. Short stories crafted by humans take hours to days. Novels take days to years. The heart speaks its own language at its own speed and some aren’t happy with the RPM’s achieved. Too bad. All the input fed to any language model can’t give me a deeper means to understand people who shoot out of bed and get an idea down in the crush of night because there is nobody’s urgency to contemplate, nobody’s anxious voice to hear. The component that truly mattered might not be there at all.

So I’m dismayed, a little more lonely at the knowledge that what means everything to me means so little to some with deeper pockets that can't fill fast enough. It’s not pleasant to read but tell me that a model can feel this way, much less express it with any honestly. The answer would be some interesting content, I’m sure.

This is coming extremely late as I have not been on the site much through COVID, but I'm at MFF this weekend!

Panels you can find me on today:

Historical Fiction at 5pm
Kink Topics at 10:30pm

Both are at the Seatac room at the Hyatt Regency hotel, bottom floor, West side.

Hope to see you there!

House maintenance expenses, work booking problems, all that stuff thwarted this year's con plans. I will have a couple stories that I'm putting up snippets for that will be in anthologies at the Furplanet table but this year will see me at home, vicariously enjoying the con through tweets.

Enjoy all! Hope to be on deck for AC'20

Hiya.
If you’re reading this you may be cramming badges and extra underwear into a suitcase right now. In a little over 48 hours Anthrocon 2018 will begin. I’m gonna be there, and doing a few panels on the writing track throughout the weekend, though admittedly fewer then previous years which will give me ample time to hang out and socialize.

This year I’ve been a bit lighter in writing, having burned a lot of coffeepots along with ~iconNighteyesDayspring to get the Dystopian anthology ready in time for AC. Along with this you’ll see I’ve got two stories out in The Tales from the Guild Anthology Volume 2 and Claw Volume 1 respectively. They’re already linked on the main. I’m rapidly switching gears to other projects, including one more anthology project I’m editing that’s in pipeline which is confidential (but maple flavoured) and settling on one of two novel ideas that have been knocking around in my head for awhile.

Finally, I’m going to see about securing an artist for the next chapter of the two-long-on-the-blocks Open Seasons series which has been in perpetual cliffhanger for nearly three years.

Man, planning is exhausting. I need a rest.
See you in Pittsburgh!

And it looks like the rain is gonna miss us for most of today, thankfully. (Don't let us down weather-channel radar!)

I arrived late yesterday and helped  Nighteyes and his mate get Rysingsun accessories offloaded for the teamsters before doing some slushpile sorting for the upcoming Dystopian anthology and drifting about to meet some other furs.

If you're at AC, come by and say hi! I've got four stories out in Heat 14, ROAR 8, FANG 8 and Bleak Horizons, the last of which I'll be reading an excerpt from at a panel on Friday.

In total I'll be on five panels, which you can see listed here: https://anthrocon2017.sched.com/mob.....oyjbrm;speaker

Please stop in and bring questions for all the qualified pros I'll get to sit with. And if you'd like a book signed (LOTS of us will be around to do this), Heat is available at the Sofawolf table with the other three at the Furplanet table.

Have a great con!

Time flies, right? I'll be at MFF from Thursday night on. Can't wait to see everybody I know there and meet a lot of new faces. Taking a lighter load than at AC, I'll be on two panels in the writing track, details here and will also be one of ten authors featured in Hot Dish 2 which is launching at the Sofawolf table in the International Ballroom, tables 3-4. Navigate your way with this handy dealer den guide here.

As this is my first MFF and visit to Chicago too, I'll be lost somewhere if not hanging round the den or panel rooms for the writing track. Please, if you see me and want your copy of Hot Dish 2 signed (lots of us will be on hand to do this) stop me and tell me which is better; wolves, aliens, or aliens pretending to be wolves. It matters;|

Happy MFF, everybody! See you in a day-ish

Writing for many is a purgative exercise, a way to deal with the things we love and hate in ways make some sense of the world we're living in. If you’ve read any of my stuff, you know I play with historical fiction a lot. I love hanging out with the ancients, the explorers and the bohemians. Creating 'furry' historical fiction in these settings brings these stories to a whole different level. Using sapient animals lets you handle the dark parts of history that came before us however you want. Feel compelled to explore racial, gender or class conflicts? Furry gives you metaphors for that. Want to rose-color the same chapter in history and go a direction where none of these things plague us? You can tweak that out if you want to. The parallels cut as close or far from the mark as you need to in the furry lens because we see things differently through the rodent’s eyes, no less than the elephants. Are you scared of what lurks underfoot? Or are you frightened that this great world around you will crush you without warning?

In a very real sense, we were asked us these questions last week when the free world elected that guy. I won’t say anything new about the racist, misogynist, authoritarian, exploiter of white working-class resentment at America’s helm come January. Today people we know and love are justifiably scared for their physical safety, their scarcely-improved health care, their marriages, their religious freedoms and jobs, all so this elite swindler can pass himself as the true savior of “us” versus “them.”

Being Canadian, and white, I’m obviously not in any firing line. South of the border nobody would see my bisexuality. So I laughed with everybody else at this idiot who could barely string a sentence together, listened to media lining a bubble of smug bias I didn’t know I occupied, and made it worse by amplifying what a cakewalk the US election was for Hillary on social media. And why not? Americans and Canadians live in a land where crypto-fascists don't take power (anymore) all and I’m safe from authoritarian monsters.

Until Tuesday we presumably all were.

It’s taken me several days to process the sick horror that comes with seeing Susan B. Anthony’s legacy spat on and people of color being told their marginalization should become domestic policy. This comes as a wake-up from pretensions I’ve long held without realizing them, that made screwing around with history such light, diverting fare. I could put everything bad people did in lurid technicolor on the written page because the Caligulas and Hitlers of the world are supposed to be far behind us. Or in the sense that they exist now, they are someplace else in bad parts of the world that we’re lucky not to live in. Cause we're better don't you know.

I finally started catching up on old shows and watched the first episode of The Knick a couple weeks ago. Clive Owen’s chief physician from turn of the twentieth-century New York was an openly racist bastard to Andre Holland’s African-borne Parisian-trained surgeon and this was 'okay' because it’s an accurate, embattled portrayal of the distant, horse-drawn bygones that will likely going to lead to a reckoning. After the election on Tuesday, I saw the second episode where this injustice is doubled-down on, the black surgeon sent to toil in the hospital’s basement despite his obvious competence and extensive education. Now the show that drew me in now thoroughly depresses me. It’s set 116 years ago…

Before November 8th, I could write an openly misogynistic detective into one story and a sexually abusive businessman into another without apology or having to explain their context in history because I 'knew' these were representations of people we’d never have to bend a knee to ever again. Because WE'RE progressive, WE'RE ahead of the moral curve and only getting better! Back pats all around! Certainly nobody’s stumbling across my shit and thinking “this writer gets ME with this character," but as Alex Beecroft noted in this excellent article on historical representation in fiction bombarding historical 'reality' at a reader is no virtue in and of itself. It can divorce a reader who seeks some form of escape. Or understanding. Or reflection on what came before means to people living right now. The article came out well before the election and what was great food for thought that week was a serious prognostication of the right now. We're going to have a lot of people reliving the darker parts of history outside of the pages in coming months, maybe years. Cultural, ethnic and religious representation, whether in mainstream entertainment borrowing from history like Game of Thrones or small press work coated in looser furry metaphors has the potential to help or hinder how we look at ourselves, now more than ever.

The train wreck of last week compels some sober questions as to how we deal with fictionally representing a past that is sadly more cyclical than we were willing to face. We’ve long known that people with evil, vengeful intentions were among us but we never thought they’d get the reigns of the free world while being so brazenly open about what they represent. The bigots of influence had learned to be more subtle, hiding in their shadows. Not anymore. We refused to take them seriously.

So, at the moment, I’m doubting a lot of things I take for granted in writing what I write for fun and occasional profit. Handling the past in fiction doesn’t feel like it can or should be a completely escapist outlet right now. Maybe not for a long while. Or on the other hand if it is, the villains in our stories shouldn't be given the benefit of being regarded as simply 'of their time.' We're all going to exist as minor characters in someone's history book, long down the line. Would we want the mysoginists and racists of 2016 to be regarded as just typical actors in the grand scheme?

None of the past is behind us, not really. The villains twirling their whiskers are smiling right over all our shoulders. Perhaps our writing needs to be insurgent again, definitely more compassionate, more conscious about portraying where we've come from and where we're going as a result. If the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction needs to make sense, it must now also appeal to it.

It's literally been two months since I've been on FA. Life was a bit hectic through the summer, seriously cutting into any chances I had to write or even socialize to the extent that I wanted. Now, I'm slowly getting back on track, with some new goals lining up in advance of the new year.

I feel with 13 stories out and another 7 on the way it's time to chance gears and start working on a novel concept that's been pinballing around my noggin for a year or two. The concept is a bit out there, but melds a lot of things I really like, being an alternate historical setting with a supernatural horror angle. Won't say more at this point, but I'll be doing some key research in Chicago immediately after MFF this December, where I'll be one dog in a massive pack of writers doing panels on the track there. Things aren't locked down, but I appear to be on two of them, a much more relaxed schedule than I'm used to at AC (not that that's any less fun) As my novel research after involves museums and famous bars, I know that part will be just as memorable as it is educational.

Also, I'll have an anthology out at MFF that I'm in too, the long awaited and expertly curated Hot Dish 2, which contains a Novella length work I am particularly proud of. The next five weeks can't pass quickly enough, especially since the $%@#ing US election will FINALLY be behind us all. That will be one of many things to celebrate when we converge on Chicago as the autumn ends and the fun begins. Can't wait to see you all:)

It's just three days until fellow scriber  ocean flies in from Western Canada and we head down in my micro-car to Pittsburgh for Anthrocon. I've been really excited to see everybody again (especially since I suck at keeping in touch) and of course the whole furry writing corps of engineers be embroiled in assorted shenanigans both on and off the convention floor. Lots of new anthologies and novels are coming out from Sofawolf Press, Furplanet, Rabbit Valley and Weasel Press. I'll be linking snippets to things I'm in over the next couple days as AC approaches.

There will be a writing track as always, shepherded by  IanusJWolf which kicks off Friday and runs the whole weekend through. The entire schedule for Anthrocon can be found here: https://anthrocon2016.sched.org/

There are eighteen panels in total with a rotation of eleven writers in the mix. I'm on these five:

Slip-Wolf
• Fri 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM / Settings and Worlds
• Fri 8:00 PM – 9:00 PM / Action!
• Fri 10:00 PM – 12:00 AM / Adult Writing
• Sat 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM / Western
• Sat 8:00 PM – 9:00 PM / Submit and Publish


Please check the convention schedule linked above to get all the details, and I really hope to see you there:)

I had a really good 2015 as a writer, having published seven short stories in as many anthologies with Furplanet and Sofawolf Press, a career best for me that I honestly don't know if I'll ever top. Taking a quick look back, here's a quick summary:

Unfading - Heat issue 12
This metaphorical exploration of the various issues faced by transsexual people follows a young wolf's multi-year journey in becoming the rabbit she knows lies within.

Relics, Rabbits and Tuscan Reds - ROAR Volume 6
A fun tale of secrets and intrigue set in one of my favorite places on Earth. Sienna awaits!

Ashes - FANG Volume 6
To be gay in Victorian Britain was to be convicted in one's own soul, and some prisons are harder to escape than others.

Every Breath Closer - Inhuman Acts Anthology
A diva seeks to escape the fame that is destroying her life while The squirrel detective on her trail learns the horrible extents others take to create a legacy.

Sighs for the Labyrinth - Dungeon Grind Anthology.
Loin cloths and inhibitions fall to the sand when a Minotaur teaches an introverted Spartan general the language of a warring heart.

Chain Link - Will of the Alpha 2 Anthology.
What if your worst shame was your strongest kink? A successful business wolf finds himself against the fence when his urge for fulfillment threatens his safety and sanity.

Mustard Mulato - Will of the Alpha 3 Anthology
A raccoon with slavish tendencies brings headache and heartbreak to his artistic lemur girlfriend and finds himself exposed for a very thorough critique.

I really enjoyed working on these with some great editors, including Darkend, Ocean Tigrox, Ashe Valisca, Mary E. Lowd, Kandrel and Rechanmole, many of whom are also stellar writers with thier own eligible works for this year. I hope you get the chance to vote in the Ursa Majors here.
Thanks for reading:D

If you're reading this you are either not at Feral or screwing around on the Internet while you should be reconnecting with nature so throw your laptop in the lake right after you read this okay?

Saturday morning I'll be holding a writer's worskshop entitled; Setting And Worldbuilding while Set at the Edge of the World (where there's bacon)

It's going to explore furry settings as narrated through the direct experiences of characters in stories. We'll be exploring writing from the senses and projecting that stimuli onto the characters who wind up experiencing our carefully crafted kingdoms, wastelands, spaceships and summer astral-projection camp (future theme alert Potoroo!)

Essentially, the workshop explores how seeing imagined settings from different character's perspectives makes a setting distinctly unique each time.

Bacon provided by the ton by Camp Feral,
Imagination provided by the ton by you!
Saturday, 10am, hope to see you:)

Having successfully convinced the powers that be of my potential capacity to talk to other writers about writing in front of a room of other writers and people and things, I have a schedule for panels which I am participating in at Anthrocon. Follow this link to see what I've gotten myself into.
AC panels I'm sitting on

You'd think that with a month away it would be easy to get things in order for a convention. Funny thing is, there's lots of little things that have to get prepped over this month that I have to get ready for, all while getting editing out of the way on three other projects, helping another editor finish the second round of his anthology and prepping for an Italian trip right after the Vikings finish decimating downtown Pittsburgh (the theme-glossed furries, not the Minnesota NFL team-I don't make sports predictions of any kind, ever) Digression over.

Can't find an artist for the next chapter of Open seasons. All the leads I'm chasing open up, get thier queues loaded and close down faster than I can blink, so clearly the solution it to contract an artist in person at AC, where our eyes can meet and we can plot and plan doom for my characters with cold, salacious glee.
You may wonder why not just put the damn stuff out? I could easily throw the next four chapters out without any art, but both my icons are naked grey wolves with bedroom eyes and honestly, isn't that what most of us see every single day?
Here's how the next chapter starts:

Lyrise felt time slow down, like this moment was filling an eternity. She felt the stallion's blade turn under her chin, thick fingers working it slowly...

See, its been forever since the last chapter, how meta of me, huh? Still, its going to be a good wait if the art is good, and I'm still intending to commission artists to work each chapter already in the catalog that has a grey wolf writer staring off into the middle distance as it's header.

OTHER FUN NEWS!

Barring the anarchist sabotaging of Sofawolf's and Furplanet's print houses, I will have three story snippets coming out over the next two weeks, staggered every couple days. These three are all turning up in anthologies to be released at Anthrocon this July 9-12

Also, I will have an author's bio being put out by the furry writer's guild sometime later this month which I will have to send another version of, again, as a helpful reader found some spelling errors that got by me. Durr.

Love and peace. Or war, if that gets you more play with the Viking folk.

Slip

Funny that my last post apologized for dropping off the face of the earth and then three months later...

I hope everybody still in this feed, and it doesn't look like anybody fled, is well. I see many people I've been following have been pretty busy from the journal list, and I can say the same for myself.

And its exactly the same situation as last time when I dropped out for nearly forever. I want to honestly apologize for being so out of touch with everybody socially. Some days its hard just to find time to tweet. Why is that? On the life front, I got ANOTHER promotion at work, this time to a much better department handling things I like. Overtime has been mandatory for me whenever I can get it, both to get fully prepped for my new position and for reasons to be explained below. I've also been handling a series of minor health challenges too as I've been trying to get back into shape and hitting every wall imaginable. My fault for agreeing to get old. Not gonna do that anymore.

Outside of work and health, there is writing, which in the past couple months has hit the highest gear ever in output and range of projects dabbled in. I got into four more anthologies, lost one due to an editor going AWOL, completed several rounds of edits on three stories coming out soon, took an assistant editors' post on the Noir anthology with :oceantigrox: am part-timing on a podcast with a group of guys that is very slowly coming together (but am currently obliged not to disclose), and took on a novel beta read for another author who didn't say whether I can talk or not but will err on the side of discretion anyway. (He's a fox. Not that fox. The other one. Not him either...)

Up and coming is the big event of the year (for mono-con me), Anthrocon, which I'm going to be attending as one of many writing-track panelists, details being hashed out right now with organizers and participants. I'm also going to have X number of stories coming out there, the number currently appearing to be 3, but could be going up or down by one or two, details to follow. Many other stories/novellas slated to come out at AC have been delayed until sometime after the summer. AC is just under three months away, and will be immediately followed by a vacation with my mate to Italy, which I have been promising to take her to for years and will be expensive as hell, which is half the reason for that overtime I'm going insane with. Needless to say, July 8th is going to be one happy day when leaving work, lemee tell you.

I'm halfway through the next chapter of Open Seasons-no that project is NOT abandoned. I am looking for an artist to illustrate the next installment and am keeping with a theme in which no two chapters are illustrated by the same hand. As the story is about shifting perspectives and suspect motives, I like that every blink puts things through a different person's lens. That said, I love everybody I've worked with and would commission any of them in a heartbeat.

Intending to keep in touch, and I hope spring comes fast for every one of you. Love, peace, good writing.

Slip

It's been a crazy quarter-year. Between last post and this one, I wrote and sent four stories, had a couple accepted and started relining the plot structure on a novel I started last year, (though I'm not sure when I'll get back to that)

I joined a gym, got a promotion at work, said goodbye to a good friend who's taking a six-month contract in North Van and toyed with the writerly seduction of almost total seclusion, save some occasional twitter high-jinx and checking out posts and art here every once in awhile. I've been facing a bit of a personal dilemma of late facing the surmountable but annoying problem of accumulated personal debt due to a house furnace, a stove and a washing machine all dying within the last six months, typical homeowner shit. I'm not destitute or anything, my spouse and son and I are doing just fine, but it has taken a social toll in that I hardly ever get out from all the overtime I've been working to keep in financial shape. Most of my free time has been spent writing since my big goal at this point is to finance the majority of my big con visit (AC in July) with writing and money saved on the side. I'm also reading a lot since I've fallen behind considerably on all the stuff I want to keep up on and find I need inspiration.

Alot of pros tell me that reading is the essential counterpart to writing if you want to get any good, and I can vouch for the long stretches of writer's block I've cracked by picking up something fun, or something horrific, or something academically informative just to get my mind on a different track and receptive to new ways of written expression.

Anyway, I wanted to let anybody tracking me know I'm not MIA and that I'm going to be getting back on track with Open Seasons, which has at least another ten chapters to go before the major arc winds up. I was working on at least two stories a month for awhile and am now able to stop and chill out a bit. Hope as the snows come and the holidays gear up that you manage to do the same.

Happy Holidays, Slip

About an hour's drive East of Huntsville Ontario and up a dirt road that winds and dips like a motocross track, one comes upon Arowhon, a tidy collection of wooden cabins, rope obstacle courses, campfire circles and ball courts nestled around a pine wooden lodge in the middle of Algonquin park, some of the purest, densest wilderness Canada has. There are archery ranges, climbing walls and diving towers into bracing lakes from end to end.

But its only in the second last month of August that the park gets furries.

Having gone to a half dozen hotel/convention-center based cons, it occurred to me within about an hour of opening my sleeping back and cracking my first drink to wonder loudly why places like these aren't the most obviously sought-out locales for furries to gather en-masse pretty much anywhere there's sunlight. I mean sure, we're tech engorged; We watch ponies on t.v., play every computer game ever made and write pretentious con reports on furry websites.

But furries are obviously connected by a love of nature, the animalistic side in all of us, and a yearning for the right to just let go of shit for awhile. And where in a Hyatt Regency are you going to see chipmunks dodging hiking boots and foxes winking back at you from a tree line as you follow a back trail you thought was a shortcut but didn't really care if you were wrong? Don't get me wrong. I'm not dissing hotel-based cons, most of which I've been to vastly exceed expectations. They are all exciting, awesome experiences despite the antiseptics of really ugly carpeting, slow elevator lines and rickety folding tables, but why should a con be awesome despite anything?

As a rare newbie prowling, I asked about twenty of the one-hundred and forty-seven attendees to Feral this year how far they came for this experience and the furthest I heard was a 17 hour drive from Kentucky. By the point that tidbit hit me, I wasn't at all surprised. Feral is genius planning and execution by people who work themselves past exhaustion.

If you don't know, the camp has been run for several years by a cadre of insane West Toronto-centered furs guided by recording artist, podcaster and oft-tapped natural resource  potoroo, who's army of organizers, panelists, poets, artists and gophers (I know alot of them but don't have the space to iconize everybody) put this thing on over a four-day blitz that has them in endless motion. Yes, any con is a daunting challenge that few really appreciate, we all know that, but these guys lined up contingencies for things that no convention center has to worry about. What other con assembles eleven meal plans and four evening snacks for every single con-goer, the allergic included? What con has working solutions for torrential downpours, boisterous people injuring themselves, (new guys hear the ankle-con story) and coordinates constantly with a half dozen life-guards and observers for high-ropes, archery ranges and a two story climbing apparatus?

And yes, some campers could potentially be drunk when they go to play with the toys. Not the staff's fault, but they're still prepared. Its an amazingly impressive feat put on seamlessly by people who are exhaustedly drifting back to their day-jobs as I write this and will likely be preparing for next year before I post. So why aren't there camp-cons all over North America? Cause they're damn hard to do.

So what were the particulars of this year's show? Like a conventional con, there are panels and workshops, but these aren't nailed down by an auditorium-style table and chairs. The guests of honor this year were digital artist, music producer and DJ, Kihu (not on FA) and author and teacher  Tempo321 who were both great in their roles. Being a writer looking to collect tips and trade insights, I spent a great deal of time talking with Tempe, who was easy-going and accommodating. I went to his writing and gaming workshops, done round-table style at the porch table of Teepee heights, and a room-escaping hike-and write tour around Arowhon's more secluded lakes that developed everybody's descriptive skills. These activities were highlights for me personally, as Tempe led some great discussions.

Other gatherings I attended were Teachings of the Sacred circle held  Gishkishenh, who is as quick with her wit as with an archery bow. I should add I found that out 'outside' the panel, lest somebody get confused. I also enjoyed The Tarot as a Tool for Writing, held by Skylos (not on FA), who showed some unconventional and inspiring ways to use Tarot cards to crack writer's block. He was also a an affecting and hilarious contributor at the poetry jam session that took place fire-side by the main lodge on Sunday with Conbook poetry contributor Trevor Patrick. Finally, for the audio-phile entertainment curious, Roo joined  louphin and  Leviwolstrom for a special edition of the Wagztail podcast where they opined and joked about the technical and creative aspects of podcasting.

Busy as I was, I missed alot due to crossover scheduling.  Anyare did a panel on artistic character creation I was sad to miss, and  Yennix had a leather working workshop that would have been cool to attend as well. As with staffer mentions
above, I sadly couldn't list half of everything that went on that I couldn't go to. It was impossible to get bored there, and I found I was nearly spent of energy in the evenings when the DJ lineup, from Kiju on down took us through hip-hop, EDM and pretty much anything you can possibly dance to.

What else? The meals were amazing. All the food fresh and meaty or vegetarian as you needed it. Endless bacon! I didn't believe that. Now I'm apologetically humbled. And what do you spend all those burger, chicken, lasagna and cupcake calories on? Camp wide melee events, dodgeball, and the already mentioned evening dances. There were so many ways to excercise the mind and body that every meal went down gloriously.

Though I can ocassionally be a solitary creature, I met great people in my cabin, with whom I helped prep a dirty song chosen by Omet for the cabin skits on the last night. Skylos gave us musical accompaniment with the melodica while my travelling companion  Arrkay, Omet,  Sybol and her mate Ferguta all handled lyrics. We were rated roughly five-ish in popularity by applause-o-metrics and were happy to take that.

I could go endlessly on about every little thing about Feral made it special and memorable and awesome, but I think you get the point. Feral is a holiday away from everything, a freakishly loaded supercon, an excuse to disconnect from one half of your life and thoroughly bond with something closer to your core self. All you need to do is shut your damn phone off and stop looking for that tenuous connection by the flagpole. I know I'll be there in some capacity next year and you already know why. Hope to pass a whiskey flask out by the fire if we meet.

Cheers

I was only able to make it for the last day of the final Condition convention, but I'm happy to say I had a great time. The World Building panel I ran had a lot of active participants and everybody brought a lot of great ideas to the table in regards to what goes into creating a world for furry characters to populate. We read excerpts from two other authors,  kandrel 's story Dream a Little Dream of Me from Hot Dish and  whyteyote 's story Two minutes from Heat Issue 9 which everybody provided great insights for. Both excerpts were used with the author's blessing and support and formed perfect examples of world building as done by great writers in the tight space afforded by the short story format.
The finishing project was the collaborative design of a barbershop for the modern day metrosexual furry in need of a wolf-scaping (yeah I'm imagining me) that brought up the implications of propriety, privacy and infrastructure. All in all it went pretty well for a first-time ever con panel and the audience made it awesome as only they can.

In just twelve days I'm heading off to my next and last major con of the year, Camp Feral. I won't be doing a panel there but will be going to some writing workshops or panels held by GOH  tempo321 and am really looking forward to meeting some new people while getting inspiration for what comes next.

Writing wise, there should be a new chapter of Open Seasons very soon. I've relined some parts of the story now that a plot issue has been resolved going forward and its my hope to have it on the boards before I go on a cottage excursion later this week. Lyrise has to contend with some of the lies she's told and has to shepherd a new agent through the complex web of intrigue and deception that is her job.

If all goes according to plan, and it's a pretty basic plan so it should, I'll be moderating a discussion tommorow at Condition versus the Monsters in London Ontario, talking about, well, here's the description:

Description: World building can be fun or frustrating, but it is an essential component in setting the written (mis)adventures of your tail wagging, feather moulting or nocturnal heroes. This open participation panel will discuss the possibilities and pratfalls involved in developing worlds either startlingly alien or eerily similar to our own.

Note: This is not an adult content panel, but erotic or other sensitive issues may enter the discussion.

This and other fun stuff will be going on during the last day of condition versus the monsters, which you can read all about in their handy con guide here

Hope to see you there:)

I couldn't get down this year because of finances and other things. I'll be burying any regrets I have in the glow of word counts now that Camp NaNoWriMo has kicked off. Details on that can be found here. If you want to clear some cobwebs (and I have a novel project that needs resuscitation) than this is an excellent place to start. You can even adjust your word count if 50k isn't reasonable. Hint: I can't do that much either this month.

Speaking of Camp, if you are in Eastern Canuckistan, you can always sign up for Camp Feral, our country's one and only outdoor convention, camp thing. Writer's GOH this year will be Tempe O'Kun and the artist/musician will be Kihu! I'll be going this coming August to meet new people and hang out and details on that are available here.

Its well worth the drive North to Algonquin park, especially if you can't deal with the summer heat anymore and need to get into furry shenanigans outside of a hotel. Hope everybody enjoys your weekend, at AC or away from it. Play safe.
I'm going out back with an ax to kill a tree-stump. Fun times:D

Slip

I dunno. Maybe I should have waited. AC is over two weeks away and the days will be long between for those of you going, but lets be honest here; I’ve been pretty excited since about five this morning and only an early rise followed by a work thing with no outside internet has kept me shut up for nearly ten hours. I don’t remember any of what I learned today, honestly. How many days in a row can I smilingly daydream of coyotes and still keep my job?

I was honored to have my story chosen for Heat 11 several months ago, stewarded along by the story-tailoring talents of The Dark End, who was firm, supportive and great to work with. I was supremely glad to be in Heat, already knew that some of my favorite authors were going to be on board and Dark End made the experience positive in every way.

I woke this morning to a tweet from Huskyteer, passing on the news that the listing for Heat was up and I checked the link as I prepped for work. I read the TOC with interest. Literally everybody I love is in this issue! Kyell Gold introduced me to the vast possibilities in antho fiction, taking the complications of extra-human sensuality seriously in a way I’d never seen and inspiring me to pick up the pen that I’d dropped years ago in despair. Whyte Yote demonstrated the beauty in kinks of all kinds and the ways in which we use desires to find truth in ourselves. Huskyteer lead me to the focal point where humor and love for adventure intercede with grace and Tempe O’kun brought me back to the West and rekindled a love in period fiction I didn’t know I’d lost. These are mere fragmentary nods to the above author’s ongoing accomplishments, and I am equally excited to share space with the other writers in this issue who’s work I’m not yet familiar with. The company each of these writers is enough to smile about all on its own.

And yet there was more! In addition to finding out that my story is going to be illustrated by Ludo/Bloodshot23, an amazingly dynamic and expressive artist who’s work I am quickly becoming familiar with, and who’s interpretation of my characters is something I’m excited to see, I discovered that I’ve been granted an additional gift.

I can say with complete honesty that I don’t deserve the honour given me when placed against the incredible pool of talents above. My story, Jewels of Remorse, was chosen as the cover image of eleventh issue of Heat. It’s a wraparound cover that features a pivotal moment of my story, rendered by the expert brush of Blotch , who’s work decks dozens of novels and anthologies on my shelf. I don’t have the vocabulary on hand to say just how fucking blown away I am by how cool that is. I wrote a bunch of test tweets, and the ZOMG!!! eye-bugging just didn’t say enough, no matter how I put it down. I tweet-drafted a battery to death. Proud of that strangely.

I’m very grateful to Sofawolf, Dark End, Black Teagan, Alopex and Jeff Eddy as well as everybody who’s filled this anthology’s pages. I hope the July 4th weekend is the best con ever for every cool thing I’m gonna blow my paycheck on. (Uncovered!) I wish I could make it to Anthrocon this year to thank you all in person, but the above gushiness will have to suffice until I can swing down your way.

And make beer or something like that happen.

Slip!

Heat 11 can be preordered for Anthocon pickup or home delivery by clicking here

The latest chapter of Open Seasons is finally up after a long period of relining and plotting and other story shenanigans. Things. are going to get a little hectic in the coming chapters as characters come to reckoning for mistakes they've made, and not necessarily the one's you'd expect.

In other news, there's a big announcement coming up in the next day or so as Anthrocon approaches. I won't be able to go to that con this year (for good reasons actually-I just got a promotion at the day-job) but will be anxiously awaiting some of the wonderful releases coming out from Sofa-wolf Press. More on that very soon.

*wags*

You know how it is when you work on a project long term and it's going well but you get the urge to change gears a bit; the latest story I've thrown up basically scratches an itch to do something silly and irreverent. That Hamsters eating Tiny Burritos video sparked an idea that was amusing, and I was finding the Open Season Series to be darker than my mood, so things just happened. Also I'd never done macro/micro porn before.

Open Seasons will return soon with Lyrise taking more control of her current predicament. She has horrible knowledge she currently feels powerless to act on because it will threaten the agency's standing with its clientele, but something inside her suggests she has run into this kind of situation before. If only she could remember.

Spring finally came! Time to do a little writing outside. What else does one do when the weather's perfect?

Vacations, season changes and new projects have made this an interesting month. Will have more to say soon but if you already follow my twitter feed you may have discovered where one or two stories are turning up in 2014.

The next chapter of Open Seasons was delayed apiece by a vacation in New York, which I'll be paying off for the next four months with no regrets. It will also have some art attached, a piece by  anyare which you can already see as the latest favorited art listing. That beautiful if deadly pinup has already inspired the next chapter, which is being worked on in parallel with another anthology project due at the end of the month.

Spring has arrived at last! It's time for the Bunnies to cavort:)
And maybe set up a little well-earned revenge:O

<-< Well look at that! The art now representing the prologue for Lyris'e tale of sex, seduction and danger put together by the awesome  shintori who is frequently open for commissions and does stunning atmospheric work like you see here. I'm extremely grateful for this piece, which was well worth the wait and hope to be privileged with Shintori's services again in the future.

FE 2014 is so close I feel like I should be packing the car right now. I'm budgeting for art commissions and book buys from the Bookshelf Bear gentle-furs. I like meeting new people and am a great listener. Just look for the grey-muzzle wearing lots of grey.

Story news!

Mentioned it before but now its happening; rather than doing long chapters that get put up every month or so, I'm going to shorter excerpts of 2000 words or so that will hopefully be put up once per week. Its a bit much to expect people to remember what plot points were driving a narrative ahead when there are so many other great things on FA that you'll be enjoying between chapters. This doesn't change the pacing of the story as its moving along. There will be some subtle cliff-hangers, some major and more sex to come, but things will not be packed deliberately to have some of everything shoved into the 2K excerpts. This just means that the tale will be carrying forward in smaller bites spread out more evenly.

The first excerpt coming up answers one big question plaguing our recklessly self-endangering rabbit. The story takes a dark turn...