The conclusion to Indigo Rain’s preview is up now, in three places—

Right Here!

And, of course, SoFurry and Fur Affinity. (Why not Weasyl? Keep reading if you care.) While I don’t like to be so gauche as to cheerlead for myself, it helps visibility immensely on SoFurry to have stories favorited. And ideally given high star ratings, but only favorites count for popularity. Things should still be on track for a release at Further Confusion this year.

So: Weasyl has fascinating issues. Like FA, you can embed BBCode in uploaded text files, so [I]italics[/I] become italics, except it has to be [i]italics[/i] because their parser is case-sensitive. They have a WYSIWYG text editor you can write stories in, which creates uppercase BBCode, but goes through its own parser for conversion to HTML. Unlike Weasyl’s (other) parser, this one creates <i> tags for italics instead of <em> tags, and Weasyl has a bug in its CSS which turns italics with the <i> tag invisible. Yes. Oh, and Weasyl doesn’t handle UTF-8 text in uploaded files, so “risqué” gets turned into “risqué”. I really do want to love Weasyl but it’d be nice if they’d make it just a wee bit easier. I’ve mentioned all these things in a forum post there, so hopefully they’ll be fixed soon.

The first few thousand words of “Indigo Rain” are now posted, for those interested in reading it. The blurb-esque description (which I suppose could be “punched up” for More Blurb Action, but what the hell):

A raccoon street performer finds herself drawn into a dangerous plot after a private dance turns into a terrifying encounter. In the opening chapter, we meet Roulette and learn about her life in Achoren, a northern country within the empire of Ranea.

Read it right here.

Also, if you’re watching me on Fur Affinity or SoFurry, then you’ll see it posted there as well. (And if you’re on one of those sites and you aren’t watching me, now would be an excellent time to start, wouldn’t it?)

As I realize that I haven’t mentioned this here definitively, only in vaguely handwavy fashion: the full version of “Indigo Rain” will be released in print for FC2013, with cover and interior artwork by Sabretoothed Ermine.

Already Among Us: An Anthropomorphic Anthology
Edited by Fred Patten
Cover art by Roz Gibson
Trade paperback, 389 pages
Legion Publishing, June 2012

(This originally appeared over on Flayrah.)

Unlike many of the other anthologies produced primarily for the anthropomorphic sub-fandom, Already Among Us draws on works by authors in the larger arena of science fiction, from the 1940s through the 2000s. The only “furry” author represented is Michael Payne—and with a story of his that appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction. Even so, Already Among Us may have a little trouble getting beyond the sub-fandom audience.

A few years ago I was fiddling around with a new web site called Claw & Quill, whose idea—put very crudely—was to have a story-focused archive site, as deviantART and its various clones/spinoffs didn’t do a very good job at presenting stories. There are a few reasons C&Q didn’t really come together, ranging from the canonical “bit more off than I could chew” to a decreasing level of motivation as a couple sites that did a much better job at presenting stories than the others (or even their own previous incarnations) appeared.

This brings me to Weasyl, yet another new art site following the DA/FA model. It has a cute name, a fervent staff, questionable typography, and a subtle existential dilemma.

Back in July (that long?) I mentioned that I’d been working on a novella called “Indigo Rain.” While there’s a lot of details to be worked out, there’s a good chance that it’s going to appear in print—with illustrations by a terrific artist—for Further Confusion 2013. I’ll probably put up a fairly substantial preview once things seem to be in motion.

“Rain” is set in a fantasy world that I wrote a lot of stories in back in the dark ages: the Empire of Ranea. Ranea has magic and multiple races, but diverges at least a bit from the canonical fantasy worlds otherwise. Magic is treated more as an engineering discipline than a mystical force by most, and you’re likely to see it showing up in seemingly mundane fashions everywhere—which isn’t to say that there’s no grand and wondrous magic, but that the place has a decidedly different feel. The multiple races include humans, but rather than elves, dwarves and hobbits there’s a mix based on other animals, including Melifen (cats), Vraini (foxes) and Rilima (mice). And it’s more Victorian era than medieval, and—at least in some areas of the Empire—rather cosmopolitan and progressive. Of course, that brings with it considerable class and racial tension, not always kept well under the surface.

Most of the original stories show their age; with the exception of the once-famous “A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood,” they’re not particularly sophisticated. “Indigo Rain,” though, should make a great introduction for new readers. It’s the longest Ranea story written to date, does a better job of showing the world than any of the other stories—even though it’s only showing one part (and frankly, not the part the tour guides would take you to)—and I can’t wait to introduce people to Roulette and the other characters.

More soon, hopefully! Meanwhile, I’m flirting with doing another new Ranea short, more in the few thousand word range, for free posting, and seeing if any of the older shorts are salvageable enough for me to rewrite. (Way back in 2008, Eurofurence 14 attendees might remember me reading a scene from a prospective rewrite of “A Gift of Fire.” It’ll happen eventually, I promise. There’s also another novella I did a few years back I need to rewrite called “Going Concerns,” but that’s for yet another day.)

(I wrote this review for Flayrah at Fred Patten’s request, but I’m not sure when/if they’re going to post it given that they posted a review by Roz Gibson. So, here it is.)

The Ursa Major Awards Anthology
Edited by Fred Patten
Cover art by Teagan Gavet and Tess Garman
Trade paperback, 339 pages
FurPlanet Productions, June 2012

This anthology is drawn from the first decade of winners—and in some cases, nominees—for the Ursa Major Awards, furry fandom’s rough equivalent to science fiction fandom’s Hugo Awards. The Ursas are a popular vote; any fan can nominate a work in one of several categories, as well as vote on the final ballot. The Ursas started in 2001, organized by longtime fan and editor Fred Patten, who’s also the editor of this volume (as well as a frequent reviewer on Flayrah). Many of the stories feature illustrations from their original publication, and all are introduced by Patten.

I’ve been watching and silently judging another flareup of a very old debate in anthropomorphic fandom, this time happening on Twitter and in the comments on Flayrah’s review of Roar #4. Does there need to be a justification for having characters in a story be animal people?

We can illustrate the divide with two comments. First, from “Crossaffliction,” in his usual diplomatic style:

For the record, the entire premise of “let’s make talking animals the main characters and leave that completely unexplained in [a] way that offers nothing to the story” is a flawed premise, and also makes people wonder why you’d do that (we suspect the writer has some sort of freaky weird animal people fetish, and, you know what, we’d probably [be] right in this case).

Then “Sparf”:

I agree with some of the most prolific writers in our fandom when I say that we have moved on past that need. This is furry fiction as a meta genre unto itself. Every story does not need an explanation of where furries came from or why they exist. If it is germane to the story being told, sure, it can be revealed in the narrative, but usually it is trite or feels wedged in.

While I can quibble with both (if a genre is “meta” it definitionally doesn’t exist “unto itself,” and at times Crossie has an unhealthy hangup about the fandom’s unhealthy hangups), three observations.

I’ve lately been feeling that I’ve been neglecting my aspiring writer duty to keep reading. (The most common bit of advice that most professional writers will give aspiring ones boils down to “read, read, read.”) Among Others won the Nebula Award for best novel of 2011, so it seemed like a good choice to pick up.

Jo Walton is one of a number of names I’ve known for a while as “someone I should read” but haven’t. She’s done two previous novels that I remember having a specific interest in: Farthing, a mystery novel set in an alternate 1949, eight years after Britain brokered a piece with Nazi Germany that gave them Europe; and Tooth and Claw, a Victorian novel with all the appropriate trappings of inheritances, difficult romances and stuffy class striation—with the not-so-minor difference that all the characters are dragons.

Among Others is more conventional on the surface, albeit only by comparison. Morwenna, the story’s protagonist, is a teenager growing up in Wales in the ’70s. She’s estranged from both her parents—a distant father and an abusive mother—and her twin sister was killed in an automobile accident that left Mor permanently walking with a cane. As the story starts, she’s starting at a boarding school in England.

I’ve never been particularly well-organized. I keep saying I’m going to get better at it, but the chances are I’m lying. I’m firmly into middle age, and while I don’t believe you can’t teach old dogs coyotes new tricks the truth is that when you’ve had the same bad habits for a quarter-century it requires non-trivial effort to keep those habits from getting worse. I’ll be happy if I can just stick to “write something new every day” as mentioned in my last post, but as I said there, that’s spotty.

A major part of my problem in Getting Things Done™ is distractability. There’s always something else to focus on. I’d love to blame that on something fashionable like ADHD—when I was diagnosed with it, they still called it “hyperactivity”—but I’m pretty sure that it’s more that there’s just a lot more to distract me these days than there was 25 years ago. Most of this has to do with something called the Internet. You may have heard of it. The reason I sometimes feel more productive taking the laptop off to Harry’s Hofbrau is, I’m sadly confident, that Harry’s has no wifi.

But, enough of that! I’m going to document my current projects here as much for my benefit as yours—although if you never hear of any of these again for months, feel free to guilt trip me about them, because dammit.

One of the most common questions for a writer—even us mostly no-name types—is, “Where do you get your ideas?” (Harlan Ellison once answered this with, “There’s this little store in Schenectady…”) A common answer that isn’t as flippant as it first sounds, though, is that ideas are easy. Developing ideas—taking them from that initial snippet of image, text, or “what if” question and turning them into a plot and then, finally, a complete draft—is the tough part.

I know my own biggest problem is just sitting down and getting the words on paper. (Well, screen.) Sometimes it’s the vast initial blankness before any words are written that I have to overcome—deciding what happens to kick things off—but more often it’s figuring out what to type next. What’s the next thing that character says? What’s the next thing I need to describe? How do I get from the last thing I typed to that scene I have in mind that’s somewhere near the story’s end?