Mid-April Check-In

I’m trying to keep Patreon up to date with more frequent posts, and I realized I had some news I hadn’t shared yet on here. I also want to give a sneak peak of what I’ve been up to, so I’ve got a few things to talk about.

First, Gnoll Tales won an Ursa Major Award this month in the Best General Literary Work category. I want to thank everyone who voted for me and has supported me to get this book out there. It means a lot, and I have for a couple years now dreamed of winning an Ursa Major Award. I’m thrilled to finally have won one.

I also found out, right after Gnoll Tales won, that it got nominated for a Cóyotl Award which is fun the Furry Writers Guild. I’m also very honored by that.

On the writing front, I’m closing in on wrapping up Therianthropic Dreams. I’ve had the poetry chapbook reviewed by my writing group last weekend, and while there are some things to poke at, it seems pretty solid. With their feedback, I have twenty-four poems selected, and I would like to add one more to bring the number to twenty-five. Since the collection pulls material from 1999 to today, twenty-five poems from twenty-five years feels like a good balance. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to write a new one or select another older piece, but I’ll figure that out this weekend. I plan to for the chapbook to head to the printer sometime next month, assuming the cover is ready. I have the artist Kippycube doing the cover, and she’s already fairly far along with the process, so things are moving ahead well.

The Blood of Life is a little stalled, but that’s because I’ve been working on the chapbook. I’ve had my writing group review a chapter at the end of last month, and I plan to submit one for the next meeting, if not all of the three remaining chapters for the book. Finding the right way to arrange the ending scenes has been a challenge, but I’ve got parts of all of the last three chapters written. It’s just making the pieces fit right that’s giving me trouble. I need to revise another chapter to post on here next week. Also, Hibbary and I have been discussing the cover, and I love what they’ve come up with.

I’ve also, since I have taken the time to draw more, planning to do a one-page comic about the current state of my books. I’ve sketched out the comic, and once things get closer to AC, I plan to see if I can actually make the sketch actually look like something. It’s an amusing idea, and while I don’t know if it will amount to anything, I’ll give it a shot.

Finally, I’ve been doing an April writing challenge with a group of writers where we check-in with each other. They asked if anyone wanted to present, and I opened my muzzle I had experience  doing writing panels at cons. It looks like on Sunday I’ll be presenting “Moving from Writing Short Fiction to Novels” as a twenty to thirty minute presentation to some of them. I’ve wanted to develop a novel writing panel for doing at cons, so I’ve had this kicking around in my head for a while. This will be the first time I’ve touched on some of those subjects. If this goes well, I hope to run this at some cons coming up.

Anyway, that’s the round up. I’m apparently busier than I think I am.