Some of you might remember this story from, well, a long time ago. A lot of you might not at this point. This wasn’t the first Ranea story but it was the longest one—I think—unmatched until “Indigo Rain,” and for a while was quite popular.

But, as I said: a long time ago. While it’s never been particularly hard to find for those who know where to look, it’s not been very discoverable. I’d started rewriting it in 2010 with the intent of making an expanded version, but never got past about halfway through chapter two. Due to a bit of prodding on unrelated things I decided to simply do a less dramatic revision of the rest and powered through it all today, and, well, here it is.

I’ll be serializing it on the archive sites starting… soon-ish, maybe one chapter every week or two, but for the small in number but high in wisdom group of you reading things over here, you can get it all now—and with somewhat easier to read typesetting and navigation to boot. (Soon I’ll finally start putting stories in the navigation bar of Coyote Prints, too, I suppose…)

A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood

So here’s the thing: bad reviews are fun.

Sure, good reviews can be fun, too. But let’s face it—stuff you hate gives you more occasion for zingers. Roger Ebert opened his review of one infamous movie with ”Battlefield Earth is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time.” (My favorite review opener, though, is from Mary Pols of TIME: “More than 24 hours has passed since I watched the new Adam Sandler movie Jack and Jill and I am still dead inside.”)

But a good review can’t be just zingers, and the point of a review is not to show off how witty the reviewer is. Ebert explained—without rancor—just what it is that made “Battlefield Earth” suck. He didn’t accuse the movie of being an assault on all that is good and holy; the movie’s creators and stars needed a thick skin to deflect the barbs, but they weren’t personal attacks. No one was writing, say, “This is a steaming pile of shit.”

“That may be vulgar, but it’s not a personal attack.”

Well, see, that’s kinda the heart of the matter.

So, Further Confusion 2013 has come and gone, and with it a few notable events for me:

• The release of ”Indigo Rain”
• My first reading since Eurofurence 14 (!)
• Oh yes, running FurCon’s writing track
• A lot of alcohol

Everything seems to have gone really well from those standpoints. It sounds like FurPlanet sold about two dozen copies of “Rain,” which may not sound barn-burning but I’m pretty happy with it. (Look for information about an ebook release, er, eventually. Sooner rather than later. There’s a non-zero chance the ebook will not have Sabretoothed Ermine’s great interior sketches, though.) I got positive feedback on the writing track from both attendees and the con committee. While I didn’t pull the reading off flawlessly—and I’m not likely to be recruited by Audible.com any time soon—overall, it was pretty smooth.

Also, I will probably not be drinking for the next week.

As I mentioned on Twitter, my current job is being phased out, switching from full-time to part-time at the end of the month. (I confess my enthusiasm for the work has already phased out, although the job loss is due to the company’s finances, not my performance.) This may or may not give me more time to work on my personal writing projects like the glacially-developed science fiction novel I’ve been hammering on since roughly 1858, tentatively entitled Kismet, as well as a couple new pieces I’ve been playing around with and the hopefully-soon-reviving Claw & Quill Magazine—but one of my definite goals for 2013 is to get both of those specific projects launched.

I also have a subject I may want to rant about, but I’ll decide later. (In short form, I’m considering how to compare and contrast “giving a small press book a negative review” and “shoving your junk in a light socket and screaming on YouTube for seven minutes.” The differences are subtle, but I think they’re important.)

The talented Sabretoothed Ermine has put up the cover and one of the three interior illustrations for “Indigo Rain” on her Fur Affinity page.

• “Silver Bells at Sunset,” the color cover piece
• “Private Dance,” a somewhat racy interior piece

Those pieces not entirely coincidentally illustrate scenes from the two preview bits I’ve published.

• Part 1: here FA SF
• Part 2: here FA SF

The novella will be available in print from FurPlanet and premiering at Further Confusion 2013.

I’ve never been good at blurbs. (Frankly, I’ve never been good at marketing or self-promotion, period, but that’s another topic.) A blurb, if you haven’t heard the term, is the pitch for your story: a paragraph or two that sells someone on it. It’s the answer to the question, “What’s it about?”

In the screenplay business, this is called the “logline,” and it’s usually just one line. An example from Blake Snyder’s screenwriting book Save The Cat! is: “A cop comes to LA to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists.” In one sentence you have a hook and outline the protagonist’s story: “who he is, who he’s up against, and what’s at stake” (again quoting Snyder).

Now, if I’m bad at blurbs, I’m terrible at loglines. Knocking a story down to one sentence is excruciating. A story of any length has two arcs in it, the plot arc and the main character arc. (Arguably most stories, including “Indigo Rain,” have a third for the “impact” character, a term I’m shamelessly stealing from Dramatica, about which I’ll eventually write more.) Trying to get the story down to only two sentences hurts.

For “Indigo Rain,” I don’t need to write a logline—I’m not trying to sell a screenplay—but I do need to write something for the back cover. A blurb! It needs to be short, in part because I don’t want to cover up too much of Sabretoothed Ermine’s gorgeous cover artwork and in part because I’m assuming that the person picking it up is going to make a decision in a few seconds. In those few seconds, I need to get across all those things that Snyder said, and get across the story’s genre—which is harder than it sounds: it’s action/suspense with a romance subplot, and it’s set in a fantasy world (one which some fans will recognize by name).

I came across an older but thoughtful guide on this from Marilynn Byerly, who describes herself as writing “cross-genre adventure novels” (a lot of which could be slotted into the “paranormal romance” category). The key points I took away from her mesh with Snyder’s; you want to communicate four things:

• The main character and her setting
• The overall story conflict
• The main character’s interior conflict
• What’s at stake

Byerly changes the balance of these depending on what genre she’s writing for, but those are pretty much always present.

So for “Indigo Rain,” I’ve come up with this:

Roulette’s dreams of a better life in Ranea’s capital city-state turn upside down when a horrifying encounter leaves the dancer fleeing for her life, plunging her into the midst of a struggle she’d never been aware of—one that will turn tragically violent unless the mysterious Brothers of Atasos can be stopped.

And as if her life hadn’t gotten complex enough, Roulette may be falling for entirely the wrong person…

I’m not completely happy with it, but I’m not sure how to improve it at this point, either. If I explain a few things a little more—for instance, if I say that the struggle Roulette finds herself in is essentially about civil/racial rights—then I need to explain things more than a little more to be able to say that no, it’s not a didactic political diatribe masquerading as fiction. I can say that in exactly those words here, but I can’t say it that way on the back cover. Also, “entirely the wrong person” isn’t fair; it’s more accurate to say the person isn’t anything like who Roulette pictured in her daydreams. Again, that’s tough to boil down in a very nuanced way (especially without giving away who it is).

But I’ll keep poking at it and see if it changes shape.

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.)