Author: furrywritersguild

Book of the Month: Fragments of Life’s Heart

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Fragments of Life's Heart Cover

November 2016’s Book of the Month is Fragments of Life’s Heart, an anthology edited by Laura “Munchkin” Lewis and Stefano “Mando” Zocchi.

They say Love is the oldest story on Earth, but we don’t have to tell it the same way every time. How many ways are there to explore our feelings that we may have never even considered? Countless fragments of different worlds, all held together by the greatest force of all.

Join us as we explore the many different forms of love—family love, forbidden love, love that embraces what society always taught was wrong. Love can bloom, thrive, and end. Love can heal, mesh, and blend. We’re all Fragments trying to stick together.

Fragments of Life’s Heart includes 17 stories, many of which are from FWG members:

  • “Tending the Fires,” Jess E. Owen
  • “Transitions,” Mog Moogle
  • “The Mistress of Tidwell Manor,” Renee Carter Hall
  • “Yet Time and Distance,” Kris Carver
  • “Polynomials,” Fever Low
  • “Raise Your Voice,” Stefano “Mando” Zocchi
  • “Going Out,” T.C. Powell
  • “Harvest Home,” Altivo Overo
  • “The Foreigner,” Dwale
  • “Trade All the Stars,” Watts Martin
  • “Draw to the Heart,” Ocean Tigrox
  • “Paint the Square-Cut Sky,” Slip-Wolf
  • “Hearth Soup,” Laura “Munchkin” Lewis
  • “Brass Candy Girl,” M.C.A. Hogarth
  • “Footsteps,” Televassi
  • “Rain Check,” Field T. Mouse
  • “The Soul of Wit,” Daniel Lowd

The anthology is published by Weasel Press, and is available from the publisher as well as Amazon, Rabbit Valley and major ebook sellers.

Book of the Month: Dog Country

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October 2016’s book of the month is Dog Country, by Malcolm F. Cross.

A crowdfunded civil war is Azerbaijan’s only hope against its murderous dictatorship. The war is Edane Estian’s only chance to find out if he’s more than what he was designed to be.

He’s a clone soldier, gengineered from a dog’s DNA and hardened by a brutal training regime. He’d be perfect for the job if an outraged society hadn’t intervened, freed him at age seven, and placed him in an adopted family.

Is he Edane? Cathy and Beth’s son, Janine’s boyfriend, valued member of his MilSim sports team? Or is he still White-Six, serial number CNR5-4853-W6, the untroubled killing machine?

By joining a war to protect the powerless, he hopes to become more than the sum of his parts.

Without White-Six, he’ll never survive this war. If that’s all he can be, he’ll never leave it.

Dog Country is available exclusively as a Kindle ebook from Amazon ($4.99 to buy, or available through Kindle Unlimited).

Guild news, October 2016

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New members

Welcome to our newest members: Bruno Schafer, Jako Malan, and Stephen Coglan! In addition, welcome Sean and Andrew Rabbitt–perhaps better known as Rabbit Valley–to the FWG as associates! If you’re not a member of the Guild and you’d like more information about joining, read our membership guidelines.

Member news

Tor Books has bought the sequel to Lawrence M. Schoen’s Barsk: The Elephants’ Graveyard. In addition, Les Editions de L’Instant has bought the French language translation rights for Barsk.

Thurston Howl Publications released Wolf Warriors III: Winter Wolves, the third edition of their charity anthology in support of the National Wolfwatcher Coalition. It includes works by, among others, Alice Dryden, Amy Fontaine, Renee Carter Hall, Bill Kieffer, BanWynn Oakshadow, Frances Pauli, and Televassi.

Madison Keller’s Flower’s Fang is now available as an audiobook.

Donald Jacob Uitvlugt’s short story “In the Days of the Witch-Queens,” originally published in the Menagerie of Heroes charity anthology, is now available as a 99¢ ebook on Amazon.

Fred Patten published a large article on The State of Furry Publishing on Dogpatch Press.

New markets

  • Speaking of Lawrence Schoen, his press, Paper Golem LLC, is accepting submissions of novellas (20,000 to 40,000 words) for the fourth volume of the novella anthology series Alembical. Submission guidelines.

For ongoing markets previously covered but still open (and occasionally, open in the future), visit the FWG web site:

Remember to keep an eye on the Calls for Submissions thread on the forum, as well as other posts on the Publishing and Marketing forum.

Furry Book Month!

October is Furry Book Month! The Furry Writers’ Guild has joined forces with some of our fandom’s great authors and publishers to offer special deals during the month. Visit the Furry Book Month page for more details and links to deals, talk about the books you’re reading on the FWG Forum, and make sure to leave a review of what you’re reading on Amazon or Goodreads—it really helps! Follow along on social media with the tag #FurryBookMonth.

Odds and ends

The Tuesday Coffeehouse Chats continue to take place on the FWG Slack channel, while the Thursday chats continue to take place on the shoutbox. There’s some discussion of moving the Thursday chats, too, or going to just one chat a week—if you’d like to weigh in, visit the forum. Visit the forum anyway.

As usual, we’d like to keep recruiting you to the FWG Goodreads group: add things to our members’ bookshelf (see the instructions here on how to do that), start conversations, indoctrinate people.

The FWG blog desperately needs more love. If you would like to love it, consider writing a guest post. See our guidelines for the details.

Have a terrific (furry book) month! Send news, suggestions, feedback, and spare hashtags to furwritersguild@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.

Book of the Month: ROAR 7

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September 2016’s Book of the Month is ROAR 7, edited by Mary E. Lowd.

Welcome to a LEGENDARY volume of ROAR! That’s right, the theme for the seventh volume is legend, and it will take you on a journey from a fortune teller’s bamboo hut to the end of the world in the coils of a dead snake god, back in time to the Cretaceous and then up to the stars. You’ll meet tigers and cranes practicing Kung Fu, a singing frog, a gambling pigeon, a rap-star bearded dragon, a rhinoceros who’s friends with a goat, and several creatures you’ve probably never seen before.

The seventh volume of FurPlanet’s annual general audience anthology has 17 stories:

  • “Crouching Tiger, Standing Crane,” Kyla Chapek
  • “The Frog Who Swallowed the Moon,” Renee Carter Hall
  • “The Torch,” Chris “Sparf” Williams
  • “A Rock Among Millions,” Skunkbomb
  • “The Pigeon Who Wished For Golden Feathers,” Corgi W.
  • “Unbalanced Scales,” Bill Kieffer
  • “Reason,” Heidi C. Vlach
  • “Old-Dry-Snakeskin,” Ross Whitlock
  • “Kitsune Tea,” E.A. Lawrence
  • “A Touch of Magic,” John B. Rosenman
  • “Long Time I Hunt,” Erin Lale
  • “The Butterfly Effect,” Jay “Shirou” Coughlan
  • “The Roar,” John Giezentanner
  • “Trust,” TJ Minde
  • “The Golden Flowers,” Priya Sridhar
  • “A Thousand Dreams,” Amy Fontaine
  • “Puppets,” Ellis Aen

ROAR 7 is available in print from FurPlanet and DRM-free ebook from Bad Dog Books, as well as from Amazon.

Guild news, September 2016

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New members

After a big July, we didn't induct any new members in August. Maybe our next new member will be you? If you'd like more information about joining, read our membership guidelines.

Member news

Members Mary E. Lowd, Skunkbomb and Frances Pauli sold stories to Scratchpost Press's The Society Pages, a forthcoming anthology.

Televassi will have a poem in Thurston Howl Publications' Wolf Warriors III, their charity anthology. In addition, his story from Gods With Fur will be reprinted in THP's 2017 wolf anthology.

From Spring's Storms, the sequel to Patrick "Bahumat" Rochefort and Keith Aksland's novel From Winter's Ashes, has begun serializing on the web.

GoAL Publications released the third (and final?) issue of their eponymous magazine.

New markets

  • ROAR 8 is open for submissions (as of September 1). This general audience anthology always has a loose theme; 2017's is "Paradise." Editor: Mary E. Lowd. Publisher: FurPlanet. Length: 2,000–18,000 words; prefers 4,000–12,000. Payment: 0.5¢/word. Deadline: February 1, 2017. Submission call.

For ongoing markets previously covered but still open (and occasionally, open in the future), visit the FWG web site:

Remember to keep an eye on the Calls for Submissions thread on the forum, as well as other posts on the Publishing and Marketing forum.

Cóyotl Awards

The 2015 Cóyotl Awards were awarded at Rocky Mountain FurCon! The winners:

  • Novel: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard, Lawrence M. Schoen
  • Novella: Koa of the Drowned Kingdom, Ryan Campbell
  • Short story: "The Analogue Cat," Alice Dryden
  • Anthology: Inhuman Acts, Ocean Tigrox (editor)

Congratulations to all the winners! Remember, to the best of our knowledge, the Cóyotl is the only literary award you can hug. (Okay, you could hug a Hugo, but it wouldn't be comfortable.)

Odds and ends

Thurston Howl set up a FWG Submission Deadlines Calendar using Google Calendar; you can visit it on the web, or subscribe in a calendar app of your choice. The calendar not only hits the markets that get picked up in this monthly newsletter; he does a good job of finding "furry-adjacent" markets.

While the Guild blog is not blogging as hard as it should be these days (your president-slash-editor accepts full blame), the forum remains quite active. If you are not part of the activity there, go add to it! Also, consider writing a guest post. See our guidelines for the details.

As always, the FWG Goodreads group needs more good reads. (Get it? I'm here all week.) Go add things to our members' bookshelf—see the instructions here on how.

Have a terrific month! Send news, suggestions, feedback, and legal awoos to furwritersguild@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.

FWG Member Spotlight: Madison Keller

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Tell us about yourself and a recent published project of yours.

I have been writing since 2012 and published my first novel near the end of 2014. My newest project is The Dragon Tax Book One, which came out in June 2016. This originally was published in 2015 as a short story in the anthology A Menagerie of Heroes, which went out of print just a few months later.

I’d had so much fun with the characters I’d already written several more stories of their continuing adventures. I’d planned on perhaps doing a series of linked short stories, but with the very first one out of print and hard to find, I scrapped that idea. However, I’d had to cut some scenes to fit in the word count limit and I had the idea to add back in those missing scenes and tighten up the story, making it a novella length work and republishing it as a stand alone first in the series.

The Dragon Tax Book One

Why do you like using “furry” characters in stories?

I enjoying figuring out how furry features and characteristics would change a society’s fundamental values. I also like using it to explore aspects of human behavior that wouldn’t come up in non-furry fiction.

What made you want to become a writer? Are there authors or books that strongly influenced you?

I was a huge bookworm and devoured the entire science fiction/fantasy section of the local library as I was growing up. I wanted to be a writer to tell the stories that filled my own head. However, I let others talk me out of pursing a career in writing and threw away everything I’d been writing in junior high and high school. With the advent of the Kindle I began reading many self-published works and was re-inspired to again put pen to page.

In high school I was inspired by the likes of Piers Anthony, Tracy Hickman, Walter Jon Williams, and Barbara Hambly. Lately I’ve been devouring A.E. Marling’s Enchantress series, Charles Stross’s Laundry files, and Jonathan Howard’s Necromancer series as well as many other books.

Tell us a bit about your writing process. Do you see yourself as a “pantser,” an outliner, or somewhere in between?

I’m an outliner all the way. Before I write a single sentence of my manuscript I’ll outline the plot, define all the major characters, and do high-level worldbuilding. As I write I will expand character profiles, add world-building details, and tweak the outline.

Do you have any advice you’d give other writers?

Don’t let other people discourage you and never stop writing. Read a lot, everything you can find, but especially books in your chosen genre.

What’s a project you’re working on now, or that may be coming out soon?

I’m currently juggling three projects—working on the next books in the Dragon Tax series, finishing up the final planned book in my Flower’s Fang universe, and outlining a new werewolf urban fantasy trilogy set in central Washington state that is as of yet un-named.

Where can people find you and your work?

All of my work can be found on Amazon or on my website, flowersfang.com.

Book of the Month: Sixes Wild: Echoes

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August 2016’s Book of the Month is Sixes Wild: Echoes, by Tempe O’Kun.

Sixes Wild: Echoes cover

Life’s not all whiskey and revelry for this bunny gunslinger. In a recent tangle, Six had cause to dynamite a lion crime lord in his silver mine. The kitty had the nerve to survive and vanish with one of the guns tied to her dead father’s spirit. A sensible hare would go to ground, lying low while she tracked down the varmint. And that’s just what she’d do, had she not stumbled into love with the local fruit bat sheriff. Love’s all well and good, but courting a gentleman when you’re no proper lady is a challenge Six never thought she would have to tackle.

All told, Frontier life is enough to trounce anybody. But then, Six Shooter has never been just any bunny.

Echoes is the sequel to Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny, which won a Cóyotl Award for best novel in 2011. It’s available in print from FurPlanet and Kindle ebook from Amazon. (It should be available as a DRM-free ebook from Bad Dog Books soon.)

Guild news, August 2016

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New members

Welcome to our newest members: Kris Carver, Jay “Shirou” Coughlan, TJ Minde, and Mog Moogle! If you’re not a member of the Guild and you’d like more information about joining, read our membership guidelines.

Member news

Sean Rivercritic has started a new publishing imprint, Goal Publications. (Also see Market News, below.)

The novel From Winter’s Ashes, co-written by member Patrick “Bahumat” Rochefort (with Keith Aksland), is available on Amazon as an ebook.

Editor Fred Patten was interviewed on the Furry Times blog.

Madison Keller’s steampunk short “Poppy and the Great Expo,” originally in the 2016 Furlandia program book, is now available as an ebook. In addition, her novella Snow Flower is now available as an audiobook.

Member (and past president) Renee Carter Hall launched a bimonthly newletter.

Kris Schnee’s novel The Digital Coyote has been released in ebook and print form.

Mary E. Lowd sold two stories in July, one to Daily Science Fiction and one to Analog (which she notes is a furry story, “about a dragon/lizard-like alien”).

Daniel Potter published the second volume in his successful Freelance Familiar series, Marking Territory.

New markets

  • Seven Deadly Sins: Furry Confessionals, themed around Dante’s seven deadly sins. Publisher: Thurston Howl Publications. Length: 2,500–8,000 words. Payment: contributor’s copy. Deadline: December 1, 2016. Submission call.
  • Species is a projected anthology series in which each volume presents three sections—folktales and myths, reprints, and original stories. The first volume is Wolves. Publisher: Thurston Howl Publications. Length: 2,500–8,000 words. Rating: PG-13. Payment: contributor’s copy. Deadline: January 1, 2017. Submission call.
  • Heat #14, annual anthology “in which sex or romance play an important role in the overall plot but are not the sole purpose for the story’s existence.” Editors: Dark End and Teagan Gavet. Publisher: Sofawolf Press. Length: 4,000–8,000 words. Payment: 1¢/word. Deadline: September 19, 2016. Submission call.
  • While Goal Publications has wound down their eponymous magazine, they are now looking for “full-length works,” novels and novellas. Submission guidelines.
  • The Symbol of a Nation, anthology themed around “furries that are the national animals of country.” (The guidelines get somewhat complex.) Editor: Fred Patten. Publisher: Goal Publications. Payment: 1¢/word. Deadline: December 1, 2016. Submission call.

For ongoing markets previously covered but still open (and occasionally, open in the future), visit the FWG web site:

Remember to keep an eye on the Calls for Submissions thread on the forum, as well as other posts on the Publishing and Marketing forum.

Odds and ends

Member Malcolm F. Cross appeared in a brief profile on seminal science fiction blog File 770.

The World Fantasy Convention programming this year offers an “animal fantasy” panel which refers to Watership Down and The Book of the Dun Cow as being “in recent years.” We have a lot of work to do, people. (With some pressure, they added Kij Johnson’s The Fox Woman, so they’ve at least hit 1999. Progress! That also nearly doubles the number of women authors their programming refers to.)

The Tuesday Coffeehouse Chats have been successfully transplanted from the FWG forum shoutbox to the now-official FWG Slack. If you have no idea what any of this means, you haven’t visited the forum in a while, have you? Go visit it. There’s cool stuff there.

The FWG Goodreads group needs more love. Go add things to our members’ bookshelf (see the instructions here on how to do that). Start conversations. Put subversive happy faces with cat ears in your reviews of non-furry books. (No, don’t do that.)

The FWG blog also needs more love. If you would like to love it, consider writing a guest post. See our guidelines for the details.

Have a terrific month! Send news, suggestions, feedback, and steampunk bats to furwritersguild@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.

Book of the Month: Gods With Fur

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July 2016’s Book of the Month is Gods With Fur, a new anthology edited by Fred Patten and published by FurPlanet.

gwf-cover
Art by Teagan Gavet

From the very beginning, mankind has found the divine in the shape of animals from across the world. Deities such as Ganesha, Coyote, Anubis, and The Monkey King—even Zeus took to the wing from time to time. In ancient Egyptian deserts, misty Central American rainforests, and across wind swept tundra, man has forever told stories of gods with fur, feathers, scales, or tusks.

Gods With Fur features twenty-three new stories of divine animals working their will upon the land. You may recognize gods such as Bastet, while other stories see authors working in their familiar worlds, such as M. R. Anglin’s Silver Foxes books or Kyell Gold’s Forester University books. Others are set in new worlds where the anthropomorphic gods have tales to tell us. We are proud to present this new furry view of divinity.

The majority of contributions in Gods With Fur are from FWG members. The full table of contents:

  • “400 Rabbits,” Alice “Huskyteer” Dryden
  • “Contract Negotiations,” Field T. Mouse
  • “On the Run from Isofell,” M. R. Anglin
  • “To the Reader…,” Alan Loewen
  • “First Chosen,” BanWynn Oakshadow
  • “All Of You Are In Me,” Kyell Gold
  • “Yesterday’s Trickster,” NightEyes DaySpring
  • “The Gods of Necessity,” Jefferson Swycaffer
  • “The Precession of the Equinoxes,” Michael H. Payne
  • “Deity Theory,” James L. Steele
  • “Questor’s Gambit,” Mary E. Lowd
  • “Fenrir’s Saga,” Televassi
  • “The Three Days of the Jackal,” Samuel C. Conway
  • “A Melody in Seduction’s Arsenal,” Slip-Wolf
  • “Adversary’s Fall,” MikasiWolf
  • “As Below, So Above,” Mut
  • “Wings of Faith,” Kris Schnee
  • “The Going Forth of Uadjet,” Frances Pauli
  • “That Exclusive Zodiac Club,” Fred Patten
  • “Three Minutes To Midnight,” Killick
  • “A Day With No Tide,” Watts Martin
  • “Repast (A Story of Aligare),” Heidi C. Vlach
  • “Origins,” Michael D. Winkle

Guild news, July 2016

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New members

Welcome to our newest members, Mut and Invisiblewolf! If you’re not a member of the Guild and you’d like more information, read our membership guidelines.

Member news

Several publications with contributions from FWG members are premiering at Anthrocon 2016 over the June 30–July 4 weekend, including Gods With Fur (published by FurPlanet, edited by Fred Patten), FANG 7 (published by FurPlanet), ROAR 7 (published by FurPlanet, edited by Mary Lowd), Altered States (published, again, by FurPlanet, edited by Ajax B. Coriander, Kodiak Malone and Andres Cyanni Halden), and Sofawolf’s Heat #13. In addition, Fragments of Life’s Heart (published by Weasel Press, edited by Laura “Munchkin” Lewis and Stefano “Mando” Zocchi) will be premiering later this month.

Tempe O’Kun’s new novel Sixes Wild: Echoes (published by FurPlanet) will also be premiering at Anthrocon 2016.

Rechan sold a piece to Tarl “Voice” Hoch’s untitled science fiction horror anthology.

Mary E. Lowd’s (non-furry) story “Birthing Class” was published in Theme of Absence.

Frances Pauli’s story “Domestic Violence” was accepted in the Domestic Velociraptor anthology.

Madison Keller released her novella The Dragon Tax on Amazon; this is an expansion of her story from the RainFurrest 2015 program book.

Kris Schnee has entered his novel The Digital Coyote into Amazon’s “Kindle Scout” program, a competition for a publication contract.

M.C.A. Hogarth released her novel Only the Open, the fourth book in her Princes’ Game series.

Market news

Ongoing: Fred Patten’s next anthology for FurPlanet, The Dogs of War, is looking for original furry military-themed stories “preferably of 4,000 to 20,000 words.” The emphasis should be on military actions, not politics; Fred notes that despite the title, he’s looking for all kinds of anthropomorphic animals, not just dogs. Payment: ½¢ per word, on publication. Deadline: October 1, 2016. (Read the submission call.)

ROAR 8, FurPlanet’s annual general audience anthology, will again be edited by Mary E. Lowd. Next year’s theme is “Paradise.” It will be open for submissions from September 1, 2016 through February 1, 2017. (Read the submission call.)

Laura “Munchkin” Lewis’s charity poetry anthology, Civilized Beasts, is accepting submissions for a 2016 volume.

Remember to keep an eye on the Calls for Submissions thread on the forum, as well as other posts on the Publishing and Marketing forum.

Guild news

Want to hang out and talk shop with other furry writers? Come join us in the forum shoutbox for the Coffeehouse Chats, Thursdays at 12 p.m. Eastern. More info on the Coffeehouse Chats is here. (Remember, our forums are open to everyone, not just FWG members. Come register and join the conversation!)

Elsewhere on the Internet, we have a Goodreads group with a bookshelf featuring books by our members. Feel free to add any members’ books we’ve missed so far (see the instructions here on how to do that).

Remember, we’re always open for guest blog post submissions from FWG members! See our guidelines for the details.

Have a creative and successful month! If you have news, suggestions, or other feedback to share, send an email to furwritersguild@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.