Tag: guest post

Guest post: “Writing Furry Speculative Fiction” by Mary E. Lowd

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Writing Furry Speculative Fiction

by Mary E. Lowd

 

My favorite books as a kid were all about talking animals. As I got older, it got harder to find those sorts of books. Sure, there’s the occasional piece of science-fiction with animal-like aliens or off-beat literary novel from the point of view of an animal, but, mostly, talking animals are seen as kid-stuff in our culture. So, when I set out to write a serious, hard science-fiction novel featuring talking otters as the main characters… Well, I was breaking new ground as far as I knew, and I had to make up the rules as I went along.

Since then, I’ve learned that there’s actually a name for the genre of fiction I was craving, and there’s a whole community of readers, writers, and publishers who’ve put a lot of thought into how that genre works. I was ecstatic when I discovered the furry genre. Finally, I wasn’t alone, writing about otters with spaceships.

There are a couple of different kinds of furry fiction. Perhaps the most mainstream is ‘the secret life of animals.’ These stories are usually set in our normal world — talking animals co-exist with humans who are simply unaware of the dramatic tales unfolding around them. (E.g. Watership Down by Richard Adams and Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White.) Animals in these stories are often only slightly anthropomorphic. They can think and talk like humans, but they’re otherwise normal animals.

The other extreme of furry fiction features animals who are so thoroughly anthropomorphized that the differences between different species have become largely aesthetic, possibly metaphorical. Foxes date bunnies; elk work in office buildings with mice. Instead of co-existing with humans in the normal world, these anthropomorphic animals replace humans. In this kind of fiction, the different animal species are merely different flavors, adding texture and color to characters in a simple short-hand.  (E.g. Maus by Art Spiegelman and Save the Day by D.J. Fahl.)

When writing speculative furry fiction, it’s possible to fall into these extremes. You could tell the story of the first colonists on Mars from the point of view of their pet cat. Or, the first colonists on Mars could be cats with no explanation given for their furriness. However, I love the stories that fall in-between, and, I like it best when those stories have an answer to the obvious question: why can the animals talk?

This question has been explored so much by the furry writing community that some people feel it doesn’t matter anymore, much like the question of faster than light travel in mainstream science-fiction. How does the FTL drive work? Who cares? It just does. However, the type of FTL drive in a sci-fi universe determines the sorts of stories that can be told there. Similarly, the type of anthropomorphic animals determines a great deal about a sci-fi universe’s history and culture. So, it’s worth knowing the tropes.

The oldest trope is parallel evolution. See, those golden-furred, feline bipeds who live in family groups with one male figurehead where the females do all the work… Those aren’t lions. They’re aliens. From a different planet. They just happened to evolve to be really similar to lions. (E.g. The Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh.) This is a great trope. It’s easy to use and widely accepted.

Another answer to the question, ‘why can the animals talk?’, is that they were genetically uplifted by humans. (E.g. Startide Rising by David Brin.) This is my personal favorite. Of course, it raises its own question of ‘why?’ Were we designing soldiers, slaves, or simply companions? Are they treated as equals? If so, did they have to fight for their rights? How long did that take? Different answers to these questions lead to wildly different universes. If we were designing soldiers, then the talking animals are probably larger, predatory species. (E.g. Forests of the Night by S. Andrew Swann.) If we were designing obedient slaves, they  might be dogs or a docile species like bunnies. (E.g. Ship’s Boy by Phil Geusz.)

A final possibility is that the animals actually are humans who have drastically modified themselves. (E.g. The Book of Lapism by Phil Geusz.) In this case, the species of animals will be chosen by individual characters for personal reasons. Individuals who choose to modify themselves so extremely are likely to be rich, eccentric, socially outcast, or part of a fringe subculture.

And, of course, all of these answers can be adapted easily to fantasy universes by replacing science with magic and scientists with wizards.

As you can see, explanations have been developed that will fit anthropomorphic animal characters into almost any piece of speculative fiction. And, from fantasy to space opera to near future hard sci-fi, most speculative fiction can benefit from the color and texture added by a few talking animals. Besides, they’re just fun to read.

So, now that you’ve learned the basic tropes, go forth and add anthropomorphic animal characters to your speculative fiction!

 

This post first appeared on Jester Harley’s Manuscript Page.

Guest post: “Why I Review” by Tarl “Voice” Hoch

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Why I Review

by Tarl “Voice” Hoch

 

For those that follow either my Smashwords or Goodreads accounts (or my Facebook and Twitter for that matter) will know that for the last year or so I have been reviewing any and all books that I read. No matter what they are, be they religious texts to fiction novels, I head over to the sites when I am done and rate them, plus give them each a review.

Someone once asked me why. Why do I review, and why is it so damned important to me that I do?

The fact is, it helps the community, it helps the writer, and it helps the purchaser.

In all of my time doing this, I’ve tried to stick to the constructive criticism model I learned in University. Say something nice, then something that needed improvement, and then something nice. Though I didn’t see very many students following this model in my art classes, I saw just how effective it was when someone actually followed that guideline. I’m also happy to say, except for two or three books, I have been able to stick to that formula.

You see, reviewing helps writers. It helps them to know what they could improve upon in their story. If only one person says something, then it’s kind of pointless. But if you have ten, or twenty, or fifty people saying that your pacing is choppy, then you know what you need to work on. It also gives you to know what worked in your story as well. If everyone raves about how hot your sex scenes are, then you know you don’t need to work on them, and can concentrate on the stuff that DOES need work.

But as mentioned, reviewing also helps purchasers. I have taken novels and short stories off my wish list because of poor reviews. Let me make this clear before I continue, they have to be GOOD reviews. Well thought out, well spoken, before I will listen to them. None of this “IT WAS AWESOME!” crap. Anyway, if someone has commented on a novel being terrible due to the ending, or the pacing, or grammar, or whatever, then I am more likely not to get it. Not only does it save me money, but it also saves me frustration at the author when I read it (and hopefully lets the author know what they need to work on).

And last, reviewing helps the community. Be it writer, or be it furry, reviewing works constructively lets authors know you’re reading their material, it gets knowledge of a book or anthology out there, and it lets the culture grow and evolve in a positive manner. Without reviewing, everything would just sort of stagnate. No one would get feedback, besides sales authors wouldn’t know if people were reading or enjoying their material, and no one would be able to improve upon their work.

In the end, I review because as a writer, it helps not only my community, but it helps other writers to improve their craft. I try to give as detailed reviews as possible and try to be fair and honest with each one I give. I’m not perfect, and there have been reviews where words fail me and I have to put something down. But for the most part, I try to explain the best I can what I liked and didn’t like about each and everything I read.

So that is why I review everything I read.

I suggest you do the same. It helps a lot of people out when you do, especially if you take the time to make it detailed and you give it in the constructive criticism format. Not all books are perfect, because no writer or editor is perfect. But that said, no book is ever complete crap either, and there is always something positive to say about a story (though I’ve come across a couple where I honestly couldn’t think of anything good to say, and those two stories still bother me because of that).

In the end, the brief time it takes to actually type out a short review is so minor compared to the benefit to those it touches, that there really isn’t a reason why you shouldn’t be reviewing the stuff you read.

 

This post first appeared on Tarl “Voice” Hoch’s blog on Goodreads.

 

Guest post: “Why Furry” by Frank LeRenard

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Why Furry

by Frank LeRenard

 

It’s one of those extremely difficult, often tiresome, and seemingly ubiquitous questions in furry fiction: why use anthropomorphic animals and not just humans? And I see all manners of mental acrobatics going on amongst all of us in trying to answer it. We’ve come up with some decent excuses along the way: simple stylistic choice, a means to bring up complicated issues like racism without offending, etc. But it’s a tough question to answer effectively, because in the end the reason may simply be that we think anthro animals are cool.

But there’s a sort of hidden tradition embedded in furry lit, something a bit more penetrating and philosophical than what usually comes to mind.

So, we homo sapiens spend an awful lot of time trying to understand ourselves. All of the so-called great literature of our day seems to be focused on that nebulous concept we call ‘the human condition’. I’m sure part of this quest stems from the general idea that humans are super special, something new and interesting in the universe, the most intelligent creatures of Planet Earth and masters of all that surrounds us. So in our sometimes overly simplistic thinking, we try to reconcile that idea with the well-known fact that humans also often act like completely irrational beings, fighting and killing over stuff like jealousy or love or power (so-called ‘animal’ things), and this confuses us and makes us ponder what truly makes us human.

But really, as time has gone on, a lot of things have become clear. For one, we aren’t the center of the universe. The universe, in fact, has no center because it exists as a kind of geometry for which a center is impossible to describe. We’re not the center of our own solar system, either; the sun is. And the more we study our neighbors, those other ‘lower’ species that inhabit this little planet with us, the more we start to realize that we’re even pretty closely connected with all of them, too. We share many behaviors with other animals: crows can use tools, elephants display empathy, octopi can figure out how to open jars even if they’ve never seen one before. Maybe the time has also come for us to admit that we’re not the center of the Earth’s ecosystem either.

So what do we as a species do in this new realm of apparent purposelessness? It seems a bit of a depressing existential quandary to deal with. But, you see, this isn’t the only way to think of it. Because in this realm, what’s really happening is that we’re finally starting to perceive the ‘other’.

One of the most famous photographs ever taken was an incidental one nabbed by Bill Anders in 1968 while he was on the moon, which was later dubbed ‘Earthrise’. He admitted that getting the shot wasn’t even in the plan at the time; just one of those moments where you turn around and think to yourself, ‘Oh, that’s cool. I should take a picture of that’. But it resonated deeply in the public. It was the first picture of Earth taken from another world. A first outside look at the place where we all live, a giant blue marble set against a deep black backdrop, a splash of color juxtaposed with the dreary cratered grayness of the moon’s surface. Earth in its proper context.

But the topic here is anthro characters in fiction. You see, it’s hard to build a complete picture of something if you’re living inside it. This is as much true for humanity as it is for the Earth or the Milky Way galaxy. The fact that we are the only species we know how to communicate with on a fundamental level is problematic in that respect, because we can never really gain an outsider’s view of our own species. And so we’re left with this conundrum, this constant effort to learn more about ‘the human condition’ by peering at it through human eyes.

But fiction is bigger than that, because it relies on this thing we have called ‘imagination’. Maybe we can’t see ourselves as we truly are from our current vantage point, but we can always pretend. In our imagination, we can sit back and take the long view, look at the Earth from the moon.

There are other options than anthropomorphized animals, of course. Aliens, magical beings, robots, etc. But at some point, if you get too far out there, the whole picture just starts to look like a barely visible blue dot amongst billions and it loses its impact. You don’t want to get so far out that you can’t even find the thing you were supposed to be trying to understand. Who knows how aliens might even think? Do they have bifocal vision, hearing organs, stomachs? Do they see better in visible light or infrared? Do they see different wavelengths as colors? Do they communicate through speech, chemical signals, vibrations in the ground, what? And robots can pose a similar problem, assuming we’re the ones programming them; they either have this simplistic, binary manner of thinking that ends up generating seemingly bizarre solutions to common problems (see: a modern robot trying to enter a car; there’s a video of this somewhere), or else they just end up thinking themselves superior and take over the world.

But I already mentioned that there’s a nice midpoint that’s readily available: other animals. They’re different, but we have common ground. We know they exist, too, and we’ve taken some time to study them, so you don’t have to start completely from scratch. Plus, we all evolved through fairly similar pathways, even think in similar ways about certain things, yet our biologies and brains are distinct. It works out very well for the imagination, as a little spark to step out of the realm of being human, but not so far that your whole audience (who is, until further notice, always going to be human themselves) can’t relate to it. Why not exploit this? Because talking animals are kiddie stuff?

Of course, that’s the point I’m making. They aren’t, or at least they don’t have to be. You want to explore ‘the human condition’ like all great literature is apparently supposed to do, you do it from the outside. And there’s this great resource sitting right beside us that we can exploit for that purpose. Use it.

Or else just do it because anthro animals are cool, I guess.

 

Guidelines for guest blog posts

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The FWG blog is now open to guest blog posts from members! We’re looking for posts on any aspect of the writing process or the writing life, aimed at any skill/experience level of writer. This can be anything from a straightforward how-to article on craft to something more like a personal/inspirational essay (maybe on an author or work who influenced you, or some meaningful experience you’ve had related to writing in general or writing furry fiction). Topics can be specific to furry writers’ concerns, but they don’t have to be. We’re also open to posts from editors’ perspectives and to interviews of writers, publishers, and editors within the fandom. The specifics:

  • Submissions accepted from current FWG members (writers and associates) only.
  • Length: Open, but 500-1000 words preferred. (Also open to series of posts.)
  • Please include a title for the post.
  • Content should be appropriate for all audiences.
  • Reprints are fine (please provide the link to where they originally appeared).
  • Send submissions in online format (blank line between paragraphs, no indents). One space after periods, please. You can send as .txt, .rtf, or .doc, or in the body of the email.
  • Send to furwritersguild (at) gmail.com, subject line Blog Submission.
  • Response time: Generally within 1-2 weeks. After a month, query.
  • Your blog post will include a link to your page in the Member Directory, so you may want to make sure your bio there is up to date before submitting. (Email updated bios to furwritersguild (at) gmail.com.)

We try to post 2 guest posts per month, on the 10th and 20th, depending on the number of suitable submissions received. Any questions, comment here or email us at furwritersguild (at) gmail.com.