Kyell has won several Ursa Major Awards for his work, and recently won two Rainbow Awards for his novel, Out of Position. His latest book, Shadow of the Father, is being released this weekend at Further ConFusion in San Jose, California. Another novella, Bridges, will be released next month at Furry Fiesta in Dallas, Texas, where Kyell will appear as the Writing Guest of Honor. Bridges is part of a new project called Cupcakes, which Kyell is launching along with some other furry authors.

Kyell has been active in furry fandom and queer speculative fiction for ten years. In addition to his fiction, he also co-produces (with K.M. Hirosaki)  a furry podcast called Unsheathed. When he’s not writing and podcasting, you might find him at cons, or campaigning for gay rights in his current home state of California. He lives in the San Francisco bay are with his partner, Kit Silver.

Kyell blogs on LiveJournal as kyellgold, and maintains a personal website at www.kyellgold.com.

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OA: Shadow of the Father takes place in Argaea, a fantasy world you’ve written about before. What keeps you coming back there, and do you plan to return in future books?

KG: Whenever I write a story, it involves a host of secondary characters, and the lives of the main characters obviously extend beyond the scope of the story. After writing my first story in that world, I was intrigued enough with the characters to write a “before” novel and an “after” novel. I think one of the appeals of the medieval/Renaissance world is that it is simpler and starker than our modern world. The stakes in any conflict can be higher: literally life and death. Because survival was much less assured than in our contemporary world, because class distinctions were so much more important then, the stories that we write about can be more visceral. The story of Shadow could not be told in a contemporary setting: even a mountain city would not be isolated, with our modern communications; assassination would not be as credible a threat.

I do think the lack of a communications infrastructure is a big part of what I enjoy about that world. It increases the characters’ reliance on each other for information, which lets me explore their motivations in more detail–lies carry more weight. I’m definitely returning to that world–I have a story started that takes place there, and doesn’t involve any previously written characters.

OA: Furry fandom is the butt of many jokes, even amongst other geeks. Why do you think people are so wary of it, and how do you cope with negative reactions?

KG: I’m certainly aware of that reputation, though I’m not sure where it comes from. I think partly it’s partly due to one of the unique aspects of the furry fandom: that the fandom has no media source material. Star Trek fans, Star Wars fans, Harry Potter fans, with all those people you can look at the TV shows, the movies, the books, and you can understand the appeal that drives people to band together around them. Furry fandom is harder to understand because there is no TV show, no movie, no book that is the focal point of the fandom. Even generic “science fiction” fans have Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Card; “fantasy” fans have Tolkien. Furry fans tend to create their own source material, tailored to their tastes, and that can be a bit hard to understand from the perspective of an outsider looking in.

Additionally, you can’t ignore the fact that the fandom is more openly sexual than most other fandoms. Most of my work is adult, and it’s had a good reception in the fandom, even from straight people who are happy just to skip some of the explicit scenes. There are people in the fandom who avoid anything sexual, and a great amount of non-sexual work, but of course when outsiders are looking for something to represent the fandom, they’ll pick the thing that looks strangest to mainstream society.

That said, I think that negative reaction is not as widespread as perhaps people think. Loud people in any group can affect the perception of that group, and a few loud people mocking furry fans on the Internet does not mean that that attitude is in the majority, nor even widespread. My experience has generally been that people who don’t understand furry fans usually just shrug and leave them alone. I’ve been quite happy to see my books getting some appreciation outside the fandom among gay readers, in Elisa Rolle’s journal, for example, and in her Rainbow Awards (which was a huge surprise), so I haven’t had to deal with a lot of negative reaction at all. When I do, I just ignore it. The need to create our own source material has made the fandom astonishingly creative–mostly, as you note, in the realm of visual art, but writing and music are catching up. There’s even two furry musicals, though neither of them has had much play, and there are about a hundred furry podcasts now. It may not be to everyone’s tastes, but I’d rather focus on all that positive work than on a few critics.

OA: Are there any particular stories you’d recommend to someone who is new to the concept of furry fandom?

KG: Sofawolf Press publishes a journal called “New Fables,” which collects literary-quality furry stories of many different types. That’d be a great place to start. There are a few other books that are close to the fandom: Michael Payne’s The Blood Jaguar (Payne attends furry conventions and is familiar with the fandom) and iBooks’s Furry! (a collection previously published by Sofawolf Press as Best In Show, an anthology of the best stories published in fifteen years of the fandom).

Mainstream books and movies that relate to the fandom–Richard Adams’s Watership Down, Disney’s Robin Hood and The Lion King, Alan Dean Foster‘s Spellsinger series, Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople stories.

OA: You’ll be launching a new novella called Bridges at Furry Fiesta next month as part your new Cupcakes project. Can you tell us a bit more about Bridges, and the basic concept behind Cupcakes?

KG: Bridges started as a short story about an unusual sexual experience. It’s set in a world contemporary with ours, starting by following a young man (a fox) looking for a date, approached by a flirty fellow named Hayward. Hayward becomes the central character of the story–the whole “quiet, shy person approached by attractive, outgoing person” is a popular romantic fantasy, but it made me curious to build Hayward into a real person, to figure out what his motivation would be for the things he does. The more I wrote about it, the more I became curious about his life, and the wider and more far-reaching the story grew, until it ended up as a novella. So I didn’t want to just post it online, as I do with a lot of my short fiction.

I participate in a writing group, and one of the things our group has noticed is that some of our stories have settled into a novella length, and there are very few outlets for that. We are friends with a couple publishers in the fandom, and it turned out that one of them, FurPlanet, was interested in publishing some shorter works. Novellas fit perfectly. But we wanted to establish a brand associated with our novellas, something that would be kind of fun and would allow our fans to follow our work and discover other people. Cupcakes are a big trend right now, and a favorite of my partner and myself, and we thought that was a perfect description for a shorter, snack-sized story that still had enough substance to it for people to really get into. It also has a bit of a “treat” association with it, something special, and we liked the way that sounded. As a bonus, it gives us an excuse to have cupcakes at the release party.

Mine’s the first to come out; there’ll be info about the other projects and the other authors at www.furrycupcakes.com.

OA: Furry fandom tends to involve a lot of artwork. Are there any artists or individual pieces that you think we should check out?

KG:There are a ridiculous number of talented artists in the fandom. As I mentioned, the unique nature of our fandom really encourages creativity and artwork. I can’t possibly give a rundown of all the ones worth watching, nor even all my favorites, but I’ll highlight a couple that would be good places to start.

Blotch is a friend of mine, and one of my favorite artists. “He” illustrated my novel, Out of Position, and the cover is one of my favorite pieces of his. All the work at his online gallery is great, but a couple of my favorites are “Laugh at Life” and “Fly By”.

Sara Palmer and John Cooner have been kind enough to illustrate my books, and have extensive bodies of wonderful work. Sara has a lovely soft touch with marker and colored pencil; John is an excellent cartoonist, a former animator who really understands how to bring characters to life.

oCeLot also does terrific work with color and design. John Jay Doggett does adorable old-timey cartoony pics. Katmomma has great style as well. If you’re looking for more, you can venture to the furry-only art site furaffinity.net and look for some of the above artists (Blotch, oCeLot, John Jay Doggett, Katmomma, Sara Palmer, John Cooner) as well as a couple other of my favorites, Kenket and Kamui and check out the other artists they like and follow. There’s a lot of great work out there.

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Thanks, Kyell! Join us next Friday for another Spotlight, and in the meantime, why not check out some of Kyell Gold’s books, or even find him in person at Further ConFusion? If you’re not in San Jose, but are interested in meeting other allies at cons, be sure to check the Queer Friendly Cons page, which has been updated a few times in the week since I first posted it. Please keep those suggestions for further additions coming!