Husky Galore

Volume 2 of Allasso from Pink Fox Publications launches today, and it includes my short story, Tiger Light.

Allasso is quite a new venture, publishing what's best described as 'furry literary fiction'. Although all the content features anthropomorphic animals, it's intended to appeal outside the fandom too, so don't be shy!

Both volumes, Shame and Saudade, are available to read online for free, but you can also purchase an e-book (only £2.52!) or hard copy - which would help the editor to continue production.

View the contents page, or skip straight to my story. (Warning for mild sexual content and implied drug use.)

I'm probably the only person who still uses LJ as an RSS reader, but there is a feed at pinkfoxpubs if you want to keep up with Allasso news. Submissions are currently being accepted for Volume 3.

Yesterday sofawolf formally announced the lineup for Heat #9, so I am almost a published furry author. There are, of course, things that could still prevent my becoming an actual published furry author, for instance the Apocalypse, so I won't be truly happy until I have a copy in my paws.

You can see the product page here. This is an adult publication and you'll need to click a disclaimer before viewing, but the page itself is fairly demure with no anthropomorphic norks or willies on display. I promise.

A friend told me about Writers' Village a few months ago. The website offers writing tips by email - some free, some you pay for - and quarterly short story competitions. Entry to the competition is £10, but every entrant receives a critique of their work.

This sounded a pretty good deal to me, so I entered a story I'd recently finished and wanted some feedback on.

At this point it would be traditional to say 'and then I forgot all about it', but that would be telling whoppers. I anxiously watched my inbox for my critique, and checked the site daily so that when the winners were posted I could compare them unfavourably with my own effort.

But I didn't need to do that, because I got a phone call telling me I had won first prize in the spring competition. (There was an email too but it had gone into my junk folder, probably because it contained the words Congratulations, you have won.)

( Extract and link under the cut. )

I can truthfully say that I did not set out this morning to buy a telephone table. Yet, somehow:



Yeah. Sensible purchase decision for an unemployed person who's supposed to be moving house in two weeks.

But it was a tenner from the British Heart Foundation's furniture-and-electrical store, and it makes my telephone look great.

(Now you can all tell me about the one in your mum's garage you could have given me for free if you'd only known.)

That was a busy week.

On Wednesday I went for a ride with a friend from the bike club, because if you know bikers you're going to know people who are retired or work shifts or are otherwise free in the daytime. We rode over to Westerham, a favourite spot of mine surrounded by excellent roads.

In the evening, yagfox and I attended a Future Cinema screening of Bugsy Malone. I'd never seen the film but was vaguely aware it featured a bunch of kids throwing custard pies at each other, which sounded like fun.

The audience, including some quite tiny children, dressed suitably for Depression-era USA (I was in drag, as it's so much easier) and willingly played along with the shoeshine boys and soda jerks who entertained us while we waited to enter the Troxy. Yag was told he needed a shave, and we both found ourselves at the barber's having appropriate moustaches drawn on us. My favourite performer, though, was the man who served me my macaroni cheese at the food counter, who said "Ciao, bello - oh, scusi, bella!"

You'll have to go along yourself to discover what the full experience was like. Many thanks to Yag for spotting this and sorting it! Dry-cleaning bill is in the post :)

nou has been having a Week Of Coding, and kindly invited me round on Thursday so I could have a crack at JQuery in company. Shamed by the presence of another human being, I knuckled down and worked through three chapters of From Novice to Ninja.

Friday I went on another ride with four bike club members of flexible work schedule. I got home, it rained buckets for an hour, I went out again to have dinner with mrs_leroy_brown and kitty in their new pad. This was all quite tiring and I didn't do much on Saturday.

On Sunday I visited Croydon again for the South End Food Festival. There were samples and special menus from local restaurants, cooking demonstrations by chefs stationed at an enormous Aga-sponsored roadshow trailer complete with MC, and, as is usual on these occasions, I bought far more olives than I can sensibly eat.

Also, words have been written. Including, of course, these ones.

I've been not-working for two weeks now. Scary how quickly the time goes. Much of it seems to have been spent waiting for my computer to catch up with my requests for it to do stuff.

On Thursday I attended a recording of The News Quiz at the Drill-Hall-as-was. It lasted an hour and a half, at the end of which Sandi Toksvig apologised profusely for the late running, blamed Jeremy Hardy, and wondered how on earth the BBC would cut it down to twenty-eight minutes (by cutting out the swearing and slander, mostly).

What you missed: the story about Rick Wakeman going for a drink with Ronnie Biggs; Sandi's inability to pronounce the Chinese names of the Edinburgh Zoo pandas; Jeremy simulating urination up a curtain.

On Friday I participated in 3hundredand65, a collaborative graphic novel played out on Twitter over the course of a year. Participants have 140 characters to convey the next instalment of a story that's lyrical, comical, scary and surreal, in support of the Teenage Cancer Trust. Join in or follow along at @3hundredand65 and #3hand65.

My Tweet and the artist's accompanying illustration are here. Did I cynically exploit the project in order to get a picture of wolves? Judge for yourselves! (And yes, huskies would have been too blatant given my username.)

On Sunday I went round to my friend Nick Ultrafox winolj's place, where he, his housemates and various others were having a Shakespeare readthrough. I hadn't done anything like this for a number of years, and it was great fun.

The play was The Comedy of Errors, which is early and barmy - you think Twelfth Night is full of unlikely twin-related coincidences? you ain't seen nothing yet - and we bagsied parts as they appeared. Pity the poor bloke who jumped gamely in at the start, only to find that his character had four or five speeches of lengthy exposition, full of complicated names, in a row. Every time he finished one the other character in the scene would say something along the lines of 'But pray, continue!', to general hilarity.

One of those present was elethe, whom I met at a party in late 2004, Friended, and hadn't seen since.

Yesterday I saw someone else last glimpsed at a party even longer ago: kyyanno, who'd suggested we meet up as he had the week off. It was a fab sunny day, and we ate lunch at a picnic table outside our rendez-vous point, the Station Cafe in Alton.

Kyy had requested a pillion ride and brought his own helmet and jacket. After a rocky start in which I nearly rode into the cafe signboard (it's been a while since I last took passengers), we set off for a twenty-minute jaunt around the back of Lasham airfield and through some nice bends I'd prepared earlier.

I wonder who will emerge from the woodwork next?

A few weeks ago, I announced my intention to write 500 words a day - 15,000 words a month - for three months, which would give me 45,000 words and, hopefully, something approaching a first draft.

It's March 31st and the word count stands at 15332.

I suspect many of these words are padding induced by the daily target, à la NaNoWriMo, and there are already plot holes and contradictions to fix, but that's what second drafts are for. And probably third, fourth and fifth drafts, by the look of it.

I haven't made as much progress into the plot as I'd thought I would by now, probably due to the aforementioned padding, and it may turn into 60,000 words in four months. I'm also teetering on the brink of the black hole in the middle of the book where I've no idea what happens, but I know where I need to end up and I hope ideas will occur to me as I go along (have I mentioned I belong to the seat-of-pants school of writing?).

But! 15,000 words, not to mention numerous plot strands, devices and characters, exist now that did not exist on March 1st. Onward!

Down in France, I caught a few minutes of the new, inferior* Thundercats on Saturday morning TV while waiting for it to be breakfast time.

It was only later that I remembered the original Thundercats didn't air as Thundercats in France, but as Cosmocats.

We had at least one French family holiday during the major Thundercats phase of my life. I was delighted to discover a whole new country full of merchandise, including a comic book, a collectable mustard jar with Lion-O ('Starlion') and Cheetara ('Felibelle') on it and a 7" single of the theme song, which I played so often I can still remember most of the French lyrics:

Cosmocats extraterrestres!
Cosmocats, c'est vous
Qui avez tous les pouvoirs
Cosmocats, à vous!
Cosmo, cosmo, cosmo, Cosmocats!
Cosmo, cosmo, cosmo, Cosmocats!

I could go on, but I won't. I make no claims for the accuracy of the grammar, either.

Later on Saturday I discovered Cosmocats DVDs in a shop called Kandy, which appears to be the French equivalent of Poundstretcher. I recognised the episodes immediately, even with French titles, and bought the one with Tygra on the case as a present for my ten-year-old self.

(I also brought back a collectable mustard jar, with Spielberg's Tintin on it this time, having recently finished the Bolt and Mittens mustard obtained on a previous trip.)

* YMMV, rose-tinted spectacle etc. If I'd been a fan of My Little Pony in the 1980s I expect I'd now be complaining about how terrible the new one is.

When I informed Howard that for his birthday treat we were going to an aviation-themed hotel in Picardy, he received the news with equanimity.

Our destination was Le Crotoy, a little way down the coast from Le Touquet and an important site in aviation history. René and Gaston Caudron, brothers and pioneers, flew their experimental aircraft along the beach, and after the First World War a school for pilots was established. Hopefuls travelled from all over the world to gain certification; there was a delegation from China, and Bessie Coleman, the first black woman to hold a pilot's licence, came from Texas to pick up her brevet in 1921. (We learned all this from the Caudron museum in nearby Rue.)

The hotel, Les Aviateurs, was all I'd hoped for. Each of the bedrooms was named after a French pilot; we got the Adrienne Bolland room. I had not previously heard of her, but she was the first woman to fly across the Andes. The dining-room was decorated with photos and models of aeroplanes, and some of the tables had biplane mosaic tops while another featured the cover of The Blue Lotus. The hotel bar and some of the tables were original fixtures from the pilots' club, and were over 100 years old. What stories they could have told!