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September 6, 2016

Poem Anthology Civilized Beasts 2016 – OPEN FOR SUBMISSION

by Pup Matthias

2237d0_279de4e132234f0dbc1eb187f7931614When most of us think of Furry writing we think of your standard novels, novellas, short stories, even comics, but one form that doesn’t get the same attention is poetry. Mainly cause there hasn’t been too many opportunities in the fandom to showcase anthropomorphic poems. There are a few exceptions like Heat and the soon to be released anthology Wolf Warrior III which offer collections that mix poems with short stories, but there hasn’t been an anthology dedicated to poetry alone. Until last year when Laura “Munchkin” Govednik released Civilized Beast. Now she’s back again for round two. Civilized Beast 2016 is open for submission.

So where did the idea of doing a poem anthology come from?

The idea for Civilized Beasts started in the Furry Writer’s Guild.  I was surprised to find there were other members and future members who also had a high interest in poetry and hoped to see more of it in the community.  Through various discussions, I realized that a poetry collection about animals for animals could be a great way for people in and out of the furry community to connect.

When it comes to theme, Civilized Beasts does the same thing as Heat by having a generally open theme for everyone to play with.

The theme this year is the same as last year: Animals, be it the outside observation of animals, in the mind of an animal, or the symbolism of an animal.  By leaving the theme so open, it allowed poets a lot of freedom last year, and an incredible variety of poetry was submitted because of it.  It is my hope that poets will be just as inspired this year, so I decided not to limit the theme.

Munchkin is looking for all kinds of poems. Whether they are your traditional rhymes, sonnets, haiku, or free verse. You are free to write what speaks to you. Munchkin wants you to think outside the box. To go wild. There’s even no word count limit to your poems.

For anyone interested, there’s no maximum or minimum line count, though longer poems will be looked at more critically since we only have so many pages to work with. 

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August 22, 2016

Purrfect Tails – OPEN FOR SUBMISSION

by Pup Matthias

7cf29bba-07f0-4b2b-8767-f2562fedf847This is different, yet it’s familiar. Say one day you are walking down the street doing your business when someone catches your eye. They look human. They have the eyes, nose, lips, skin, but that’s not what grabbed your attention. It was the ears for they are not human, but of an animal. Your first though is of a cat. Then you look down to notice a tail. You want to know more about this person. What they are, why they are like this, and maybe, just maybe, you want to explore more. That is what Tarl “Voice” Hoch presents to use with his new erotic neko anthology, Purrfect Tails, and they are OPEN FOR SUBMISSION!

So first thing first to those who don’t know, what on earth is even a neko?

A neko is a character who is either male or female with feline characteristics on a human body, generally a pair of ears, and in many cases, a tail. Unlike a furry character, they generally look human or extremely close to it rather than being a sort of half breed between a cat and a human. They generally still act like cats, or have cat-like tendencies, but also function as normal people as well.

A good place to learn more about Nekos is here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CatGirl

Edited by Tarl “Voice” Hoch, best known for doing horror anthologies, he got to become an editor cause as he puts it he fell into it.

I had been noticing that there was a distinct lack of horror books/anthologies in the fandom and made a tweet about it. Next thing I knew, I was getting all of these favorites and replies to it and Fuzz said FurPlanet were interested in it. So I wrote up a proposal and call for submissions and that was that. I learned a lot of lessons from that first anthology, had some good and bad experiences, but in the end it helped me to grow as a writer.

Already, Tarl has produced many works both within and outside the fandom.

I have a horror anthology published by FurPlanet titled Abandoned Places and I am currently working on a science fiction/horror anthology which will also be published by FurPlanet. I also wrote the story for an 18+ comic which was illustrated and printed by KomicKrazi and only available by sending me a request or at Fur-Eh! in Edmonton. Other than those, I am published in a number of anthologies inside and outside of the furry fandom, a list of which can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5759304.Tarl_Voice_Hoch

But that still leaves us with the question, why is Tarl interested in making an erotic anthology around nekoes?

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August 15, 2016

Les Ailes du Singe. T.1, Wakanda, by Etienne Willem – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

1969_couvLes Ailes du Singe. T.1, Wakanda, by Étienne Willem.
Geneva, Switzerland, Éditions Paquet, May 2016, hardbound €14,00 (48 pages).

This is another fine entry in Lex Nakashima’s & my project to bring American furry fans the best of new French-language animalière bandes dessinées. We covered Étienne Willem’s previous four-volume L’Épée d’Ardenois, set about the 13th century with knights in armor. Les Ailes du Singe, The Wings of the Monkey, is considerably different. It’s set in New York in 1933, with knights of the skies.

It’s March 1933, in the depths of the Depression. Tens of thousands of people are out of work, eating in soup kitchens and living in Hoovervilles. Harry Faulkner (monkey), a top pilot in the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I, and the owner of his own barnstorming and movie stunt-flying Jenny biplane during the ‘20s, has fallen on hard times; but he’s not so desperate that he’ll take a job as a common mechanic. He complains to his girlfriend, Betty Laverne (deer), a newspaper reporter for the Herald, and to his own mechanic, Lumpy (pig), that he wants a job that will let him fly.

Meanwhile, the mayor of New York (rabbit) is gambling on jump-starting a return to prosperity – and advancing his own political career – by sponsoring a fleet of high-profile dirigibles (which the mayor secretly owns a share of) powered by synthetic helium, that will replace the railroads in crossing America in comfort and speed. The first of them, the Navy dirigible Wakanda, is about to cast off from the Empire State Building on its posh maiden voyage to California. The flight is covered by Betty.

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August 8, 2016

The Dogs of War: military fiction anthology OPEN FOR SUBMISSION

by Pup Matthias

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Art by SabretoothedErmine

War. War never changes. Obvious Fallout reference aside, and yet it’s a subject that our fandom never fully explored. Especially in an anthology, but that changes. The new war theme anthology The Dogs of War is OPEN FOR SUBMISSION. Headed by our own Fred Patten, this anthology, as stated, covers the topic of war, but that doesn’t mean every story has to be your typical “war” story.

These [stories] may be serious or humorous, featuring battle action or the boredom of peacetime, from grim battlefields to recruiting stations.  Warfare from Bronze Age battles to Middle Ages warfare to far-future interstellar battles.  Anything with a military or army (or navy) theme and animal characters.  

You are free to tell your war story the way you want. You can do an All Quiet on the Western Front or a MASH. Do something modern or travel to the past or future. Plus any genre of your choosing from sci fi to fantasy to steampunk to whatever your creative mind can come up with. But that leaves us with a question. How did Fred come up with doing a war theme anthology?

Frankly, it was by accident.  Wikipedia ran an 1876 political cartoon by John Tenniel about the then-current political/military tensions in the Balkans that was based on Shakespeare’s famous line about “the Dogs of War” from his Julius Caesar.  I realized that none of the furry specialty presses had published an anthology of military stories yet.  I proposed it to FurPlanet before someone else used the theme.

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July 29, 2016

Heat Volume 14 – OPEN FOR SUBMISSION

by Pup Matthias

heat-5_coverWe are in the heart of summer. The pools are open, the grills are cooking, and for us writers, Sofawolf’s long running anthology Heat is OPEN FOR SUBMISSION for their fourteenth volume. One of, if not the longest, and the most prominent, anthology in the fandom; Heat is once again open for all of your erotic encounters. But outside of being an erotic anthology, Heat never does a yearly theme like its contemporaries like Roar, Fang, or Trick or Treat.

Heat does not, and has never had, a theme beyond “furry erotica.” Heat occasionally develops themes post hoc, like the Americana theme running through Heat 13. We didn’t choose those stories for being related to Americana: we chose stories because they were good and it turned out that the stories we chose had a lot to do with Americana.

Write the hot and sweaty or sweet and sensual furry story that you want to write. It doesn’t need to–and shouldn’t and can’t–be tailored to what we want.

There is only one thing the people on Heat want?

In brief: short, well-written furry erotica of all orientations with an emphasis on good story.

That is what we want to see in general, but there are certain things we want to see more of. A lot of the stories we get are straight or gay, have a male protagonist, have a young protagonist, have a canine protagonist, are set somewhere in contemporary America, or are fairly straight-forward romance story. Anything that moves away from this would stands out among our submissions.

We’d love to see more stories with a lesbian or bisexual focus. We’d love to see more transgender characters. We’d love to see more female protagonists. We’d love to see middle-aged or older characters. We’d love to see ourselves visiting different time periods or different locales or transported to whole other worlds. And we always love when our writers can mash together erotica with an unexpected genre. (I still think one of my favorites for this is Tempe O’Kun’s “The Case of the Gelatinous Gemstone,” which mixed erotica, comedy, and mystery.)

While kinks are allowable, remember that most of our audience is not likely to share that particular kink and therefore it should not be the primary focus of the story.

However, the editor of Heat, Dark End, points out that there are many common mistakes made when people submit to Heat. He recently posted a detailed blog about it on SoFurry, but if you choose to write for Heat, keep these things in mind to avoid these common mistakes. One of the biggest being, don’t make your erotic story just about the sex.

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July 13, 2016

Fellowship of the Ringtails, by Angela Oliver – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

ringFellowship of the Ringtails, by Angela Oliver. Illustrated, map.
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, June 2013, trade paperback $15.49 ([iii +] 406 [+ 9] pages), Kindle 99¢.

Technically the title of this book is Lemurs (A Saga). Book One: The Fellowship of the Ringtails. But the cover doesn’t say so; Amazon.com doesn’t say so; and I’m pretty sure that nobody else is likely to say so, either.

This title makes it sound like either a parody of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, or an unimaginative imitation of it. Fortunately it’s neither. Its opening paragraph is:

“‘There will be others, Fiantrana,’ the soft voice drew the young lemur from her reverie. She turned her gaze from the great stone tomb: the final resting place for her ancestors, relatives, and most recently, her own son. There was a deep ache inside her: the memory of his tiny, fragile body as she had cradled him to her breast, watching his life breathe out of him.” (p.1)

Angela Oliver, of Christchurch, New Zealand, is devoted to lemurs. In a two-page “Why Lemurs?” afterword, she explains that she was introduced to lemurs while working at a local zoo park, went to Madagascar where lemurs come from in 2007, and fell in love with the whole island-nation. The Fellowship of the Ringtails is an adventure fantasy featuring anthropomorphized lemurs in their Kingdom of Madigaska, a fictionalized Kingdom of Madagascar before it became a French colony in 1897.

An important fact is that there is not just one kind of lemur. There are many different species, roughly divided into the sifakas that are almost entirely arboreal, and the “true lemurs” (which she has dubbed the hazosaka because it sounds better for a fantasy novel) that can walk on the ground, including the famous ringtailed lemurs. For The Fellowship of the Ringtails, she has made the sifakas into the royal family and the aristocracy of Madigaska, while the hazosaka are the commoners.

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July 12, 2016

Tailless, by Erin Quinn – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

Tailless, by Erin Quinn
Las Vegas, NV, Rabbit Valley Books, May 2016, trade paperback $20.00 (284 [+ 1] pages).tailless-by-erin-quinn-206905

Dolores, a young tailless vixen, is a waitress at Max’s lower-class diner. When she is molested by a drunken rat customer, Max (a fatherly bear) moves in to protect her; but she can take care of herself.

“Dolores clenched her serving tray to her side and took a step forward. Her heals clacked against the wooden floor. The diner became quite. ‘I wasn’t done with ya, sweetie. How about bring that bare bottom back over here?’ She toyed with the idea of clawing his face, but her father’s words echoed between her ears: ‘Young ladies do not raise their claws.’” (p.1)

The problem is that they are in the city of ‘Lo, Lyndon, and Lyndon lost the Common War with Ulick a year ago.   King Scottsburg (lion) is furious and is executing most of his old advisors, their families, and anyone else he doesn’t like as traitors. Dolores and Max cannot afford to do anything that will bring themselves to the attention of his Royal Guard. Dolores is something of a mystery woman:

“Ever since they met Max had been curious about her. She arrived six months ago with little more than the clothes on her back. The easy option would have been to turn away a girl who had no work history, no credits to buy a meal, and a vague explanation for why she was in the city. But she was eager to help and wanted very little in return. Max couldn’t say no.” (p. 3)

It’s not giving away much of a spoiler to reveal that Dolores is really Belladonna Sinclair, daughter of a minister personally executed by King Scottsdale. While the Sinclair family was in favor before the war, Dolores/Belladonna was in a close friendship with young Tym Timmons (gray and black tabby cat). Since the war, Tym is the new Minister of the Interior, in charge of finding and executing the king’s enemies. He dares to plead for Belladonna’s pardon since she was innocent of her father’s treason, but King Scottsdale is adamant that she be publicly killed. The missing Belladonna/Dolores’ hiding is helped by the fact that nobody knows that she lost her tail in the war (“‘I just got caught up in a scuffle. It wasn’t too bad. Honestly, I’m sure whoever swung the sword wasn’t aiming for my tail.’” – p. 29), but it does make her stand out. She is now in hiding in ‘Lo, helped by her taillessness and the fatherly Max, and by James Euclid (skunk), the handsome son of her former (slain) university professor.

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July 6, 2016

Persimmon Takes On Humanity, by Christopher Locke – book review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

persimPersimmon Takes On Humanity, by Christopher Locke
Los Angeles, CA, Fathoming Press, February 2015, trade paperback $14.95 (477 pages), Kindle $1.99.

Persimmon Takes On Humanity is blatantly a didactic novel. But it’s a powerful one. In its first few pages Persimmon, a happy-go-lucky raccoon; Scraps, Persimmon’s younger brother; her reluctant best friend Derpoke the opossum; and Rawly, an arrogant rival raccoon dare each other to venture from the safety of Oak Tree Forest to cross the river to the human land, from which no raccoon has ever returned.

“‘Having fun?’ Rawly, an imposing raccoon, stands over them on his hind legs asserting his dominance. He glares at the playful pals. Derpoke goes limp with fear.

Persimmon lets go of Derpoke and leisurely rolls onto her side to face Rawly. ‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Grumpykins.’

‘Grumpy?!’ Rawly replies, incensed. ‘How about rightfully annoyed that you’re in my territory – again? You think you can just gallivant around all over my trees?’

‘The forest is big enough for all of use to share,’ Persimmon responds defiantly. ‘I’m not intimidated by the silly rules you males force on everyone around you by rubbing your butts on everything.’

[…]

‘The most ridiculous thing about you jumping between those trees is that you were doing it to show off to your puny brother and this cowardly opossum.’

Persimmon pops up, indignant. ‘They both have more heart than all of the other raccoons combined. Besides, I did it to prove to myself that it could be done – and maybe to taste the thrill of it.’

‘Huh. Well, if you warriors are so brave, then why don’t you venture past Oak Tree Forest on the other side of the river?’ Rawly provokes.

‘You’re absurd,’ Persimmon jeers. ‘As if you’re courageous enough to venture there. No raccoon has ever gone past that point and lived to tell the tale.’” (pgs. 4-5)

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July 1, 2016

The Lottery – Furry, by Karen Ranney – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

41vGf3jdd5L._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_The Lottery – Furry, by Karen Ranney
Seattle, WA, CreateSpace, April 2016, trade paperback $9.95 (232 pages), Kindle $2.99.

This book seems to have drifted in to this furry review site by mistake. Despite its title, and its label as Book 1 of The Furry Chronicles trilogy, it’s a werewolf novel – or more precisely a woman’s paranormal romance novel.

That’s probably natural since Karen Ranney is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of women’s romances; not a furry author. In fact, the three volumes of The Furry Chronicles are a spinoff of Ranney’s previous The Montgomery Chronicles. “You’ll see what happens to Opie, meet Antonia, and follow Torrance’s adventures as well.” (Ranney’s website)

Torrance Boyd is a young junior vet working at Alamo Veterinary Services LLC in San Antonio. She’s a soft touch for all of the stray dogs that an elderly do-gooder finds and brings in there. Torrance can’t bring herself to throw them out again, so she personally pays for heartworm testing, flea dipping, and other medical expenses; which keeps her perpetually broke.

She has another problem:

“I didn’t know, for certain, that dogs shared a communicative bond, but as a species I wasn’t far removed from them. You see, I’m a Were. Ever since my younger brother asked me if that meant we were weird I’ve called myself a Furry, a label that doesn’t endear me to either my family or my friends. At least, those who knew what I was.

Only another Were could recognize me, but even then, we didn’t go around acknowledging each other in public. In other words, we don’t sniff each other. We don’t even venture near the nether regions in our four legged form. Can you imagine meeting the eyes of someone whose butt you just checked out when he was furry?” (p. 5)

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June 21, 2016

The Art of Finding Dory, Foreword by Andrew Stanton – Book Review by Fred Patten.

by Patch O'Furr

Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.

414KAEEKD5L._SY379_BO1,204,203,200_The Art of Finding Dory. Preface by John Lasseter. Foreword by Andrew Stanton. Intro by Steve Pilcher.
San Francisco, CA, Chronicle Books, May 2016, hardcover $40.00 (176 pages), Kindle $17.49.

Here is another “all about” coffee-table art book about the making of a high-profile animated feature: Disney/Pixar’s Finding Dory, the sequel to the studio’s 2003 award-winning Finding Nemo, released on June 17, 2016.

But this is about the art, not the story of the movie. Since the movie takes place almost entirely underwater, there is a tremendous emphasis on the underwater lighting. Steve Pilcher, the production designer, explains how the lighting constantly changes more than out-of-the-water lighting. Not only is there different lighting for the different levels of depth in the ocean; between really deep and among the coral reefs near the surface (there is much more light closer to the surface), there is a big difference between underwater in the ocean and underwater in the tanks of the Marine Life Institute.

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