Dogpatch Press

Fluff Pieces Every Week

Tag: sofawolf

July 13, 2017

Hot Dish Vol. 2, Edited by Dark End – Book Review by Fred Patten

by Pup Matthias

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

Hot Dish. Volume 2, edited by Dark End. Illustrated.
St. Paul, MN, Sofawolf Press, December 2016, trade paperback $17.95 (viii + 307 pages)

Hot Dish #2 is an anthology intended for an adult audience only and contains some explicit sexual scenes of various sexual orientations. It is not for sale to persons under the age of 18. (publisher’s rating)

Hot Dish #1 (edited by Alopex) was published in March 2013. Sofawolf described it as “Hot Dish is a collection of stories about the romantic and erotic relationships between characters of disparate species and sexual orientations. It is a hearty portion of quality fiction which was too long to fit into our yearly adult anthology, Heat.” It won the 2013 Cóyotl Award for Best Anthology.

Hot Dish #2 does not have only stories that were too long for Heat. Sofawolf solicited stories especially for it during 2014. But otherwise this is a good description of Hot Dish #2: eight long novelettes of romantic and erotic s-f & fantasy relationships with humanoid animals, each illustrated by one of three artists. Romance and eroticism are presented in an extremely wide range of backgrounds and emotions.

These eight novelettes are so lengthy that each feels almost like a short novel. This is a long review.

“Loops and Knots” by Tempe O’Kun (illustrated by Anyare) is a time-travel comedy. Tess, a jackal, and Erik, her golden retriever mad scientist/hippie lover, can’t get enough of each other. So Eric turns their large refrigerator into a time machine and brings his one-week-future self to join them for three-way fun-&-games. When Tess is too tired and needs a break, she gets an erotic thrill watching present-Ertk and future-Erik making love to himself.

“‘It’s more like retro-chronal masturbation, really.’ Erik draped a blanket over her lap.” (p. 10)

“Still in a post-orgasmic daze, Tess watched her boyfriend’s temporal tryst. His silken shag blended together, every shade of gold shining in the autumn sun. His muzzle locked with itself. Feeling an odd pang of jealousy, she crossed her arms. ‘You’re completely shameless, aren’t you?’

[…]

She pressed a hand to her forehead, trying not to smile. ‘Oh, all right. Go fuck yourself.’” (p. 17)

It’s very lewd, very sticky, and very funny.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
February 21, 2017

A Decade of Gold: A retrospective of the works of Kyell Gold, by Thurston Howl.

by Patch O'Furr

Thanks to Howl, of Thurston Howl Publications, for his guest post. I’m told it was approved by Kyell.  Enjoy.

Few authors have captivated the mainstream furry audience as famously as Kyell Gold. From his 2004 short story publication, “The Prisoner’s Release” to his upcoming novella, The Time He Desires (Dec 2016), Gold’s works have been award-winning pieces of fiction that have even attracted the attention of non-furry readers. Throughout the past twelve years, Gold has gone through a multitude of genres and such unique characters. Below, I hope to detail many of his milestones over the past almost-decade as well as provide a primer on Gold’s work.

pros_cover_lg

Gold’s debut to fiction was his Renaissance-era novel series set in the fictional universe of Argaea. While it technically started with his “The Prisoner’s Release,” which was published in Heat #1, it later became a novel series, starting with Volle (2005). The series follows a red fox, titularly named Volle, as he undergoes a spy mission, pretending to be a lord of a small area participating in negotiations in the kingdom’s political mecca. The catch is that Volle is a hypersexual fox who struggles to keep his sex life separate from his political life, neither of which allow him to use his true identity. This series is a prime example of how Gold can meld genres. In this case, historical fiction meets homosexual furry erotic romance in a way that is both believable and evocative. The Argaea series has received stellar reviews and widespread reception. So far, the Argaea series includes the following titles: Volle, Pendant of Fortune (2006), The Prisoner’s Release and Other Stories (2007), Shadows of the Father (2010), and Weasel Presents (2011). While not all of these stories follow Volle, they are all set in the same universe. All except for Weasel Presents (which was published by Furplanet Productions) were published by Sofawolf Press, with Sara Palmer being the primary illustrator for most of these.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 comment
October 20, 2016

Interview with #FurryBookMonth Creator Huskyteer

by Pup Matthias

fbm-logo-800Through out the month of October you may have been seeing a special hashtag around twitter of people talking about Furry books more then usual. That is because we are in our first official Furry Book Month. A way to both celebrate the Furry writer community as well as promote just how diverse the community has gotten. You would be amazed how some people still only view the fandom with only three publishers: Sofawolf, Furplanet, and Rabbit Valley. But we have expanded to around eight with newcomers like Thurston Howl Publications, Goal Publications, and Weasel Press; bringing with them new voices and new stories with the same fluffiness or scales or feathers we love.

The Furry we have to thank for getting this event off the ground is Husykteer, a well-known and active member in the writer community since 2010. She began by posting stories on SoFurry, but by 2012 got published in both Roar 4 and Heat 9. Since then she has continued to put out quality work.

So far, I’ve had short stories and poems published in a number of anthologies; most recently Gods with Fur, Claw the Way to Victory and Inhuman Acts. My short story ‘The Analogue Cat’, which appeared in The Furry Future, won the 2015 Ursa Major and Cóyotl awards for short fiction.

I’d love to get some books out there with my name, and mine alone, on the cover! A novella, Peace & Love, should be coming out from FurPlanet soon.

But how did the idea of Furry Book Month come about? Anyone who has been around the FWG forums knows that the writer community, while growing, is still under appreciated in many aspects. So there has been a growing want to promote the community more to get people to check out their work.

In 2015, Furry Writers’ Guild member Rechan challenged the FWG forum to read a furry book, or several, during October. This grew into the idea of promoting books in the wider furry community during October 2016.

Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a comment
September 19, 2016

The State of Furry Publishing – Fred Patten gives the inside story of eight groups.

by Patch O'Furr

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

Back in February 2015, Dogpatch Press published a two-part “History of Furry Publishing” by me. (Part 1 and Part 2) Patch has asked me to contact the furry specialty publishers for a follow-up to bring it up to date.

The traditional “Big Three” furry specialty publishers are FurPlanet Productions in Dallas, Rabbit Valley Books in Las Vegas, and Sofawolf Press in St. Paul. They were profiled in the earlier article. Here is their current status.

FurPlanet Productions

furplanetbannerweb

FurPlanet has been doing very well, as evidenced by having 24 new titles at Anthrocon 2016. FurPlanet has had dealer tables during 2016 at Further Confusion in January, Furry Fiesta, Anthrocon, and Rocky Mountain Fur Con, and plans to appear at Mephit FurMeet, Furry Migration, and Midwest FurFest in December. Besides selling books, FurPlanet has established a strong presence and met a lot of great fans, some of whom have been encouraged to become writers in FurPlanet’s anthologies.

FurPlanet prefers to release new titles at the conventions it attends. Further Confusion in San Jose in January and Anthrocon in Pittsburgh in late June or early July are the big release weekends each year, and publications are aimed for those dates. FurPlanet used to have several releases at RainFurrest in Seattle in late September, but with the disappearance of RainFurrest FurPlanet may shift to Midwest FurFest in Chicago in early December. If something becomes ready at a different time, it is released at the first convention it’s ready for.

Some of FurPlanet’s art folios are annuals. Those usually appear at the same convention each year. FurPlanet and its readers can count on two short fiction anthologies edited by Fred Patten at FC and AC, and an annual volume of FANG and ROAR at AC. Other anthologies, single-author collections, comic books, and one-shot art folios appear as they’re ready.

Erotica clearly sells very well. About 70% of FurPlanet’s sales are adult titles versus 30% of “all ages”. Of the 24 new titles at Anthrocon 2016, only 5 were all ages. FurPlanet’s best selling titles are the comics and books with well-written stories featuring adult themes. Rukis’ novels and comics, and the “Cupcake” novella books have been especially popular.

FurPlanet has three tables together at Anthrocon, so it has a much wider display of titles there. At conventions where it has only two or one table, there are about 100 titles, focusing on what is new or still selling well. Titles that are part of ongoing series will stay on the tables much longer.

Convention sales and online catalogue sales are about equal. Sales of FurPlanet’s print books are much greater than of Bad Dog Books’ e-editions. The Bad Dog e-books are not Amazon’s Kindle books. The only difference is that the Kindle books do not have adult illustrations, due to Amazon’s rules on eBooks. The Bad Dog titles are not censored. That is why many of the Bad Dog eBooks do not appear on Amazon.

For conventions relatively near Dallas, FurPlanet drives its stock there and back in its hatchback. For Further Confusion in California and when it was attending RainFurrest in Seattle, FurPlanet shipped its stock there and flew.

FurPlanet regularly displays Rabbit Valley’s and Sofawolf Press’s titles at conventions where those publishers do not have their own tables. There are no arrangements yet with other publishers, but with several new ones appearing, there could be in the future. FurPlanet has stocked a few mainstream books like the American editions of the French Blacksad and Grandville titles, but those are rare exceptions. FurPlanet’s recent carrying of several of Disney’s Zootopia titles has been due to the extreme interest in Zootopia by many furry fans. There are no plans to carry other books related to anthro-animal movies.

FurPlanet Productions is basically a part-time hobbyist mail-order business in Dallas. Everything there is in a large room called the Production Room. FurPlanet’s stock is kept there, orders are packed and shipped from there, and their bookbinding equipment is there. This room is not open to the public, and there are no plans to open a store front.

FurPlanet consists of four people: FuzzWolf and Teiran, the two owners, and their two long-term employees Buck Turner and Zia McCorgi. All four have regular jobs and run FurPlanet in their spare time. All four appear at almost every convention that FurPlanet displays at. They are sometimes joined by their friends Ajax B. Coriander and Andres Cyanni Halden, who have edited anthologies for FurPlanet in the past.

FurPlanet has this to say:

We’d like to thank everyone, our authors, artists, editors, customers, and helpers, especially Buck and Zia, who have made this all possible for the last eight years.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 comment
August 10, 2016

New Furry Novels Summer Releases

by Pup Matthias

Good day Fluffer Nutters. Around Anthrocon, we did an article highlighting all 25 books being released by Furplanet, but there were and are still more Furry books being released that we didn’t cover from the many other publishers and self-publishers. This list covers the rest that I can find. If you know any that I missed, feel free to mention them in the comments. Hope you enjoy your next furry obsession.

SOFAWOLF PRESS

Franco_front-cover_SC-lgFranko, Fables of the Last Earth by Cristobal Jofre and Angel Bernier (General Hardcover $39.95/ Softcover $19.95)

Franko, Fables of the Last Earth is a collection of six comic stories about Franko, a precocious lion living on the Atacama Desert of Chile with his friend Shin, thousands of years in Earth’s future. Theirs is a vibrant world of animal characters, where humans are long gone, along with much of their technology. Life on this desert, the driest in the world, is difficult, but also full of adventures and mysteries. In each fable, Franko and Shin encounter challenges and riddles that they must solve, and in the process they learn a bit more about themselves, and others. Not every fable ends with an obvious lesson, but each one is thought-provoking and full of surprises.

Franko was originally published in Chile in its native Spanish by Amapola Editores, Ltda. as Franko, Fábulas de la Última Tierra. We at Sofawolf Press fell in love with Franko, his friends, and his gorgeously-illustrated world, and so in 2016 we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the printing of an English translation of this collection.

The fables included in this volume are:

  • The Fable of Mana and the Treasure
  • Chapter Title Page by Hax
  • The Fable of Cobrafrog, the Merchant
  • Chapter Title Page by Ekara
  • The Fable of Megaboss
  • Chapter Title Page by Martin Caceres (inks) and Ekara (color)
  • The Fable of the Host of Midnight
  • Chapter Title Page by Arashi Takemoto
  • The Fable of the Slave Master
  • Chapter Title Page by Seyorrol
  • The Fable of Behemo, the Hermit
  • Chapter Title Page by Rodrigo Lopez

Due to the success of meeting one of our Kickstarter campaign’s stretch goals, the collection includes three additional black and white comics:

  • Box
  • The Second Rain
  • Florid Desert

This book is suitable for readers from age 7 to 700.

Read the rest of this entry »

1 comment
June 29, 2015

Exclusive: Nordguard game and Windfall novel coming out at Anthrocon, from Tempe O’Kun.

by Patch O'Furr

tempo321In November 2014, I shared news about the very active Furry author Tempe O’kun.  Public Radio interviewed him about his writing – and they treated Furry writing as just a genre, not a “weird news” item.  Even the romance kind!  That was refreshing, and I thought he did a great job representing it.  So do other furries, it seems, because he’s been honored as an award winning Furry Writers’ Guild member and a convention guest of honor.

Tempe got in touch to share exclusive news about upcoming projects.  His novel Windfall sounds like a unique genre-mixing delight, with cute furry romance and paranormal horror.  There’s also art from the Nordguard card game below.  They’re coming out at Anthrocon 2015.  If you can’t wait to see them in person on July 9-13, here’s a taste.  I asked Tempe to round out his news with personal chat about how his year has been – and if he had stories about making projects happen.  I asked: “Are you excited for Anthrocon, and what else do you plan to do there?”

Tempe responds:unnamed

My year has been great thus far! I was guest of honor at Camp Feral 2014, and I have been invited to GoH another con in the spring.

ThinkTank Games and I started work on what would become Nordguard: Tribes of the White Land expansion before the game’s core set even came out. Originally, we’d planned it as a series of smaller expansions (about the size of Magic booster packs), but eventually took the most interesting elements from each set and combined them into a 36-card pack. It shuffles directly into the main set and, just like the original, it’s a boxed set—no buying multiple packs to get the cards you want, like in a CCG. The highlights include two canon characters (Iyoto and Manny) who were mentioned in the first book, but haven’t been seen yet. It also has Team Fortress 2-style side-grades for every character. BlackTeagan also developed an entire new tribe—the Nituuyik, arctic lynxes—for the expansion, who will later appear in the books. So this is the first time the card game will have a direct influence on the graphic novels!

We’re also reprinting the core set. We’ve gotten some great feedback over the last two years and we’re pretty confident about the streamlining we’ve done for the second edition.

Read the rest of this entry »

2 comments