Welcome to Tempe O’Kun, author of Paranormal Furry Romance, anthropomorphic-animal Westerns, and a frequent guest of the site.
The smash-hit furry anime Aggrestuko that came out April 2018 is already slated for a second season, but we got a Yuletide treat: a Christmas special. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to Tempe O’Kun, author of Paranormal Furry Romance, anthropomorphic-animal Westerns, and a frequent guest of the site.
You might not be into pro gaming. Maybe your interest in gaming is limited to what you play yourself and the occasional piece of fan art. That’s cool.
But let me tell you why you should care.
You might not have noticed, but we’re rainbow animal-people. Midwest Fur Fest just passed 10,000 in attendance, a world record for furry cons. In some ways, the fandom will always be our weird little club, but we’re not some unknown niche anymore. Not when one of us breaks into the trending topics on Twitter.
So somebody is going to be the face of the fandom—or rather, various people are at different times. And we’re lucky that our two recent high-profile furries (SonicFox at the Game Awards and Bucktown Tiger on Jeopardy) have been really upstanding guys.
And it’s not just a public persona. As it happens, I talked to SonicFox at MFF last weekend. I ducked away from my book launch for a few minutes to say hey. And, even in suit, he made a little time to stop and chat with me. Just as you see in the video, he comes off as a sweet and sincere person. He’s absolutely someone we want as a go-to example of a furry.
Guest post by Arrkay from Culturally F’d, the furry youtube channel. See their tag on Dogpatch Press for more.
Finally, the YouTube channel for the furry fandom has enough videos about foxes to make a whole playlist. Our latest episode is all to do with the classic 1973 Disney film Robin Hood. This timeless classic surely set many young minds onward to furrydom. Our guest writer Tempe O’Kun has Arrkay squawking all about the stable relationship between Robin and Maid Marian.
Tempo (Tempe O’Kun) is a furry author in North Dakota.
Art: Rattusdingus
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If you support white supremacy…
If you play dress-up in the uniforms of genocide…
If you mock people who just want the same rights you enjoy…
…you don’t belong here. Not in my fandom. Not in my country. Not in my world. You cannot possibly play the victim enough for me to consider your murderous opinions valid. So cry all you want, but we’ll be here in the furry fandom having fun without you.
To the rest of you, to actual furries: this is our fandom, a place on the Internet that’s nobody’s but ours. We decide who gets to play here, and what the rules are. The offline world’s pretty messed up right now, but kicking the Nazis out of furry is a concrete, realistic, and powerful move toward justice.
I’M JUST HERE FOR THE TALKING ANIMALS
Let me tell you why to care.
Tempe O’Kun is a popular author of Paranormal Furry Romance, anthropomorphic-animal Westerns, and even game design.
Tempe writes in to share his recent appearance in the news, plus Q&A with me.
“I helped boo my Republican rep whenever he defended Trump-Russia. Normally, I don’t like having my real life intersect with furry, but these are exceptional times.” See Tempe in cowboy hat on North Dakota’s KFYR-TV:
Things got physical at a town hall meeting this afternoon in Mandan with Rep. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. Two people were escorted from the Coffee with Cramer event by police officers. Things got heated, when Cramer was accused of supporting tax cuts for the wealthy.
Submitted by Fred Patten
Sixes Wild: Echoes, by Tempe O’Kun. Illlustrated.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, June 2016, trade paperback $15.95 (155 pages).
This is a mature content book. Please ensure that you are of legal age to purchase this material in your state or region.
This short novel is a sequel to O’Kun’s Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny, an anthropomorphic-animal Western published by Sofawolf Press in June 2011. That won the 2012 Cóyotl Award in the Best Mature Novel category, and was a nominee for the Western Writers of America’s Spur Award in the Best Short Novel category. (For the record, there has also been a promotional 8-page Sixes Wild: The Bluff comic book, illustrated by Sidian.)
Echoes begins where Manifest Destiny ended. The setting is White Rock, Arizona Territory, a stereotypical dusty early 20th-century Western town (they have newfangled electric lights) except that the townsfolk are all anthro animals – sort of. (I still haven’t figured out how a big-winged fruit bat sheriff who flies and hangs by his feet upside town in his sheriff’s office can ride a horse.) The main characters are Jordan Blake, the fruit bat sheriff, and Six Shooter, a rugged hare bounty hunter. What nobody knows (well, they pretty much do by now) is that Six is really a crossdressing female, and she and the sheriff are secret lovers. Very graphic lovers; this is a mature content book.
Manifest Destiny ends with Six going after Tanner Hayes, the arrogant lion mine-owner revealed to be a villain who goes on the run. Echoes begins with Six coming back to town empty-pawed.
“‘Thought you had a lion to run down.’
‘Hayes has gone to ground. Haven’t got mah gun back either.”” (p. 7)
Meanwhile, she’s heard a new rumor that interests her.
“She rests her paws on those revolvers, one a silver heirloom, the other a blue steel substitute. ‘A spot of treasure hunting.’
I look up from my bookkeeping to take account of Six. One never can tell how serious she takes her tomfoolery.
‘Ah’ve been hearin’ rumors.’ She brushes the dust from her fluffy tail. ‘Folk tell of a cliff-house with all manner of lost riches.’
With a sigh, I lean back in my chair, steeple my wings, and put away the pen with one foot. ‘I wouldn’t put much stock in saloon scuttlebutt.’
‘Nor would ah, but ah heard it from an old ‘yote traveling with the circus.’
My wing fingers interlace. I wish I knew her better, and not just because I’d like to know if she’s poking fun at me. ‘If he knew where all this treasure was, why was he traveling with a circus?’
‘He said it was cursed.’ Her dexterous paws dance theatrically. ‘Everybody who went lookin’ met a grisly end.’” (p. 8)
Submitted by Fred Patten, Furry’s favorite historian and reviewer.
Windfall, by Tempe O’Kun. Illustrated by Slate.
Dallas, TX, FurPlanet Productions, July 2015, trade paperback $19.95 (325 pages), electronic edition $9.95.
This is a mature content book. Please ensure that you are of legal age to purchase this material in your state or region. (publisher’s advisory)
It has been six months since the popular TV series Strangeville was cancelled after five seasons. The cast has split up and gone their own ways. For Max Saber (husky) and Kylie Bevy (otter), teenage supporting actors who played a high-school boy & girl on the series, this has meant returning to their homes across America. Yet they have remained in touch through texting, and after six months, both are wondering whether their TV romance might have been more serious than they realized. When Max, on his parents’ Montana ranch, gets an invitation from Kylie to spend a three-week vacation in her old New England town of Windfall – the town that the creepy, surrealistic Strangeville was modelled upon – he takes it. Yep, their romance is real. So is the horror of Windfall.
As readers of my reviews know, I don’t think much of funny-animal novels in which the characters are really humans with superficial animal features. But Windfall presents them in depth. There are constant mentions of fur, wagging tails, perked or drooping ears, the female otters’ whiskers and webbed paws. A teen rhino fan asks Max to autograph his horn. “The otter threaded her tail through the hole in the [car] seat and popped the key into the ignition.” (p. 41) Max calls Kylie “rudderbutt”. Some of it is occasionally anthro-specific, as when Kylie finds a deer’s skull while she and Max are camping in the woods:
“She knew that [the deer had been feral]. The eyes were too far to the sides and the neck attached at the wrong angle, leaving little room for the brain. Still it looked enough like a sapient deer’s skull to give her the creeps.” (p. 57)
In 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:
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.
