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1. Tell us about your most recent project (written or published). What inspired it?

My most recent project, The Stolen Guardian, was published just two weeks ago! It’s a dramatic action/adventure story about two high ranking military individuals dealing with a foreign invader and invincible monsters. There’s magic, drama, death, and even a little romance.

The story has been a long time in the making. The original version of the story was actually a role play that I did over the course of about a year with a friend of mine during my senior year in high school. It was also originally a Sonic the Hedgehog fan fiction, though it was a very loose fan fiction which only used a few basic elements from the world. No canon characters or storylines were involved with the story, and it even took place on a different planet.

As I studied craft and worked toward making my world an original world, The Stolen Guardian went through a bunch of drafts and changes until I ended up with what I have now.

2. What’s your writing process like? Are you a “pantser,” an outliner, or something in between?

I’m kind of a mix of both. I tend to write really detailed outlines with descriptive beats and clear goals, but I allow myself to pants things if the story lends itself to it. Any time I hit a wall, I’ll try to re-outline to make sure everything matches up. I like to see where I’m going while writing.

For short stories though, I tend to shoot the breeze. My best short story, “White Assassin,” which will be coming out next month, pretty much wrote itself. All I did was throw characters into a situation, and everything fell into place. “White Assassin” actually won an Honorable Mention in the prestigious Writers of the Future contest, which I see as proof that sometimes pantsing can be awesome.

3. What’s your favorite kind of story to write?

I prefer character driven action and drama, with a bit of wit mixed in. I’m a very introspective person myself, so my characters tend to be introspective too. I also prefer speculative fiction. Pretty much all my stories have some level of magic, science fiction, magical realism, or other such things in them. Real life is boring. Magic is awesome!

4. Which character from your work do you most identify with, and why?

Hmm, that’s a difficult one. Probably Matt Azure from The Stolen Guardian. Matt is a really passionate character, and he’s got a powerful drive to do whatever he can to help others. He throws himself into situations that he knows might be bad for him to protect those he loves. I’m not always good at that, but it’s something I admire and strive for, so Matt has become the sort of person I’d like to be.

5. Which authors or books have most influenced your work?

Three authors really stick out in my mind. Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, was my first major inspiration. A lot of my writing style reflects his, such as close third person POV, lots of different POVs in a book, extreme detailed descriptions, and we even have similar characters.

The second is K. M. Carroll, author of The Spacetime Legacy series. She was one of the first really serious authors I ever sent my work too and she was completely honest about how much my writing sucked at the time! But she was patient and she helped me develop my craft and style, and still helps me with editing and marketing strategies today. She’s also an amazing author in her own right, and she always amazes me with how many books she’s put out. She has a big family, but she’s found a way to be the best mom ever, while still writing quality books and putting out several a year. She’s a big inspiration.

The last author that has really influenced me was Jess E. Owen, author of the Summer King Chronicles. K. M. Carroll introduced me to Jess’s books and I fell in love immediately with her writing style. I love the fact that she has such a strong sense of style and her characters feels so real. I’ve found over the years that some animal books never feel right because the characters never feel like animals, but Jess’s books aren’t like that at all. I also love the way she describes things, especially flight. Any time I get to describe flight myself, I think of Jess’s books, which makes flight feel so authentic and beautiful. The fact that she has an amazing series of great animal books has inspired me to believe I can do the same.

6. What’s the last book you read that you really loved?

Gosh, I read so many books, that’s hard to know! I think A Shard of Sun by Jess E. Owen is one. I’m actually rereading it for the third time. I’m also reading The Martian right now, which has immediately grabbed my attention. Excellent books.

7. Besides writing, how do you like to spend your free time?

I’m a college professor of English, which means lots of essay grading, so generally I don’t have a lot of free time. But when I do get it, you’ll often find me drawing or painting, walking through the botanical gardens by my home, or playing any number of video games. I’m a huge Assassin’s Creed and Halo fan, and I’m looking forward to both of the new games. Especially Halo. The game comes out on my wedding anniversary!

I also spend a lot of time reading webcomics. Questionable Content and Furry Experience are my two favorites.

8. Advice for other writers?

A lot of writers tell you to write every day. Don’t listen to them. Write on your own schedule. Make sure you’re making time to write, but don’t kick yourself if you don’t write every day. Sometimes life is more important than writing.

Also, don’t be afraid to try a lot of different genres. Sometimes writing a brand new genre will be a breath of fresh air and will rejuvenate you as a writer.

9. Where can readers find your work?

My novel is available on Amazon here.

Readers can also visit www.zyearth.com and access the first two chapters of The Stolen Guardian there. I’m also going to be releasing three short stories in the next three months, all of which can be downloaded for free from my website.

You can also find me on Goodreads.

10. What’s your favorite thing about the furry fandom?

The openness! I’ve only really been involved with the furry fandom for about a year, and I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I was drawn in and how kind everyone was. It seems like furries happily invite everyone into their circles and it’s made me feel really special. I’m very glad and blessed to be a part of such a wonderful group of people.

Check out R. A. Meenan’s member bio here!

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It's been a long time without a chitchat thread and I also need an excuse to use my me account :D

Copying /u/heughcumber style, here we go

Hello fuzzy friends! Winter is making its presence be felt and Halloween is almost here. Also, there are a lot of new people and this is a good opportunity to get us to know better.

Anyway, rules are the same as usual:

• Be nice to people
• Try not to be too graphic (we've got some youngsters in our midst)
• Have fun!

Talk about anything but here is a conversation starter if you wanna use it:
Whatcha plan on doing on Halloween? Does your country even celebrate anything?

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Three anthro-oriented games that you might have missed…

A big problem in the “Kickstart your Indie Video Game” world—as covered in A No-Name Developer’s Guide to Succeeding on Kickstarter—is that the indie market is frankly saturated. Lots of titles to play, not enough time to play them, let’s not even talk about how money enters into the picture. It may be that there isn’t room for another big furry video game success story this season, after Them’s Fightin’ Herds beat its goal by $100,000 (yay!)

So here’s a look at a few titles that are struggling on their goals. Maybe wrong place wrong time, maybe the difficulty of crowdfunding an indie product. But they’re fun projects and deserve a look.

Legends of Gyo

Indiegogo through 11/15/15

A MMORPG with an elegant art style and a mythic storyline. Legends of Gyo is a game very much about dragons–they rule the world, and your character is one of that illustrious species. Looking at the concept art on the project page, playable characters are willowy and so-very-serious, giving the game an anime-inspired feel.

There’s not a lot of material on the game on the project page, but there’s a few vids on the team’s Youtube channel, including a very pretty sweeping tour of the game’s maps and some of the odd magical features of the landscape.

Sadly, the game developers don’t really seem to have a fan base, and there just isn’t a lot of information specifically about game play, size of the world, all those crunchy things. I feel more than anything else Gyo may be suffering from poor marketing—a lack of a good outreach department to tell the world how awesome the product might or might not be. The dragons are pretty—haughty and cold, but that’s kind of the style.

A concern I have is the budget breakdown, which seems very spare. $2000 for a project launch is pretty tight, and while a lot of the game seems to be already built up, $700 for art is hard to wrap my head around. Scrolling down, their real goal is more like $4000 (a second player class, a second map…) and I’d question whether the game can be playable without it. The goal just doesn’t look honest, and then it’s “Flexible Funding” on top of that. It’s hard for me to recommend a project with the red flag of a fundamentally if unintentionally dishonest financial plan…it doesn’t even mention “$200, funding platform fees.”

But the dragons are pretty.

ZompireWolf

Kickstarter through 11/24/15

“The hero is a 600-year-old werewolf that got into a fight with a vampire…and lost. If that wasn’t bad enough, he tried to befriend a zombie, got infected, and became…ZOMPIREWOLF.” His enemy? The Professor, armed with a guillotine gun.

I think I’m kind of sold right there :)

This mobile app game is an “endless runner” game, a mad dash away from the professor, trying to find enough blood, brains, and meat to “survive” (whatever that means for someone who’s died twice) and swapping between the powers of zombie (slow and unkillable), vampire (fast, can fly), and werewolf (strength, carnage, really fills out those pants.) A selling point for the game is a “junior mode,” with less gore and a sturdier character.

Is there a plot? I do not know. Almost definitionally an endless runner seems like it’d have a hard time reaching a resolution. There’s a hint on one of creator company Durtbird’s subpages: “..all through his life, he thought he was the only one…but he just found out he’s not!” So it’s an endless run for self-discovery, kinship, maybe romance.

No, probably not.

I was kind of taken by the game’s main character, he’s appealing, if perhaps a bit of a loser. But the game puts him in the “victim” role, being pursued by a monster hunter, so that kind of makes sense. The concept art is all kinds of cute (art by the highly versatile Ciaran Lucas), with goofy grins and cartoony style on the more sales pieces, and a lean, loping werewolf on the storyboard art in the Kickstarter vid. Snappy dresser, too.

I’d love to be able to say more about this one, but it’s up against one of the very fundamental problems with crowdfunding video games: how do you get footage from a game that’s in development. And if you do, will it be so rough that it hurts your chances at a final product? Using some cute storyboard and really, really charming concept art may be the best way to go.

The project’s goal seems sound for a mobile app, and their rewards make sense. For a reasonable price, you get the thing. There’s some good swag at the higher levels, but mobile apps tend toward simplicity, so there’s not a lot of +1s you can add to the game itself. I’d love to go to the Ireland kickstarter party (they ran Ghostbusters at their launch party, so they’ve got taste.)

I’ll be backing this one, but it’s a hard road to goal. Good luck, guys!

Riposte

Kickstarter through 11/18/15, and on Steam Greenlight

An honorable mention for Riposte, a 4-player arena brawler for the underserved online PC market. The look and feel of the game is at this point very “Smash Bros,” although I cannot stress enough the challenges of launching a video game on Kickstarter: “I can’t fund the development of the product until I have a good-looking version of the product.” So it’s hard to say what the final will look like.

The characters on display are a beefy wolf-badger, a quick bug thing, a Samurai-esque owl, and a dragon warrior with an admirable minimal approach to clothing. All of them can be customized with different uniforms (a sci-fi look, power armor, the “Beyond Thunderdome” style, or enigmatically, chef hat and Spatula of War. The game does have an element of comedy.) Overall, it’s a world-hopping sci-fi smashup, and fans of that genre that have restricted their brawling to the console in the living room will be happy to have the PC option.

The game is very smash Smash Bros, down to the sound effects and slightly comical approach. That may be hurting its marketing a bit, its main selling point is that it’s not tied to a console, but that’s hard to express in a quick lookover.. It’s got some unusual play modes, like a sporty two-team “footbrawl” mode.

If you’d like to learn more about Riposte, check out the downloadable demo and join the conversation on Steam Greenlight!

Follow @furstarter on twitter for the latest fur-friendly crowdfunding projects!

Hey, folks. So, a thought has been rolling around in my head, and I'm curious how others have handled this situation.

I've been lucky. My two serious boyfriends have both been furries (one I met through the fandom, the other it was a happy coincidence). My previous roommate was a furry, as well (also met through the fandom). However, if things with my current BF don't work out or I get a new roommate, odds are that their replacements will be from outside the fandom.

Do you talk to potential roomies or relationships about your involvement in the fandom? How do you bring the subject up? What sort of reactions do you get? Did they get introduced to the fandom and become furries themselves?

To give you my answer to the question: I've run into this scenario with a couple of friends before and handled it by asking their thoughts about the fandom in the abstract. Depending on their response, I may or may not disclose that I'm a furry or admit to even a tangential alignment with the fandom.

Curious to hear what you all have to say. Cheers!

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So i was looking through my old dsi and i happened upon flipnote, and i realized that it was probably one of the big reasons i'm a furry and so i wanted to ask 2 things. 1. have any of you had experiences with flipnote 2. did any of you post flipnotes online?

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Link: http://www.picarto.tv/essjayc

Come see me colour and finish up my 10'th page of Project Blackhammer! Finally working again!

So early... no one that I know is online or around yet. :( Come keep me company!

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I know they exist but they just seem so hard to find. I'd seriously like to get to know some of you, maybe become good friends!

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