...I absolutely did not recognize this name, although also: oh my god. Hi! I appreciate the comment particularly given that it's paths we have definitely trod before.
I've argued in the past that the Furry Writers' Guild, as much as I've liked it (and for a while got deeply involved with it), had a fundamental category error from its inception: it was consciously modeled on the Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers of America, but SFWA is fundamentally a writers' union, founded to advocate for the (financial) interest of (professional) writers as set against editors and publishers. By modeling the FWG on them, it put a lot of focus on perceived professionalism rather than on community.
There are a couple of angles that I considered taking, and decided I didn't really have the grounding to talk about even if I couched it in terms of "Well, in my opinion."
The founding premise and conceit of the Guild in its current iteration is why I described the scene as a cargo cult. There’s no way for that to not sound dismissive and condemnatory, and so at least at some level I have to cop to being dismissive of it. That’s not to say that I think the Guild itself is, or was, valueless. But I agree, generally, that it was hobbled from the outset by a role it could never actually fit into, given both its limitations and the total addressable market it functionally covered.
I think I might have argued openly back then that the FWG also should have identified specific services it could provide to writers, and collected dues in order to fund those services. SFWA does this. The OTW does this. With the benefit of hindsight, I was further arguing for an overbuilt organization whose structures were designed to support both a member base and an audience that were orders of magnitude smaller. At the same time, it’s meant that as we contend with, for example—
I mean, take generative AI. The Guild does not have a usefully informed position beyond “it’s bad”; it is not in the position to offer resources for editors concerned about how to manage the AI submissions or the use of AI in writing and editing, let alone any legal opinion about what authors could reasonably do to protect their intellectual property. Or, I dunno, to point authors to responsible and reputable artists they can work with.
Would that be useful? I mean. No, probably not :p
But I do think:
When I was more involved with the FWG, one of the questions I kept wanting to focus on was "how do we get more readers". But the real question was "how do we monetize more readers", which of course sounds terrible when it's put it that way. Even so.
From that perspective, perhaps the key missed opportunity there was that the rise of fanfic should have been identifiable within the community. A new pathway to sales success being “cultivate a large reader base through engagement and tactical posting of new chapters until you have a guaranteed target audience with sufficiently strong parasocial relationships to provide not just sales but also a built-in channel for earned marketing” should not have come as a surprise.
The FWG should have been aware of this—I know I brought it up in the chat sometimes. But, although there are numerous furry authors who fit this description, they were never active in the Guild. And I do think—again there is no way for this not to sound critical—that there was a cohort that was not just single-mindedly focused on traditional publishing channels, but also dismissive of anything that smacked too much of posting on FA or SoFurry to be lost amongst the Sonic porn.
I also disengaged from the Guild, and so from a mission point of view I don’t really know. The shift in mindset towards people like Chipotle and Makyo augured at least an awareness that the original approach had lost relevance. And, to be clear, that approach was not confined to the Guild. The last year that she ran the FWA writing track, Jelliqal lined up some solid self-publishing panels that also touched on community and brand management. I’m not sure I saw those elsewhere.
(“Be the change you want to see in the world.” Yes, I know—I also didn’t propose them, that’s true. I didn’t, and don’t, think I have too much to add to the monetization topic)
I don't think they're as meaningless as furries often disparage them as being.
…That’s on me. I kind of wrote this, more or less, stream-of-consciousness. When it started, it was very directly about the Ursa Majors, and then it was very directly about the Leos (whose statement, as I said, I think was significantly true).
I think that… mm. To be blunt, I think that the machinery of furry writing is largely geared towards internal rewards, in general. The fandom has some very talented editors, who were and are capable of putting together fantastic collections of work. This is useful as advertising—I’ve definitely found some great authors that way. That said, I don’t think those anthologies’ role as “something I can hold in my own hot little paws and sign for my friends” or alternatively “purchase for my friends to show that I support their work and have them sign” as opposed to, like, publication qua publication was ever really appreciated.
(Possibly this is because that would make it sound too much like anthologies were a vanity press exercise, and up through... at least the middle of the last decade, probably?... “self-publishing” was a dirty word. I am entirely serious and entirely non-judgmental in saying that, even if every anthology was purely For Funsies—and they are not—their role in giving people something to put on their bookshelf was always virtuous and good in and of itself)
Awards, in the general sense, serve a somewhat similar function although with the drawback of either becoming popularity contests or being labeled that way. In general I think that they can be good at that, and I think the Coyotls especially and the Leos from what I know of them probably had intrinsic value in that regard.
I think for me the Ursas are in a little bit of a different category for two reasons. The direct reason is that for more or less the entire time I’ve been writing they were subject to the kind of ballot-stuffing that made them both easy to exploit and academically unreliable as a gauge of what actually was noteworthy, which—for more or less the entire time I’ve been writing—they’ve kind of thrown up their hands and shrugged about.
Which is fine.
The indirect reason, and also the reason why I lumped them in as part of the “let’s roleplay as professionals” section, is that I think the Ursas were (accurately) perceived as serving in that role by the kind of writers who were trying to steer the fandom in that particular way.
I don’t know how to articulate this particular combination of incentives and characters—whatever “problem” it is I am trying to give names to. Like, that Ryffnah—specifically—might or might not have ever copped to trying to sway the Ursas, but if you backed her into a corner I think she would tell you that it’s just something you have to do if you want to be a serious writer.
But I think in any case the Ursas have never been fit for purpose. Put another way, from 2011 to 2022 the Ursa short fiction category—the category with which furry writing, I think, most identifies itself—covers 22 authors. In that specific case, it is so clearly absurd to posit there have only been 22 noteworthy authors over that time period that I would argue it directly goes to the credibility of the entire enterprise.
(I picked that year since that’s when the Coyotls started; between 2011 and 2022, inclusive, 62 authors of less-than-novel-length fiction have appeared on Coyotl ballots)
There are a lot of furry readers who are not furry writers. I interact with them all the time! But many of them are not furry readers who buy things from furry publishers, and we keep using that as our benchmark. I'm pretty sure my stuff on Fur Affinity gets considerably more readership than any furry anthology has.
Yeah, I guess I was trying to make that point and it didn’t really cohere.
Furry can support a nigh-limitless number of authors who have interesting ideas to tell, are not interested in making it a career, and are satisfied with the degree of interaction they receive on furry websites or within their furry social circles. The number of authors it can support whose aim is to write furry-targeted fiction by sending traditional short stories to FurPlanet anthologies and parlay that into mainstream success is… possibly non-zero, in the literal sense, but a rounding error away from zero.
The number of authors it can support who are interested in monetization but whose channels for that are are patron funded, Kickstarted, or wholly self-published—and whose output is liable to be substantially non-traditional, whether that means visual novels, meta-narrative work like Maddy’s Post-Self canon, or producing content for Patreon or social platforms—is higher.
How much higher? I don’t know. High enough to be a reasonable aspiration. How reasonable? I also don’t know. Reasonable enough that there is an alternate universe where the Guild saw where things were going ten years ago and could answer that question for me. Maybe.
I hope I didn’t leave anything out that was a critical point I needed to respond to. I wanted to let your comment stand on its own modulo the areas where I thought I’d erred or been unclear enough to warrant clarification >.>
