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For a limited time only, all GryphIns audiobook boxed sets are just $9.99. That’s three full audiobooks per boxed set, or $3.33/book. (Apple Books discounted them even further to $7.99, wow!)

Gryphon Insurrection Boxed Set One: Eyrie, Ashen Weald, Starling ($39.99 $9.99)
On sale at: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Chirp, Google Play, and Spotify!

Gryphon Insurrection Boxed Set Two: Reevesbane, The Ruins of Crestfall, The Crackling Sea ($39.99 $9.99)
On sale at: Apple, Barnes & Noble, Chirp, Google Play, and Spotify!

But wait, that’s not all! An ebook boxed set of Eyrie, Ashen Weald, Starling, and Blue Eyes & Other Tales is available in a bundle to help the Furry Writer’s Guild. (There’s a lot of gryphons & dragons in anthropomorphic literature, and it’s a great chance to help them out! The proceeds go to the Furry Writer’s Guild plus the authors involved.) It also includes Tales of Feathers & Flames, stories set in the world of Dire. That set has a full scary gryphon novel by me, Coldbright, about a snarky small opinicus and his dire ex-boyfriend gryphon trying to solve a mystery in a misty valley buried under a snowstorm. Saylor Ferguson’s Dragons of Time is also in the bundle, and Tales of Feathers & Flames includes her beak-cute lesbian love story. There’s a lot to love in the bundle.

FWG Bundle: https://furrywritersguild.gumroad.com/l/FurryBookMonthBundle

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner, and it’s been a few years since we’ve had a new card. Not only have people been requesting a Foultner+Henders card, they’ve also wondered why those two never got chibi heart stickers. Oops! Well, thanks to Kittrel, we’ve remedied both of those problems this year.

You can download high definition versions of this card and the seven from past years over on the goodies page. And yes, there’s even a Tresh and Rorin card for you fanfiction writers! If there’s a GryphIns couple you’d like to see show up on the 2024 card, use the contact form or social media and let me know.

On the writing front, the Opinicus (#7) audiobook is in its final checks (patrons got their copy already) before going out to stores. Pridelord is still going through edits. I’ve been moving a little slow because we’re going to need to change health insurance, and navigating that with the current treatments is a little tricky. (January was light on edits, but I had my co-pay reduced by $12,500 a month, so I feel pretty productive.)

On the up side, every time I read Pridelord, I love it. On the down side, I just started going through edits again two days ago. Hopefully, it’ll reach you all soon. I’ll keep everyone posted.

Oh! I had a few requests for a convention appearance page. I need to sit down and work with Glenn (my husband, dragon author) on that. Generally, with treatments taking up every Saturday and Sunday this year, it’s tough for me to do conventions unless they’re local. He usually goes and attends them for me, selling copies of GryphIns I sign before he leaves, his own dragon books, Dire/Tales of Feathers and Flames by John Bailey, shirts/stickers/maps/art prints, fountain pens, and ink. If you’re going to attend a convention he’ll be at, I can sign and personalize a book for you ahead of time and send it with him. And hopefully, by 2024, I’ll be feeling well enough to travel again.

If you’re coming to Tails and Tornadoes this weekend, here’s how to find the STET Publishing booth! Glenn will be there again and has his dragon books, my gryphon books, and John Bailey’s Dire… plus some early copies of Tales of Feathers & Flames, a gryphon and wyvern anthology! (I’ll talk a little more about it when it releases later this month. But it has a lot of your favorite gryphon authors: Alexander Bizzell, JFR Coates, Glenn Birmingham, myself, Saylor Ferguson, and M. H. Wolfe. Also includes a Dire Rada interior art piece by Maria Puenchir and a brand new wyvern cover by Fleeks.)

If you’re at DenFur this weekend, come say hello! Glenn Birmingham and Jean Kidd are handling the STET Publishing table, and they’re selling my gryphon books, Glenn’s dragon books, John Bailey’s Dire, t-shirts, stickers, bookmarks, and more!

They’ll even have the very popular flash drives in the shape of wooden books with a gryphon logo on them that contain:
-Audiobook editions of Eyrie, Ashen Weald, Starling, Blue Eyes & Other Tales, Reevesbane, The Ruins of Crestfall (great for listening to on your way home from the convention, Reevesbane and Crestfall aren’t available in stores yet on audio)
-Ebook editions of GryphIns 1-7 (+Blue Eyes), Dragon Source, Dragon Bound, Dire, and Tales of Feathers & Flames (not yet available in stores)
-The map of Belamuria for anyone who wanted to take a close look at it

There’s also smaller clip flash drives that have just the ebooks.

I’m not quite well enough to attend the local cons yet, but hopefully next year. I spent this month doing health things so I can get a higher level of treatment as we narrow in on the right dose. In the mean time, I appreciate Glenn and Jean selling my books alongside their own =] Tell them hello if you’re at the convention.

If you’re at AWU this weekend in Utah, feel free to swing by the STET Publishing booth and say hello to my spouse, Glenn! He has copies of my gryphon books, his dragon books, John Bailey’s Dire, Fleeks’ gryphon pride t-shirts with Cielle on the front, bookmarks, and more!

At past conventions, a few people asked for the ability to buy the audiobooks and ebooks on a flash drive or with a code, and we have both. (If you get the audiobooks, they even come in a wooden USB drive in the shape of a book with a gryphon on the front.)

I’m looking forward to attending some local conventions as it gets safer, hopefully later in the year. Being immunocompromised makes it tough for me to attend conventions, but Glenn has been nice enough to handle both of our books when he attends them. And here’s where you can find him:

Opinicus, the seventh GryphIns book, releases on July 1st! Oh my gosh, that’s not even a month away!

The ebook preorder is up in most stores, and you can use this books2 read link to check most of them: books2read.com/opinicus (a few stores may be a little slow). The hardcover and paperback editions should release at the same time. We’re still catching up on the audiobooks, so Starling should release next month and Blue Eyes soon after. While it’s my hope that Pridelord (GryphIns #8) will see the audiobook release at the same time as the main series, we’ll have to see how long the audio productive takes. James and the audio team is catching up fast, though!

You’d think release day would be the busiest, but there are a lot of final little checks and fixes that happen a few weeks ahead of time, so I’ve been re-reading Opinicus for the tenth time to see if any typos slipped past me or the editors, and I’ve been getting all of the Kindle X-ray articles typed up. I thought I’d be smart and type them all up in Scrivener and then copy and paste them over to Amazon this time.

In the mean time, I thought it was time to do an art share! I’ve had a lot of fan art come in this year, and that’s made me happy. 2022 wasn’t as crazy as the two years before it, but I’ve been continuing on these intense autoimmune treatments, so I’m spending about two days a week getting stabbed with needles and pumped full of healthy antibodies that don’t try to kill me in order to trick my immune system into calming down a bit. All of the fan art has made the needles easier to bear. And now, I share it with everyone else!

First off, Lewis Badger deserves an award for sending in the most fan art. Here’s a taste of some of what Lewis has shared (Xavi+Pink Paw, Younce, Ninox, Triddle, Askel).

Golday41 on DeviantArt has new Hatzel artwork showing her facing off against the monitor lizard from Eyrie.

And then Katie Schultz sent in this amazing Rybalt Reevesbane piece. I tend to put up fan art of characters while I’m writing or editing their scenes, so I’ve had Rybalt and Stripes on the brain recently.

Now it’s time to get back to filling out all of those Kindle X-ray entries. I’ll share more fan art as we get closer to release day. I hope everyone is doing well. I can’t wait until everyone gets to read Opinicus.

My spouse and I really wanted gryphon pride shirts to wear this year, so we reached out to Fleeks a while back and she was happy to put some together for us. I’m sporting the intersectional pride and pan shirts, but ever since getting that RedBubble store up and running, we decided to make some of the others available, too, in case anyone else wants one! (And if your pride colors aren’t available, use the contact form to let me know and we’ll make it happen for you.) Almost all of the designs look great on black, but RedBubble lets you change the fabric color if you want something else. Just make sure the background color doesn’t hide the pride colors.

Also, Shep, who does the Telegram stickers, decided that pride flags should have dragons or gryphons on them like the flag of Wales, and I’m all for it:

In other news, I’m so late to Pride Month because my air conditioning died and we had a week of 99F weather right afterwards. My temperature tolerance has gotten a little better since the higher infusion dose, but that was still too warm for me. Everyone’s AC dies around this time of year, so we had to wait a few weeks. (It really died back in April, to give you an idea of the wait.) My spouse traded in some old travel points from his previous job, and we spent the hottest days in a hotel, where I got a lot of reading done. I finished up the Tensorate series by Neon Yang (excellent novellas of varying length and form) and Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon. Orange Tree actually makes me a little mad because the description, cover, and title all made me think this was going to be a long, boring book. And while it’s long (264k word count, standalone novel), this book is about dragons. Dragons of every type. Good dragons, bad dragons, western dragons, eastern dragons. It’s essentially the Reign of Fire of the epic fantasy world, and I enjoyed it a lot. I just wish they’d marketed it that way!

I brought a laptop with me to the hotel and nearly finished a short novel set in the world of my next series. This will go out for free to the newsletter and Patreon next year, around when the series shows up for preorder. (Side note: thank you so much to my patrons! I’ve named my AC unit after all of you.) That free novel is essentially a fantasy version of Animal Search & Rescue with a vulpegryph (fox gryphon) who enjoys baked goods, multiheaded goose hydras as an invasive species, and dryads who hate grass.

But you’re probably here for the gryphon books, and I have good news there, too. My developmental editor is finishing up Crackling Sea (#6) and should have it back to me before the end of the month. And now that I’m back in my house, I’m finishing up Opinicus (#7) to send to him. 2020 and 2021 have been crazy years, so I’m not going to make any promises until the preorder page is up, but let’s just say it’s very likely both will be out this year.

That’s all the news for now. I’m looking forward to spending all of July editing in the air conditioning. I hope you have a cool summer (or, for my southern hemisphere readers, a pleasant winter)! And don’t hesitate to shout if there’s a gryphon pride shirt design that you’d like to see added. We’re happy to oblige =]

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I just received a surprising, delightful gift from my friend Anna, courtesy of Wolfberry Crafts: a Reeve Brevin figurine for my gryphon book shelf!

I’m blown away by just how beautiful and intricate the details are. Really, I’m speechless. It’s amazing, and thank you so much to Anna for the late Christmas gift—and to Wolfberry for doing such great work!

I’m about 97 books into the 100 gryphon book reading challenge, but I lost count so I’ve been going back to write short reviews on each and count them up. Yesterday was IVIG Infusion day for me, so I spent the first few hours reading a new book that James Spaid from the Gryphon Pages website recommended to me: Beyond the North Wind by Gillian Bradshaw.

One of my biggest concerns has been for gryphon books that have gone out of print and lack ebook editions. Every so often, you hear about how gryphon novels were so plentiful that in the 1950s other books would joke about how none of them could decide on the same spelling for gryphon, but I’ve had a hard time tracking down all of these lost books.

North Wind isn’t that old, but it fits into that period of time in the ’90s when gryphon books were huge (think of The Black/White/Silver Gryphon trilogy by Mercedes Lackey) but so many of those titles never made it to ebook and the rights lapsed. The Wyrmwood books by Robin Wayne Bailey, the Crossroads books by Nick O’Donohoe, and…. Beyond the North Wind.

This book only has a German paperback and an English hardcover, but I found a lot of used copies online because it was common in school libraries. So if you want a copy, they’re still out there.

What’s special about this book—and the reason James recommended it to me—is that the author spent a lot of time researching the Greek-Scythian myths about gryphons and Arimaspeans. While I’m more of an Egyptian gryphon fan (go team four cat paws!), and I don’t think gryphons have any one true set of defining myths, a lot of how we think about modern gryphons come from this source material.

For those who don’t know, the Scythians told the Greeks that the hills of Siberia were full of gold guarded by gryphons. And those gryphons were at a constant war with a race of one-eyed men, the Arimaspeans, who wanted their gold. Eventually, the Armiaspeans tamed horses, which allowed them to steal the gold and escape, which is why everyone knows that gryphons hate horses and will kill them on sight.

(The poet Virgil later used the image of a horse and gryphon creating offspring, the hippogryph, as an example of impossible love. Because everyone knew gryphons killed horses on sight, they could never fall in love. That’s actually where the hippogryph first shows up. Unlike the gryphon, which sprouted from dozens of different cultures, hippogryphs were invented by one poet.)

Gillian Bradshaw’s Author’s Note for North Wind goes into detail about the fragments of Greek myths and poetry that she used as her reference, and the story does feel like a YA version of a Greek epic by Homer, though written in a much more accessible style. It centers around the search for the people from Beyond the North Wind, but it’s really about one Greek poet who is charged by Apollo with saving the gryphons from the Arimaspeans.

A gryphon dies at the start, so I was a little worried, since I’m only reading these books for the gryphons. But it quickly becomes pro-gryphon, and while there are no gryphon protagonists because it’s told from the Greek guy’s point of view, there are more named gryphon characters than humans or Arimaspeans.

Ultimately, I liked it. I loved seeing the most common gryphon mythology brought to life. This feels like it was a book the author had a great time writing, and I’m sad that it’s been lost to time without an ebook edition.

As my own Author’s Note to this post, if you’re interested in all of the disparate gryphon myths that different cultures came up with, The Book of Gryphons by Joe Nigg is a good starting place. It’s out of print but easy to find a cheap, used copy of. And the cool gryphon insignia under the dust jacket means it’s okay to get a well-loved copy =] And I should give a shout out to the Gryphon Pages online by James Spaid, which recently managed to get a foreword by Joe Nigg. I think every little gryphon fan found the Gryphon Pages the moment their parents let them online, but if you didn’t, there’s a lot of information there.