Furry Writers' Guild Presidential Candidacy

Back in 2015, when I joined the Furry Writers’ Guild, I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into. [adjective][species] was chugging along, which felt good, and I was only then starting to get into furry fiction. I’d been writing loads of non-fiction for years, of course, but finding a few stories I had to tell started pushing me into wider realms.

When I joined the Guild, it was as an associate member. My work with [a][s] saw to that, as well as my few articles and a story or two posted elsewhere. It felt like a comfortable spot to me, and I found myself surrounded almost instantly by wonderful folks and neat ideas.

In my time with the Guild, I like to think that I’ve grown in a lot of ways. For one, I’ve become more and more entranced with furry fiction, and my few stories spawned several¹ fiction² projects³ of my own.

I’ve also become more adept at providing feedback to others on their own writing. This had always been a thing with [a][s], of course, but the ability to sit down with a piece of writing and provide feedback along several axes has grown from “email with a few comments” to “fully marked up document while editing an anthology”. It’s a place I’d never have pictured myself five years ago!

Now, I want to do my best to give back to the FWG what I can. I feel that I can offer my services, not only as a writer, but as an organizer. I’ve worked through several capacities and positions of leadership over the years, and each has given me experience that has extended beyond just my duties in that position.

I’d like to formally announce my candidacy for president of the Furry Writers’ Guild. I hope only that I can offer the Guild my service in return for all that it has given me!

Goals

• At several points during the last year, we started to address the topic of self-published authors and how that plays into guild membership. We came up with good ideas, but I think that nailing something down and getting it added to the by-laws would be a good goal for this next round.
• There have been a few discussions this year about the goals of the guild itself: is it for lifting up of members, or is it for providing outreach to the audience of furry fiction? While each informs a different path that the guild may take, I don’t think that they’re mutually exclusive.

I’d like to see about implementing an outreach arm, program, or what-have-you — we can decide specifics down the line — to focus on getting the word out about furry fiction. This will allow the guild to focus on lifting up authors through promotion, access to markets, and so on, while still living up to our stated goal of promoting anthropomorphic fiction as well as its creators.

The outreach arm should target both authors and readers. Even non-member authors can get something out of the guild, in terms of markets and writing advice. A lot of resources are for all comers, not just members. * I’d like to keep talking with Chipotle and Sean about the future of the forums. There are valid concerns with SMF that would be fixed by moving to something like Discourse or similar, but we do need to address adding a shoutbox of some kind; many people (rightfully) enjoy that, and just forcing everyone to the Slack or the Telegram chat isn’t a solution * I think that getting the FWG blog up and running in a more aggressive fashion would help us out quite a bit in terms of promotion. This is currently done through the member spotlights, but there are other additions that might help as well, such as member fiction, solicited articles, and so on. This would be a topic to discuss with the guild as a whole.

I welcome any and all questions or comments. Please feel free to get in touch through comments here, on the forum, Slack, or Telegram group, or through email to makyo@drab-makyo.com. Information on the elections is available here.

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