XaiJu
nighteyes_dayspring

nighteyes_dayspring

patreon


nighteyes_dayspring posts

The Forgotten God (Story)

This story is based on an encounter that happened in a D&D game I play in. In that game, we're dealing with an angry, vengeful gnoll god who is a major part of the campaign. My character, being the only gnoll in the party, at one point actually hugged the god to let him know it was going to be okay. It didn't work, but I thought about this encounter and decided to wr...

View Post

Running a Little Behind

With last month’s story taking me so long to finish, I’m behind a bit on this month’s Patreon story. It’s written it, but I still have some revisions to do on it. It’s an idea that came to me a little while ago I needed to get down, so I'm excited to share it with you all. It will be up in the next week after it’s been polished.

View Post

The Clockwork Wolf (Serial Story) - Part 2

I got a little behind there since this is for July, but I've finished part 2 of the "The Clockwork Wolf." Enjoy!


I rolled over on my bed. Something had woken me up, and it wasn't the sound of the waves down on the shore below. My ears swiveled and then I picked up the sound. There was music playing in the background still. I yawned and looked at the clock on the nightstand. It read 2:17.

"Man can those ReizTech people drink," I mumbled. I had retired around ele...

View Post

Rethinking the Monster, Ruminations on “The Clockwork Wolf”

The July story is going to be a little late, but it’s because I realize there are more revisions to do than I thought there would be. When I decided to run “The Clockwork Wolf” and break it up, I wanted to address some issues I’ve had with it. I finally broke down and decided to do was add a sex scene, something my previous drafts lacked. There’s also a lot of dialogue protentional between the characters I left on the table when I wrote this I’ve decided to explore, and a sex scen...

View Post

The Last Time I Saw You—for Dwale (Poem)

Recently, Dwale, a writer, poet, and friend of mine committed suicide. What happened was tragic and sudden, and has affected many writers I know. Dwale (it/its pronouns) was well known in the community and a joy to interact with. Its partner has asked to keep the details of what happened private, but the Furry Writer's Guild organized two events this week to remember it with. For one of those, people shared poems they wrote about Dwale, and I'd like to share my contribution here. View Post

Date Reality Overflow (Story)

This creepypasta style flash fiction is based on some junk data I ran into at my day job. This idea hit me so hard, I wrote the original draft in thirty minutes. It's not a furry story, but it's something I'd like to share. I'll continue "The Clockwork Wolf" next month.


The oldest record in the database was from September 15, 1978, over fifteen years before the advising program had been founded. Two even older records existed dated January 1, 1900, but those were obv...

View Post

Sneak Peak - The Blood of Life

Earlier this month, I took a week off from work and attended an online writing retreat. I've been working on edits to Scars of the Golden Dancer, but I needed a break away from the book. Instead of finishing edits on the novel, my goal for the retreat was to outline The Blood of Life. This is the novella I plan to write about the characters from " View Post

The Clockwork Wolf (Serial Story) - Part 1

This is an older story I've had I'll be revising as I post it.


The badger grinned and swung the blood splattered executioner's ax in front of himself. "Off with her head," he said, a dark expression on his face, as he pointing to the woman. His simple dark robes were splattered with bright red.

The target of his rage, a badger wearing an elegant dress three hundred years out of style, put a ruffled sleeve to her chest, "But, I just wanted to let them eat cake!"...

View Post

Endings and Beginnings

I don't have a story for May this month since I’ve been so slammed working on novel edits to Scars of the Golden Dancer. I’ve been making a very concerted effort to get through notes from two beta reads I received, and it’s taking a lot of my energy in May, something that’s been lacking also due to some general life stuff also going on.

I’m really excited to finally get this book done. It’s taken me a lot of time, and I want to finally see it done. That doesn’t me...

View Post

The Moment of Combustion (Story)

Hey, I've got the April story done now. This piece references the narrator for the the anthology I edited with Slip Wolf, Dissident Signals. I've always wondered what her story would entail, so I wrote a little something about how I envision she began her journey. Slip probably has his own vision of her journey. We never discussed what her name was, so I just call her The Dissident. Perhaps so...

View Post

Working on April Story

I'm planning to post the April story on Sunday, which is May 2nd. It's taken me a little longer to put together even though it's short due to having a lot of life stuff going on. Novel edits are taking more time then I expected, and I haven't had a lot of time to write and edit in general the last two weeks.

There is some exciting stuff going on though, and hopefully I'll be able to talk about that more soon.

View Post

Making it Fit (story)

Since I wrote it, I've been wanting to do a sequel to "Foxing for Pizza." I finally have gotten this done.


As Alex went to pick up the can of pineapple juice to finally fix himself a drink, it slipped out of his paw, and went sliding across the table, spilling its contents.

“Fuck!” exclaimed the red fox, as he tried to grab it. His claws scraped across the can, ...

View Post

Moon Run (Story)

It's taken me longer to write this month's Patreon story than I expected, but I have an older piece that I've been sitting on for  a while I'd like to share. "Moon Run," is something I wrote about three years ago and have never found a home for. It draws on my personal feelings about getting older and how the world changes around us.

One thing that is a background element in this piece, The Pine Community Coffee House, is based on a real coffee house that existed where...

View Post

Same as Me (Story)

I wrote "Same as Me" last year for an anthology that got canceled after the story was accepted. There are actually two versions of this piece, one written for a furry audience and one for a general audience. In both, I try and be very non descript on who the narrator is, although I did use a species in the furry version of the story. No gender is ever provided so the reader can choose that for themselves. 

The title of the story is drawn from the meaning of the View Post

Stepping Through the Mists (story)

I got a little delayed on getting this done and then last week happened. Anyway, the December Patreon story is done! This is more lore from the gnoll druid I'm playing, Ingot. I'm planning to have the character take the feat Fey Touched soon, and I wanted to write a story about someone with an ability like this.


Beyond the veil of this world lies others, and one of those is where the fey dwell. They rarely visit our world, but when they do, we must be careful. They a...

View Post

2020 Year in Review

This past year has been the strangest year of my life to live through. Everything happened in 2020, and nothing happened in 2020, both at the same time. The release dates for many anthologies were pushed back, and fur cons after March were canceled for the safety of the attendees. It has also been stressful for all of us, and while we are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel with the pandemic, vaccine distribution is going to take some time.

Because of that, 2021-01-01 19:51:34 +0000 UTC View Post

The December Story is Coming

I hope everyone is having a good holiday season and ready for 2021 to come in a few hours.

I’m going to have to apologize that the December Patreon story is going to be late. I’ve been knee deep in novel edits. I’m  am down to one chapter left to go over in detail, but it’s taken me a while to get here. That leaves me only 11 pages left to do some major revisions on. Getting to the point has also been emotionally intense for me as the writer, and I’m hoping that will come...

View Post

100,000 Words

When I finished the first complete draft of “Scars of the Golden Dancer” the book was only 60,335 words. I even proudly tweeted about that. It turns out I was naïve though. The version I submitted to a publisher last year was a little over 90,000 words. Now, after doing more editing on th...

View Post

Learning to Outline

One of my challenges as a writer is learning to outline my work. I've often liked to just run things by the seat of my pants, and when I come to roadblocks and decisions, I will sit back and think what to do. The serial, "Every Day is Monday" is a perfect example of this technique, but I also wanted to run that as a loosely flowing story and see where it goes. This works fine for me for short stories, but it's has some shortcomings that are forcing me to change my techniques.

The first ...

View Post

Every Day is Monday (Serial Story) - Part 3

This took far longer for me to get done because I've been juggling a bunch of things, but continuing the serial, things are heating up for our protagonists.


“Sam, Sam, Sam,” she said shaking her head. The coyote clicked her tongue at my disappointed. “This is all you’ve got on the guy you’re working for? What type of information broker are you?”

“Jonas and I looked, but that’s it,” I said gesturing at the half page of basic information.

...

View Post

And Yet You Crow (Poem)

This is quite a bit outside of my normal writing, but the upcoming election here in the United States has been on a lot of people's minds, including mine. I was lying in bed this past week thinking about racism when this piece tumbled out of me. I used to write a lot of poetry in high school, but it's very rare for me to write it now. It's also not furry, but I thought I'd drop it here, if you are interested.

Sorry that this is an image also. I don't know how to share a formatted word d...

View Post

Happy Halloween!

I'm going to be a a few days late with the October story, since I've been busy working on a story I need to submit tomorrow night. I do though have the next part of "Every Day is Monday" written, I just need to do some revising. I also have a poem I wrote this week I put on Twitter, I'm going to post right after this.

Also, if you aren't following me on Twitter, I recently got a commission o...

View Post

The Death Dancers (story)

I've got another story from the perspective of my D&D character Ingot to share. This time, the gnoll is here to tell the story of a volcano his people are familiar with and why no one lives next to it anymore. The name of the volcano the DM came up with, but the story behind it I wrote to use as background material in the game.


In the mountains lies a volcano that towers over the nearby peaks we gnolls call Nur-Ba'Nkekur, which translates to the Mountain of the H...

View Post

"The Gnawer of Bones" (Story)

I'm recently stared playing a druid-skald gnoll in D&D called Ingot. In stock 5th edition D&D, gnolls are just bloodthirsty monsters, but since a furry is running this game, he's created a custom race and given gnolls a very different treatment. It's been fun getting to play Ingot, and to support the character's interest in oral storytelling, I want to write some short pieces of lore he can reference in game. I'm not sure how many I'll do, but "The Gnawer of Bones" is the first. View Post

What I've Been Working On

I've written the next part of "Every Day is Monday," but I haven't wanted to post a section until I have part of the next part of the serial written so I don't put write myself into a corner.  However, I've been focusing on novel edits for the last month, and it's taken up a lot of my energy. I'll get part three up this week, but I have a different short I''m posting today called "The Gnawer of Bones" that's some gnoll lore to support a D&D character I'm playing.

As for the nov...

View Post

Every Day is Monday (Serial Story) - Part 2

I realize going over the first scene, I never gave our narrator a name.  I went with Sam, and I've updated the first scene to include a name drop early in it. You'll want to read that before you read this, but things start ramping up here.

  

“Do you think you can get your paws on the police report?” I asked Jonas. After spending an hour reading up on the murder, I went into the office where the rat was already hard at work.

That rat mused for a m...

View Post

Every Day is Monday (Serial Story) - Part 1

For July, I'm going to be doing a serial on Wednesdays, posting it scene by scene. I've only got part of this done so far, so we'll see how this goes. The story isn't complete yet either, so this is something different for me. I expect there to be about four to five installments of this, so we'll see where this ends up.

  

  

Monday, the only day of the week we’ve got left anymore. You think there’s going to be a Tuesday at some point, maybe ...

View Post

An Ocean of Sand - V1 (Story)

I'll be doing a serial story in July where I'll be posting one scene each week. In the meantime, for June, I'm sharing something I wrote a few months ago for a submission call that didn't get accepted. This story might be a candidate for some significant reworking later on, hence why I've tagged it as V1, but it will be a while before I did back into it. I had originally wanted this story be whimsical, but I'm not sure I quite got there.


  

The desert...

View Post

Tax Information

Patreon will start collecting taxes for certain types of content starting July 1st. I'm sure you've seen it from other creators on here, but I should let you know. changes are about to go into effect. Because of how complex tax law is, and without knowing how many of you are outside of my region of the world, I can't say for sure if sales tax will be collected on your pledge or not.

If you have questions, you should be able to find answers 2020-06-30 02:26:44 +0000 UTC View Post

Foxing for Pizza (Story)

After last month's serious Patreon story about the pandemic, I wanted to write something lighthearted for this month's piece. With all that's going on in the world right now, I needed a distraction writing something that was just fun and silly. I'd joked about this story idea before, so I finally went ahead and did it.

  

When he said he wanted pepperoni and sausage on his pizza, Alex knew he was going to be getting meat, but he didn’t know he was going to hav...

View Post