ConFuzzled was a very busy con this year as I was asked to contribute to some of the writing panels. There has been a feeling that writing has been somewhat undervalued of late, but there has been a real renaissance in furry literature in the UK in particular. The launch of The Book Badgers is one such example, while the Dealers’ Den at CFz has definitely seen an uptick in the number of furries selling books.
I was honoured that Huskyteer asked me to get involved in the writing group as I still feel I’m a novice when it comes to furry publishing. She said I would make a valuable contribution though, and over the course of the last two months, we planned seven different panels. I was directly involved in two of them, but we all lent a hand in the planning.
The Furry Fiction Showcase saw five of us – Huskyteer, Televassi, Alice Crawford, Amethyst Mare and myself – telling the room about all of the places you can read furry fiction, from the main furry publishers all the way through to free sites like Fur Affinity and SoFurry. The seating arrangement wasn’t the best, but I think we imparted some useful knowledge. Ziegenbock of The Book Badgers was here also, and they kindly offered some prizes for the Five Sentence Fiction panel later in the con (which I sadly missed).
The other event in which I was directly involved was the Historical Fiction Panel. This was hosted with Huskyteer and we talked about a range of topics related to writing historical fiction including how historically accurate you should be as well as the importance of research. I was quite nervous going into this, but Huskyteer was very supportive and enabling, so I think we did a good job. Getting a plastic duck from ConOps for some reason before the panel helped. Televassi, whose area of expertise this really is, couldn’t make the panel but we did relay a lot of their contributions. We received a lot of good questions from an interested audience, so the talk was really worthwhile.
The historical fiction track built on Televassi’s World Building Panel the previous day, which was the most popular of the seven panels. This was perhaps because it had greater appeal as the topic overlaps with things beyond fiction. Televassi was the only one who had created a slide presentation, while we also had an activity at the end where we had to build a world of our own inside 10 minutes. This was definitely one of the more energetic sessions.
The Writers’ Coffee Morning was a good way of meeting fellow writers, as well as pick people’s brains on things like writing techniques and literature recommendations. There was a lot of video game talk here and I did come out of the session feeling I wasn’t as widely read as I should be, but I did learn a great deal. I think many people felt the same and I look forward to attending next year. This was one of the events we reprised from 2023, having run just three panels last year.