by Michæl W. Bard ©2008 Michæl W. Bard

   Something different this time, based on my own experiences, and recent frustrations with furs with a chosen form about which they know nothing…

   So: You’ve figured out your fursona. You’ve proudly announced it to furdom-at-large. Now what?
   Let’s run through a hypothetical case with examples and ideas that you can use as you wish. For the sake of argument, suppose you’re a deer. Nothing wrong with that. Not the most common choice, which means people won’t accuse you of lacking originality. And, it feels right. Fine… but where do you go from there?
   Well, perhaps the most obvious question is, what kind of deer? In North America, the White Tailed Deer is probably the best known—but it’s far from alone. The first thing to do is to poke around at the various breeds of your chosen creature, and the best way to start doing that is your friend Wikipedia. Start at the beginning and look up Deer. That gives you the basics—why deer have antlers and not horns, and a list of links to subspecies.
   At this point, you can start exploring the options. Browse. Click. Skim. See what appeals to you, and what doesn’t. Do you want to be a Chinese Immigrant deer (see Reeves’s Muntjac)? Or maybe you want to be something old and classy, that’s extinct—or, for your purposes, has been in hiding (see Schomburgk’s Deer)?
   Read, browse, take your time. Explore. Get ideas. Play with thoughts. There’s no rush. If it takes days, or weeks, or even years, then that’s how long it takes. This is for you, and your opinion is what counts. Take your time, find out what feels right. Hell—in your browsing, you may even go with another species. Nothing wrong with that! There’s a whole world to explore.
   Anyway, somewhere in the course of your research, you’ll settle upon a more specific species. For this example, let’s say you’ve chosen White-Tailed Deer. So what if it’s common? It feels right to you—it’s what you want to be—and that is all that really matters.
   Now what?
   The obvious next step: Go and read the Wikipedia article on White-tailed deer! It’ll give you the basics, some ideas as to where you might be from, any odd colouration patterns you might choose to have, basic characteristics, etc. However, do keep in mind that Wikipedia is just a starting point—for one thing, you will very likely want to know more about your chosen species than it can tell you. Even so, at least Wikipedia will give you a basic grounding so that you won’t commit any cervine (or whatever-ine) faux pas such as, oh, chomping down on a big hunk of steak. And yes, I have seen people with fursonas do things as odd as that…
   Anyway, now you can poke and explore at your leisure. Browse more internet sites. Read abstract papers. Go to the library and find books (both non-fiction and fiction). Bring up Google and run an image-based search for Deer Fursuit to see—and, perhaps, sew—what people have done. And so on. Go to story sites such as Shifti and read stories of your chosen form to see how others interpret it. Explore! Have fun!
   Of course, the results your search yields will depend strongly on what sort of creature you’re searching on. While a Google search on dog breeds—shih tzu, say—will bring up lots of information on the care and feeding of the breed, a similar search on white-tailed deer will primarily yield sites on the hunting thereof. Sadly, that’s the way the human world works. But, it does mean there is a vast array of information. Things like tracks, different paces, mating calls (always handy for the active furry! :) ). Still, there are more once you borrow in it.
   Explore, enjoy, poke at it. Even if you don’t find precisely what you’re looking for, at the very least you’ll learn something new!