Tempe O'Kun

Tempe O'Kun, also known as Tempo (born 1985 in Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA ) is a furry novelist who lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, USA. He is best known for publishing Sixes Wild and Windfall, as well as Nordguard: The Card Game. He is the staff writer at Culturally F'd, a furry cultural analysis channel.

Published Works

 * 2010 - Heat #7 - "Code Drop" (short story)
 * 2011 - Heat #8 - "Short Film" (comic)
 * 2012 - Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny (novel)
 * 2012 - Sixes Wild: The Bluff (comic)
 * 2012 - Heat #9 - "The Prisoner" (short story)
 * 2013 - Heat #10 - "In Season" (poem)
 * 2013 - Nordguard: The Card Game (card game)
 * 2014 - Heat #11 - "The Case of the Gelatinous Gemstone" (short story)
 * 2015 - Windfall (novel)
 * 2015 - Nordguard: Tribes of the White Land (card game)
 * 2015 - Heat #12 - "Cosmoknots" (poem)
 * 2016 - Heat #13 - "With All Faults" (poem)
 * 2016 - Sixes Wild: Echoes (novelized anthology)
 * 2017 - Heat #14 - "Instincts" (poem)
 * 2018 - Heat #15 - "Every Nine Lives or So" (story)
 * 2019 - Ironclaw: The Book of Monsters (Ironclaw RPG supplement)
 * 2020 - Sleep for Gamers (self-help book)

Honors

 * Bismarck State College Instructor of the Semester - Winter 2014
 * Ursa Major Award - Best Game of 2013 for Nordguard: The Card Game (nominee)
 * Coyotl Award - Best Novel of 2012 for Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny
 * Western Writers of America Spur Award 2012 for Sixes Wild: Manifest Destiny (nominee)
 * Guest of Honor at Camp Feral 2014
 * Ursa Major Award - Best Novel of 2015 for Windfall (nominee)
 * Coyotl Award - Best Novel of 2015 for Windfall (nominee)
 * Guest of Honor at Abando 2016

Biography
Tempe O'Kun's interests includes horseback riding, video games, launching objects with giant slingshots, hosting bonfires, cycling, and role-playing games. He has graduated from culinary art school as well as getting degrees in English and Computer Science. Tempe O'Kun is a member of the Western Writers of America as well as the Furry Writers' Guild.

Tempo also teaches and gives presentations at Bismarck State College, his alma mater. As of 2014, his classes include novel writing, getting published, and interactive storytelling.

National Public Radio's Main Street program interviewed Tempo on November 20, 2014 about being a writer in the furry fandom.

Fandom involvement
O'Kun is also active within the fandom and is a regular attendee at Anthrocon where he has held novel previews and book signings. He has also attended Midwest Furfest, San Diego Comic-Con, and Further Confusion several times. He was a guest of honour at Feral! 2014. He was also guest of honor at Abando, a furry convention in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He has also appeared multiple times on the South Afrifur podcast.

Tempe was the game designer for the Nordguard card game that is based on Blotch's first Nordguard graphic novel. This project has over 50 illustrations from Blotch and was published in 2012 from Sofawolf Press.

He has been active in the Elder Scrolls game-modding community since about 2005. He voiced a playable race of Final Fantasy moogles in The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind in the Mog*Mod, working with webcomic artist Ian McConville.

O'Kun has a Twitter feed where he posts updates about his work, though this is more geared toward day-to-day thoughts and activities. His Fur Affinity is his primary gallery.

Fursona
Tempo's fursona is a Siberian husky dressed in a cowboy hat and boots.

Other stories
Aside from his original works, Tempe O'Kun has also written the fantasy series Adept Paws as well as Dog City, Jak and Daxter, Elder Scrolls, Bolt, and Regular Show fanfiction, the later being the series with which he started his career as a writer in the furry fandom.

His Bolt fan fiction follows the dog Bolt and the teenage human Penny, his owner to whom he directs all his love and attention. The series has been on the back-burner since 2010 as O'Kun shifted focus towards his original creations, but has seen a resurgence in late 2011 due to popular demand and is now posted on SoFurry under the account of Mittens, one of his editors for the series. The stories are some of the most popular of all time on SoFurry, consistently ranked in the top 15.

Adept Paws is the author's first and only fantasy series. Like Code Drop and Sixes Wild, it centers on the romantic relationship between two characters namely the vixen Rea and a young, feline adept named Jax. As her village, Lagan, is attacked by flying beasts, some of the young adepts, including Jax, are captured and brought away. Rea, determined to get back to Jax, joins a search party from the village and sets out to find the other adepts.

Tempo has also posted Elder Scrolls fanfiction, which he intends to include as part of a mod for The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. This series is a romance between the Argonian Swims-With-Wolves and a mysterious vulpine Lilmothiit.