November 9th, 2007
Ta’avahiel drew a deep breath as he walked through the hallway of cats, flinching every time another tabby or calico rubbed itself against his leg and streaked another line of fur across the immaculate white of his gown. The air was thick with the smells and yowls of a thousand cats doing their thousand feline things, hunting, playing, sleeping, mating, all shot through with the fine food and drink of the Prince who ruled them all. One low purr rumbled differently from the rest, spilling out into the hall from beyond a half-open door. The angel rolled his eyes, folded his wings carefully, and slipped inside.
A cat-eared youth lay sprawled in folded a bed, his tanned, golden skin gleaming with sweat as it lay against the watery blue sheets and the sleek, powerful leopardess who shared them. The jungle cat yawned, baring her great, sharp teeth, and Ta’avahiel stopped his approach, waiting as she nosed her companion awake. The youth barely seemed to notice his presence, as though members of Heaven’s Choir came daily to his door, and drew the great cat’s head to him, kissing her between the eyes.
“Tybalt…”
The youth’s ears twitched a little, as though expecting Ta’avahiel to continue, and the kiss slipped lower, until his lips met the cat’s, lingering there in a deep, gentle touch of affection.
It was pointless to argue. “Tybalt, Prince of Cats, whose subjects were once as gods and have never forgotten…”
The kiss broke for a moment as Tybalt peered over his companion’s head, narrowing his bright green eyes to slits. He considered the angel with slow, lazy confidence, twitching his tail beneath the sheets. “You forgot ‘each equal to any king’, but that may pass.” The kiss resumed, dying off into a show of warm, contented nuzzling, as if he enjoyed watching Ta’avahiel squirm in discomfort at their open, bestial affection. “Go, Remi,” he murmured, sending his subject away, and the leopardess stalked from the room, glaring at her master’s visitor for his intrusion.
The angel closed the door, unfurling his wings once more. The gesture would be lost on the Prince, he knew, but it always felt better to speak bathed in His glory. “If a man layeth with any animal, he must be stoned.”
Tybalt yawned, in his peculiarly feline way, running his tongue across the edges of his teeth. “Higher than a kite, Tavah, but I am both and neither, and the rules bear little upon me, as well you ought to know.” His ears folded flat against his head, as though in demonstration.
Ta’avahiel bristled a little at the Prince’s defiance. “That was an abomination, before the eyes of God.”
A low chuckle served as an answer. “You saw only a kiss, little bird. Leave it be.”
“Judas betrayed the Son with the same.”
The Prince stretched, letting the sheets fall around his body as he raised his hips, cracking each joint in his back in a slow, lazy rise to his hands and knees, then fell over to his side again, considering his visitor. “You didn’t come to lecture me, Tavah. You want something from me, and it must be something that no one else can give.” He thought for a moment, gesturing to a small pouch on a nearby table. “It’s probably not the catnip, but you’re welcome to some if you want.”
Ta’avahiel shifted awkwardly, trying to recover his dignity from beneath the Prince’s idle, uncaring gaze. “Something only you can bring me, yes.”
November 8th, 2007
I hate working graveyard at the pawn shop. It depresses me, the druggies scraping for another hit, the gangfights and the accidents. I don’t hear them anymore, only the ambulances.
One went by, few nights back. It was raining. A kid came in ten minutes later, soaked and depressed. “What happened out there?” I asked.
“Drunk,” he explained, setting down a battered ring box. “Can’t keep this.”
It was an engagement ring, brand-new. “Two hundred,” I offered. He looked worse. “Two-fifty.”
He took the money, numbly.
“Get turned down?”
He broke down and cried. “Never got to ask…”
P.S.: I’m an Opera user. Back when I wrote Graveyard, that meant that I used an ad-supported browser and got keyword-filtered GoogleAds with most websites I visited. Of course, one day I was working on the old site and noticed that Google had looked at my story and assigned it The Worst Google Ads Ever.
November 5th, 2007
1000 Gears is live now, but not quite complete. I’m still doing a lot of back-end work, trying to get all the miscellaneous pages and code working, and this doesn’t give me much time to write. That said, I have a pretty large archive that I’ve left scattered across the Internet, so I’ll be posting new pieces every couple days.
In the meantime, if you’d like to help me with the debugging, feel free to comment anywhere. If you have questions for me, ask them in the comments here, and I’ll get to them as quickly as I can.
November 2nd, 2007
1000 Gears was created somewhere between my need for a new website and (my softer, fuzzier, and more-optimistic alter-ego) Catboy’s response to the other community/archive sites out there.
We invite all of you to join in. Submit something if you’d like – fiction or commentary, pictures or words – and we’ll see if we can find a place for it. There’s something really magical about the energy that a small group of talented, creative people can find, given the freedom to riff off one another and the world around them.
That energy is really what we’re trying to encourage with 1000 Gears, so we’re going to make a few promises to you right now.
- No ads. No advertisers. Ever.
If we like something and want you to know, we’ll review it. If we don’t, and we want you to know, we’ll review that too.
- No filler.
We will not post unless we have things to say. 1000 Gears should be interesting even if you have no idea who we actually are.
- If it’s not good, we won’t post it.
We may not post it even if it is good, depending on our space and bandwidth concerns, but we won’t post it unless we feel that it’s worth reading.
We may link to Terrible Badness™ if we can find creative ways to mock it, but only if we believe the mockery is worth posting on its own.
I tried to make him be nicer, really I did. This was the best I could do. - Catboy
- Anonymous submissions are anonymous. Period.
If you don’t want to be credited, we’ll delete your personal information once we post your work. Anonymity grants you the freedom to speak freely, and even we won’t know who you were.
- Once it’s up, it’s up.
Of course, should the situation arise, we’ll cooperate fully with courts and/or the appropriate legal notices. Beyond that, though, we’ll stand behind our decisions to post. We believe that artistic merit trumps obscenity, and we believe in the freedom to rip and remix ideas from from the world around us. If Neo-Confederate sympathizers want to complain, they’re more than welcome to submit rebuttals – we’d love to give them equal time if they have interesting things to say – but we certainly won’t delete it without warning.
All of this boils down to two basic points:
- We will be worth reading.
- We won’t sell out.
It’s really that simple.
