I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it this year, but Sunday night I booked tickets to YaoiCon. If anyone out there would like to meet there and chat for a while, please leave me a note and let me know!
Also, I am working on another Tybalt story. I hope to have it done by con-time, but I’m not completely sure about that. By the end of the year, for sure. Two Tybalt stories in one year… it can happen.
For Hannah, because she made a difference.
Even with his heart pounding in time to the DJ’s command, a hundred and twenty-six beats per minute, Jamie could feel the one it skipped. Someone was watching him; he’d felt it, uncoiling a tight, nervous desire from the base of his spine, sliding it up his back until it made the hairs on his neck stand on end and his knees go weak, made him excited and just a little scared.
For months he’d walked past the door here, stolen glances past the curtain at the slender, pretty boys dancing together here, taking each other home, but he’d never dared step in before. Now he wasn’t sure whether he should have come. Someone would notice him; someone would tell; people would know; they would be polite of course, nothing overt. It was the twenty-first century after all, but he would hear their whispers, notice their sideways glances in his direction, and he would move again, unable to cope, unwilling to be that token friend, unwilling to be treated so differently. It wasn’t his fault he’d been born this way.
But there was that look. It promised so much.
For as long as I’ve been writing him, Tybalt has been a creature of the YaoiCon Fiction Anthology. I’m almost finished with his latest, long-delayed story, First and Last and Always, so I emailed Anne to see if she would like to reserve it for next year’s anthology, if it happens. I say if it happens because the Anthology has not been published for two years running.
I suspect, much to my disappointment, that there are no plans for further issues. It’s been about a month since I emailed Anne, and I noticed that her contact information has been locked at the YaoiCon site.
This doesn’t mean much, if anything, for Tybalt’s future. The past two Anthologies have paired me with Tammy Lee, and I don’t think we have very good creative chemistry. Tybalt remains one of my favorite (if most demanding) characters, and I’m sure he’ll continue to slink into my writing life whenever he has a story to share.
For now, I’ve been sidetracked by an interesting little experiment (you can expect it in time for Christmas), and First and Last and Always will go back to the top of my stack once it’s done.
Well, it is a present for most of you. I think perhaps that some of you will not want it.
Just in time for Christmas, Tanko has given her permission for us to post the first Tybalt pictures ever! She drew them for The Tears of Anael when it was published in the YaoiCon 2004 fiction anthology.
Tybalt is very pretty, but in these pictures he is also very naked! Please use your best judgement before you click on the story.
Thank you and Merry Christmas,
~Catboy! =^.^=
N.B. The copy of this story in Envy, the YaoiCon 2006 anthology, contains a number of misprints and editorial errors. I am very sorry for the inconvenience.
Yellow-throated songbirds pecked at the bars of their tiny, gold-wire cage, blinded and too fat to fly, searching in vain for the trays of millet and grapes, oats and figs that someone had taken away that morning. A soft mewling startled them, but they soon forgot it, oblivious to the sleek, golden-skinned cat-prince watching them. Tybalt licked his teeth contemplatively, sprawling in the Roman couch beside the cage. He flicked open the top and plucked out the fattest, laughing quietly at its futile squirming. It amused him for a moment, but soon he grew bored again, and he thrust it, head first, into a glass of brandy.
It didn’t take long. The bird drowned in minutes, its struggles against his hand growing weaker and weaker until they stopped altogether.
“That’s cruel, Tybalt, even for you.” Tybalt’s guest, a gentle sylph of a boy, just barely a man, tried to look away, but the beautiful tragedy entranced him, somehow, and he could not.
“Well, I miss her, and their suffering eases my own.” He plucked the bird’s feathers deliberately, one at a time, tossing them back into the cage. “You wouldn’t deny me that, would you, Methyst?”
Methyst buried his face in his hands, running his fingers back through his short, dirty-blonde hair. “Still her, even now… Tybalt… It’s been seven hundred and fifty years.”
“Seven hundred and forty-nine, two hundred eighty-seven days.”