tybalt Archives - Kendare Blake

Posts Tagged ‘tybalt’

You fuck, you ate my cat. Goodbye, my Tybalt.

This is difficult so I’m going to do it quickly. I wanted this to be a sort of tribute post, but now that I’m actually writing it I don’t think I have the stones to pull it off at the moment.

Anna readers may recognize the title of this post as one of my favorite Cas Lowood quotes. He says it after his cat, Tybalt, meets an untimely demise in Anna Dressed in Blood. What you might not know is that Tybalt is actually my cat. A black, sweet and slinky ball of sass who pulled tufts of fur out and left them around the house. He could catch flies in his mouth in midair. His eyes were sometimes green, and sometimes yellow.

When he died on Thursday, they were green.

It all happened very fast. A few weeks ago, he became a picky eater, and stopped sleeping between my feet. We thought he had a cold, and tried different kinds of food. We worried he might be feeling neglected, and lavished him with more attention. When he didn’t improve, we took him to our vet on Monday. Blood tests. Fluid in his belly. Cancer.

We thought we would be going to pick him up. Perhaps have a few good weeks to say goodbye. But Tybalt never came home.

Our house is sad now, and full of shadows. It’s too quiet. It’s cold. I would like to lie down and kick dirt over myself like a demented, post-partum sea turtle. But it’s been a dry summer here and the ground is just…packed really fucking tight.

Thank you to all of the readers who told me how pissed they were about Tybalt’s fate in the book. I used to tell him about it, and he would slow blink at me as if to say, “I told you. You shouldn’t have killed me off. I was the eye candy. I was the star. Now be a good girl and give me some treats. Just a small handful, as I don’t want to ruin my lunch.”

Cats pack a lot of words into slow blinks. Anyway, for the next while, if I’m slow to respond or absent-minded with anyone, this is why.

A new catson! And ANTIGODDESS ARC giveaway with swag! (Ends Friday, July 12th.)

So this is a long and rambling giveaway post. I should probably break it out into more than one, but being the infrequent blogger I am, this is how it goes. First off, we had a minor freak out last week when we thought Tybalt was losing weight. There were several possible explanations for this (having his fangs removed, a recent food change, stress) however, I immediately assumed he was dying the horrible death of the dead. After much obsessing, and a knee-jerk vet appointment he never made it to, we determined the likely culprit was all of the above, plus being lonely after losing his cat brother, Mojo Jojo this winter. The solution? A new catson. Everyone, meet Tyrion Cattister:

Originally, we were told he was a girl, so his name was Cersei Cattister. But then we brought him home and I noticed, well…nuts. I said, "better change his name to Tyrion." And Dylan said, "Those aren't nuts; she's a girl." And I said, "Listen, I think I know cat testicles when I see them." And then neither one of us knew what to do with that statement. Tyrion and Tybalt (we didn't do the "T-Y" matching thing on purpose) are getting along famously, after some fangless hissing. And I become skeptical that Tybalt was ever losing weight in the first place, because that kitten makes him look enormous, and his fat ass is putting my legs to sleep as I type this.

The one thing you can be sure of with a name like Tyrion Cattister, I'll never put him in a book. Which leads me to hint at another contest I'm running at the time of ANTIGODDESS' release. I'm running out of pets to put in books, is what I'm saying. I'm going to need to mine yours. It will be the "can I put your pet in my books?" contest.

But for now, let's segue into THIS contest: an ANTIGODDESS ARC with signed feather bookmark!

There are 2 ARCs up for grabs. I had three, but someone had a reading-related tragedy, and I was moved to help. So these are the last 2 I've got.

NOT SO FAST THOUGH!

First, you have to listen to my history lesson to find out how to comment. Why? Because, I'm a jerk, that's why.

In Antigoddess, there is a lot of allusion to the Trojan War. It's one of my favorite subjects, and the three goddesses at the heart of the story factor in pretty large in The Goddess War. Just in case you're unfamiliar with how the Trojan War started, here's a quick refresher:

One day, the gods were hanging around on Olympus, doing whatever the frick they do when they're not wreaking havoc or boning each other, and the goddess Discord (who nobody liked to hang out with because…well, discord is unpleasant) tossed a golden apple at them with a tag marked "To the Fairest."

For whatever reason (fruit shortage?) all the goddesses went Belieber crazy over the apple, until it came down to a final three: Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite. But how do you determine the fairest goddess of all?

Easy. You make a mortal teenage boy judge them like cows. I guess.

This unlucky chap was Prince Paris of Troy, who you are probably familiar with because of the famous story of Helen of Troy, or because of Orlando Bloom's butt cheeks in the film, Troy. Unfortunately for Paris, instead of allowing him to judge them fairly for their…er…fairness…each goddess offered a bribe.

Athena promised him he would become a great hero, and have great glory on the battlefield.

Hera promised him riches, and a vast kingdom.

Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman in the world.

He chose the hot chick, and as a result, pissed off Hera and Athena, and they pretty much ruined his life and the lives of his whole family. Killed his dad, had Achilles murder his brother Hector, sister Cassandra taken as a slave and murdered later (though she was sort of screwed already…as outlined in Antigoddess). Troy fell, chaos reigned, Aphrodite made the apple into one super-sized and very heavy earring…

SO, HERE'S HOW TO ENTER! Put yourself in Paris' place. Who would you choose, if you were offered the bribes? Why? Would you choose Athena's offer? It would be way cool to be a hero, to have a great destiny and kickass adventures. What kind of hero would you be?

Would you choose Hera's riches and power? Maybe spend your days Kardashian-ing it up poolside?

Would you choose the most beautiful girl, or boy? Snag yourself a…a…man, I'm out of touch. Who passes for hot these days?

This giveaway is international, and you can enter for multiple entries: comment below, comment on the ANTIGODDESS Facebook entry, Tweet the contest mentioning @KendareBlake, or comment at the GoodReads mirror post. I'll draw two random winners next Friday, July 12th. Good luck, and I look forward to your answers 🙂

You’re my lawyer so I think you should know: I’ve killed a lot of people.

So I've seen a few reviews lately that seem to be pretty upset about a certain cat in a certain book that I may, or may not have written. Okay, I did write it. It was Anna Dressed in Blood and the cat was Tybalt. And, SPOILER ALERT!

He doesn't make it.

I'm very, very glad that this pisses people off. Believe me, if he could read reviews, he'd be really glad too. Because Tybalt is actually my cat. Come on, I couldn't kill some poor random cat, but I figured my own could take it. At first he was flattered. He was all, "Oh, you're putting me in a book." Then I told him what happened to the character and he drew back his paw and smacked me.

Not really. He didn't wrap his little cat-fingers around my throat and scream, "Bring me back, bitch! I'm the heart of this book!" If you read the acknowledgements you'll see I thank him for being a good sport about the whole thing. Although now he keeps pitching me ideas about a cat who flies a helicopter that runs on pineapple juice. Don't judge him. He's a cat. He doesn't understand how the world works.

But this post isn't really about a cat. I just wanted to address how glad I am that people are pissed off when bad things happen to animals. Enough said.

This post is about characters! Characters make stories. It's our job as writers to write characters truly. Truly. They don't have to be sympathetic. They don't have to be people you would care about. Some of the best characters aren't. (See Patrick Bateman, in the American Psycho title quote) But they do need to be true, as true as an imaginary person can be, and if they're not, that's on us.

The character I'm working on now, oh, I'd like to kill her. I love her, but I'd like to kill her. I have tried to write her story five times now. She's in a book that was written over a year ago. And it's just this past week that I finally found her voice. It still slips away, sometimes, because she is flaky and I want to throttle her, (I'm kidding. She's not flaky.) and I look down at paragraphs and realize she's not talking to me anymore and I have to delete huge chunks.

I heard a writer I admire say that characters are just different facets of ourselves. But they can't always be, can they? Or is George RR Martin super, super schizophrenic?