Documents of Tabat: Fashions of Tabat

abstract image — What are the documents of Tabat? In an early version of the book, I had a number of interstitial pieces, each a document produced by the city: playbills, advertisements, guide book entries. They had to be cut but I kept them for web-use. I hope you enjoy this installment, but you’ll have to read Beasts of Tabat to get the full significance. -Cat

An Instructive Listing of the Fashions of Tabat, being Pamphlet #2 of the first series of “A Visitor’s Guide to Tabat,” Spinner Press, author unknown.

Tabat, like any city, has fashions that distinguish it, often shaped by the city’s history and resources. To look like one of the natives, you may want to purchase one or more of the following to wear.

Feather cockades, worn pinned to the breast or on a hat, represent a long tradition in the city. The explorers of the early expedition Perseverance found a river of feathers, cast off by vast flocks of waterfowl. They brought back sackfuls of the varicolored feathers to the city and it became customary to show one’s support for one expedition or another by wearing the cockades. In recent times they have become associated with different political powers in the city and with the coming of the elections, they are widely used to indicate one’s party affiliation.

Rain market hats, wide-brimmed and tightly woven of purple reeds, are seen in abundance on the streets of Tabat and are as functional and cheap as they are picturesque. Some sellers sell hats with designs or slogans painted upon them, often distributing the latter at political rallies.

Great-coats, woven of wool or made of dyed fur, are traditional gear for Merchants, Explorers, and others who travel widely. Their styles may vary from year to year in matters like buttons, pocket cut, or thickness of piping, but generally they remain the same in overall look.

Dandies of either sex prize the fine lace gloves produced by the Altos factory, where they are woven by the large spiders exclusive to Altos use by order of the Duke. If on the street outside where they are housed in early morning or evening, linger to hear their haunting song.

***
Love the world of Tabat and want to spend longer in it? Check out Hearts of Tabat, the latest Tabat novel! Or get sneak peeks, behind the scenes looks, snippets of work in progres, and more via Cat’s Patreon.

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2 Responses

SFWAauthors says:

April 7, 2015 at 12:35 pm

Cat Rambo: Documents of Tabat: Fashions of Tabat http://t.co/1vM5HdEknG

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DanielleGembala says:

April 7, 2015 at 1:34 pm

Oooh. http://t.co/G8y8DUjs1L

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Clarion West Write-a-thon Progress: How Deep Is Red

June 20, 2011

As many know, I’m participating in this year’s Clarion West Write-a-thon. Last week I let people choose the title of the story I’d write for the write-a-thon’s first week, and the people’s choice was “How Deep Is Red”.

So here’s a chunk from this morning’s writing so far. The story will be the sequel to “Sugar”, which is available in Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight. If you’re interested in getting to see the whole story, then I invite you to support me in the Write-a-thon! I’ll be sending a weekly e-mail that will include the stories that I write for the Write-a-thon over its six-week course, so for a small donation, you’ll be getting what I’d like to think of as high quality fiction. 🙂

Laurana used a bowl of mercury to watch her lover’s battle. The thick, silvery liquid showed the ships from above, a fat-bellied Tabatian merchant, and the two pirate ships, lean-lined and fanged with cannon, converging on it from either side, the wind behind them making them race forward.

Tiny toy ships. The name of the merchant was Saffron Butterfly The pirate ships bore no names, only figureheads of women, one with a flaming skull for a head, the other with bracelets and necklaces of snakes. Flame’s Kiss and The Serpent.

The liquid didn’t transmit sound. For that Laurana relied on imagination: the deep-throated boom of the guns, the crash of cannon balls, the shouts of despair and defiance.

The Kiss neared the merchant. Laurana leaned forward, trying to find Cristina among the mass of pirates: some readying spidery hooks and ropes, others with hackbuts raised and aimed, all braced for collison, another sound dependent on Laurana, whose mind rendered it down to the taste of salt on one’s lips from the relentless wind, the crash louder than anything one had ever heard. There. A purple bandana tied across orange curls. Cristina, swinging herself aboard the pirates’ prey.

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Teaser from Fairypunk Sleeping Beauty Story, "Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing"

May 9, 2012

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I was pleased to be asked to participate in the very cool Fairypunk Stories project. Here’s a teaser from the version of Sleeping Beauty that I just sent off.

(From “Seven Clockwork Angels, All Dancing”)

If a clock has ticked, it must tock, and thus time moves along. And in every tick and tock, there’s a story. Sometimes more than one.

Once upon a tick and tock, there was a great Lord and Lady, who were Patrons of the Arts and Sciences. They endowed libraries and laboratories, and commissioned portraits and poems and marvelous machines that could pay chess or spin a silk thread so fine you could barely see it or build their own, even tinier machines that could make tinier machines in turn, and so on and so on, until they produced the head of a pin inhabited by seven clockwork angels, all dancing.

The Lord and Lady loved the works they commissioned, but they yearned to produce something of their own. One day it came to pass that the Lady announced to her Lord that they had collaborated very well indeed, and that she would soon produce an heir.

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