Cat Tales (Professionals zine)

Zine
Title:	Cat Tales
Publisher:	Bound in Leather Press
Editor(s):
Date(s):	1986
Series?:
Medium:	print
Size:
Genre:
Fandom:	The Professionals
Language:	English
External Links:	@The Circuit Archive
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cover by J. Clissold

Cat Tales is a 196-page slash anthology with fiction by Fanny Adams. Artwork - J. Clissold (front cover) and Pat Cash. Many of the stories were circuit stories and when the collection was published, it was part of the debate whether fanzines would harm the circuit:

"To be fair, I don't see fanzines undermining the fabric of fandom and ruining all our fun—that would be ludicrous—but I do wonder if B&D fandom will be as much fun five years and fifty zines down the road. It hasn't stopped me from contributing to all the planned B/D and B&D zines I know about, and I'm hoping to get Cat Tales Collected done by the end of the year, so you see, I am not against the concept...merely not totally for it. I assume that you zine eds are going to write fervent letters denying that zine publication will have any negative effect whatsoever, and in fact will prove, with evidence gleaned from the New England Journal of Medicine, that B/D zines will prevent cancer, heart disease and boils. Unfortunately, youze guys have this vested interest in zine production that makes your support a little suspect. What about the rest of you?

An Announcement

"Cat Tales collected will include about 50% new material. You will not be paying for everything you've gotten on the circuit already. Plus, we're lining up some lovely artists to illo the stories. This is going to be a nice zine, folks. If you like the series, you'll like C-T Collected. Meow."

Summary

Summary from a distributor, Agent With Style: "Set against a backdrop of magical happenings and wild impossibilities, Ray Doyle discovers that he has abilities that defy the laws of nature. Dealing with being a shapeshifter is hard enough, until his lover, Bodie, scares him by making a man who dared threaten Ray simply...disappear. Wild talents can be dangerous, especially when the man displaying them growlingly insists he doesn't have them. Add in a prescient Cowley and an unruly Murphy who refuses to play by the rules and you have a thrilling mix of modern and ancient magic that will take you on the wildest ride yet."

Content

• Cat Tales 4
• Letting the Cat Out of the Bag 21
• Nine Lives 36
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 60
• The Persian of CI5 71
• Belling the Cat 84
• Cat's Cradle 120
• While the Cat's Away 131
• Manx Without a Past 137
• It's Only a Beautiful Persian 145
• Cat's Paw 176
• Cat Among the Pigeons 189
• Discovered in the Litterbox 194

References

• "Ok, ok, this is cheating [as it was written by my friend]. I don't care. I adore Beelzy and Colette and Tal and Rev and Jamie and Dahout and everybody else.. .I love the touches of myth and magic and the Old Religion.. .1 love the way what started out as a bit of fun has become murky and serious and very complicated.. .and I have a distinct advantage here because I know what comes next! Well, so will the rest of you when Cat-Tales Colllected is published, tee hee."
• "The CAT TALES series I have always found vaguely depressing and, truthfully, I never made it all the way through the CAT TALES zine."
• "It is the sense of hurry up that makes me disappointed with Cat Tales, the zine. I enjoyed the circuit stories because they were fun, witty, had elements of the supernatural, contained interesting, other-than-Bodie-and-Doyle characters. The interpretation of Bodie and Doyle and their relationship as well as their powers added to the appeal. The detailed research provided a finely woven fabric of a backdrop. But, as pieces were altered somewhat and as new material was added to comprise a zine, I became less enchanted. As characters are wont to do, they created new problems, revealed new aspects of personality and power as well as new plot directions. None of these elements were accomodated in the final few pages of the zine, which left me frustrated and irritated. The zine was like a movie, where you've invested time and emotional energy, only to get to the end and find the film maker had no idea how to end the film so as to wrap up loose threads or provide a resting place, a sense of finality. The best example of this in Cat Tales is the scene where Bodie, frightened and fascinated with his power still, uses a thunderbolt to obliterate Doyle's clothes, resting in a chair. This is where I began to fear for the rest of the zine, where I began to worry. Indeed, the final pages proved out my fear. This is a moment that is extremely significant to the Bodie-Doyle relationship, and yet it is never dealt with. It was as if Fanny were meeting a deadline and had no time for the two or three chapters necessary to complete this work... And yet, I did enjoy a great deal about Cat Tales. The individual stories with their humor and well drawn characters such as Colette were most enjoyable."

• "I've always had very strong reactions to Fanny's stories. The Cat Tales zine drove me nuts while still fascinating me. I spent almost an hour trying to describe my reaction to a friend. She managed, in one sentence to boil it all down by pointing out that not only is this a story, but it's a religious tract. As you know, religious tracts can be enlightening, or boring, or threatening and I wasn't pleased to find all of these reactions within me. It wasn't after all, my first exposure to the religion involved. The enlightening part came to me by looking out my front door. Wasn't I having trouble relating to a forest oriented religion? Could that be difficult to someone who has spent all of her adult life on the prairie? How much of this religion can be translated from the trees to the grass? I had the strangest impression that this religion could not endure here, that it would wither in the dry wind that blows almost constantly. I got the shivers just thinking about it! On the other hand, I found the idea of a were-cat great! I floundered my way through the part which seemed to be based partially on real people, trying to find out why they were there (that aspect seemed to have the feel of excluding the reader) to the end. This end seemed muddled or unfinished, as more obviously happens after that. Kinda like real life. Any story which can get so much reaction from a reader has to be considered significant. If I felt the message in the way of the story, I still had to acknowledge that it was directly responsible for one of the few religious revelations I've ever experienced. In my opinion, if a story does that to even one reader, it was worth writing."

• Yeh, we were trying to meet a deadline, and you're right about CAT TALES being rushed there at the end. That zine could easily have been (and perhaps should have been) twice as long - but we wanted to get it out on time, and, quite frankly, we were both getting a bit tired of eating/breathing/sleeping CAT TALES, and wanted to go on to other things. Still, I don't feel we compromised ourselves - no, not everything is neatly tied up at the end, but that's life, isn't it? Personally, I would have liked to delve more into the uses and abuses of power, but we had to stop somewhere. At least most of the relationships were worked out, and the characters were learning to deal with it all, by the end. Still, when I re-read the zine, I wish there was more.