Author Archives: Kate

Kage Baker had a natural talent for close-in focus. She called it “having fun with your OCD”. She could (and did) turn the little wheels of her inner vision to a tight beam of attention on one problem or detail … Continue reading →

Kage Baker was quite frightened of hurricanes and tornadoes. The annual weather reports from the Midwest and the East quite unnerved her, especially since they got better and more detailed all through her life. When we travelled one summer week … Continue reading →

Kage Baker, for all her love of heat, would have been hiding from our weather now. This is the sort of weather where errands were run at dawn and after sunset; we spent the day en deshabille in front of … Continue reading →

Kage Baker loathed entropy. And she fought it remorselessly. Yeats’ dire and despairing poem, The Second Coming, was the epitome of everything Kage would not accept, and fought all her life. The idea that everything eventually winds down was personally … Continue reading →

Kage Baker would have characterized my last week as a cluster f***. Complete with asterisks. She was one of those rare people who can actually pronounce asterisks. I think it had something to do with her descent from real Southern … Continue reading →

Kage Baker was  prone to tonsillitis, as well as colds:  but only as an adult. As a child, she was free of the problem; sore throats and inflamed tonsils were my speciality . Kage ran more to fevers and rashes, … Continue reading →

Kage Baker hated cold. And having colds. Upper respiratory tract infections incurred her deep personal hatred, directed with as much specificity as she could summon toward viral particles romping through her own cells. If there were any truth to the … Continue reading →

Kage Baker once told me (blearily clutching her coffee cup), “A trip’s not over until you’ve slept it off.” She was good at bon mots like that. After an epically wretched flight home – 10 hours to get from SeaTac … Continue reading →

Kage Baker absolutely loved staying in hotels. The whole convention thing – a necessity for a writer to observe, from time to time – got a thousand times more fun for her when she realized it meant more weekends in … Continue reading →

Kage Baker has been flitting through my dreams of late. By of late I mean the last week, when I have been sleeping in strange beds, in strange places. And by flitting, I mean I wake up knowing she was … Continue reading →