Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker’s writer business is suddenly madly active and time consuming today. Things are moving, Dear Readers.

There were several Spam comments posted here this morning, all leading to different porn sites. Sorry, guys, none of them were especially keen, so I deleted them. Editorial privilege, you know. If I’m gonna host porn, I’d like there to be some men in it. Obviously, though, some rumour of this blog is spreading slowly through the aether …

It’s apparently box season! I’ve suddenly getting all sorts of things I’ve pre-ordered and forgotten about. The parrot and the Corgi are going insane from the parade of delivery men on the porch, and I suddenly have all kinds of distractions piling up. But! I also got 4 copies of the audio book of In The Garden of Iden! It’s lovely and hefty, and the lady on the cover art has sort of red hair and a nice gown with an unmistakeable Maryean Tudor neckline – which is nothing short of miraculous. She’s also wearing an inexplicable glittery gold cat mask, but hey – you can’t get everything. Cover art is a constant mystery and a frequent disaster.

Several signed contracts have been dispatched back whence they belong. Also, the changes to the first edit of TWONG II. Man, I still need a title for that, a real title. I can maybe use Who We Did on Our Summer Holidays as a subtitle, but not as the main title. Anybody out there got any suggestions, kids?

I got an email from Right Hand (otherwise known as Jessi, the indefatigable assistant to Linn-The -Agent) sending me electronic copies of a contract from Russia for Empress of Mars. Whoopee! Because the edition they did of Anvil of the World is, like, the most beautiful of all Kage’s books. She loved it. It has gold leaf, copious colour illoustrations, a cover in some interesting and mysterious leather, gorgeous Cyrillic fonts. It also appears to be printed on toilet paper, but it makes an interesting whisper when you turn the pages.

I must write. I must file. I must re-arrange the brag shelf. Hell, I must build a brag shelf in the first place – something besides boxes and boards, at least. It is obviously time to get all Kage’s books back on display where they can intimidate and inspire. I must do research. I must renew Locus, the car insurance, the storage unit, Norton Security. I must get the little black cat out of the printer, where she has taken up residence today …

Ah, the life of a would-be, almost-functional, jigsaw-reassembling writer!

Kage Baker subscribed to one trade publication, as a writer – Locus, which is pretty much the Grey Lady of the genre. I still subscribe.

It’s where the best and most fearsome reviews come out; it’s where the size of the publishers’ ads shows plainly who is or is not in favour. There are interviews with the most watched of the up and coming, and with the eminences and dons from their Olympian fastnesses. There are lists and review of conventions (although the listings in Asimov’s are also excellent for that), and ever-fascinating details of who sold what to whom … plus the even more fascinating rumours of who might have. Volume sold at various bookstores. Speciality advertisements – agents, artwork, marketing. Online journals evolving into or out of pro status. The inevitable lists of the dead.

Kage read it with great interest – she loved insider gossip, even of the cut-and-dried journalistic sort. She read other people’s review with acumen and sympathy, but she never looked at her own until I had read them (in my capacity as filter) and translated for her. It could take her a couple of weeks to work up the nerve to read a review, even after I assured her it was good – and most of hers were. And the reviews in Locus are excellent, matter; a writer can learn things even from the bad ones. If they don’t throw themselves off the roof in despair first …

Locus also gives out their own awards, voted on by the people who read the magazine and therefore (theoretically) have an interest in the entire genre. Kage was always thrilled to get a nomination, and longed for a win – which she got, last year; I am looking at it now. The Locus Awards mattered a great deal to her.

So did the Nebulas, even more – they are nominated and voted upon by authors, the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America: as Kage affectionately said, “One’s terrifying peers …” Again, last year was her year to win, and her Nebula (a thing of beauty that looks like a still photograph from the Hubble) holds pride of place on her desk right now.

And then there are the Hugos – usually regarded as THE award, although I don’t think Kage was alone in holding the Nebulas in greater esteem. Today, the list of the Hugo nominees came out.  Those are always a giggle, as the Hugo is  – despite its undeniable solemnity and prestige – pretty much a popularity contest. Anyone who buys a membership in the World Science Fiction Con can nominate, and subsequently vote; and the majority of those who buy memberships are fans. And to some extent, authors with large numbers of organized fans are the ones who win Hugos.

Whenever someone observes this phenomenon, of course, other people (rarely writers; usually fans) start yelling Bad sport! Sour apples! So writers rarely comment on it out loud. Over the years of being Kage’s retinue, though, I have heard several giggling conversations observing that a collection was being taken up to assassinate So-and-so, just so someone else, anyone else, could win a Hugo … but that sort of things goes on at every awards ceremony, I’m sure, and is rarely acted upon.

Kage was nominated last year, as she knew she would be. (She died – it was practically a guarantee.) She did not win. Which would have been all right with her, as what she really liked were the cunning little rocket ship pins they send out to all the nominees – she had several of those, and wore them proudly. I got the newest one late last year, and it’s on the desk right now.

Anyway, my opinion is not really a matter of moment. I am not a writer. (Not yet. I hope to be …). I am still only a chronicler, a translator, an amanuensis. I can make snarky observations and not be blamed. Much. Never mind that I have been an active reader of science fiction for half a century, and never wavered; that the written word is still my forte, and not anime or cinema or toys … my opinion only counts if I buy a ticket to the Hugos. Which is fair enough, I think; if I can’t find my way to pony up the brass for a nice chicken dinner, can I really be taken seriously?

Anyway, I’ll watch for the winners in Locus and online, and cheer for the ones I think deserved the nod in all these contests. It’s rare that utter dreck gets nominated, and rarer still it wins (though it happens, hilariously). But for now, I am gonna go work on editing what will be a new book from Kage Baker later this year … so keep your eyes peeled, Dear Readers. She may yet be back.

Kage Baker always said: Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

To which I always replied: He is risen indeed!

Kage was a Christian. I’m not. But Resurrection is a universal hope, and no one with any senses at all can deny the leaping green return to life of the Spring time Earth. Young squirrels are running along the porch railing, leaping in and and out of the mulberry tree. Mockingbirds are singing hymns and carillions in the wisteria. Every plant in the garden is in bloom and promising fruit.

I even have a chocolate rabbit.

Happy Easter to all of you, and the blessing of the green god of your choice on your hearts.

Kage Baker loved William Shakespeare. It is not going too far to say she adored him, expressing admiration for his works, his philosophies and even his person on just about every level of affection. She even wrote a cameo for him into her Company series; although, in typical Kage humour, she portrays him as a dedicated gardener rather than the king of playwrights.

This is not to indicate she doubted William Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays attributed to him. She did not. In that centuries-long acrimonious debate over who wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Kage was firmly on the side of the glover’s boy. It just amused her to add some facets to his character, to make him more of a whole man and less of an icon. She knew a lot of retired actors and artists, and was full well aware that homely pastimes like gardening are how the larger-than-life hold on to their humanity.

She also knew, first-hand and from the cradle, how the satisfaction of a steady life can appeal to one who has wandered in the groves of Art. They are desperate lands, those groves of Art … the wood outside Athens, the forest of Arden, Propero’s Isle – they’re all grand places but mighty short of dependable heat and clean linens. Eventually even the best writer in the English language might grow tired of that damned Muse of fire, and long for a bit of life where his meals came on time and a man might take a walk in his own garden in peace.

One of Kage’s  own peculiar habits as a writer was to make safe places in her work for people she loved. So she wrote a scene where the retired Master Shakespeare is comfortably ensconsed in the best house in Avon (which he did eventually buy, you know); proud of his poetry, embarrassed at having been an actor, satisfied at having pulled off a trick that was magic even 500 years ago: making a living by writing.

In other scenes and other stories, she even made Shakespeare literally immortal. He survives the end of the world, the collapse of civilization, the Singularity: or whatever it was Kage actually saw in her own head, that ascension/assumption/metamorphosis she described at the end the Company books.

What she actually wrote down, I know, was some pale reflection of the Ouroborous-gears in her mind – one of the reasons Kage gives a rundown on everyone’s fate at the end was to give her overpowering personal vision a shape other people could see. Also to avoid what she called “the Entwife error”: because it bothered her to the end of her days that Tolkien never explained what happened to the Ents and their wives … the only other clue I have to go on is that she maintained that the world ended frequently – but no one ever noticed.

At any rate, she made sure the folks she most cared about survived, even the ones who didn’t notice that Reality had turned the page to a new chapter. William Shakespeare was one of them.

Today is William Shakespeare’s birthday. Forty years or so ago, it was also- mirabile dictu! – the Opening Day of the Renaissance Faire in Agoura.  Kage and I spent a happy hour or so on what was called the King’s Truss Bridge, which spanned a ditch (although it was a loudly singing stream bed that early in the year) leading from the Lower Faire to the Upper … we had baskets full of stalks of Sweet William, and we handed them out to the passing customers, crying: “Welcome to Pleasure Faire! Wear Sweet William for William Shakespeare’s Birthday!”

The customer laughed and tucked the flowers into the hats and  hair and camera straps. We handed out flowers, and kissed selected young men, until we ran out. Of flowers, anyway …

Then we went off to sit in the shade of the oaks, and drink ale, and toast Sweet William, and watch Greg Probst and David Springhorn perform the weirdest Pyramus and Thisbe in the rolling world.

Good times, in the morning of the world.

Kage Baker, Good Friday, misty weather, late brunch, narcolepsy, editing, printing new pages, printer, printer with arthritis, printer with seizures, nice fat PDF file instead …

Bacon, cheese crackers, chocolate eggs, rabbit cookies, coffee, more coffee, all the coffee, stuffed parrot singing himself to sleep …

Little black cat, silver tabby tigress, corgi with static discharge, squirrel, raven, phoebe, titmouse …

Stir vigourously. Season to taste. Turn out in buttered chafing dish or spring storm, whichever happens first.

I have spring fever and am going back to bed while the mulberry tree throws green fruit against the windows.

Kage Baker liked the name Maundy Thursday. It amused her, being an old-fashioned word. It might refer to charitable purses given out by English royalty to the deserving poor. (Whatever the deserving poor might be – they only seem to occur in England.) It might be derived from the Latin word mandatum, meaning a commandment (as in Christ’s Last Supper instruction to his disciples: A new commandment I give unto you. That you love one another as I have loved you); but no one is quite sure …

She wasn’t as fond of its actual implications. It’s the night of the Last Supper, nearly the end of Holy Week, the eve of the Passion and Sacrifice. That mattered to Kage, though she kept the remembrance in her own way. She was more into lilies and white candles than the Passion. Contemplating the death of Christ made her feel ill. She preferred to think of the living godhead. God, she always felt, shouldn’t have to die; but if He does, Man should not prefer that Death to the glory of His living in the first place.

She didn’t approve of death. Or loss, or change, or endings … transmutation was acceptable, as long as the original essence was still discernible. Conservative in her miracles, was Kage.

I’ve spent the day making editorial corrections to TWONG II. Survived a sick headache and a flat tire, and the hideous traffic attendant on the masses of people leaving town for the holiday weekend. Or fleeing the Westside to get away from all the closed streets and grim young men in sunglasses, since the President is over there tonight … it was an especially secular day, as a matter of fact.

Tomorrow, I’ll try to turn my thoughts to some resurrection or other – it’s good for the soul, after all, Christian or no. Nothing to scorn in lilies, chocolate or bunnies, either. But right now the immortality of the soul is a topic that occupies my mind a great deal. It probably always will through what is left of my own life, wondering where Kage’s has gone on to and what it’s doing there …

Sitting on a hillside in the spring sunlight, I hope; sipping sweet white wine and eating candy eggs, while the Young Lord of her choice bends over her with His arms full of lilies.

Kage Baker loved shipwrecks.

That sounds perfectly awful, but  it’s not as though she went out on stormy nights with lanterns, and tried to fake lost ships inshore to plunder. She was just fascinated with the flotsam and jetsam that the waves flung up on their own. She put salvaged net floats in the garden as bird scares, and was always on the lookout for shaped bits of wood.

We used to go out after storms and see if anyone’s fishing boat had foundered or slipped its moorings. Nothing got Kage more excited than the tangible proof that a ship had once sailed nearby. If the proof was weathered planks half-buried on the strand – well, that just meant it was now salvage, and that a memento could be honestly borne away by a passing small girl.

Or a passing writer, if one happened to be taking a break from her duties down by the blue Pacific. Kage had several bits and pieces of wrecks cast up on Pismo Beach; the best kind, the highest grade of salvage, was anything that still had paint or brightwork. The best of all would have been a bit with a name on it, but she never got that lucky.

She did come across some fairly long planks, though, when we first moved to Pismo. She incorporated them into her bed – fastened them into the framework to support the mattress. Mind you, the entire bed frame was made of salvage of one sort or another. I cut the wood to her design, and Kage put it together with screws and plates. The thing had a gentle organic tilt to it, but somehow never fell down. And she slept in it for close to 10 years, until she finally broke down and bought a brand new professionally-made frame with royalties.

She kept the old planks, though. She stored them under her bed for dreams of the sea.

Now, something has happened that would have thrilled Kage – a shipwreck has been revealed by the winter storms in San Francisco recently:

http://blogs.exploratorium.edu/strange-attractor/shipwreck-ahoy/

Kage would have been ecstatic. We’d be on our way to San Francisco today, I have no doubt, to see what could be seen. With luck, I could have dissuaded her from relieving the wreckage of the odd nail or scrap of plank – after all, it’s not on her beach. But she’d have prowled around it in delight, and wondered at its history, and been amused at the idea that Prince Phillip had made a landing in San Francisco Bay … and then we’d have gone to Cliff House or Swiss Louie’s, and had Irish Coffee and fried oysters and sourdough bread.

I can’t make the pilgrimage, myself, much as I would love to: I have a manuscript to edit. The Women of Nell Gwynn’s II is awaiting my attentions. It has ships in it,  though; and shipwrecks, too. And it was itself very nearly wrecked on the deadly Lee Shore of Mortality. But such an old hand as Kage was would never have lost her vessel so close to homing – she passed the wheel to me, and I have very nearly brought it safely in.

Only a little ways to go, now. So I had better get to it.

Kage Baker had only one piece of serious advice to would-be writers: sit down and write.

Oh, she’d make jokes about never stinting on the chair cushions, or orate at length on the benefits of fountain pens over felt-tips; she make the classical jokes about where she got her ideas: A post office in New Jersey. (These days, that statement is usually attributed to Roger Zelazny, but I’m pretty sure Aristotle and Shakespeare made similar remarks.)

It’s a frequent question asked at cons and book signings. Someone comes up, tells the writer how much they adore their work, and – with all their soul yearning in their eyes – asks: “How do you write like that?” If they are a little cooler and less desperate, they ask if the published have any special advice for the novices (Yeah, keep your day job and find a new hobby was Kage’s standard response).

Or they may go for a more sophisticated approach – “Where did you find your agent?” Or “How do you contact someone in the publishing business?” (Check New York. Most of them hang out there was the answer  if Kage was feeling grumpy. If she was not, she’d tell them Look in the Writers’ Guide). The totally shameless, clueless or just rock-bottom desperate would inform Kage that they had a great idea but didn’t know how to write: but they would give it to her for a collaboration. That one was the hardest to answer, because the interrogator often really was ignorant or rude or grasping at straws: so Kage was unusually gentle with this inquiry. But all her answers still amounted to No way in hell.

Real writers, published or no, have already learned the only magic trick there is:  to be a writer, you must write. Sit down and write. It’s a very physical activity; it takes all your hands and eyes and must be done for hours at a time to have any effect. You will ache when you are done; you will suffer headaches and muscle cramps and hunger pangs. It’s right up there with shoveling for inevitable, necessary labor – to produce a hole you must dig, and to produce a story you must write.

It’s amazing how seldom this occurs to people on their own. I learned it by observing Kage. But she seemed to know it in her blood.

Mind you, Kage had her irrational rituals. There was juju she worked just to get a session started – a game of Freecell, her daily clicks at the Hunger Site, looking through all the magic windows of webcams on her computer. But when she had to, she could skip those. The real trick, the only trick, was just to sit down and write. And how that works can’t be explained, because it works differently for everyone who tries to write. Kage said it was like the Who’s opera Tommy – one of her favourites – in that duplicating what brought enlightenment to one person was not the answer for the next. You ended up deaf, dumb and blind, but no Pinball Wizard.

These days, I’m under a geas to be a writer – Kage laid it on me, with neither mercy nor advice, in the last weeks of her life. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that I might not be able to do it. It is a fact, and a very peculiar thing to me, but Kage – brilliant, inventive, visionary, prolific writer that she was – had no doubt at all that I could pull off a similar trick if I just applied myself. We wrote a lot, both of us and together as well, from adolescence on – but I gladly yielded the race to her. I liked what she wrote better than my own stuff, and then it began to sell …

Still. I got a duty here, y’know? And I find I can’t shrug it off, because my brain insists on playing with the ideas Kage left me. And when those run out, it generates more … Who We Did On Our Summer Vacation will, yes, be published! And there is now a book of Mars stories in the works; and Kage left hints for me to work on. How does Mars Two survive after the bomb in the arethermal plant goes off? What kind of society grows up among the crews digging the new canals? Bees didn’t work; what about birds? Could you build a dam across the Valles Marineris?

I’ve been holding on; I’ve got that part down pat. Now it’s time to sit down. And shut up. And write.

Kage Baker partook of chocolate year-round (and sometimes 24/7), but like all theobromos fans, she observed some specific holiday as being more chocolate-appropriate than others.

First on that list has to be Halloween, at least for anyone who has been a kid in America. Here in California, it was even more a significant chocolate holiday since October was when the fall weather finally cooled down  enough for chocolate to survive in daytime. You had a chance of packing Hershey’s miniatures in your lunch box and not having them melt before lunch break.

Thanksgiving is simply not chocolate-specific, even if you could convince your mother to buy those chocolate turkeys at See’s. Even then, their main charm was native absurdity (a chocolate turkey? What do you eat first, the head or the feet?) and their colour – they’re always wrapped in gloriously polychrome foil. In these more recent years, though, Thanksgiving has also been the gateway to the excesses of the Christmas season, which is pretty grand – and See’s also puts out their fall truffles then, in astonishing flavours like pumpkin, pecan pie and cranberry.

Then comes Christmas, and the entirety of December is one huge chocolate orgy. By New Year’s even fanatics like Kage are looking slightly askance at chocolate  – though that never stopped her from eating Valentine’s Day hearts. But things slow  down in the Spring, chocolate-wise … until you hit Easter.

When we were kids, before every holiday that could be pinned to the calendar got its own custom-dyed M&M’s, Easter was the Other Huge Candy Event – the polar opposite of Halloween, the dawn partner to that night-time celebration.

Despite our parents’ dutiful insistence to us that Easter was not about candy, most of us got to adolescence before we thought about anything but chocolate bunnies and new clothes. I suspect a lot of kids do. The candy of Easter is so lovely, besides! Pastel colours, jellybeans like coloured glass, solid chocolate lagomorphs … I remember sitting in the garden on an early Easter morning, contentedly eating my way down the head of a chocolate rabbit while admiring my lace-stockinged ankles amid a drift of rose petals …

Anyway, the next big chocolate blow-out is nearly upon us. I intend to get some speciality malt ball eggs today – those good ones enrobed in white chocolate, with water-coloured spots painted on them to look like exotic bird’s eggs: nightingales, quetzals, phoenixes. Maybe one or two of the little golden bunnies now marching in their sturdy phalanxes through all the supermarket aisles. How could one not want to take a few of them home? They look positively wholesome.

And just in time for all this theobromine excess, here is a recent article about a new way that chocolate is, yes, actually good for you! Behold:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6699-persistent-coughs-melt-away-with-chocolate.html

Chocolate cures persistent coughs. It’s as effective as codeine, that staple of childhood, and has none of codeine’s nasty side effects. It neatly disables the cough-irritation reflex – so if you’ve got some evil bronchial plague left over from Winter still bothering you, your salvation now lies in chocolate bunnies. And eggs. And roses. And truffles. And, if you just really aren’t into the whole happy hoppy bunny scene, these tentacled cuties:

http://ghost111381.blogspot.com/2011/04/chocolate-cthulhu-idol.html

Kage would be so pleased. She avidly collected all the information coming out the last several years about the medicinal virtues of chocolate – and this one would have been the crowning glory, for her. She got bronchitis every year, which she stalwartly fought off with whiskey and lemon juice – she would have been much happier to treat her lingering coughs with theobromos.

And this, Dear Readers, is why it’s a good idea to always keep abreast of the scientific journals. See? On top of everything, chocolate has an educational moral, as well. Kage always knew there was nothing it could not do …

Cthulu Choccies

Kage Baker didn’t like to be surprised by restaurants. She didn’t like to be surprised by anything, actually, but especially not where she went to eat. She was therefore always cautious about trying new places. Novelty in dining was not her thing. She liked an experience to be just as it was the time before, so she knew what to expect and could savour everything in advance.

Historic restaurants are invaluable for this, and nothing made her happier than to discover someplace was doing business just as it had when she was a child. When the Golden Lantern closed in Pismo Beach – that being the chosen purveyor of Chinese food from her childhood – Kage was in despair. At least, until we watched the cleanup crew carry out a barrel of MSG that was as tall as I am … then she stopped complaining, which finally enabled us to find Mei’s, the best Chinese restaurant in the Five Cities, and we could eat Chinese takeout again.

Until the threat of chemical warfare, though, Kage was adamantly opposed to trying anywhere new. She’d rather have lived without egg fu yung than try a new chef.

For most of her life, she had longed to eat at the venerable Brambles, in Cambria; we’d been driving by it for years before we got it together to actually go and eat there. It was old, elegant, dark; leather banquets and tiny tables looking out on a tangled green hillside, a menu from the 1920’s, diverse martinis … just Kage’s kind of place. When it suddenly closed a few years on, she was disconsolate; she insisted on driving past it at every opportunity, yearning at it to re-open. And you know what? It did. Against all odds, the place passed to a cousin of the original owner and it re-opened. Just in time for Kage to celebrate her last birthday there, in fact.

The bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel in New York, which houses a mural of Old King Cole by Maxfield Parrish. Cliff House and Alioto’s, on opposite ends of  San Francisco. The Big Yellow House in Summerland (which is extremely haunted). If a restaurant had been standing at least three generations and served alcohol, Kage was a natural patron.

Here in Los Angeles, it was places like the Hollywood Roosevelt – where we actually stayed a few years back, while researching Rude Mechanicals; Kage ecstatically ate grilled fois gras and drank Bombay Sapphire Gin and wrote in a room right down the hall from where Montgomery Clift famously plays a ghostly trumpet in the halls. (But not for us, sigh.) It was places like Clifton’s Cafeteria, which is an ancient delirium filled with fake waterfalls and palm trees. Or Musso and Frank’s Grill, where the menu and the waiters are all old enough to have served Dashiell Hammet. Or the Tam O’Shanter, where you can get ale by the half-yard and the otherwise-elegant tables all feature Laurie’s Season Salt in labelled bottles …

Or Damon’s Steakhouse in Glendale. Damon’s is a dark, relaxed place full of tikis and paintings of vahines on black velvet, though there is nothing especially tropical on the menu . But the house salad is unique and irreproducible, the steaks are fantastic – especially the tenderloin; the decoration is – well, it’s sort of upper-class Beach Hut, is what it is. There’s an outrigger hanging from the ceiling. There are bamboo and tapa mats and monkeys everywhere. There’s an enormous salt-water aquarium at one end, and Kage always wandered over to gaze happily into it when we ate there.

I’ve been eating there since I was still in footie pajamas. Since we reached our majority, it’s been me and Kage – the bar could make the Planter’s Punch and Mai-tais she liked, and it is my very favourite steakhouse in all the world (and I have had steak in Kansas City, kids).

I’m going there tonight, on this hot windy Spring evening in Los Angeles, to dine with Anne and remember our sister. Anne will relax her dietary standards enough to eat a steak, and I will tempt Fate with a single cocktail – one evening off my heart meds won’t kill me, and I certainly cannot toast Kage with a metropolol tablet.

So I’ll drink the kind of musical comedy drink she preferred, and I’ll eat her favourite steak in one of the grand old restaurants she loved. And then … I’ll come home and write.