Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker tried very hard her whole life not to let necessity dictate anything she did. She didn’t approve of “real” life getting in the way of actually living, and so she dodged it as much as possible. She wasn’t much of a compromiser.

Mind you, she spent most of her time writing, so it made a certain amount of sense that she didn’t enjoy answering the phone, or the door, or the mail. She avoided small talk as much as she could, even at publisher’s parties; which earned her a reputation as a modest lady and a good listener. That reputation was enhanced by the fact that she had a low voice, and was often just not heard when she did speak – but it never does a person any harm to avoid all those situations where you say something astonishing and weird into a sudden silence. If you paid attention, you discovered she had a keen and deadly wit. Some people learned to sit near her at parties and conventions, so as not to miss the  sotto voce commentary.

She once spent an entire book release party sitting near the piano and apparently consuming unnatural amounts of Peanut M & M’s. She was actually feeding them to the young man who had sneaked into the party and was hiding under the piano scarf. Kage had a lovely evening trading barbs with him and slipping him snacks. And when it was obvious she had picked a spot and was not moving, people came to her to talk. It might have been the only cocktail party she ever really enjoyed.

I am not so lucky nor so adamant (it is entirely possible no one still on life is so adamant as Kage was). Today, I have been beset by an unending stream of tasks that just would not end. Consequently, here it is past 8 – and the parrot is not yet put to bed and is reaching the tired-toddler overload stage: he’s making velociraptor noises and throwing seeds at the Corgi. The slow cooker pot roast is, well, still slowly cooking and will be lovely – tomorrow. I keep saving documents to the wrong drive and then having to find them again and move them. I am hours behind on helping people with their homework. I haven’t even managed to drink all the coffee in my morning carafe!

FYI, Dear Readers, I have several categories of blog entries. It’s for internal filing, so I can find specific entries if I ever need to. One of them is labeled “excuses”. That’s where this very late, very brief, very desperate blog is going to be filed. The excuse is that I can’t bend reality like Kage did.

You’d think I would know that by now …

Kage Baker was a connoisseur (connoisseuse? Gender endings in French translate hilariously in English) of that phenomenon where you mention something obscure, and then suddenly a dozen references to it bombard you from all over. There is undoubtedly a clever name for it, but I don’t know what it is – I only know it does happen, and it happened to Kage a lot, and it always fascinated her when it did.

Like discovering that sea salt and lavender are wonderful flavourings in everything from dinner rolls to chocolate bars: and then suddenly getting dozens of gift baskets and emails and supermarket coupons for sea salt/lavender flavoured stuff. So you could sit in your bath soaking in sea salt/lavender bath oil, eating sea salt/lavender chocolate melted over sea salt/lavender bread …with a lavender candle burning in a sea salt candle cup. (Disclosure: this scenario is based on a true event.)

Why, Kage would cry out, does the universe want me to know about this suddenly? And she might never find out, but in the meantime things tasted and smelled pretty good and life was just generally enriched. And usually a story point came out of it.

A couple of blogs ago, I mentioned Kage’s fascination with old candies, and the amount of time we sometimes spent discussing them. I’m not sure why, but the candy that sprang to mind was Bonomo Turkish Taffy. The stuff came in 4 flavours – brown, white, pink and yellow. They purported to be chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and banana, but believe me – they tasted like colours. Possibly made of melted crayons. The taffy was some sort of complicated plasticine, I think, because its biggest claim to fame was that it would shatter when struck sharply against a hard surface – but if chewed slowly, it remained soft and malleable. Relatively soft and malleable, as Dear Reader Mr. Gillan commented; teeth were still at severe risk.

Anyway, whether or not you ever lost a filling to this stuff, it was an old candy. I haven’t seen any in years. But in my email inbox this morning was my monthly newsletter from The Vermont Country Store – a wonderful source of household goods presumed extinct but somehow obtainable from VCS: Tangee lipstick. Herbal Essence shampoo. Garibaldi biscuits. And what are they featuring in candy this month? Bonomo Turkish Taffy.

Go to their site – http://www.vermontcountrystore.com . There it is, and they are even insisting it is the original recipe. Mind you, if it is, either this is the oldest taffy in the world, or NASA has re-invented it as a superior sealing material for rocket valves … but there it is.

And yes, I know that Google and every other search engine in the world targets my ads with references to what I have recently visited or said. It’s still rather wonderful and strange to get this reference delivered to me over my morning coffee – not in an ad on the side bar, but in correspondence from a third-party merchant from whom I have never bought any of it. (Especially the banana … wow, that was horrible.)

It was like a little wave from the Vast Unknown, letting me know that weapons grade weirdness is still out there. It was a reminder that things remain wonderful and strange and mysterious and they need to be chronicled. It was Kage cocking snooks at me and telling me to pay attention.

Because life is lovelier and odder than even Kage ever imagined; and as long as that is so, there is a point to being alive. Live to be surprised, live to be amazed, live to notice the interconnected High Weirdness the universe is concocting on every hand.

Okay, climbing arthritically off my soapbox now. I must go assemble some archaic legal forms that no one uses anymore except (apparently) the Germans, so as to prove that Kage is dead and I am her heir and it’s perfectly all right to buy her book and pay her Estate … more High Weirdness. If a Munchkin shows up with a Scroll from the Coroner, I will let you all know.

Kage Baker died a year ago today – January 31st, at 1:15 in the morning.

I haven’t said all I need to say about her, not by a long shot – but the worst year of my life is over; I can put off my mourning black and wear cheerful purple instead. I can look back to a year ago and see something – anything! – besides Kage’s death.  I made it.

Also, at 1:13 in the morning this morning, I finished Nell Gwynne II; Or, Who We Did On Our Summer Holiday. It is done. Today I’ll do some necessary clean up and spell-checking, and send it off to Linn-the-agent, the most patient woman in the world.

It’s a nice little steampunk romance, set in the semi-tropical splendour of Torquay, Devon. Even the Ladies of Nell Gwynne go on holiday … Boy meets girls, boy loves girls, girls sink boy’s fiendish submersible gun platform in the cold, cold sea. Boy runs off to Australia to sulk, girls return home to their high-class London brothel with a bucket of seashells and a new fox terrier. Ta-da!

I hope and pray this will not disgrace the name of Kage Baker. I don’t think it will.

Now off to correct my execrable spelling – now, that was one of the pains of her life …

Kage Baker spent the last day of her life in a tremendously good mood. I can’t think of a much better way to spend it, than happy and with your family.

I ought to leave today’s entry at that. But I don’t want to. It wasn’t one of those quiet, nunlike deathbeds, all white linen and hushed voices – Kage’s bedroom was full of people all day, laughing and joking and carrying on. Kage was, too. Even the last few hours, when she was in coma, we all stayed and talked to her – but before that, it was a pretty lively party. Kage was indisputably happy this day a year ago.

That really, really matters.

We went to tremendous lengths to accomplish it, too. Had to fight well-meaning hospitals, evil architecture (I will never trust stairs again.), and a lot of medical personnel who were too tired and overworked to treat patients like people. Kage had only three neglectful nurses, but even one is too much when you’re sick enough to be in the hospital in the first place. Patients like Kage – who was polite and cooperative and too sick to fight back – are easily overlooked and bullied. Luckily, I am a nasty old lady … always pack someone like me, Dear Readers, when you have to go to the hospital. I am a vicious were-Corgi.

Anyway, it took a truly surprising amount of effort to ensure that Kage could die in her own home, in her own bed, in a place that was not filled with brights lights, whistles, alarms and shouted conversations. Really, trying to actually rest in a hospital is like napping in a machine shop. Where the mechanics are all loud drunks. Servicing carnival rides.

It helped that none of us who were with Kage this day a year ago realized how short the time was. We had a house full of loving people – Anne and her girls, Emma Rose, and a blessed surprise in the person of Wayne Fisher.

Wayne is an old, old, friend – from Faire, and all manner of life adventures between Faires, too. Kage loved him like a son. We didn’t expect him, and then he suddenly turned up – having driven from the Bay Area at his usual 90 mph – to see her. He stayed till the end, and made her very happy.

All day, people were with her – usually at least one niece curled up on the bed with her and often all three. She and Anne got to sit and talk a lot – an indulgence I had had all along but that poor Anne had not. As I said, we thought we had a month or two; Anne planned to be up every weekend for that time, and so she and Kage were settling in for some serious catching up … but I think Kage knew it would not last.

Her head began to hurt again. The tumour in her cerebellum had not been idle all this while: as our friend Athene had commented in despair, “She doesn’t have cancer, she has killer kudzu!” Yeah, pretty much. And it was pressing on her medulla oblongata, which controls (among some other vital things) one’s breathing.

Kage thought the mere sound of medulla oblongata was hilarious, by the way. Like clavicle, and uvula, and epiglottis. They made her laugh. Writer are odd.

People talk, with perfectly warranted horror, of how cancer can take agonizing years to kill someone. I guess none of us is ever pleased with what we get out of Death’s grab bag, because those of us who have watched our loved ones melt like candles in a blow torch cannot really recommend that route, either. Do you now how quickly cancer can grow? In the space of a day and a night, a woman can go from vital and alive to dead of respiratory failure as a tumour eats her body’s ability to remember how to breathe.

That’s what actually killed Kage. It got harder and harder to breathe, and the pain in her head began to grow. I could give her meds to deal with the pain, and for maybe the only time in her life she didn’t fight me about taking them. I had meds to strengthen her heart beat too – another task of that hilarious medulla – but she didn’t want them and I didn’t press her. As the afternoon wore on, she began to slip away and I knew she did not want to linger.

The last thing she asked for was to have her pillows re-arranged. The last thing she said was that she was much more comfortable. The day was over by then, evening coming on; I think she saw that last sunset, looking west our her bedroom window. She saw something – there were a few minutes when her eyes were intently focused, just after we fixed her pillows … Shortly thereafter, she was in a coma.

We all stayed with her. We talked to her, we assured her she could go, we played Do You Remember? There was actual laughter, and there was still family all over her bed.  People took it in turns to nap in the living room, but we mostly even ate there with Kage. I think. I don’t actually remember eating or drinking: my memory of that evening is a fixed camera shot on Kage’s face. I was only a pair of eyes, watching her.

Anne and the girls had fought it as long as they could by midnight, and were lying down exhausted in the other rooms.  But I had given up sleep weeks before. Wayne and I were holding Kage in our arms when her breath stopped at last, but I think she was already far gone and away before that. The high tide that night peaked at 10:15 PM. She died 3 hours later, at 1:15 AM, as it flowed away into the west. Couldn’t have managed it more neatly if she had tried.

I checked her pulse – still. I checked her pupils – fixed and uneven. I checked her breathing – quiet at last.

I went to wake up Anne.

Kage Baker was especially busy this day a year ago. True, she was confined to bed and asleep a lot of the time – but when you are dying, finding a comfortable place in bed and getting some sleep is work. It takes a lot of concentration. Otherwise, you just sort of zone out and waste the time you still have.

At least, the only person with whom I have conversed during the critical process so informed me. And she was an expert, both on work and on wasting time. It was a basic tenet of Kage’s nature that she threw herself into both with total concentration. This day a year ago, she was on an upswing – energy rising, strength peaking, alert and alive and full of ideas. We thought it was the comforts of being home, that she was responding to the good vibes of her own place. Somehow, it never occurred to me that it was the flaring of a candle before it goes out.

This day last year was a Friday, and we were expecting guests: sister Anne, her daughters Kate and Annie, and our niece Emma Rose. Bear in mind, this was a festive occasion – we thought Kage had a month or two left to her, and Anne was initiating what she planned as regular visits. Kage was looking forward to playing hostess from the comfort of her bed. I was looking forward to guests. I spent a lot of the day frantically cleaning house (not too well, it had piled up a lot of neglect …) but I managed to arrange it so all our guests would have somewhere to sit and somewhere to lie down. Sometimes that and food is all one can manage.

Between the Dyson and the Swiffer, Kage and I plotted. Literally. She called these brainstorming sessions, and they had a lot more in common with flying upside down and sideways through burning barns than they did with sudden cerebral lightning. Kage’s planning sessions were volatile and interactive, and  swooped from topic to topic as connections were made in her mind. I remember that that day we worked on Who We Did On Our Summer Holidays, and some more details on the troll-witch marriage story. Some more adventures of Lord Ermenwyr, including some that will never see the light of public publishing; we laughed a lot.

We talked about the garden – what to plant in the next few months, how the heritage Roman hyacinths were naturalizing (those were her favourite flower, and finding them was quite a prize), whether or not to plant a plum tree. We had one of our In A Series discussions of old candy – the sweeties we had loved as kids: which were extinct, which had changed, the virtues and flaws of alterations in recipes and packaging. Kage could talk for hours about the histories of the candies we ate when we were kids. So can I, at least after doing it so many times with Kage: though my own memory is not so good that I can still sing the Bonomo Turkish Taffy jingle. Kage could.

She talked for some time about a pet project she had cherished for years: the life of Long John Silver, post-Treasure Island. Kage adored Long John Silver; he was, I think, her ultimate father figure icon. She had a novel all worked out in her head, that would have sequed from his own father and improbable youth  into his fabled career. His mother would have been a daughter of Baron Samedi, and his own wife (there’s a Mrs. Silver mentioned in Treasure Island, did you know?) a priestess of Erzuli …

I will never write this one. I don’t have Kage’s love of the sea, her love of rum and orchids and Caribbean nights, her love of big bluff sailors … her special voice. Some of her voice I possess, in the blood we share, but some is uniquely hers and cannot be duplicated. I wish it could; this sounded like a hell of a tale. But it is beyond me, just as it was beyond her a year ago.

We sure had fun talking about it that day, though.

Back to the job, now – the Ladies are all stripped down and greased up and poised for attack;  Mr.Pickett is about to be blitzkrieged with foix gras, plum duff and the intensely focused charms of Lady Beatrice.

Kage Baker was a great gardener. She could grow almost anything except zinnias. Don’t know why those would not grow – zinnias are tough, usually – but she could not get them to thrive, anywhere we ever lived. Which was a genuine pity, because she loved them. But they withered or mutated into calendulas or were attacked by ants or eaten by gophers. One year they were all devoured by white-headed sparrows. A true grotesquerie.

For years she avoided tulips, because she felt they were boring. Florist flowers in vapid pastels, she said. La la, what a drag. Also, tulips have a reputation for being difficult. It’s a warranted reputation, too, but if you find the right varieties, the trouble is worth it. When we moved to Pismo Beach, Kage discovered exotic tulips. She also took up residence in a portion of California that gets cold in the winter, that has actual frost, that sometimes freezes. And when she planted tulips there, they bloomed.

Kage went crazy for tulips. Never mind those bags of sad, dessicated bulbs you find in the hardware stores – she pored over catalogues and ordered her plants from breeders. Her favourite was Old House Gardens (oldhousegardens.com) which specializes in rare, heirloom and antique bulbs. Tulips with petals like dragonfly wings and damascened stilettos. Tulips with fringes, with viral colour patterns, with toothed edges, with actual freaking scents! Tulips with odd numbers of petals, tulips that re-bloomed or had sprays of multiples; the aboriginal feral tulips from the wilds of Turkey and Afghanistan.

She planted them all in planters, so we could keep track of them. At first she took them up in winter  and stored them in the fridge – we had one crisper for veggies and one for tulips – but eventually it proved cold enough to leave them in the earth. All our roses were ringed with tulips, and whole planters were dedicated to them. For a few precious weeks in January and February, the garden looked like a medieval tapestry. And since little else was blooming then (except nasturtiums. Nasturtiums will survive nuclear holocausts and the zombie apocalypse), it was twice as rich and gorgeous.

We never picked them. For cut tulips, we went to Trader Joe’s and got their wonderful, locally grown and ridiculously cheap tulips bouquets. You can find some really lovely odd ones in those. Kage always kept them until the petals went transparent and looked like stained glass, and fell all over her desk with a noise like ripped silk. I found tulip petals in all the drawers when I packed the desk out …

This time a year ago, only a few had bloomed. There were two buds; there was one fully opened flower, one of the red and white mixes she loved best. I forget which one – maybe an Absolom or an Insolinde or a Mabel; maybe a Striped Sail, which may have been her utter favourite. All I remember is that one tulip was standing in the garden, glowing red and white. Kage couldn’t go out to see it – she was simply no longer walking at all – but I told her about it and brought her a photo on my phone. She was delighted.

In fact, all that day she seemed to gain strength and energy. Anne and her daughters  and the lovely Emma Rose were coming up that weekend, and more good friends were expected the next weekend, too. Kage was eager to see people, lively and in a good mood. She dictated notes on a story about a witch that married a troll – major in-law problems, there –  and we read through another volume of P.G. Wodehouse.

I wish I had managed to help her to the window, though. To see the last tulip.

Kage Baker won several awards the year she died. Some of them were undoubtedly subtly influenced by the fact that she was dead – as an historian and an artist, Kage was quite aware that dying always boosts an artist’s sales. It’s a cliche.

Of course, it’s often valid, as well; someone dies unexpectedly and their peers look around and say: Whoops. They’re gone. You mean (fill in the blank) is the last thing we’re going to get from them? Jeez, maybe it’s time they got an award? And Heath Ledger wins the Oscar, which he most certainly deserved but would not ordinarily have been awarded so early in his career. The Academy likes to wait sometimes, as if somehow someone remarkable is going to turn in a performance that invalidates whatever brilliance they have already exhibited …

Kage, luckily, found out about most of her nominations before she died. It made her very happy, too. They were not the only ones she’d gotten over her career, of course; and they all made her exult. Nothing made her dance around the living room like getting a nomination. Yes, it’s cool to win, but it’s also true that even getting nominated is a thrill: and Kage saw no reason not to enjoy that. She cherished every Hugo rocket ship she got just for being nominated.

Mind you, the ones she won were pretty nifty, too. Her Ted Sturgeon Award is faceted lucite. It stood right in front of a west-facing window by her desk; every afternoon it refracted rainbows all over the living room and kitchen, right up to the feet of her Emperor Norton Award (given out for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason”). The Emperor Norton award is a distinguished bronzoid gentleman with a huge feather cockade (which falls off at intervals), inexplicably as armless as Rodin’s Balzac. Kage loved that one …

Kage’s Locus Award sits beside the computer on my desk. Her Nebula reigns in glorious splendour on the top of the desk, surrounded by candles and lava lamps. And behind me is the Romantic Times Award she won last year for Best Science Fiction Novel, for Empress of Mars. All these were in 2010, when I journeyed from convention to convention to accept her posthumous honors …

Now I’ve just been informed that Kage is nominated once again by Romantic Times, for Best Fantasy Novel. This  time it’s for The Bird of the River, which came out from Tor Publishing last year shortly after Kage died. I intend to go, of course, just in case – especially as the RT Convention this year is being held right here in Los Angeles (check it out here: http://www.rtbookreviews.com/convention-home). I can drive there and still sleep in my own bed! And the RT folks are grand people, and the convention will be fun.

It will save me a plane trip, too. The Award I carried home from the 2010 Convention is a gorgeous crystalline trophy shaped like a writhing flame on a base … or like a very large spear head. I guess it depends on what your expectations are. Last year, the TSA’s expectations were that I was carrying a weapon-shaped thingie … although, once they saw it and read it, they were cool about it. Still, if Kage wins again, I’ll be ever so happy to bring her booty home in my PT Cruiser … which, even decorated with chrome and pirate regalia as it is, has never attracted the attention of the TSA.

In the meantime, though, I must go write. Between the good news, the housepets, burning my toast, spilling my coffee and taking the nephew to school, I have yet to write a word today on Who We Did etc. And I need to. Lady Beatrice is being borne in a dark carriage toward a rendezvous with a mad submariner, the other Ladies are converging on Torquay beach in their underwear, and the fate of a French hermaphrodite brig hangs on a folk song …

And the whole thing has to be done by Monday next.

Kage Baker was a natural analyst. She subjected the world to some kind of personal cladistics in her head, and re-assigned its parts into new and more detailed relationships. She was a human prism, breaking white light into its components.

She was one of those people who takes things apart to see how they work – and actually gets them back together with no parts left over. Although for some years in her 20’s she kept a big brass alarm clock in 4 pieces – one large, 3 very small – on her desk, to remind herself how important it was to get all the pieces back in … the clock worked, though, albeit it gained or lost time on some mysterious rhythm I could never deduce. And it made a weird noise when you wound it …

Being a woman of her hands, Kage often took things apart. More often, she put broken things back together. She was a kitchen alchemist, analyzing tastes or scents or colours on the kitchen table and mixing them up – like Love Potion No. 9 – right there in the sink. She had an amazing palette, and could (and did) break down recipes from the flavours, including “secret” ingredients.

Many of her experiments concerned making colours, as that was one of the things that literally fed her soul. I think she enjoyed some sort of kinesthesia, where colours created tactile sensations; looking at the world was like walking through a constant bead curtain for her, flowing and tapping over her skin. Stained glass could make her dizzy, and the application of water colours was a sensual exercise. She did all her paintings in ink and water colour, and was always experimenting with new and different washes.

Two of her favourites were based on Higgins Payne’s Grey ink – both the waterproof and the non. One day she left an empty bottle of each out on the roof beside her tower, and some months later they eventually filled up with rain water. The waterproof dregs yielded a warm, prismatic wash  that bled out at the edges in  pale oranges and blues; the other one produced cooler colours, green and lavender. Brushed on wet paper, both made the most interesting storm clouds ever.

She loved Windsor Newton inks, but she collected them as much for the labels as the colours. They come in wonderful pyramidal bottles with marvelous illustrations on them, like exotic chocolates or painted tiles. Mind you, they are good inks – although the carmine tends to clot a bit, and smells dreadfully of cochineal beetles. But the beautiful little pictures on the bottles themselves were what enchanted her.

She kept her inks and paint boxes in a wooden ammunition crate, in separate whiskey tins – you know, those hinged tin boxes with Bonnie Prince Charlie looking uncharacteristically competent on them? Or a stag staring out, suggesting that he expects to live a lot longer if you’ll just drink what’s in the bottle. Kage was not overfond of whiskey (except as an accompaniment to the Amazing Jacobs Brownies, which I’ll tell you about some day) but I am – when people bought me really good whiskey in commemorative tins, she kept them and filled them with ink bottles.

I have them all, in storage. Someday I may have time to write some letters in Squirrel Brown or Emerald Green. When I’ve saved the French Navy and sent the Ladies home to the vicinity of Whitehall.

When this year is over, and I can break down the bleak white winter light of my mourning into brilliant colour, through the prism of Kage’s memory.

Like a box of cookies

Like another box of cookies ...

Kage Baker … where do I go from here today? I honestly don’t know. I need to write, because I must finish Who We Did On Our Summer Holidays and send it to Kage’s agent by the end of Monday next.

And I ought to see to some mundanities like laundry, dishes, parrot maintenance, retrieving the rawhide chew thrown into the top of the bookshelf  by the projectile-talented corgi.

But I have a headache … whine, whine, whine.

Kage got bad headaches, migraines – much more so than me. Her own solution for a migraine headache always started with “I will do nothing and see if it goes away spontaneously.” (For the record, this never worked and I don’t recommend it.) Things would then segue into copious amounts of real Coke, then black coffee, then an eventual lie down. Note the absence of pain killers? She hated taking pain pills – seemed to think it was wimpy or something. Her last week of life, I still had to argue with her about this …

Once I finally got her to take something and she had slept a bit, the pain would usually withdraw to the point where she was bored, but also still visually challenged. Her therapy for this stage was to watch cartoons. She claimed that sitting still and watching certain kinds of animation provided a soothing rhythm for her recovering optic nerves without placing strain on her eye muscles. Not anime! She preferred classic Disney or Warner Brothers, but in later years Samurai Jack, Spongebob Squarepants and Invader Zim did the trick, too.

Was this total nonsense? No idea. My first instinct was always to  chalk it up to reverse hypochondria, or faith healing: Kage was better than anyone else I ever knew at sinking herself into an alternate reality, so maybe it was a form of trance. It seemed to work for her, I can attest to that.

It does nothing for me, though. But then, not much does – I can’t take NSAIDS right now, and Tylenol might as well be artificial sweetener for all the good it does me. So I am going to glug a cup of Don Brown’s coffee (world-famed headache killer) move the carton full of The Scarlet Spy copies off my bed, and pull the covers up. Harry will sing me to sleep for a while.

Then I can get back to planning night maneuvers in the English Channel.

Kage Baker was largely indifferent to the traditional attitudes regarding the days of the work week. She did have that Melendys-Saturday thing, but that was about it. The whole TGIF, Black Monday, Hump Day cycle pretty much missed her. Sometimes it was because she was unclear as to what day of the week it was, but mostly she just didn’t care.

Having a work week at all was a hideously artificial state to Kage. She loathed it. She tried very hard to make her living in less conventional ways – mostly via art – in her 20’s, and almost succeeded. That alone should have convinced her she would eventually win one of the more exclusive lotteries in the working world, and make her living with her pen  … but almost surviving on your art really only works when you are very young. And when it’s spring and summer; that helps a lot, too. She gave in to the inevitable when she was 27, and finally took a job in the pink collar ghetto.

The photo below aptly demonstrates her enthusiasm. It was the picture for her first office ID tag. She looks like she’s just woken up to find herself in The Village …

However, Kage did recognize the necessity of keeping money coming in. For the many years she was part of the office brigade, she was a stellar worker. Never late, rarely absent, worked hard; a quiet, unassuming, committed cubicle dweller. Many employers were favourably impressed by the copious notes she kept at all her jobs, and her tidy record-keeping. And she did keep good records.

That wasn’t what she was writing, though, as she scribbled away at her desk between letters and phone calls. A lot of the Company bosses who make live miserable for the field Operatives began life as satirical  sketches by the quiet lady with the long red braid … and it was in that atmosphere where the motives of Dr. Zeus changed from altruism to  greed. Kage looked at the business world, examined it in detail, judged it like Athene Ergatis, the patron of working women: and dismissed it as an unworthy life form.  In that very different world in her head, Kage plotted out the destruction of the corporate life.

In the meantime, to survive it, she ignored it as much as she could. I was the one who set the alarm clock, started coffee, laid out the vitamins and then drove us to work – Kage had a blind faith (literally, sometimes, if she couldn’t get her eyes open) that I would deliver her to the right job. As I recall, I usually did.

This makes Kage sound rather like an undisciplined maniac who simply couldn’t cope with real life. But that’s totally untrue. She had an iron discipline and astonishing self-control; despite hating everything to do with the office life, she kept at it steadfastly, doing good jobs for her employers. She got steady raises (when anyone still gave raises); she never got fired (until everyone in the country started getting down-sized). (The first time … in the ’90’s. ). The only 2 times I remember her getting a reprimand was for wearing pink high tops and a  Hawaiian shirt to work (she loved both); and for threatening to break a fellow worker’s nose with a stapler when he would not stop yelling Cowabunga! in her ear …  and those were both in the early days. An office just wasn’t where she wanted to be or what she wanted to do, and nothing ever slowed her determination to escape.

Consequently, she had no interest in the social conventions and rounds of office life. She dutifully contributed to pot lucks and baby showers and birthday parties; she liked her co-workers. And she wrote and wrote and wrote, and submitted, and edited: and one day she suddenly had an agent and a publishing contract. And she quit (with two week’s notice, because she really was a conscientious person) and went home to do what she really wanted.

She promptly did not sell another thing for a year. But we were frugal (being poor helps one economize by habit) and she stage managed for Renaissance Faires, and we hung on. And while she sometimes had to take part-time jobs again over the years, when there were dry spells. Kage never again had to deal with the 9-5, Monday through Friday regimen she so detested. She stopped caring about Mondays, or Wednesday,s  or even Fridays – except to get us packed for a Faire if one was on.

And in 16 years she wrote the 8 books of the Company series, 2 steampunk novels, 3 fantasy novels, a children’s book, two pirate novellas, a stand-alone SF novel and dozens of short stories, novelettes, novellas … and the half-dozen embryonic stories that now live in  my head.

Imagine what she would have done if she’d escaped sooner. Imagine if she had lived.

Now, Dear Readers, I have to go arm the Ladies of Nell Gwynne with adzes, drills and other unladylike toys, and supply them with a gallon of sheep-grease.