Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker, like all writers, occasionally suffered from writer’s block.

It’s a curious and agonizing disease. You don’t just revert to the non-writer’s frame of mind, oh no – you want to write, you need to write, and you simply cannot. The words don’t come. You may know the plot – you have it mapped out on in neat notes and diagrams and 5 colours, you actually know what comes next! Except it won’t. You can read over the last few hundred words, that came spilling out in glorious glossomania, and it’s like someone else wrote them. You’d love to meet them and maybe take dictation, but they seem to have moved to Zimbabwe …

All writers dread this. All writers encounter it. Some writers, according to agonized reports, actually primarily exist in this horrid state, and can only really write during the intermittent lifting of the block. That would be like being a hydro-electric generator in a seasonal stream, waiting out the dry season for those 3 precious months when the water might finally flow.

One of Kage’s rare gifts was the uncanny rarity of her writer’s block. And the brevity. When she absolutely could not write, an hour in the garden often did the trick. Separating and replanting the irises, pruning the roses, moving the nasturtium vines around – because you can’t get rid of nasturtiums, you can only convince them to grow in another direction – and she would come pelting back in and dive back into the story. Maybe it was the visual metaphor of the damned nasturtiums.

For really severe cases, a day of gaming on the computer usually blew the block apart. The Monkey Island games were her favourites. Sometimes playing them would segue into something to do because she didn’t actually want to write, though. Or at least not as much as she wanted to wander around Plunder Island. She’d save them as rewards to herself, then – ” … another chapter, get Mendoza out of whatever hell she’s fallen into now, and then I can go fight The Pirate LeChuck!” she would mutter. “Listen, would you go look up DNA and see if the helix turns deosil or widdershins?”

(Answer: both. Think about it.)

Last ditch solution to writer’s block: an obscure, weird movie called The Wrong Box. It’s based on the novel of the same name, written as a family lark by Robert Louis Stevenson and his step-son Lloyd. It’s a gloriously weird Victorian pastiche, hysterically funny and full of eye candy. For some reason, the film totally fascinated Kage and she watched it over and over, laughing harder every time. Even as I write this,  our parrot Harry is whistling the main theme from the movie, which he memorized over the years …

None of her solutions work for me. It’s like insomnia or hiccoughs; other people’s solutions never work. It’s amusing to watch someone try and recite the alphabet through a mouthful of peanut butter, but they aren’t going to stop hiccoughing. I have to try and find my own. The first step is identifying whether or not writer’s block is the problem – the last 6 months have been so full of grief and strain, sometimes I don’t know if I can’t write or just can’t plain old function. So far, I can’t  tell what my stamina is, or how much I have, or what turns the flow on and off.

Whether or not I can get out of bed is a helpful clue. And this blog is a fine axe to take to the occasional block. So is a round or two of computer Mahjong  or Plants Vs Zombies. My own last ditch is apparently to give up and read for an hour. More solutions  in the ever-changing puzzle of  How To Make This Work.

Tomorrow: fiction is reality. For a given definition of reality …

Kage Baker was a fan of steampunk before it even had a name. She was fascinated by clockwork.  Brass  brightwork and beveled glass delighted her eyes. She liked machines that clicked and struck gongs, rather than purred. She loved complex gearing systems, despite the fact that she never managed to shift gears on a bicycle in her life.

Of course, the fact that the ancient two-wheeler (she called it The Flying Saucer. I have no idea why.) on which she learned was made of cast iron may have contributed to that; nonetheless, the gear on even a svelte Schwinn defeated her. Though that may have been for the best: the streets in the Hollywood Hills were all at angles so acute that the ability to build up any speed would have launched a bike rider right off the edge of the Hills and over the freeway. Luckily, Kage never got out of low gear.

The old television show The Wild, Wild West was one of her all-time favourites. No one realized it at the time – in the 1960’s, steampunk was unrecognized – but the show had the look down pat even if no-one had given it a name yet. If all you’ve ever seen, Dear Reader, was the very odd cinematic version with Will Smith, do yourself a favour and go find the TV series (there are episodes on youtube). It will amuse and delight you, give you a look at one of the unacknowledged roots of steampunk, and also provide a peek at some of the sets on the inside of Kage’s head.

The other side of this bright brass coin was darker. Kage had nightmares from an early age of being made herself of clockwork. She would dream often that the complicated joints and gears of her hands were exposed, or that a window had opened in her skull: all within was clicking, whirring machinery and tiny puffs of steam. And this was the ultimate and original origin of the cyborg operatives in her Company stories; although, 30 years after waking up in terror to go check her face in the bathroom mirror, they had evolved into sleeker and more modern machines. Kage was proud of them, too. But there is still an echo in all the stories, of her own unease at the idea of being part machine.

However, none of that cast a shadow on her delight when steampunk burst (clanking discreetly) on the genre fiction scene. “I gotta write this!” she exclaimed. Some of the results were  her Victorian invisible government agency, the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, and the entire novel  Not Less Than Gods. Even before that, though, she wrote of a perfect clockwork hero in the short story “Oh, False Young Man!” (Dark Mondays collection, Night Shade Books). And of course, the rail-riding geared caravans she invented for The Anvil of the World were essentially wind-ups cars. True, they were wound up by racheting levers, operated by mighty-thewed and dedicated men – but their direct ancestors were the key-operated cars Kage loved in Warner Brothers cartoons.

It’s been a little harder to outfit a Ladies auxiliary for the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, particularly in the time before bustles. It’s easy to draw some cunning little super-engineered firearm from the inside pocket of a waistcoat; impossible to do the same with a corseted bodice. Reticules only hold so much, and have less cubic available than a tall top hat. Making the Ladies the denizens of a brothel has helped: so often they can dispense with those awkward outer layers …

Though Kage always wanted to come up with some deadly clockwork to fit in a bustle. I have the notes – so who knows?

Tomorrow: things that fall in the channel

Kage Baker was left-handed. Not aggressively so – ordinary scissors didn’t disable her. She never wanted any of those cunning isomer-tools made for the sinister to use. We had left-handed refrigerators from time to time (due to the shape of various kitchens occasionally restricting which way the fridge door could open) and she complained when she had to switch hands to use them. But all her writing and drawing was pure lefty.

She drew a lot. I have sketchpads full of her train-of-consciousness art; she carried them everywhere in high school, and did pencil sketches to illustrate the stories she told in the cafeteria. (She told tarot cards for pocket money there, too.) For some years she did commercial murals with Momma – they spent one hideous summer painting snowscapes on the side of a professional Santa Claus’s sleigh – but her own chosen media was ink and water colours. Kage adored coloured inks.

Accordingly, along with her fondness for maps and ink went a love of intricate alphabets. She taught herself calligraphy. Being left-handed, though, she had to letter very, very carefully – otherwise her hand trailed over the wet ink as she worked across the page. I’ve seen other lefties just curve their hands around to accomplish this. To Kage,  though, it was easier to just do her lettering backwards and upside down. I’ve wondered what that said about her brain …

Human brains have two halves, hemispheres divided vertically. The rather simplified accepted wisdom is that the left brain controls the right side of the body, and is orderly, logical, intellectual, reasonable. The right brain in turn controls the left side, and is creative, intuitive, emotional and less verbal.  Left-handed people are running off the right side of their brains; they are frequently creative and disorganized. Think Leonardo de Vinci, who invented everything but finished almost nothing. Right-handed people, conversely, have the left side of their brains dominant, and tend to be planners and doers. They make lists, ace multiple answer tests and are, in fact, most of the people in the world.

Intelligence has little to do with this. Lots of people are logical, methodical and stupid. The world is also rich in artistic idiots – not savants, who have a whole other suite of problems, but people who genuinely create art and also genuinely create chaos.

So, Kage was left-handed and I am right handed. She could write literally upside-down and backwards; after all those years reciting in front of a nun’s desk, I can read that way. She could do research for her books and end up finding roads beyond the fields we know: usually through some wardrobe doors, I think. I did the same and brought home solid facts  – which was not always useful. I went to the library once for information on the fabled island of Jamaica, and somehow brought home a book about its cement factories. (Huh, said Kage. Listen, go find out if bacteria can live inside cement, okay?)

What we finally decided was that, what with the handedness and all, we constituted one complete and fairly well-wired brain. One of the few differences pathologists found in Einstein’s brain after he died, was an unusual number of connections between his two cerebral hemispheres. While our brains weren’t physically connected, as a team we did have access to both a right and left side all the time. It made up for the times we were each half-witted.

On the one hand, this makes it harder for me to function now – half my brain has been amputated. On the other hand, Kage left me a good image of her brain in all her writings. And on the other other hand , I’m used to her running her thoughts through my brain, and vice versa. In effect, I have a brain prosthesis.

See the lights blink?

Tomorrow: musings on steampunk. Probably.

Kage Baker left me boxes and envelopes and Peechee folders and plastic bags and old purses full of writing. Manuscripts, some of them; others are single pages and torn scraps of same, tucked into books all over the house. I found a lot of them when I cleaned out our apartment after she died (and two $50 bills, too, to the amazement of our friend Neassa and I: we went out to dinner that night on Kage), as well as bits of stories tucked at random between pages of other stories … it’s an Escher library here, weaving in and out of dimensions and stacking shelving on the ceiling.

Last night I sat down with one of the older manuscripts to read through it – I needed to hear Kage’s voice, in something I haven’t read a hundred times. I had to sort through it so all the pages ran the same way and in order – no numbers, of course – before I could read through the old handwritten pages. No one has ever seen this one but me. It’s the beginning of a sequel to a book she never even submitted, but that insisted on being written.

This afternoon my patient sister Kimberly (with whom I now live) handed me a little scrap of blue-lined note paper: on it, in faint pencil and written across the lines rather than on them, is this:

Now peace be on your soul,
And peace be on all here
And peace be in our house
At the darkening of the year.

For though the shadow fell
And though the blade was red
We’ll drink beside the hearth
To the unborn and the dead.

Ch: The child is being born.
No, nothing on the bough
But the berry and the thorn.

And life stretches up
And shadow stretches down
And the fire burns high
Along the antlered crown.

Fear never cold
Fear never heat
There is a broken circle all unbroken:
There we meet.

Ch: The child is being born.
No, nothing on the bough
But the berry and the thorn.

It’s Kage’s handwriting. I’ve never seen it before. It must have lain on the living room floor for hours while we all walked over it before someone noticed it. Must have fallen out from between the pages, from where I sat reading across the room … right?

Right.

Tomorrow: I can hardly wait to see …

Kage Baker liked to explore ruins.

She loved history, and the pieces left behind from it in the abandoned lots of time. One of the things she wished she had done with her life was archeology – or one of the other things, at least; she still would have been telling stories. Her Company tales were her particular kind of archeology. She dug through history for scraps and anomalies, and speculated on what they might have meant. Science’s loss was fiction’s gain, as she could range much farther afield and into much wilder lands. But the actual past was her trigger for the writer’s irresistible question: What if …

Growing up in Los Angeles might seem like especially barren soil for such an enterprise, but that’s only if you believe what you see in the movies. We grew up in the Hollywood Hills, in a steep-angled neighborhood where the back street wasn’t even  paved until Kage was 7 years old. This wasn’t the part of the Hills where money lived. It was where painters and propmen, grips and extras, and the people who make furtive cheap movies lived. The house next door (which Momma rented out when we were kids, and where our brothers lived later on) had been built in the early 1900’s as an illegal film processing lab; the porches that ringed it were where the lookouts kept watch for Thomas Edison’s Pinkerton men, who might come up the Cahuenga Pass at any moment with axes and kerosene and matches. The house across the street housed a series of nocturnal film companies who spent more on thick curtains than on clothes …

A lot of movie people, the rank and file, built their houses up there. Carpenters and prop guys built the best and craziest ones, furnished with studio cast-offs and tawdry leftovers. The architects were eccentric and amateur, the buildings were romantic and ramshackle, and you never knew what sort of mad palace you might come on, wandering around up there. Some we admired from the street; others were falling down by the 1960’s, when we rambled, and so we rambled on right through them, sifting the wreckage for mysteries.

Kage always made sure we had a camera and a leash with us. The camera had no film and we had no dog, but a couple of girls could always claim they were looking for their lost pet if challenged while climbing over a wall. We never got arrested or raped. God knows why.

There’s half an abandoned castle up there, made from hand-cut blocks of the native golden granite. There are several Moorish miniatures, pashas’  pieds-a-terre, that have been continuously re-tiled over the last half-century as drunks ran into the pillars. There’s a Tudor house decorated with Bavarian gargoyles. There are garden follies without end, apparently marking  the line where imagination shades into hallucination.

Those were Kage’s favourites.  Every weird facade and unlikely vista was an entry into another world. You could go there, if you could just figure out which narrow dirt road led to which overgrown driveway, or which sagging hand-laid wall of rocks and Redicrete you had to climb over. She swore  it was so, when she was small. By the time we were grown, she didn’t insist on it – but I think she believed it even more. I can point to a dozen front walks that lead right out of this world, where the sidewalk is Los Angeles but the front porch is … somewhere else.

The power of borders is profound. Edges, says Sir Terry Pratchett, are where the real power is; Kage agreed completely. Identifying those borders, marking them, crossing them: it sets up a current like electricity between opposing poles, and that energy flows like a river in flood.

Kage and I grew up on the border of Faerieland. On that edge is where I mean to stay.

Tomorrow: bicamerality

… to announce that I am taking the day off. I have a belly-ache and other GI distractions. It may indeed be true that one must suffer to create – I’ve never been sure; when I am engrossed in one, I’m usually too busy to think about the other condition.

But I do know that in order to write, it’s easier when you can sit up. And sit still for more than 15 minutes. And focus your eyes. Having limited potential in these areas today, I am going to devote them to writing actual fiction.

Tomorrow: we will resume normal broadcasting. Well, I will. The rest of you are on your own.

Kage Baker was fascinated by maps. She could read them well, too,  which is not a universal skill by any means. Our cars were always crammed with maps of wherever we were traveling at any given time, and she could navigate us anywhere in California and most adjoining states with them. (And often had to.) When our VW bus caught fire one memorable morning, Kage almost forgot her purse, scrambling out – but she got the maps.

Online computer maps gave her even more room to roam, but she was always looking for older maps, more detailed maps. The advent of Google Earth was a gift from the gods for her: not just maps, but actual landscape! She spent so much time flying gleefully over miles and miles of virtual geography that she got motion sick. Nonetheless, she spent hours absorbing hawk’s eye views of the empty lands beyond the edges of the roads she knew, following stream beds and canyons and game trails until she threw up and had to lie down.

She always wanted to know the areas she wrote about. On the one hand, it’s why so many stories were set in California: this was her natural habitat. When she needed to set something somewhere else, she gathered descriptions and made that part of her habitat as well. She set out to learn what that place was like at street level. I think she could have been set down in any London for the past 500 years, and at least found her way to the Tower, the Thames, and the walls of the Old City. Probably some pubs, too.

On the other hand, setting a story someplace she didn’t yet know gave her an excuse to explore it. She’d set a story in the Amazon Basin or Bohemia, and then collect pertinent material like a squirrel with OCD. “I need this series of 1743 hunting maps,” she would declare, “someone has to find a wounded aurochs.”  “In 1743?” I would wonder. “Yeah, that’s the point!”

When we traveled, Kage narrated the pasts of the places we went. She’d point at buildings as we drove or strolled, and recount what had happened there 50, 100, 500 years agone. She’d describe former facades and landscaping. Just as often, she would describe what would be there, in her imagined future time, describing what would rise where now there was an empty lot or a Popeye’s Chicken. I often thought she didn’t know or care what it looked like in the here and now: she was always seeing somewhen else. She walked unconcernedly through things that no longer existed and had yet  to be born, and gave me a running travelogue as she did it. I sometimes worried she’d miss the turn back to Now. Or step off the curb in San Diego and get run over by a hackney cab in London.

The maps in her mind ran right off the edge of the world. What lay beyond, though, was not blank white space with warnings about the livestock. It became inhabited; roads and cities grew up and lived wherever she turned her speculative gaze.

I’m on a permanent road trip through Kage’s mind, now. The road signs are very clear, although the road itself disappears now again under drifts of sand, or rose petals, or feathers. Up ahead, the road through Pismo Beach turns into Torquay and heads inland through the grain fields at the heart of another continent … I think I’ll stop in Troon tonight, for a sandwich and a beer.

Tomorrow: Edges of Things

Kage Baker considered herself very straightforward. She saw herself as  logical, methodical and very much a cause-and-effect sort of person. She was wrong.

What she was, was inhumanly disciplined, dedicated to her goals, and just plain stubborn. When she started a project, she stayed with it until it was done, no matter how long it took. But her route, though as inexorable and ruthless as Sherman’s march to the sea, was likely to be a wild and twisty one. Her thought processes were laid out with a pretzel for a straight-edge.

Kage had a compass in her head. She always knew where she was in relation to the cardinal points of the map, which was extremely useful in navigating our way around California on back roads. We spent a lot of time doing that. And since I can get lost trying to exit a parking lot (I once spent 15 minutes trapped in one near the Griffith Park Zoo, going around in circles), that swinging needle in Kage’s skull got us out of a lot of lonely dead ends.

However, she couldn’t tell her left from her right. Luckily, she had a lasting scar on her left hand and eventually learned to look at her hands before she chose one direction or another. When we were driving, she tended to just point and say: “That way!” If she told me go North or bear East, I gibbered and and my brain leaked out my ears; if I asked her “Left or right?”, she confidently chose the wrong way  half the time. All of which contributed a lot to our getting lost and finding interesting places by accident …

That’s how we found where Budu was buried (ref. The Graveyard Game). Kage wanted to make sure he was buried somewhere that might  be undisturbed for the next century or so. And it had to be real. She knew it was in Chinatown, because she’d written it that way in Son, Observe the Time. But she had to see it. That was vital to Kage; she had to have a firm visualization of what she wrote about, and when she couldn’t build it clearly enough in her head – we went out and found something to put in place. She was pretty sure it was a side street off Grant, the main drag of Chinatown; but her landmarks dated from a trip with Dad when she was five years old … she remembered a shopfront with dried ducks in it, though.

There are a lot of shops with pitiful dried ducks in them in Chinatown. Also, there a lot of one-way streets. And the pedestrians have things to do, thank you very much, and are quite unconcerned with you driving where they want to walk. And Kage kept saying Turn Right where it was impossible to do so (even if she meant Right, which was always doubtful) and I was driving a manual transmission in an area where flat ground is apparently illegal. Finally, in an attempt not to slide backwards into San Francisco Bay, I made a frantic left turn and was forced into a side street called Waverly.

And there was a playground being put in at a school. An old building had been removed; the construction crew had cleared the ground right down to the original dirt of the hillside, and were preparing to asphalt it over. Kage yelled, “There! That has to be it! It’ll be there for years!” She rolled down the window and hung out, staring desperately as we went past, and told me to drive around the block so she could see it again.

Driving around any block in San Francisco is an interesting affair. One way streets that slant precipitously up hill and down , have no parking and are always full of trucks and pedestrians make it far too exciting. But we drove around that block of Waverly (more or less) a dozen times, until the transmission was moaning and Kage had the geography memorized.

And that’s where Budu is/was/will be buried. Every time we went to San Francisco after that, we drove by and waved to him. We got lost every time; Kage decided there had to be a force field near the place, to make it hard for just anyone to find it … but there Budu lies, safely hidden, until Joseph comes/will come/did come to resurrect him.  Budu would find it absurdly sentimental that we drove by to memorialize him, but Kage always had a soft spot for the Enforcers.

That’s what traveling with Kage was like in the “real” world. We usually slid sideways into the antechamber of the world in her head, and drove through the landscapes of her mind. And I’m still doing that now, still following that navigator who couldn’t tell Right from Left without a clue but  knew in her bones where the North Star was.

Tomorrow: Getting somewhere. Anywhere. Or erehwon.

Kage Baker wasn’t a night person. Given her druthers, she was asleep by midnight. Not that she got up all that early, but since she spent all the daylight hours working, she got as much work done as anyone who habitually pulled all-nighters.

I, on the other hand, am pretty much nocturnal. Nonetheless, I work on her stories now by daylight: she comes through more strongly then somehow. This means I save all my regenerative activities for night – I read, I work on this blog, I knit – oh yeah, and sometimes I sleep. Not much. Sleep is for sissies. Also for people who aren’t trying to channel a solar being, and Kage was utterly solar.

She was born on June 10th, a Gemini. Regardless of your feelings on astrology (personally, I take seriously the fact that the LA Times prints the things on the comics page), Kage was a pretty classic Gemini. There were always at least two people running around in her head, and sometimes more. She used to say that her characters had all gone feral in her mind, and her memories all belonged to other people – she just transcribed them into her stories.

Kage loved dawns, and daylight, and red roses. She was loved flames and always had a candle burning: usually one of those pink, rose-scented jar candles with the Virgin of Guadalupe on them, because they last for days.  She loved incense and burned it by the box, until the air was blue and full of drifting shapes. She loved summer fruit, especially Santa Rosa Plums; the ones in the garden were always ripe by her birthday, and they were her exclusive domain to plunder. She loved musical comedy cocktails, with rum and coloured syrups and chunks of fruit on plastic swords. A daughter of light and summer, was Kage.

In the drawers of this big oak desk, and in the bulwarks of cartons that surround me, are her manuscripts. The older ones are all handwritten. The various black inks are fading to interesting shades of brown and grey and green. The pages feel like tissue paper – some of them are 30 years old – and they smell like incense from the decades of smoke that went up from her desk.

These will be my tasks in days to come, as I revise them according to her often-explained plans. They were all saved to be used. Some of them have been mined for the tales in the Anvil universe; but since it is an entire world she built over the years, there is a lot still in there. No one has ever seen it but me. No one else knows these stories: the eventual fates of Gard and the Lady and their brood of sorcerers and saints, the anthropology of the demons, the final disposition of the Children of the Sun. I know all their names. I lived with them for 40 years. I read their histories now to refresh Kage’s voice and vision as I work.

The last months of Kage’s life, she couldn’t sit up long enough to write. I made her up a bed beside the desk, and she dictated to me. We worked over the words together as we always had, but instead of my then waiting for the finished work, Kage wrote it straight through my hands. You know what channeling really is? It’s a voice stronger than your own, moving through you like a flood in a riverbed, like the wind through an Aeolian harp or through a medium’s floating trumpet.

Late at night I take the old pages from their files and go through them, and they whisper like flames in the darkness. Ashes, ashes of roses and incense, and heat comes up off the handwritten lines like the heat of the summer sun. Even here in the darkness where I sit and work alone, the flames from her manuscripts speak. I listen as I always did, though now I wish the voice would never stop. And to keep it alive when the sun comes up again, I write down what I hear.

Tomorrow: moving around the corners in a straight line