Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker lived more inside her head than out of it. There was a lot more room in there than the one world her body inhabited. She started writing in the first place because she couldn’t find enough of the answers she wanted in the real world, so she made her own worlds where the answers evolved naturally. At age 9, they were questions like: What did Long John Silver do with the rest of his life? How would it be to live with Rat and Mole on the edge of the Great River? If you lived in the top of a palm tree, what would it be like? She learned world building first, of all the tasks of her craft.

She was very loathe to share these worlds with anyone else when she was young. She’d tell stories to us younger ones, though, when we would listen; and once I figured out she was closer and more full of ideas than the library, I became her dedicated audience. By the time we were both in our early teens, the worlds had gotten more and more complicated, and Kage needed to talk out plot points and ideas with someone. That was me. We started brainstorming, and it didn’t stop for the next 42 years.

Years before she was published, Kage already wrote very day. There are whole novels, 4 or 5 of them, in the archives. (If luck is with me, they will see the light of day. After considerable refurbishment … )  They were how she learned her craft. Most writers break “suddenly” into print like this, after 20 years of solid, steady work. The manuscript that finally gets bought is rarely the first and only; there are years and years of dedicated work behind them. The only way to be a writer, Kage said, was to write. Sit down and write: at the kitchen table, in your armchair, behind the stage between acts, for 12 hours a day in the light of the computer monitor.

Between writing (and often during), Kage and I talked. We talked out the details of what came next, what the research was yielding, how the latest installment had read. We often acted the scenes out, and a lot of dialogue came out of these improvisational exercises. (A certain amount of chocolate and alcohol may have been involved.) One of my functions was to throw ideas at her, everything I could think of – she   used what worked, but the constant culling also cleared out the ideas she didn’t like.When she hit dead ends, she’d re-cap the plot for me, then look and me and ask, “What happens next?”

“How the hell should I know?” I would usually moan. She would persist. I would curse and the parrot would run about and yell gleefully at the noise. And I’d throw out ideas (the more I wanted to get back to knitting or the laundry or my newspaper, the goofier they were) and Kage would consider and riposte and rework and suddenly need to know if dinosaurs got cancer or what those weird bones on cats’ paws are that sometimes looked like thumbs, and we’d drive out to get pizza and two hours later the plot would have taken on new life and she’d be blazing away again. And two days later, she’d pause and lean back in her chair, and say thoughtfully, “So what happens next?”

And now I am trying to pick up the process. No sighing with relief and going back to an engrossing cable pattern, now; I am making cables out of Kage’s words, and I need asbestos needles. But I have all her old work to search for ideas and answers; I have her voice in all its multiple-personality splendour, in the books and in my head. I followed her down so many strange and wonderful roads of inquiry, I can see where her footprints would lie.

And I have this blog, and all you imagined readers out there. I can shout into the darkness, and the echo will come back just different enough to be another voice. It’s probably whining, “How the hell should I know?”, but as Kage used to say, “That’s not my problem. ”

Nor is it mine. I’m operating on sonar now; I just need the echo so I can feel where the walls are. So I can feel in my skin what happens next.

Tomorrow: night and day

Kage Baker had a curious relationship with distractions. She hated being disturbed while she wrote (“Do you have to turn those pages so loudly?” was demanded of me more than once.), but would often go out of her way to find something irresistible to lure her away from the writing.  Computer games were good, especially anything to do with pirates; and while she liked Sid Meier’s classics, her absolute favourites were the Monkey Island games. Prolific as Kage was, she would have published half again as much without Monkey Island. Or Freecell.

Or road trips! In the course of our everyday lives (for a given value of “everyday” …), we spent most summers and many winters commuting up and down California for historical recreation events. In the off-season, though, Kage would often get up in the morning and announce she needed to be heading North (or East, West, South) and away we would go. She never learned to drive, so she was my navigator while I drove us all over: reading the maps, finding the alternate routes, handing me coffee and Good N’Plenty candies and beef jerkey to keep me alive at the wheel. Or feeding me forkfuls of something interesting and strange that was not really supposed to be a to-go item: I remember driving over the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco (it has since been demolished post-earthquakes) while Kage fed me spoonfuls of mushroom beef from Chinatown. Much better than a McDonald’s burger, though mildly hazardous while driving.

Those trips recharged her batteries, especially since we discussed her stories all the while. A full third of Anvil of the World was written one weekend driving between Pismo Beach and San Francisco for a Dicken’s Fair. While we drove North, she planned Lord Ermenwyr’s trip up the river with poor ensorcelled Smith – then we served beer and food and sang the Hallelujah Chorus for two days – then on the way back South, there were ambushes, battles, unexpected entrances, and finally Smith saved the world. A deal more exciting than a winery tour, I must say.

Road trips also cured her rare bouts of writer’s block, the ones that were not eased by an hour’s vigorous weeding in the garden. Writer’s block was not something Kage suffered from much. Maybe it’s why she went hunting distractions sometimes, when she needed an  excuse to turn off her brain before the bearings started smoking.

I recount this habit of hers to excuse myself from a dedicated work schedule today. I am being taken to the movies and then we’re gonna barbecue. I have extricated Herbertina from her predicament and the fox terrier has become an ally; Lady Beatrice is exploring phallic emblems, and Mrs. Corvey has found a cook. The Ladies will keep for a day.

And maybe I’ll play some Freecell, too.

Tomorrow: back to channeling Kage: maybe as a writer, but maybe as a gardener …

Kage Baker had, where her writing was concerned, a will of iron. Nothing was allowed to interfere when she wanted to write; which, like breathing, was all the time. Chez Baker, in the Hollywood Hills,  had a cupola on the top of it; that tower was her den, and the roof outside it was her private courtyard. She used to retreat from the riotous family life by climbing out on the roof; there she’d sit, enthroned in a lawn chair under the canopy of the oak trees, and let the tides of parents and siblings rush around ignored at her feet.

That was her technique – retreat, observe, write. Life lived in a duck blind; life observed, analyzed, recorded and ultimately bagged from ambush. No professional hedonist or dedicated party-girl lived more thoroughly through their senses than Kage. They certainly never remembered a tenth as much.

She started writing around the age of nine; by her early teens, she was writing every single day. I was her Constant Reader, and I spent most of high school going through half a dozen pages of her handwritten stories every day. I carried them around with me and read them at every opportunity; at night, we discussed and refined what she’d done.

When we were adults, I entered the job market years before she did – she stayed home and wrote and painted. At night, I’d read the day’s work over dinner; the brainstorming was for dessert. Weekends we went to art shows, where she scribbled in her beloved steno pads between selling water colours to bored West Hollywood yuppies. But the itinerant art scene was tough, and she eventually had to join me in what she called “the pink collar ghetto” – those clerical jobs that paid the bills and  could in no way be construed as a career. (www.kagebaker.com/bio.html)

Nonetheless, everything she saw and heard there was stored away in her treasure-chest of a brain. She observed corporate ethics in scathing detail, and formed a deep and abiding hatred of them. Eventually that dislike formed one of the energy sources for her Company series. Why does Dr. Zeus, with so noble an initial goal, go so thoroughly bad? Why does the full mindless force of the British Arean Corporation focus on one little bar on Mars? Because Kage Baker really didn’t like corporate culture.

And then we found the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, and our weekends became dedicated to another kind of art: mad world-building, theatre in the 360-degree round where you were never, ever off stage or out of character. Our friends made or juggled knives, played lutes and shawms, were Queens of England and Kings of Thieves. We built an Inn in the greenwood, and for 25 years the whole universe came to drink under the oaks in our yard. Just about anyone will come when you have the cheapest beer in the Faire. Or the only beer on the Tharsis Plateau, as Kage recast us years later in Empress of Mars.

Everything she saw and heard there got stored away, too. All the glorious loonies who pranced through that group delusion, Chipping-Under-Oakwood, were immortalized in Kage’s mind. She never forgot anything. She had the blueprints for everything. Why do the Children of the Sun in her Anvil universe, honor artisans as aristocrats? Why does Gard get his formal training as a Dark Lord in a theatre troupe? Because Kage Baker loved the company of actors and makers.

Everything decorated, accessorized and expanded the world that grew up, spontaneous and original, from the fertile field of her mind. If she really loved or hated you, some reflection of you might end up in a scene in one of her worlds. It was how Kage made immortals. It was how she tied time in a Mobius strip. In her mind, nothing was ever lost or allowed to end: time all happened now, and what you saw was merely a matter of perspective.

I know how she did it. Let’s see if it will work on her.

Tomorrow: forcing bulbs

Kage Baker was an alto. She had a soft, low way of speaking and a wonderfully warm and smooth singing voice. Singing harmony with her – I am a soprano – was a physical joy, like being a pane of blue glass next to a crimson  one in a stained glass window. It’s one of the things I miss the most often since she died, that harmonic perfection when we sang side by side.

But she was very quiet. You really had to listen to get all the nuances of what she said, and she was frequently talked right over in conversation. It made her crazy when that happened, and she often complained that no one listened to her. It didn’t help that we came from a large, loud family. Or that, spending decades in a theatre troupe, the family we joined was even larger and louder.

Actually, people did listen to Kage, because she also had a dry and hysterically funny wit. She was a natural raconteuse, and anyone who ever heard her at a reading can testify that it was always a riveting performance. As a fellow writer at a group reading once remarked: “I did some reading. Kage put on a show.” (Thank you, Rick Bowes!) No, the problem was that people couldn’t hear her.

I can no longer hear her.

I can’t summon the memory of how her voice sounded. All the years of conversation, and the only phrase I can currently call to mind in her own voice is among the very last things she said at all: “I’m going, kiddo. Sorry.” Not only does this shock and sadden me, it is damned inconvenient, since I am trying to complete her stories.  A wise and compassionate friend has assured me I will hear Kage, that my mind will resurrect her voice when I need it; but so far, that low voice is still buried in the crowd noise in my mind. Man, that would annoy her! I can see, though, I can see her roll her black eyes and make that particular exasperated moue that meant she thought no one was listening and she might as well leave the party. But no! Because I can see, and so I can read, and since I am literally walled in  on all sides with her words (boxes and drawers of manuscripts everywhere), I can summon up her voice with my eyes.

Kage’s latest novel is The Bird of the River (out July 20th. Five stars on Amazon. Go for it.), which is set in her fantasy universe. So I’ve reread The House of the Stag and The Anvil of the World: I remember where each scene was born, and can hear her expounding the plots as we drove along or did the laundry. Most of  Bird was plotted out in a bar in Kansas City, over gin Collinses: Kage kept losing pens and we finally bought her one in the lobby store, with a plastic trolley car  on the end that  lit up red when she pressed it down on the paper. During Stag she was obsessed with kettle corn and fried shrimp, and her notes were always grease-stained to the point of transparency. The  insane magical duel scene in Anvil was devised and literally acted out around a campfire in Big Sur, with much howling, laughing and snorting beer out of our noses.

I’ve reread The Women of Nell Gwynne’s and the wonderful story The Bohemian Astrobleme (which you may find online at glorious Subterranean Press, www.subterraneanpress.com), and now I can see Kage’s hands flying as she talked out the plot of the sequel with me. She gave it the working title Who We Did On Our Summer Vacation … and in fact, I have presently left the exquisite Lady Beatrice locked in carnal embrace with a mad submariner on the cliffs above Torquay. I have to rescue Herbertina from a well-meaning fox terrier, dispense with a treacherous butler, and then sort out what Kage planned to do with the strange skull Mrs. Otley found in Kent Cavern …

Oh, yes. I can hear her clearly now.

Tomorrow: distractions of the flesh

Kage Baker could write nearly anywhere. All she needed, in a pinch, were the right materials. She was picky about them, though. When she was a kid, it was black fountain pens and steno pads – those green ones with the wire tops. Later she wrote on typing paper (reams of it) with a metal-nibbed pen dipped in a bottle of black ink.  She successfully made ink from oak galls, in her teen aged years, but accidentally poisoned herself trying to make some from iris corms. The search for perfection is sometimes perilous …

Finally, in these modern days, she was ultimately converted to computers. She liked the idea of writing in light. To accomodate Renaissance Faires and conventions, she went to laptops, but they were heavy. Her final techno toy was an HP Netbook, which she loved extravagantly. It fit in her purse, it was tiny but mighty, she could listen to music, do research and write to her heart’s content. She called it her Buke, and got an incredible kick out of having a wee powerful computer like the ones in her books – although she mourned the lack of a pirate AI. (I miss the Captain, too.)

When she was at home, where she preferred to be, Kage had a precisely delineated and decorated writing area. Her immense oak roll top desk was the first prize of her first book contract. In it and on it she established her domain, in a  highly customized feng shui: lots of pirate memorabilia. Pens and inks in every colour of the rainbow. A lighthouse. A compass, a barometer, and a sextant. Two or three sailing ships, a relish jar full of beach glass and another full of sea water. Reference books ranging from her high school Latin dictionary to an atlas of Mars. Lots and lots of plastic toys, too, especially action figures of characters she liked: Mr. Krabs, Blackbeard, Charles Dickens.  A portrait of Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. And a red glass of Coca Cola, always.

Now I am trying to write, and trying to channel her while I do: to conjure her voice out of her notes and my memory. Sometimes it comes very easily: I’ve been transcribing her left-handed scrawl since our girlhood, and every one of her stories has been pounded out on the anvil of my brain. I just need to develop a long enough mental reach to do it myself.

Which is why I am still at her desk – it was the first thing I unpacked and set up when I moved back to Los Angeles, even before my bed (though, truth to tell, I could almost sleep in the desk). I’ve re-installed some of her juju, and added some of my own: although the black cat currently asleep behind the monitor, one small paw curling out to pat the keyboard, just sort of came with my new room. I have her Nebula, her Locus, and her Romantic Times awards set up. It’s as conducive a site to writing as I can manage.

The Coke, however, is beyond me. Gonna stick with my coffee. Besides, there is picture of a forge on the cup, which was the inspiration for the Father’s Shrine in The Bird of the River. What could be a better chalice than that?

Tomorrow: summoning the dead

Kage Baker was an incredibly prolific writer. She wrote every day, nearly all day; when she wasn’t literally clicking out stories on the keyboard, she was researching them. Research involved tracking down reference material, sure – but for Kage it also required field trips, background music and even menus. (Somewhere in the gestation of every Mendoza story, for instance, there was a tamale feast.)  Kage wanted an entire environment created around her in order to write. Did she need it? I don’t think so – she wrote everywhere – but it was what she liked.

Every novel, every story, had its own soundtrack, which meant she would simply put something on repeat and listen to it over and over and over. Some of them made sense to me, the  constant auditor: Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica was perfect for Empress of Mars, and the soundtracks for the three Pirates of the Caribbean films were obvious for her pirate novella, The Maid on the Shore. But the immersive Tudor atmosphere of her very first novel, In The Garden of Iden, was composed to the Police’s Synchronicity, and Not Less Than Gods was written to a background of Gilbert and Sullivan. Kage’s mind was a strange and interesting place …

Luckily, I lived with that mind my entire life; for the last 42 years, I lived literally in it. We left home together (Momma gave us ten bucks and a dozen eggs as a housewarming present). We built a household together, where our friends and lovers and jobs and cars and socks and notebooks and joys and woes were all combined; they all came and went, but we stayed together. We built an embassy, the Embassy of Us, and in it Kage wrote and wrote and wrote. And talked to me about it, and told me the stories. She argued them out with me – we’d turn on the lava lamps, the Official Lamps of the Weird, and hammer out plots and characters by the wavering shadows. The soundtrack for that was vast and convoluted and sometimes outside the range of human hearing, but God! What a song it was!

The last months of her life, Kage made sure I had all her notes, all her ideas, all her drafts of stories. She made me swear to finish them. And while I may have complained about listening to Thomas Tallis or Iolanthe for days on end (and I did) I would not dare break that last oath to Kage. She wanted the sequel to The Women of Nell Gwynne’s done first, and that’s what I’m working on now.

So I’ve set up her desk, complete with the Lamps of the Weird: though I’ve replaced the figurine of Eugene Krabs with my miniature Stonehenge. I sit down every day and try to write. Most days I manage about 1,000 words; Kage always considered that a minimum. I don’t have her finely honed discipline yet (or her possible OCD … ), but I am trying to channel that into my work space. I need an atmosphere. I need an environment. I’m auditioning music every day, to see what the soundtrack is for the Ladies in their new adventure.

It might be Jethro Tull. It might be the Watersons. It might be the telly, on low in the next room in an endless river of voices, laugh tracks and gunshots. But it’s been coming clearer these last few days, and I think it’s probably going to be … Rimsky-Korsakov. Scheherazade. Odd, for a tale set in 19th Century Torquay (look it up, kids) but, yeah – that’s where the voices are coming most clearly.

Time for an ice, a donkey ride and – a flight with a Djinn.

Kage's Desk circa 2009

Tomorrow: Le terroire of writing.

This is where I hope to chronicle my process of continuing the work of my late sister, Kage Baker. It was one of the last things she told me to do – use her notes, her plots, the thousands of drives up and down I-5 with her telling me stories, and keep those stories rolling out to the world. And that’s what I intend to do.

First, though, all thanks to our brilliant, staunch and invaluable friend, Neassa Skold. Neassa was our buddy for years, companion in all manner of historical recreation nonsense and delight. She saw us through Kage’s final illness, keeping me company in waiting rooms and helping me smuggle goodies in.  She let us stay in her family’s house when we needed a place to shelter while Kage had surgery. She came to help me clean out the house when Kage died, and kept me sane for the month it took. And she set up this blog and is enabling me to follow through on this project.

Praise her with great praise!

Now: I’ve been working since February 2010 on the sequel to The Women of Nell Gwynn’s. The going has been tough, but it’s getting easier. Last night, I had a dream – Kage, directing my view out a window to a river full of islands, all thickly grown with flowering reeds. As we watched, the river began to rise and the islands began to float. They broke up like ice floes, and all rushed forward; people appeared in the flood, and began to stack the free islands into a causeway. I asked Kage if the causeway would not get too wide and block the river – but she said: ” No, they’re taken off again at the further edge and the river runs free. And it can’t run free unless the islands are moved and stacked: so get to it, kiddo.”

Sure seems obvious to me …

Tomorrow: a first glimpse of how one takes up the reins on a writer’s hobby horse: the soundtrack