PSA I

Posted on May 12, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker had a keen appreciation of the ways social media enhanced communication. You could easily corner a vast audience without ever having to hire a hall, or find someone to make decent cookies and vol au vent pastries.

You could even more easily corner a more modest audience, with just an hour or so’s work of an evening. Most important for all, for Kage, was that all the crowds of all sizes could be managed from within a safe zone. She enjoyed her audience all the more because she could control how she met her readers. She dearly loved them, and corresponded with many; she was scrupulous about answering letters – as some of you, Dear Readers, can attest. I took dictation and did research for her on those.

She was also quite keen on science fiction conventions. She spoke as much as any con would let her, and volunteered for panels bereft of their full complement of speakers. She was a courteous participant, and a stern but amiable moderator. And she got through all these meetings and confrontations because she could hand things off to me – literally, usually – without worrying whether or not I was there to grab them. I always assumed she thought I had a Bag of Holding concealed about my person.

She did the same for me at Faires, after all. She developed a hilarious and completely not obsequious persona as the cook for whatever Inn I was supposed to be running at the time. She liked to stand just behind me, ready to take my bonnet while reminding me that the Sheriff’s men had bottomed out the porter barrel or that we were entirely out of mustard for the ham and the Pickwick Club was sure to complain. She liked to observe lugubriously that the mice were getting uppity in the Parlour, or that there were tentacle marks on the steps leading down cellar – again …

That’s the way I wrote her into The Women of Nell Gwynne’s II. She was the cook with the dab hand at poisoned trifle; entirely for the right side, of course.

It’s only one of the many ways I miss her.

This coming Memorial Day weekend (May 24th through  May 27th) is BayCon, up in Santa Clara. It was Kage’s favourite convention, and it’s still mine, though now I am playing her part for the crowds. I am less shy but nearly as funny, and just as likely to be confused about where I am supposed to be. I could keep track of that stuff for Kage, but somehow am a dead loss at it myself. Go figure, eh?

I will be there at the San Mateo Airport Marriott, from Friday through Monday, showing the flag and generally swanning about. It’s always such fun! I’m on all manner of panels – standing on soap boxes is my fave rave sport – and am greatly looking forward to it. The Inestimable Neassa will be with me, ready to take the things I hand off to her and generally make sure I don’t get lost or misplace my limbs.

If any of you Dear Readers are in the area, feel free to come see me. Do not buy a ticket unless you were meaning to anyway! I will be in the lobby and/or the bar a lot of the time, knitting and people watching. And I will try to print out my schedule before the Con, for those who are coming to the Con and want to come listen to me pontificate.

And in the merry meanwhile, there are these blogs. It’s good to be back at the forge, hammering out deathless pearls of hyperverbalism.

 

 

 

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Soft Spring Evening In A Hard Time

Posted on May 11, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker kept a sharp, albeit distant, eye on the world.

Writers have to, unless they are solely writing fan fiction or some niche genre completely unrelated to human behaviour. Pony parties, maybe. Illustrative parables concerning drywall. The history of granite – which was Kage’s favourite example of a bore-you-to-death narrative. And that was a BBC special.

The distance she required in her observations was for her own self-survival. There is no way she could have managed to keep track of current events in the present day – we’d have had to block any and all news channels, never turned on the radio, relied on taped telly shows and DVDs. Even in 2009, her last full year on earth, she never looked at newspapers. She stopped reading even mild news aggregates. She relied on me to provide her with a teeny weeny slice of what was in the news – and at that, she only really wanted to hear about cryptozoology, lost things unexpectedly found, and strange history; the exploration of Mars and the Outer Planets, the Royal family, Jethro Tull.

She never stopped mining the world for story ideas; but, then, she needed to do it personally less and less. People came to her with stories they wanted her to write – editors, not just those dreaded people who sidle up and said hoarsely, “I have a great idea for a book, and you can have it for 50% of the proceeds.” Kage said she always felt like she was about to be offered a black market baby. Most authors feel the same way, I think. But the nice, professional folks who wanted a story about dragons, or a Victorian mystery, or in the style of Jack Vance – those she welcomed happily. And in fact, she got so many such invitations that she never, ever had to search for a topic.

These days … of, Ptah, scribe of the gods and god of writers! I think I would have had to use parental controls and blocked most of the general news channels on both the television and her computer. She never used Facebook, so the increasingly wide stream of total crap that now streams through even a brief visit to any social media could be avoided. I just never told her what I was reading, unless it was a good joke or news of some amazing new find of pirate treasure.

I, myself, pay far too much attention to our steady descent into the Maelstrom. It tells on one, you know? One goes along, as hard as nails for months and months, the original steel-eyed cookie: and then, ZAP! The weight of the damned world is abruptly too much, and it’s all one can do to find enough gin to water down one’s limeade … it’s time to draw the hem of some softer, alternate reality over one’s head, and huddle in the twilight.

Spring this year has been an especially lovely season in Los Angles. Doubtless we shall burn like recidivist heretics come Summer, but so far the season has been exquisite.  It has actually rained – in fact, it is raining now, a warm soft rain from a sky like watered silk. We don’t get too many Springs like that in Los Angeles. It’s a miracle.

Wildflowers are everywhere, hillsides and freeways; they are growing up through the silver oats in my front yard. The fruit trees were thick with blossom, and now are heavy with fruit. All the little creatures of the woods are, I presume, screwing their heads off – certainly all the little creatures of my garden are. The squirrels are utterly charming in their courtships, playing romantic tag at the speed of light. The raccoons are a bit more raucous, especially as they tend to fall off the roof in the dark … the birds are simply wonderful, singing and dancing and nesting all over the garden. Periodically, all the mourning doves on the porch take off in a huge fit of preemptive hysteria, casting shadows through the lace curtains to the wooden-whistle sound of their wings …

Here in the shadow of the hills of Griffith Park, we are watching all the critters, listening to all the soft booming wings, luxuriating in all  the grey silk of the rain-pregnant skies. This evening is, for the moment, a rare bit of peace in an increasingly noisy, ghastly world. I’m ignoring whatever horrible larks the White House is getting up to tonight; we’re watching old, prerecorded television. I may read later tonight – something mindless and entertaining, like zombies or 19th century knitting patterns. I may write some more, too: Kimberly is agitating for more of Marswife, and I have an idea for a zombie story myself.

Or I may play mahjong on my new computer. Or, I know! Plants vs Zombies! A perfect compromise!

Believe me, Dear Readers. It really is. Give it a try; or whatever comforting and goofy amusement you keep in your house for emergencies. It’s not a night for grief.

 

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Hath not an Aspie hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

Posted on May 10, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker had Asperger’s Syndrome. She was what is usually called “high-functioning”, a label that incensed her. It was her opinion that she was always high-functioning, no matter what she was – and for the rest of the world to label her so cavalierly and condescendingly was an insult that drove her to rage.

It annoyed her so much that, in her late 40’s – after a  lifetime of hiding, avoiding triggers, finding compensatory habits, forcing herself to find safe ways to communicate: Kage threw all her armour to the winds and outed herself at a convention. From then on, she identified herself firmly as an Asperger person and fought online and in person for those less fortunate or gifted than herself. And also to let people know that she, herself, was not a genetic freak nor an aberration, but a talented writer whose brain was simply wired even more differently than most.

Funny thing. Most of my birth family has Asperger’s, as well as Kage. Maybe it’s why she and I were instant sisters from an early age; I was used to it. Kimberly has Asperger’s – her husband has Asperger’s – and their son, my nephew Michael, has Asperger’s. They are all “high-functioning”  -really, that is such a loathsome phrase! – and I have spent my life defending those I love (when necessary) from strangers who think there is something wrong with them. It’s not usually needed, because my family is intelligent, well-mannered and fierce: but I’m the one who can stare into your eyes like a basilisk, and am never rendered speechless. Eye contact? Cutting repartee? I am your woman.

My sister and brother-in-law are now retired – but before that, they were both teachers. She taught kindergärtners, and early education is not an easy field. He taught physics – is there anyone who thinks that is a field for the sub-average?  Michael is currently an in-home assistant for his ailing father, a vocation that requires both brains and empathy. Like Kage, he also works Fair with me; being someone else for a few weeks a year in the company of friends is apparently quite beneficial.

Kage and Kimberly both enjoyed the nickname “Aspies”. I find it unnecessarily cute, but it’s not my nickname, so I figure it’s basically none of my business.

And that is, really, part of my musings on this subject. It’s none of my business. Not for anyone, not for anything they want to call themselves. It’s no one else’s business, either. This is a subject I honestly thought was solved a few years ago – but now it appears that one of the new targets of our evil-addled government is going to be those citizens who happen to have disabilities. And for lots of people, alas, Asperger’s is a disability. The reason it was not for Kage, nor for my family, nor for people like Temple Grandin nor Stanley Kubrick nor Darryl Hannah nor (most likely) freaking Leonardo da Vinci – is that those people had adequate support systems. And those are not easily come by, Dear Readers, which is a large part of the tragedy of Asperger’s Syndrome.

Asperger’s can be an immense disability, all too easily. In some cases, it always is: where there is intellectual impairment, or neurological deficits; where there is non-verbalism, or crippling fear, or obsession – then, yes, it can be a dreadful disability. And those who suffer at that depth are truly helpless, and must be taken care of a lot more than ordinary people. Not dismissed! Never dismissed!

Would you dismiss someone who had trouble with their legs? Well, yes, come to think of it – there a lots of people who would, and far to many of them are working in the government. My point is that it is evil.

Does anyone you love have Asperger’s? Do you, yourself, know or suspect that you are not just shy, but actually an Aspie? Regard the title of this blog , then, and take it as the battle cry it has always been for the different and the outsider. Shakespeare gave the speech from which it comes to the most recognizable outsider of his world: the Jew. Its universality is such that it has remained a banner for anyone, everyone, who finds themselves cast out of society through no fault of their own.

Read the rest of Shylock’s immortal speech. Hear in it the despair and passion of someone who knows themself to be human, and knows as well that the rest of the world does not see them as such. Consider the implications of disabilities being reduced once again to non-persons, second class citizen, inhumans – and consider, too, the last line of this speech …

“I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Blood-curdling, isn’t it? All of it. Just think about it.

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Joys and Perils of Eating the Past

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker was an avid historian. She was also a good cook. At the intersection of these two passions were the period recipes she liked to recreate and serve t0 her friends. The main goals were curiosity and attention to detail: how did bread taste with peas, beans and boiled rye in it in it, and would it play better to the eye than a hunk of sour dough?

When she began writing, those same urges applied to the foods she described in her books. If it was ancient or exotic, she had to try it; not just tasting it, but sourcing the ingredients as accurately as possible, and making it as close to the original fashion as she could.

There are plenty of cookbooks out there these days with period recipes from various ages. A lot of them are in translation, though, with the original instructions translated into something a modern cook and kitchen can manage. Kage considered that cheating, even though the best of them are successful in achieving a non-modern taste treat. However, Kage liked to play it as close to the original as possible – even if it meant learning to joint a rabbit (which differs anatomically from, say, a chicken, in interesting and hilarious ways), or stewing turnips in a ceramic pot on the edge of the living room fireplace. Cream of soot, yum.)

This mania is common to the more creative kind of re-creators, by the way. In our own group, it has led to learning how to bake bread and perfect scones over a wood fire (we will never forget them, Shannon!), and discovering that parsnip tarts are a pastry worthy of the gods (thank you, Neassa!), as well as one memorable afternoon where Kimberly produced Yorkshire pudding over the open fire in the Innyard: she had tourists leaning over the fence drooling around their cameras.

It can be taken too far, of course – one of our dear friends, the late and much-lamented Kevin Brown, managed by dint of cleverness and iron nerves to reproduce Roman fish sauce, aka garum. Go ahead, look it up on the aether, Dear Readers. But make sure you pick one of the really authentic recipes, not one of the sissy versions that say it’s not as bad as you might think. Those always leave out the entrails and the solar stewing in a clay jar. But Kevin did all the traditional things. It was an historical triumph, and every bit as ghastly as you might expect.

Kage drew the line at garum, but only because she hated fish and didn’t want to share houseroom with extravagantly undead bait fish. Many of her experiments were divine. I still adore her pottage of leeks, which is guaranteed to curl your toes with delight and initiate serious cholesterol poisoning. However, as I have mentioned before, a lot of the foods in the Company books were tried out on me – sardine tacos. Maize pancakes with creme de leche. Creamed turnips, and eel soup with poppy petals. Oranges  in brine, ham with buttercream frosting, marzipan locusts. Maraschino liqueur.

Maraschino liqueur, incidentally, is disgusting. Forget sweet little cherries on ice cream sundaes; maraschino looks like vodka and motor oil and tastes like rancid buttered Brazil nuts. There is nothing remotely cherry-esque about it. Kage resorted to trying several brands, and then making it herself finally; the only person who could drink it was her, but mirabile dictu! Kage loved it!  So she drank maraschino and I ate sardine tacos, and we sneered at one another and she got to write really authentic food scenes.

In illustration of the kinds of things Kage liked to try, here is a link to the many fruits and vegetables that are believed to have made their way across Asia into Europe via the Silk Road. ( https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-fruits-grew-along-the-silk-road). There are lots of interesting things to try here. Kage was always fascinated with the idea that apples and roses – so quintessentially English! – were brought into the Blessed Isles by the Romans: who, as it turned out, got them in turn via the Silk Road.

A slight turn to one side from the above article brings us to a recent tragedy, which happened because people forgot old food information. (https://tinyurl.com/y3wo3pvr). This involved a Mongolian couple, whose people – like most folks near the Silk Road – once had very specific rules about when it safe to eat marmots. (Hint: it’s not.) Evidently forgetting this, and relying instead on imported Chinese traditional medicine, they ate a marmot’s kidneys in order to ensure good health. But, guess what? The marmots along the Silk Road are the natural reservoir for bubonic plague! Did Chinese traditional medicine know this? Nope. And this couple promptly died of plague; and I don’t think most of their friends and relations know the connection to the ancient lore …

This is the other reason to find out how and what and why people used to eat. Sometimes something fatal is mixed up in the old stories, and it’s nice to figure out what it was before we chow down on the local rodents, or wet rye flour.  Or before we condemn all moldy bread to the waste bin, when it might cure syphilis. Or even hang on to the blue moldy cheese, because it just might taste lots better than that 2-week old crap made with rennet and a cow’s stomach fat …

Just steer clear of the garum and and the maraschino liqueur.

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Pupae

Posted on May 8, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker always said she could feel her blood thinning in the Spring, thickening in the Fall. I always said that was nice poetry but lousy biology; but as Kage also believed for most of her life that raw potatoes caused trichinosis, she dismissed my cavil as mere persiflage.

But I have really a felt a thawing and a stirring in my blood these last few days, and I think I am actively pupating. Kage would not be surprised. She knew she was right.

She was also of the fixed opinion that one can always be reborn. In fact, she was fairly sure that there was no way to avoid it; it happened all the time, as far as she was concerned. All one could do was to:  First, be ready to change at any time; and Second, have a good grasp of who you are to start with, so as to reduce the inevitable period of confusion.

She held a similar opinion regarding the Apocalypse. Every Apocalypse. According to Kage, the prophecies of the end (s) of the world (s) were always true. And they happened, every one of them. It was just that almost no one was equipped to notice, because they got renewed, too; or because very few people were  wired to notice; or because the few people who did notice covered it all up as quickly as they could.

When I inquired as to the provenance of this idea, she said she learned it from an interview with Jim Morrison – in, I think, a 1964 issue of that renowned End Times journal, Tiger Beat. Another time she claimed she had heard it from the yoga instructor who rented one of the rooms of the ex-wildcat movie studio in the house next door.  She blamed it on Mother Shipton, once; and on the Rosicrucians, too – although I don’t think she ever knew any.

In the end, Kage used the idea to disguise the End of Time, the Great Silence, and lots of peculiar natural disasters; and so put paid to the Company while no one noticed. I might have attributed this to desperate fatigue as the original trilogy expanded into 7, 8, 9 books. However, Kage first expounded the idea when we were 14 and 15, eating Smith Brothers Softish Cherry Cough Drops while hiding under the curtains of grape ivy that veiled our decaying Alma Mater … so it had been on her mind for a looong time.

That was at Immaculate Heart High School. This week, the junior bacchantes of that student body are leaping for joy around the leftover May Day poles, celebrating our mutual alumna, Meghan Mountbatten-Windsor nee Markle. Talk about renewals, about the world totally changing and no one noticing! That little boy is an astonishing new chapter in a millennium-old book, and only the immediate participants have really noticed. But the little May Sussex boy is really a firedrake across the skies of British history, as bright and blazing as his Dad’s hair.

New times, Dear Readers, new times. New worlds, new magics, new flowers coming up through the winter thatch of the front garden – what was a lawn is now a waving sea of (mostly) oats. It’s green and silver and it moves like the sea, whatever it is. The oats and the wildflowers are keeping company with tomatoes, poppies, roses, a baby maple tree, a floral fountain and the stone Crocodile that swims through the lower lawn. And of course, the whole place is alive with squirrels and finches, raccoons and ravens, looking to make the next generation.

I feel like I’ve been taking a year off dead for taxes purposes. But now, I am alive again. I can actually reach above my head with my right arm, which has been a magic trick completely beyond me since last May. To celebrate, I replaced the laptop I fell on last August, and now I can once again type with two hands!

My desktop is still difficult of access, due to a year of not being able to sort or use my yarn stash; skeins of wool and linen, feral needles, are all still obscuring the desk. But I have at least partially emerged.

For your amusement, I give you as a gift the cocoons of the  orange spotted tiger clear-wing, which is none of those things – it is a butterfly that somehow spins a cocoon of silver. I also commend to you the exquisite Luna moth, into which I wish I could pupate; and the little brown bat, which is what I suspect is closer to my style.

The moral is that you never know what will hatch out of what, or what you will become, or what cycle of life you are actually illustrating. Kage may have known – I know I never will.

But all choices have their charm, Dear Readers, eh?

 

 

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I Screaming Out Loud All The Time I Write

Posted on January 15, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker thought the description of the Squeers family, in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickelby, was about the funniest family ever committed to paper.

They are a sort of ghastly, but affectionate, ogre family who run an appalling boys’ school wherein the titular hero of the novel is an unhappy schoolmaster. Briefly. It all ends in tears, bloodshed and hyperbole, because the Squeers are only affectionate to one another. To everyone else, they are absolutely horrible – except for the daughter of the family, Miss Fanny Squeers, who is convinced she is a deathless beauty and falls in love with anything in trousers …

Fanny was Kage’s favourite. She even used the character in a bespoke story about Springheel Jack, and laughed her ass off the entire time she wrote the dialogue. It appeared  in, I think, The Mammoth Book if Dickensian Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley; Carroll & Graf, October 2007. 

Since I have been mistaken about where I published my own stories lately, I could be wrong about this. My brain is leaking out my ears … but I think this is the one.

My day has been a long, long sled ride today, on a broken sled, over a morass of flaming shit. I have had severe problems with online systems which I desperately need to access, in order to pay bills and prove to the state of California that I am not dead, not in good health, and still in need of my disability benefits. ALL these systems refuse to acknowledge my user names or passwords, most have informed me I do not exist, and I have had it with all of them. Absolutely nothing has been accomplished.

The one time I got a  live clerk, she sent me a verification code via phone – and then told me her system could not recognize it when I repeated it back to her. And by then, I had tried too many times to be accommodated until another 12 hours goes by.

Hence the title. For context, and for your amusement, Dear Reader, I attach here the original letter from NN, which so entertained Kage. You should have heard her acting it out …

 

“Sir,

“My pa requests me to write to you. The doctors considering it doubtful whether he will ever recuvver the use of his legs which prevents his holding a pen.

“We are in a state of mind beyond everything, and my pa is one-mask of brooses both blue and green likewise two forms are steepled in his Goar. We were kimpelled to have him carried down into the kitchen where he now lays. You will judge from this that he has been brought very low.

“When your nevew that you recommended for a teacher had done this to my pa and jumped upon his body with his feet and also langwedge which I will not pollewt my pen with describing, he assaulted my ma with dreadful violence, dashed her to the earth, and drove her back comb several inches into her head. A very little more and it must have entered her skull. We have a medical certifiket that if it had, the tortershell would have affected the brain.

“Me and my brother were then the victims of his feury since which we have suffered very much which leads us to the arrowing belief that we have received some injury in our insides, especially as no marks of violence are visible externally. I am screaming out loud all the time I write and so is my brother which takes off my attention rather, and I hope will excuse mistakes.

“The monster having satiated his thirst for blood ran away, taking with him a boy of desperate caracter that he had excited to rebellyon, and a garnet ring belonging to my ma, and not having been apprehended by the constables is supposed to have been took up by some stage-coach. My pa begs that if he comes to you the ring may be returned, and that you will let the thief and assassin go, as if we prosecuted him he would only be transported, and if he is let go he is sure to be hung before long, which will save us trouble, and be much more satisfactory.

Hoping to hear from you when convenient

“I remain

“Yours and cetrer

 

“Fanny Squeers.

 

“P.S. I pity his ignorance and despise him.”

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Off Weekend

Posted on January 13, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker rests in the Garden of Sleep, Drake is in his hammock and a thousand miles away, and I have some sort of gastritis.

We are taking the weekend off. See you all tomorrow.

 

 

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January 11th, Mark I (Maybe)

Posted on January 11, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker enjoyed her modern technology, and depended heavily on it for her work and her play.

Being Kage, however, she also expected it to betray her, eventually. She didn’t really trust technology, at least of the sort that did not depend on the skill of her own hands. She didn’t even really have confidence in her bottle opener, and that was just basically a lever. There’s not a much simpler tool than a lever …

Anyway, she was consequently not surprised when the complicated tools of the Internet failed. The aether was as close to magic as Kage knew, and she was not a magic user. When the computer crashed or the modem failed or some even more mysterious component went tits up, Kage was infuriated but resigned. Much cursing occurred, then she handed the problem off to someone who could handle it.

And Kage, temper satisfied, could continue writing. With a sensible pen. On sensible paper. By sensible candle light, if the problem went far enough.

Last night, my computer service went down several times. Not for long, at any one time: but I was repeatedly unable to access the aether for a few minutes. I’d go off and do something else, then return to find I could only get to some sites; others stayed dead to me for the night.

It was probably some glitch in ATT’s network servers, but what it boiled down to for our purposes, Dear Readers. was NO WORDPRESS.  (There were others, but not as important. Except to me.) It’s something to which WordPress is especially prone. I suspect that any diminution of its contact with the wider aether gives it a TIA. My using  a VPN probably doesn’t help, either; but one must be safe, you know.

So, anyway, no post last night. This one may be a placeholder. It may be the first chapter in today’s blog. It may also be all I get done today, because my darling nephew found me pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, AND I got my latest shipment of Mullah coffee. So I may eventually retreat with coffee and sweeties.

But in the meantime, today is the anniversary of the Nika Riots in Constantinople, in 532 CE. Which means that even as I write, Joseph is lurking around Byzantium, running a safe house for treasures of the ancient world, and about to encounter the power of icons in a very close and personal way.*

And that is certainly good for a grin.

 

 

*”Pareidolia”, from In the Company of Thieves, Tachyon Publishing

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In Praise of Athena Ergane

Posted on January 9, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker was a proud working woman. She honored Athena Ergane, which was Athena in her aspect of the patroness of workers and artisans. Kage dedicated one of her books to Athena Ergane, though right at the moment, I shamefully cannot recall which one …

If one of you, Dear Readers, does remember, do please let me know.

Anyway, Kage also took Athena Ergane as a patroness. It fit in nicely with her personal life efforts, as a scholar and as a woman of her hands; Kage never abandoned purely physical arts entirely. She always had her pens and brushes to hand should something need illustrating. She took up carving in her 50’s, producing (among other things) faux bluestone pylons carved with cup and ring marks for the garden of the Inn at Renaissance faires. In her last couple of years of life, she was experimenting with casting little figures in rubber and plastic: also, lots of her own hands … we had some freaky pot holders for a while, but they had a tendency to melt.

Most of the ladies in Kage’s stories were likewise artisans; certainly, all the female Operatives. She favoured practical, self-sufficient women in her distaff characters – except when being a disaster was a plot point, as with Mendoza and her cataclysmic love life. Most of them were more like Nefer and Nan among the Operatives, and Mary Griffith, the Empress of Mars.

That was Kage’s idea of a true heroine. From an early age, she admired Dorothy Gale of Kansas; whom Frank Baum made utterly practical and unflappable. “No help for it!” cries Dorothy, falling from the skies with a talking hen, and manages to both land on her feet and catch the chicken.

Today, a dear friend (and likewise a determined woman of her hands), sent me a fascinating link to an article. See below:

goo.gl/GxJ2CD

This relates that a medieval nun’s skull has been found with ultramarine pigment between her teeth. As this was an insanely expensive pigment, made from crushed lapis lazuli and worth more than gold, it was only used by skilled and honoured scribes. Which means this lady, a nun in a cloister a thousand years ago, was very much a skilled scribe.

This is a nice snoot cocking, as well as a poke in the same, for all those who deny medieval intelligence in general and the abilities of women in particular. Puella virtute!

This is especially nice because I will shortly be inquiring as to the status of a novel I dropped off with a publisher over the summer. One of the main characters is a scribe-nun … at least until the world gets weird and she runs off for a life of adventure, cocktails and really wild things. She was modelled on Kage, by me, long ago. Also last year, when I rewrote the entire damned book for submission.

I am taking this as a fortunate augury. Praise to Athena Ergane!

And thank you, Stacey Jo.

 

 

 

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Obsession

Posted on January 8, 2019 by Kate

Kage Baker would have shaken her head at me sadly. “Screwed that up, didn’t you? Where’d your mind go?”

Last night, Dear Readers, I completely forgot to write a blog post. The thought never entered my mind, until Kimberly asked me this morning if I had been too tired to blog. Whereupon I realized in horror that – while I had stayed up until 3 AM – it had never even occurred to me to write. My apologies, Dear Readers!

What was I doing until half past midnight? I was reading. I was reading my own past blogs, starting way back in 2010, when I first began this. I was re-reading all my initial grief over Kage’s death, my resolution to continue her writing and the first, fairly successful attempts to do that. And the beginning of my gradual decline into the wild and active life of a coral polyp …

My gosh, some weird things were happening 9 years ago!

Of course, when you examine any past time in detail, it’s pretty weird. Especially when you get down to what the media is now terming “granularity”. I take that to mean examining something in such detail that you are getting right down into the basic texture of it – cells, maybe. Pixels. Quantum foam. What we used to call, in the naive and golden days of the ’60s, the nitty gritty.

It was certainly strange to read over those days back in 2010, 2011 and so on. It was peculiarly fascinating, so engrossing that it was gone 3 AM before I could even try to sleep. I think … I think I kept at it for the glimpses of Kage, that I had drawn so clearly in the first year she was gone. I didn’t remember that I had remembered so much.

However, it’s an obsession that kept me merely chasing my own tail. There was no sudden revelation, no new truth to simultaneously blind me and laser the scales off my eyes. It was a comfortable path but it was circular; good scenery, but it didn’t lead me anywhere. When Kimberly inquired as to my not blogging, it was like cold water thrown in my face to wake me up.

Today, I would have preferred to be in another world, though, Dear Readers. I don’t often touch on politics here, but it’s impossible to avoid encountering them in these days. Unless one is in a coma, or a gilded Lotus Eater’s delirium, the coarse texture of reality is inescapable. I am as concerned as any other rational adult over the closure of our government, and the grim antics of our execrable Chief Executive. I am just as repulsed by the prostitution of our immigration system. I am just as frightened by the growing possibility that Trump will try to hand a castrated government over to Putin.

So, I watched Trump’s address. I think he must have been heavily drugged – although nephew Michael postulated that Secret Service guys with machine guns were standing just out of sight to keep him on track. I don’t think so, though – he was, I think, willing to rein in his usual fulmination in order to pontificate on his current obsession, the Wall. I’m not ruling out drugs, mind … he didn’t make a single threat.

But it was a cruel reminder. Times are hard, hatred is trying once again to ascend to control of the world. You gotta pay attention, because the villains nowadays are sneaky, quiet and blatant liars. It’s no time to slide into the warm bath of the past. Not for long, anyway.

I enjoyed it. But I won’t sit down and disappear up my own memories again any time soon, Dear Readers. It’s much too easy to never, ever come back out again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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