Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker would be in white silk mode right now.

It’s hot here in Los Angeles, and has been for nearly 2 weeks now. Triple digit days, and nights that only get down as far as 75 degrees just before dawn. Fond as Kage was of heat – she used to claim there were salamanders in her ancestry – even she would give up eventually when it got this bad in Pismo Beach.

It may have been the distraction of me lying on the floor, whining and moaning that I was dying of heat prostration. Or it may have been the horrible sight of Harry; who, after being held under a cold shower to bring his body temperature down, looked the demon love child of a Skexis and Quetzalcoatl. (Parrots, like Moriarty, do not sweat.)

Or maybe even Kage got too hot. She’d never admit it, but she’d curse the hot wind off the beach, and knot her hair on top of her head – literally, winding the extravagant length of into a rough rope, and tying it to itself in a Gordian Knot. Then she’d pin the knot to the top of her head with a spare pencil. Or more than one, because Harry considered it his prerogative to pull all the sticks out of her hair until the whole length of it cascaded down over him … then he’d laugh like a maniac, and have to be untangled and removed.

In the moments with less parrot and more peace, Kage would change into her white silk lounging pajamas. No kidding. She would shed her shoes and stockings, which was a very decadent and informal move for her, and continue to write for as long as she could stand sitting by the window. When even the sight of the sea was too hot for her, she’d repair to her wing-back chair, drink rum and Coke with an umbrella in it, and watch pirate movies.

Harry would scurry around on the back of the chair, or run up and down her legs, cackling at the movies. And I’d take a cold shower, dress in as little as I could manage, and watch the two of them. And giggle. And read quietly while they entertained themselves … eventually the sun would set, and we’d have ice cream for dinner, and a glorious cool wind would arise from the steaming sea and all the stars would light at once from the friction of the burning atmosphere.

But we’d survive. Good times, those.

Tonight, Dear Readers, I am simply too tired to come up with a deep, cogent post. My brain has melted, and is leaking out my ears. I wouldn’t mind if it were at least cool, but my melted brain is like boiling caramel. And my hair, although tied in a ponytail on one side of my head, is still as hot and heavy as a cashmere sweater. I’d cut it off, but Kimberly would kill me – I’ve cut my hair off three times or so in the last three years, and she has dedicated herself to preventing me from doing it again. Admittedly, I always do a bad job of it and look terrible …

But we’re surviving. Good times are still happening. Ice cream for dinner has appeared on menus a couple of times in the past fortnight. I have adequate amounts of iced coffee to drink. Today I ordered the unexpected-and-anticipated-with-hysteria BRAND NEW MONKEY ISLAND game. It was Kage’s favourite game in all the rolling world, and so I will play it as a memorial.

Also, a new Stephen King novel, Fairy Tale, came out today. It materialized on my Kindle like a friendly spirit, and reading it is what I am doing for the rest of the night. With a Stephen King novel, after a certain point it’s too scary to try and asleep anyway, so why bother trying in the heat?

And I hope all of you, Dear Readers, are successfully combating the heat and are safe and comfortable. If you have silk pajamas, don them and raise a run and Coke to Kage.

One with an umbrella in it.

Kage Baker: my constant theme, the bedrock of my ramblings here. I spent most of yestreday in a delirium, wandering through some of our more chemically-dependent youth; today, I return to Kage. .

Kage made most of her living, quite on purpose, in historically creative fields. She painted, and even sold some of her work; she used to say “Well, I’m not as good as Van Gogh, God rest his brilliant soul, but I have out-sold him.”

She performed for more than 20 years at both the original Renaissance Faire, and the Dickens Christmas Faire, in improvisational theatre, stage acts, and as a singer. She had a lovely alto, perfect pitch and an inhuman skill at inventing harmony. She could also remember, and sing, every commercial ditty she had ever heard; there wasn’t a lot of call for that, but it did mean she also remembered every hymn, folk song and opera she ever heard, as well.

And she wrote. Gods, how she wrote! I have manuscripts retained since her high school days; enormous fantasy novels that have never seen the light of day. She was writing fanfic before it was popularized; steampunk, too. Had I not, to my mingled relief and guilt, talked her out of powering the Company operatives with clockwork, she’d have been an early writer of that, as well.

These are all fairly liberal areas of creativity – bordering on eccentricity and downright wackiness, even. But Kage’s eccentricities were quiet and private. And she was never wacky. She had class.

She was, at heart, an extremely conservative person. At least, in reaction to any outside force – whatever originated in her own mind could and did go off in all directions and several dimensions; but her first reaction to change from the outside was to dig in her heels and say, “NO”. If something had worked once, it was likely to work again and should therefore always be the first thing tried. The longer or more often it had worked, the more likely Kage felt it was to work again. I’ve never been sure if this reflects a complete lack of comprehension of the laws of probability, or a very sophisticated view of them. Or if she had mixed up the laws of probability with the those of Energy Conservation, or possibly Returning to the Mean. Or maybe with how to make a paper airplane …

The respective depths and widths of our minds were calibrated to different measures. One of my duties as her writing assistant was to make the necessary conversions from Kage’s universe to something closer to the one inhabited by her audience. Sometimes it was easy, such as pointing out that a third of Iden was originally written in Latin and Greek. Sometimes I had to figure out just what Kage’s view of the source of the Universe or the pancreas exactly was, and sort out how to reconcile her personal belief with science and history. Unless her idea was a plot point, and then – heck, science fiction needs those weird and differing perceptions!

And lest you think I was a self-serving editor, Dear Readers, I maintain my innocence. Even real editors ran afoul of the adamantine wall of Kage’s convictions. And I was streaks better than the editor who objected to the Milky Way being visible in one book, because, he said “No one can see that because we live in it.” A brief explanation ensued of the Earth’s distance from the bulk of the Milky Way galaxy. out here in the Orion Belt, as well as the relative size of the Milky Way versus the size of the Earth. Kage put both feet down as hard as she could and said NO CHANGE; it was, no surprise, settled in Kage’s favour, but she gleefully told the story for the rest of her life.

I think most science fiction writers have run into something like this. Especially the ones who write much harder science fiction than Kage did. The facts that the writers do incredible amounts of research, and sometimes have pertinent degrees in their fields, was no barrier ever to the opinion of a low-level editor. The high level editors, BTW, don’t seem to make errors like that. The editor who corrected Kage’s date of The Amazing Year in The Catch was thanked and obeyed immediately: because baseball was not one of Kage’s fields of expertise, and because the editor was right.

The two or three fans who wrote to tell her that cyborgs were not real, time travel was not real, or to ask why had she never considered writing a story where the Nazis won WWII? were dismissed somewhat less politely than editors. I remember Kage writing back to one guy asking if he even knew what science fiction was? He didn’t answer back, so I guess he didn’t.

She didn’t really care. She wasn’t into arguing her plots with anyone, especially if they didn’t like them in the first place. She would talk at Cons (because why go to a Con if you don’t intend to talk), but that was because the people who wanted to talk to her usually liked her work. I think there were only a couple of times when Kage encountered people who had evidently come to a Con specifically to tell off the authors. But people are weird.

It did enforce her determination not to talk to most people. One of my jobs was to either fend off those who were bugging Kage, or enable her to disappear. Like one of Swift’s flappers, sort of, except instead of a bladder full on dried peas, I usually conjured urgent meetings or family disasters. We usually didn’t start giggling for 10 or 15 feet …

But Kage knew that, despite a focus and singleness of mind like unto a diamond drill, she had a limited amount of stamina and time. Especially time, though we didn’t know that in those years; but Kage resented anything that made demands on her writing time. She had 20 or more years planned out, in which to write – not only the careful expanding universes in her head, but with room carefully left for sudden, new ideas. If Kage had been this careful and thorough with her study notes, she would have made straight A’s.

I have tons of stuff that she never did write down, ideas she recited to me to keep us awake on long drives. I’ve written it down, as well as I can in her own words. Some was literally dictated to me as Kage was dying. You know how Emily Dickinson recounted how, because she could not stop for Death, Death had kindly stopped for her? I figure he had to sprint to catch up to Kage, his robe kilted up around his bony knees, as she obviously would never have stopped for him …

Sometimes I wonder, in despair and sometimes in hope, how far I will get on Kage’s work before Death comes looking for me. Four years ago, I too thought I had 20 years or so; in the last 2 years, I’ve realized I can’t afford to think I have all that still ahead of me. But I’ll take all I can get, and see just how much I might get out into the world before that skeletal knock comes at my door.

As someone reminded me yestreday: what is remembered, lives. And I remember.

Kage Baker was a fervent proponent of coffee.

She liked tea in the proper circumstances, and loved the various rituals of the English tea ceremony, Her willingness to drink tea, however, was usually based heavily on what biscuits we had on hand. For years we had afternoon tea on Saturdays, when we could still find a plentiful supply of Alphabet  Biscuits; they were rich, square biscuits, heavily frosted with a pink and white frosting like the best enamel – but edible. They were further painted with the letters of the alphabet, and a few martial motifs like drums and wooden soldiers. Alas, they vanished into the mists of time, and I no longer even remember who made them.

Mostly, though, Kage took her caffeine (the real reason she imbibed all those brown beverages) as Coca Cola. Or coffee. The advent of Starbucks was a revelation, and we worked our way through every exotic blend they offered.  As the years went by, though, I gave my heart (and my cerebral spinal fluid, and a large portion of my blood) to the coffee we could only get Faire. That was the divine custom blend served day and night at the Teahouse of the Mullah Nazrudin’s Donkey. http://mullahsteahouse.com/

The Teahouse was presided over by the Mullah, who I am still convinced was a large, amiable, devout Sufi Djinn. He gave drink to the thirsty and hung over; he fed the hungry with insane combination of lamb and chicken and lentils; he found beds for the lost. And he made the most amazing coffee – even the most standard blend, which was some kind of Arabica, did more for the drinker than most coffee houses’ espresso. He was a good and amazing man, and I will dedicate a blog to him someday, and detail the wonders he worked for Kage and many others.

It’s a splendid coffee. For the true effect, though, you need to drink it with a hint of straw and fire retardant in it, flavoured slightly with sweat and sunscreen melting off your forehead and running down on to your lips. You need to drink it way early in the morning, when the grey ceiling of fog has not yet burned off and it seems impossible that in 3 hours it will be 100 degrees and the streets will be full of people; or late at night, when the Faire is dark but for lanterns in booth windows, and all the people left are US: a crowd of murmuring shadows under the oaks, moving like mist along the dark streets. You need to drink it with the sound of flutes and drums and hurdy-gurdies and belly dancers in the background.

However … Time rolls on, and the Mullah was some time ago gathered to the afterlife. But his devoted employees, the indefatigable coffee-servers who, I suspect, slept suspended from the multi-coloured roof tent of the Teahouse, like bats. Minor djinn all of them, I am sure. And as they are all clever and scholarly djinn, they have established a virtual Teahouse online. There one can catch glimpses of the Paradisaical booth where so many of us spent so many nights, in so many fantastical worlds and altered states of consciousness … and one can purchase the coffee beans!

Kage would have been so happy …

I have the coffee shipped to me now, two pounds of pristine beans every month or so. They come in re-purposed Amazon boxes, usually, which evokes the hard-scrabble improvisation of all our days at the Renaissance Faire. And it makes me laugh. The cats like to climb into the boxes, of course, because they smell so wonderful: but as they are both Maine Coons, they hang over the edges like pie crust and purr contentedly.

And Kimberly sand Michael grind the beans fresh for every pot (because I am still an invalid), and run them through a high-tech drip system that produces my life-sustaining tana leaves.

It’s how I made it every morning for Kage and I as well, though the system was likely to add a few weird vessels along the way. And I’ve used everything from napkins to linen handkerchiefs to formed origami filters to get a clean pour. Good coffee is essential to a successful camping trip, but the filters are the trickiest part.

And so I have maundered on for hundreds of words, Dear Readers, trying to explain the peculiar world of coffee for me and Kage. It is a landscape of creativity – because without that blessed caffeine my brain would seize up entirely; little brass cogs and wheels and worm drives would expand  like an asteroid belt around my head.

And this past day has been one of the worst I’ve had since I escaped the hospital – due to the unrelenting heat, I am sure. I am a quivering mass of tremours and thirst, which has made typing this a real gas, I do assure you.

But, you know what? I have iced Mullah coffee waiting in the fridge, For all I feel like an egg frying on the pavement, I shall probably live forever. And I hope you, Dear Readers, do the same.

Kage Baker liked to play games with reality.

I suspect most writers do. It amuses them to to twist the Fields We Know in ways both subtle and glaring; to make the rest of us see what peculiar vistas they, the writers, see – and not to be able to find our ways out, at least for the duration of the story,

The stories that move you the most are the ones you never do escape. You go through the rest of your life peering at least through the shadows cast by that wood outside Athens; skipping over the glowing paving of the Yellow Brick Road; looking over your shoulder for the hoof beats of black horses, watching the skies for dragons and pterodactyls. Watching the street lights suspiciously, for fear they will mutate into gas lamps or torches or fusion glows …

Kage excelled at making stories like that. I still walk, variously enchanted and bemused, through the worlds she made. Some of them I share with all of you, Dear Readers; and looking at the number of articles I receive about re-discovered lost animals, plants, art works, royal heirs, esoteric booze and sodas – there are a lot of people wandering through Kage’s Universe with me. I ramble also in the worlds she made but never published, where even stranger people congregate on the shore of a saltless sea …

I might get to some of those some day. One never knows.

Kage’s second most favourite reality game was called Where Would We Be Now? It consisted of bringing up the dimensions and shapes of some prior place we had lived, and figuring out where, how and even if our current home goods would fit in our old room(s). Kage had a very precise memory of all the sizes and shapes of prior residences, and it could get very interesting figuring it all out. Especially those times when we would be perforce furnishing rooms in mid-air or someone else’s lot in order to fit our chattels in. Or remembering some tiny not-quite-hovel where we had dwelt in happy poverty in our 20’s, and arguing over who had to sleep on the floor this time.

Whoever started laughing and couldn’t stop, lost.

It was great fun. Stories were born out of the exercise, as well, as Kage would sketch madly to illustrate some new configuration of our household she had imagined. Often they turned out to someone else’s household altogether. Good memories, especially on bad days.

Today has not been a well-regulated day for me; my unconscious has been playing Where Would We Be Now? all day, resulting in long stretches where I had no idea where the hell I was. I kept falling asleep, for one problem, and then constructing someplace weird from what I overheard in my sleep … for a couple of hours, I worried a great deal about posting a blog, and the decided I had no problem – I’d just take the weekend off, and explain it all to you, Dear Readers, on Monday. Then I discovered it was not Saturday, but Thursday, and had to re-arrange my internal orrery to the actual time and place. And then write a blog.

Life has been complicated by the usual summer bloom of spiders. We are not usually much troubled with arachnids, but when it gets hot, they get dreadfully pushy. They’re little ones, just dust spiders usually, but the little wretches bite. I am inured to most bug bites – even mosquitoes – but I’m ridiculously sensitive to spider bites. They swell up like wandering goiters, they ache, and they make me feverish and ill. I languish uselessly, feeling like a stepped-on egg; I get pale and garrulous and whiny. I make tiny, cranky sacrifices to hydrocortisone cream, and swear vendetti against the cursed arachnids.

I’d love to spray Raid all over, but the stuff is bad for cats, and parrots, and humans who do not breathe well. So we spray spearmint essence around (spiders don’t like the smell) and vacuum furiously, and encourage our cats in their hunting. Both the big black boy and the little orange girl are dedicated bug hunters, and can be counted upon to rid us of most of the plague. Harry does what he can, too, when one gets close to him – he is ruthless in policing the walls near his perch.

A certain amount of moths (like, every moth they can find) also fall prey to our pets, but hey – it’s the Circle of Life, you know? And there’s only so much sympathy I can extend to guests who chew holes in my clothes.

Anyway, between spiders and narcolepsy and assorted hideous dreams involving Alex Jones (do NOT find yourself half-asleep while the news is on. Learn by my error.) I have been pretty useless today. In fact, this blog is the only constructive thing I have accomplished. But I have done that – I still live!

And maybe you can try our old game yourselves, Dear Readers, and see if it amuses you as well. Trying to literally fit yourself into old dwellings can very instructive, and requires considerable skill and spatial expertise. Of course, the failures are the fun part …

Better still, let one your favourite stories drag you under their sweet-scented tide, to frolic with whomever you love that lives there. It’s time well-spent; it’s good for your soul, your heart and your long-term memory.

And some author will feel the distant thrill of a reader returning to their world. And they will be happy, too.

A very nice orrery, albeit out of proportion.