Half Empty AND Half Full

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker regulated her emotional life like clockwork – a carefully maintained series of gears and weights and counterweights and cunning escapements. Those aren’t ways of getting away; they are clever little devices that make toothed gears … pause … for a fraction of time.

That stops the inevitable progress of the unwinding of the clockwork, and makes it possible for a clock to keep time at an even rate. Instead of erratically winding down all its energy at once, or freezing for random periods of time, the entire process is regulated: one moment at a time, each one the same, which we arbitrarily call “seconds”. And thus feral Time is portioned into tame minutes, hours, days, weeks, months.

Mind you, clockwork is not all that precise: even with escapements as fine as a butterfly’s antennae, gears as minutely detailed as lace. The actual discrete pieces of Time are something we all agree on, as a polite fiction. And it doesn’t matter whether those discrete pieces are seconds calculated by master horologists or the level of the day’s sunlight sliding down that crooked tree where old Uncle passed out after that one party …. it’s agreed on by our entire society, and that’s all most of us consider.

Kage, however, expected her personal time to flow precisely the way she wanted it. She had a profound disinterest in that polite societal fiction. Good times were supposed to last; bad times were expected to have the good grace to speed past. She didn’t want Time to fly while she was having a good time – she wanted it to sit still and last. And, amazingly – or not, if you knew Kage – she managed to make Time actually do that a lot of the – well, time.

Faire was the most obvious example. While we did Faire, the weekends appeared to last about 8 days – endless mornings and afternoons under the changing shadows of the oaks, endless nights under stars, by lantern-light. The weekdays between, conversely, zipped by so fast one barely had time to do the laundry. We never really unpacked, during a Faire; we lived out of variously furnished luggage,

Time spent writing went on forever, too: many more than 24 hours in a day. Or in a night, when Kage absolutely had to sleep; rest, too, went on forever, as rejuvenating as a river fed from a bottomless spring.

It’s why she never paid attention to the face of a clock. I don’t know what she actually saw, but it wasn’t 5 or 10 or 43 minutes. It was however much time she needed to accomplish what she wanted to do. It was my problem, usually, to make that time fit into the amount of real time it took to get to work, or finish a novel, or do three loads of laundry … I gave up on the entire thing in our 30’s, and lied to her about what time it was and how long it took to get somewhere. And yet, Time still stretched and contracted like a rubber band on acid in her vicinity; I just went along with it.

It still goes on. In fact, I have come to rely on it for many things. Fair still lasts for days every weekend, while the intervening days flash by – I wouldn’t change that, because I’d rather spend more time in Dickens’ London and Extreme Christmas instead of 21st century America. Little Nell and Tiny Tim are alive and well there; while famous and beloved people are dropping like flies around here.

This weekend was Opening Weekend of the Dickens Christmas Fair and Victorian Holiday Party. Snow and tinsel! Colored lights and stained glass! The dance party in Fezziwig’s warehouse, all of Scrooge’s ghosts in his terrified nightmares! Roast chestnuts, roast beef, roast coffee beans scenting the air, along with all the spices and perfumes of Araby! Dancers, singers, sailors, soldiers, costermongers and kids rolling hoops and sulking thugs and really very friendly and not-too-respectable ladies! Cheery people of all classes and descriptions going about wishing happily confused Americans “Happy Christmas!”  And Charles Dickens himself pacing through the crowd in his enormous top hat, while Queen Victoria might be  processing by on any afternoon, followed by royal children and German princes.

Anyone would want it to last for days. And oh, it was glorious!

At the same time, though … there is the constant absence of Kage herself. I am always turning to speak to her, and finding myself talking to memory and cinnamon-scented air. She always seems to be just behind my right shoulder, never saying anything but just about to …

And yesterday – just about the time we opened, I found out later – an old friend, dear to me as a son, died. He was dying, we knew it, but – there was supposed to be time. There was supposed to be a warning, when I could have gone North to Seattle to be with him; he wanted to throw his own wake, so he’d have a chance to enjoy it. He was supposed to  outlive the Winter. But, like Kage, the time promised was not the time given – it all fled past at triple pace, and I didn’t even know he was gone until the next morning.

A mercy to me, really; or at least, not as much of a loss as to his wife and children. I got another endless day of thinking he was alive, planning my trip to see him, to say goodbye. But in the meantime, Time went on at its own pace, and fooled me once again.

Half full, half-empty – who cares how full the glass is, as long as you can share it with the ones you love? It doesn’t matter if a day lasts 3 hours or 42, if you can just spend one  more with your beloveds.

And there will never be any more of those than we are dealt. No, not though we cry ever so much … Tick. Tock. Tick.

 

 

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Dress Rehearsal – All Day, Every Day

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker loved Dress Rehearsal weekends at Faires.

They were exciting, they were productive – because you were well and truly under the gun, and had to get your portion of the show DONE, come Hell or (sometimes literally) high water. They were also always a great deal of fun: partly because nearly everyone was in a state of high energy, high hysteria, and high chemical alteration from drugs or alcohol or too much sugar.

Also – and I think this is what she loved best – they were still private. The audience was not yet there to get in the way. It was just us – our weird small town, our extended peculiar family, all our friends and best beloveds running around in the woods or the wilds of London, with no one to impress or entertain but one another.

Some of our best work was done then. The audience never does see the best of a show. Every cast in the world has always known that – only they get to see the true brilliance, the best bloopers, the funniest jokes, the greatest acts of charity and heroism.

At Renaissance Faires, I have wonderful memories of Queens wearing Micky Mouse ears and Burger Kings crowns; of halberdiers with herrings instead of pikes, of Shakespeare done in accents of purest W.C. Fields. Charlie Chaplin was wont to show up, or the Keystone Kops careen through a Morris set. And costuming was … eccentric. When you also have to build your own set, construction is little more personal than it is to the average cast. It’s normal to see people half-costumed while they wield power tools or paint brushes. I have a wonderful memory of seeing the sun come up over the Agoura Hills on Opening Morning: while I was stapling canvas sunshade to the edge of the Inn’s roof – wearing a carpenter’s tool belt over the kilted-up shift and long woolen stockings I’d slept in.

I’ve sat on the floor of the Cow Palace, singing “Jerusalem” with Kage as we painted or oiled the bar, with the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come leaning on the wall eating jellybeans through his cowl. I’ve watched my maids, in corsets and bloomers, running festive greenery all over the Parlour; watched gentlemen in their shirtsleeves and weskits wrestling with the plumbing at the Bar. And all of us pausing to shout the loyal toast as Queen Victoria and all her court paced by regally – dressed in camo and sweats and leiderhosen and gimme caps. Zombies dressed as Victorian thugs and harlots dancing to Thriller …*

Kage watched it all, with those calculating black eyes, and committed it all to the weirdest vision of the underpinnings of History imaginable. These scenes are the source of a lot of the Company’s methods and procedures – even more so of the habits and hobbies of the Operatives. She loved being behind the scenes of History. And if it didn’t happen exactly as she said – well, it should have. And in Kage’s world, it does.

This weekend past was Dress Rehearsal for the 2016 Dickens Christmas Fair. We’re almost done: even now, the Cow Palace is ringing to the increasingly demented sounds of Hell Week, as all the last-minutes furbelows and fiddly bits are put in place. The Bar and Parlour of the Green Man, thanks to my astonishing crew, are just about perfect: Extreme Christmas to the max, all garlands and bows and tartan and Turkey carpets and damask drapes and linen and glass and wreaths and garlands and ANTLERS. There are antlers everywhere. As Jen, the Chief Housemaid, remarked, “We do use antlers in all of our decorating.” It’s one of our hallmarks.

And the ride up and down I-5 was fast and amazingly peaceful both ways. Mike and I encountered no monsters (though many herds of sheep, with copious gamboling lambs). In the dark, the whole Central Valley smells of the hay harvest – which is like fresh-mowed lawn, but even sweeter, and going on for 300 miles. The November full moon rose on Sunday like a ginger pearl, delirious in size and so bright the night sky was actually dark blue. The deer grazing in the tilted fields beside the Grapevine were clear and cast in silver in the moonlight; there were no stars because the sky was too clear and full of light.

We listened to Scheherazade, and ate Sweet Tarts.

Live every day like Dress Rehearsal, Dear Readers. Wear your costume (or as much of it as you remembered to pack), hit your mark, get all the beer plumbed in and the bows stapled in place and the carpets down. Laugh and sing with the people you love, and be prepared at any moment of the day or night for the Big Performance to start.

Because it’s all performance, the audience is always just about to enter, and we are all here to make art.

 

*Go to You Tube and watch it!   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPHvg34n7Kk&list=RDPPHvg34n7Kk#t=30

 

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November 9, 2016

Posted on November 9, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker was attentive to politics. She studied everything on the ballots, she maintained her registration, she knew her representatives, she voted in every election. Nonetheless, she did not consider than politics should be discussed in every environment.

Family dinners, in public with strangers, online – she said it was rather like sex; if you wouldn’t have sex in that place and situation, you shouldn’t discuss politics in it, either. Of course, this being the Land of the Free and the Home of the Conversationally Incontinent, people do talk up politics in all these inappropriate places. Family dinners are an especial danger zone; the fact that her family was usually too large for at-table meals helped preserve the peace and a few lives. It’s harder to fight to the death when people are filling their plates from the buffet and sitting all over the house.

Chat rooms were also dangerous. Kage never got into Facebook, so she escaped the radioactive side-effects of unwanted, unsolicited and sometimes nonsensical evil comments on one’s private feed. For chat rooms and in public and at dinner, on the bus or in a church or a grocery store line: if subjected to the verbal diarrhea of someone else on their favorite politics, Kage simply fled. She refused to participate.

I hate it, too.

From her I learned to claim the constitutional guarantee of a secret ballot in order to avoid discussing politics. People who will go to great lengths to insist on their right to open-carry a hand cannon are still somewhat amazed  when I tell them I am invoking my constitutional right to keep my opinions a secret. And they seldom argue with me! It must be shock and awe; or some sort of brotherhood of crazy constitutionalism. Wow, they seem to think, I never even thought of that one!

Whatever the reason, it has been very useful the last year and a half. I’ve gotten into very few arguments. And I still do not intend to discuss the election with people, because I still think it’s rather vulgar. And I think the national supply of vulgarity will be in no danger for the next 4 years … suffice it to say, my hopes were not fulfilled by the election results.

But I am not going to be entirely silent. I am hoping that my nightmares will not also be fulfilled by the Reign of Trump, but no way am I going to be quiet on the subject. Too many of my friends won’t survive in the world he proposes to enact. The world in general is recoiling in horror from us. I keep remembering Lincoln’s great fear that we will let the goal of government of, by and for the people fail.

I remember my father’s knee as he walked the house at night, sleepless from nightmares of battle. His knees were plastic, blown up by a landmine in Korea; every step he took, clinging to his sanity as he took muddy hills over and over, was the echo of his commitment to this country. I remember that Kage’s father had two navels: the one he was born with, and the one given him by a sniper as he parachuted over Burma in WWII; both were his umbilicus to the life blood of the United States.

I remember all the women who literally suffered and died to win the right to vote. I remember all the slaves who literally fought and died for the right to be free. I remember all the children who were sent across the Atlantic with notes pinned to their coat lapels in Hebrew, in hopes someone would save them – the remnants of their families – from the horrors of Germany. I remember the shame of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shackles of flame forever on our wrists to remind us to never, ever, use that nuclear fire on a living city again.

I do fear. I fear that what was good, will die. I fear that was was rightfully dead – will rise again. But someone has to stand and keep lighting the candles in the windows of the dark world.

So from time to time, Dear Readers, I may break one of Kage’s most stringent rules and talk politics around the family table here. I’ll keep it rare, and brief, and as polite as possible; please do you the same. But if anyone finds it necessary to fling the green olives or mashed potatoes – well, I will understand. Not the black olives, though. Those are too good to waste.

It’s a tough old world. Times are hard; and despite the joy of the winners at the moment, I am pretty sure things will get harder for a while. Compassion, hope, strength, the willingness to identify injustice and speak of it – these things matter very much. They must be maintained. It’s possible to be too polite, when someone is bleeding to death who might be saved by your tearing off your petticoat …. the world has to cope with seeing a few fat old knees from time to time, so we can stanch some wounds.

Never forget:  “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”*

Kage believed very strongly in that, too.

 

 

*Edmund Burke, Parliamentarian

 

 

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Blog #2 for Today; Building Dickens

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker was always in charge of the packing for Fairs. She handled all the maps. She was my navigator. I miss her dreadfully when I have to do it for myself; not only because it means another Fair without her, but because I am so really, really bad at all those things.

However, she made me promise not to stop doing Fair – and honestly, I haven’t even been tempted to do so. Ill health has prevented me doing Dickens much and/or at all the last 2 years, and it has been horrible. Bad enough I am falling apart with ridiculous frequency – I mean, I survived the removal of a kidney last winter, then fell down the stairs and broke my freaking ankle. It gets worse because I know what is going on in the enchanted depths of the Cow Palace, and knowing I was missing it was a horrible torture.

But this weekend, I returned. Ta da! True, I can’t do much but sit and point and make whatever executive decisions don’t frighten my dedicated and efficient staff, but it’s so much more fun to be there! It appears I am not ready to settle down. A weekend on the road has left me positively euphoric. Even though my poor Cruiser is still out of commission, rental cars are a thing. I rented a charming little sub-compact, and it still had plenty of room for me, Michel and our luggage. And it was such a thrill to head North on I-5 again!

Though first we had to wait for a mile-long funeral procession to clear the street in front of us. We live only a few blocks from a cemetery; and no return to Fair, opined my trusty navigator nephew, would have been complete without our getting trapped by either a funeral or a train or a stampede of llamas … we were, after all, embarking on the Highway of the Weird.

Luckily, I-5 was kind to us. Wonderful landscapes, the seasonal icebergs of cotton bales the size of 727s on the edges of all the fields, a late perfume of hay and harvested crops over everything. There were sheep with Fall lambs gamboling. There were hawks on the speed signs, ravens pacing our car, coyotes panting sarcastically at us from the roadsides. Political signs that indicate clearly the center of California is the original home of insane conspiracy theories …

Once we cleared Vallejo, though, I mistook a turning on Highway 12/29 and drove us into an alternate dimension. Some sort of pocket Universe, I think, that involved driving in endless circles around Napa. In the dark. By the time our hosts, the saintly Skolds, were calling us to ask cautiously where we were, we had no idea: we couldn’t tell what street we were on, we weren’t sure what  city we were in, and the rental car didn’t come with a compass. And while Kage had a compass in her head, I do not.

But! I have a smart phone! Even more importantly, I have a smart nephew. Michael made me pull over, and determined that my phone had a GPS function! I had no idea, and had never even turned it on; I’d never cared. But when clever Mike did so – and also discovered the phone had a voice function – suddenly I cared very much. We were back in contact with reality! Mike was able to steer us out of the pocket universe and back to our proper destination. It was a wonder and a major triumph, and now I know something new and massively useful that my phone can do.

The Skolds, bless them, were unperturbed and gently amused by our mad adventure. I am constantly turning up at their door after some bizarre trip disaster: I even got the car stuck on railroad tracks in Petaluma one night, and they had to talk me off of the tracks and back on to the road. So they are sort of used to me being late to dinner because I am in flames, or was abducted by aliens, or have somehow gone too far and crossed the border into Oregon …

Once he was armed with GPS, Mike guided us all over the Bay area with no more contretemps. Out to the storage unit in the South Bay where the Green Man lives when it’s not doing Dickens Fair; back to the Cow Palace, through the Maze between the 580 and 880 when we left on Sunday while fearfully dodging Raiders fans. We saw many, many terrible accidents – but none of them involved us, though some seemed to have involved IEDs and heavy ordinance.

My wonderful, amazing group, the denizens of the Green Man – also known as the Chaos Construction Corps – got all the walls up and painted on Saturday. On Sunday, we got all the furniture unloaded and placed. Enormous Turkish rugs now cover the ghastly asphalt of the Cow Palace floor; our couches and tables and chairs and sideboards are all where they belong. The altar piece of the Bar is in place.

Next week we will decorate madly for two days. The walls alone have to be finished off with crown molding, wallpaper friezes and green garlands with plaid bows before we can hang a single faux Constable. And there are stacks and stacks of plastic bins everywhere: in which the bar and kitchen tools, the dishes and silverware, the tea services, the linens and table cloths, and all the enormous variety of Victorian gewgaws that enhance our walls are stored. Feathers. Mirrors. Hand-colored prints in gilded frames; dubious hunt scenes and ship wrecks and landscapes with ruins. The (working) chandelier. All the wreathes, lamps, candles and stag horns that give our Parlour its distinctive look.

Extreme Christmas is coming out of the boxes. And I am ecstatic! Even though I still miss Kage most dreadfully.

But when I am in the Parlour …. I am still living inside her head.

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BLOG #1 for Today: PSA For November

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker began voting at age 18 – part of the first crop of 18-year-olds to vote in California – and never missed an election in her life. In 2010, I wrote the following blog entry about the importance of the franchise, in her honor. I don’t think I ever said this more clearly, and it means even more now. So I am re-printing it today, in order to add my mite to the weight of voices urging everyone to get out and vote in tomorrow’s election.

It matters. It matters. It matters. Three times I say it, and conjure and compel you all: go vote.

AND NOW – A VERY SPECIAL REPEAT OF A VERY SPECIAL EPISODE

 

Kage Baker was an avid voter. She (and I) were in the first crop of 18+ people to get the vote, and she never missed an election after that. Her armoir had I Voted stickers all over it. A few fell off over the years; they got replaced at the next election. She was damned proud of voting.

Kage was an historian at heart, and she knew how seldom people actually get to have a hand in their own governance. Our system of representative democracy – while admittedly often a cluster-f**k of unimaginable proportions – is nonetheless the best system currently going. Winston Churchill told us so.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth … Every little girl should know their names, and all the other ladies who were reviled, jailed and tortured for the right to vote. Kage said there ought to be a jump-rope rhyme for it. Everybody remembers jump-rope rhymes.

Two years ago, I had a heart attack the day before the 2008 Presidential elections. Once I got to the ER, it became obvious they weren’t going to let me go -I was distraught. I had to vote! It was the most important election of my life, and I was not going to miss it. However, I was unable to talk the doctors into a day pass from the ICU, for some reason. (Maybe because they were still hysterical over my driving myself into the ER in the first place.) But they were most unreasonable.

Kage was my saviour. She got hold of the hospital ombudsman, she got hold of an absentee ballot, she got the appropriate waiver to allow her to hand-deliver my ballot to our polling place. She came to my bedside, I voted and signed and sealed, and off she went. By foot and bus – Kage could not drive – in a rain storm, in our tiny Pacific Coast town where the buses run only once a hour and stopped nowhere near the polling place …

But she did it. She marched through the storm and the growing darkness, chanting “Liz – Cady – Stan-ton, So-jour-ner-Truth!” to keep the cadence. (I know she did because she was chanting it when she left my room in triumph that afternoon.) She didn’t get home until long after dark, and went upstairs to our dark apartment all alone, to a dinner of rum and toast with a parrot for her sole companion.

She called me on the phone to announce her victory, and cried on the phone over my being so sick and far away. I cried too. We swore we would always take care of one another, as we had for years, until we were two madly eccentric old ladies racing one another to the polling booth in our wheelchairs …

Kage Baker died because she was poor and uninsured and self-employed, and no one would hurry on her care. Her cancer was diagnosed in March of 2009 – therapy did not begin for another 6 months, and surgery was stalled for 8 months. So when it finally came, the cancer had metastasized to her brain, her lungs, her gut … they cured the endometrial cancer, it was the stuff that grew while state and federal aid wasted time that killed her.

I have a very personal stake in health care reform. But we all have a very personal stake in reining in corrupt bureaucracies, rapacious banks, elected officials who sit on their asses and delay, delay, delay. Kage Baker is not the only person whose death can be laid directly at the door of the greedy, dishonest and powerful.

Go vote. Whatever your principles are, make sure your voice is heard. It really is a matter of life and death.

Really.

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A Change of Season

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker loved the change of the seasons. Despite being a native Californian – and an Angelena, at that – she maintained that we had the same seasons as anywhere else in the country. Their markers were different and their timing is funny, but they’re all here.

She was aware of all the old jokes about LA having seasons of drought, flood, fire and riot; or of having no seasons at all: just a climate. She scorned such feeble and narrow-minded descriptions of our annual cycle here in the Valley of the Smoke; and the California in total is even more richly endowed than most of rest of the world. That business with the drought, flood, fire and riot? Those aren’t seasons. Those are  just current events.

“In California,” Kage liked to point out, “we have all four seasons at the same time!”

Which is actually quite accurate: in a state a thousand miles long, divided 3 times lengthwise with mountains and edged with the largest body of water on Earth, with both the lowest point and the highest mountain in the contiguous United States – man, there’s every season imaginable going on somewhere all the time. It’s a rite pf passage for the young and athletic to go surfing and skiing on the same weekend – which is why we get excesses like naked snow boarding and shooting a curl in flannels and a muffler.

It’s downright easy, traversing 20 miles horizontally or half  mile vertically, to go from summer to winter. We did it more than once, driving up from Los Angeles heat to a snow storm at the crest of the Grapevine. It’s why, the first time ever that Kage saw snow with her own eyes, she was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sandals – when we’d left the house, it was a summer 85 degrees, and sunny. And when we got back down to our own front porch, it was a wet Fall afternoon.

This week past, it has suddenly become autumn in Los Angeles. I am assuming that is why I am full of energy and eager to accomplish things: the harvest is due, the nights are chill, the air is old gold and blue smoke. Coming home from fetching my nephew home from school this evening, the air smelled of wood smoke and wet leaves and pumpkins – the classical smell of 3 days after Hallowe’en. Never mind that it was 90 at noon today: the night air was down in the 50s, and I needed socks for the first time in 6 months.

So today I packed extra socks, since I am heading North. Lots of socks. And jeans I can get paint on, and notebooks for maps of where the hell the furniture goes, and the good metal tape measure. I’ve packed my Buke, and a thumb drive shaped like a skeleton, and some knitting in case I have to sit and catch my breath. And an insulated coffee cup.

Because  I’ll be in the Cow Palace, Dear Readers, setting up for Dickens Fair: and that place is one of the hidden houses of Winter; frost breeds there, the shadows are deep and blue with ice …

At dawn, the wild geese flew low over the house. I could hear their wing beats on the dark, cold air, between their bugled calls.

Every road in the world is shaking its mane in the wind, pawing the ground, calling out Let’s go!

Tomorrow, tomorrow, in the Autumn morning, we head North up I-5.

 

 

 

 

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Stress Encourages Growth

Posted on November 2, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker was a firm believer in the advantages of carefully regulated stress.

“It’s like bonsai,” she explained to me. “Or the espalier principle. All gardening, in fact. You prune branches to reduce unnecessary strain on the plant. You pinch back some blossoms to get larger fruit. You dead head the roses to a new cycle will bloom. Or you pin an apricot tree to a wall so you can reach all the branches!”

“So … you’re espalier-ing yourself?”

“Yep,” she would proclaim, accepting a third invitation to supply an original story to yet another anthology. “More pressure, a bigger head of steam! Diamonds out of coal!”

“You can’t make diamonds out of coal,” I would point out. “You need a volcanic vent for that.” (That’s true, too.)

“Superman can do it. And I can produce a volcanic vent if I have to …” And Kage would bend her hot-eyed glare on her keyboard, and will it to boil. And it usually worked, too.

Mind you, things would often get fairly cataclysmic when Kage added one too many scoops of coal to her steam engine. One is always in danger of blowing a gasket or jumping the rails. But Kage rather liked train wrecks; they were exciting … and as she also said (mixing metaphors fearlessly), stress is also what produces new species. Who could tell how her stories might speciate, if subjected to over-crowding and scarce resources?

It’s where “Son, Observe The Hour” came from. And Nell Gwynne, too. Also, 2/3 of Anvil of the World: all of which have been well-received, and gone on to successful and fertile lives. None show any sign of becoming extinct.

Frankly, I think Kage made these airy claims because she just took on too much to do and had to make the best of it. I”m pretty sure of it, because I kept track pf her commitments and schedules. But, you know, it was exciting, and it did work. And it seemed to satisfy both Kage’s adamantine determination to get things accomplished, and her purely human desire to spend her days in a hammock with a tiki drink …

She was big on balance, too. And sometimes you only get balance by a averaging: you lean too far in one direction, then you tilt too far in another; then you spin in place while trying to straighten up …. and it all works out. No one knows why. It’s a miracle.

So I’m updating my Buke and all its pertinent programs, and I have reserved a rental car for Friday. I’ve found my toiletries bag. Kimberly made me an incredibly clever little travel box for my constant eye drops, and I am filling up my cavernous pill box for the dozens of meds I take over a weekend. And I am taking along some thumb drives with current work on ’em, so I can write at night. Lots to do – lots and lots and too much, and it’s all glorious …

Because on Friday noon, I head North! To the Cow Palace, there to take part in the vital preparation for Dickens Fair! I’m not very useful, but it’s really, really where I belong this time of year.

Pressure, to make gems. I need that, too. It might not work for coal and diamonds, but I can be happy with a well-made bit of paste. The sparkle is what matters.

 

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There Must Be More Than One Way (Not) To Write

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker took her last writing class in high school, at age 17. That was in her last quarter of her senior year, when creative scheduling gave her a whopping 2 classes – World Religion and the aforementioned Creative Writing Class. She got A’s in both, and learned how to make potato latkes. (World Religion always did a  Passover meal.) She went to her locker exactly twice – on the first and last days of school.

The next year, Administration changed the rules …

Kage hated writing classes. She didn’t even like teaching them, although she did participate in a few seminars once she was an established writer. But that was by way of paying it forward, which she regarded as a duty to the coming generation. (I learned from her by osmosis involving alcohol.) She herself looked at (admittedly excellent) programs like Clarion, and knew they would be fatal for her. It just wasn’t her way.

I’ve never dared subject myself yet to a peer-reviewed program; I think my head would explode. It’s taken all the guts I can manage to entice a few beta readers, and to let Kimberly edit things: and that latter act took encroaching blindness to overcome my terrified solipsism. However, for the last 6 years I have indulged in the manic frenzy of NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWri Mo is short for the National Write A Book In A Month program -it’s the hefty acronym for an online discipline wherein one writes 50,000 words in 30 days. It begins every November 1st at midnight, and runs through the entire month. You register your book, its synopsis, its cover (if you like) and you can get just as much or as little help as you want: everything from a dedicated writing buddy to all night group sessions in coffee shops. The idea is, once you’ve gotten 50,000 words down – the rest will come via momentum and rewrites. The idea is to write EVERY SINGLE DAY and establish the core of your novel.

This actually works. You can reach the word minimum by a mere 1,667 words a day – and really, that isn’t much for the determined wordsmith. It doesn’t matter how polished or rough it is, either-  refinement is for later, these 30 days are just for nonstop bulk production. If you hit a blank spot, you can write  “This is a blank – will fill in history of polydactyl albino physicists later” and go on to the next, better realized scene.

I have not always made my 50,000 words – but I mostly have. I have produced two entire novels with this as central process. One was the second Nell Gwynne novel, most of which was written during NaNoWriMo. The second is Knight & Dei, which is still being looked over at Tor. The point is, though – I really did produce most of 2 entire novels in, essentially, 60 days. And if I – who am plagued with disasters, in feeble health, and the very prey and plaything of malevolent Fate – can do this, anyone can! I can even do it again!

And really, one occasionally needs a gun held to one’s head in order to write. We all know this, Dear Readers. Many professional writers expend a great deal more creativity on ways not to write than they do at a keyboard. I am, sometimes, one of them … I can resist a lot of things, but sooner or later, the specter of A Book – any book; hell, a catsup bottle label – will get me. I cannot resist the printed word, and what I like best is someone else’s work. It’s a serious flaw, I know it is, but … the gravitational pull of the printed word is my primary weakness in life.

This is why the steam engine momentum of NaNoWriMo suits me so well. It’s like a  death sentence every 24 hours. Get those 1,667 words in or die! I usually do it late at night, by candle light and the blue glow of the computer screen, crouched in the shadows like a desperate miller’s daughter with a pile of straw.

But, hey, whatever works, you know? We all tell ourselves stories to get things done. Kage used the daily sucking vacuum of my appetite for reading to power her own writing: she had to get something written every day, or I’d sulk all evening because I had nothing new to read. Sisters have a lot of uses for the truly creative.

At the same time that I am trying to knock out 1,677 words a day out on poor, long-suffering and inhumanly patient Marswife, I am also editing a friend’s work in the hope of getting it published. This forces a different, and just as useful, discipline on me. I can give myself excuses for not getting something done, but when someone else is waiting for my help – well, I must get off my spreading butt and be productive.

If virtue is not native to you, Dear Readers, it can be forced. That is my theory, anyway. So far,it mostly works. Two novels in 6 years of NaNoWriMo is an exceptional average. And I have yet to fail a friend in these delicate circumstances – it’s a survival of the soul kind of thing. I’ve lost quite enough vital organs lately; I want to hang on to my soul.

So in these dark autumn nights, I will write. When I can’t write, I will read and edit. I’ve got lots of tea lights and Yankee Candle votives, and left over Hallowe’en candy, too. My cool writing hat, my special writing necklace. Also, coffee.

And as long as there one more way to write than not to write, everything will balance out just fine.

 

 

 

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Actually Hallowe’en

Posted on October 31, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker, would, by this time of the afternoon, now be insanely engrossed in her Hallowe’en rituals. They had grown enormous, time-consuming and madly detailed by the end of her life; the Goddess only knows what we would have been brought to if she had lived longer. Actual bonfires, I suspect.

Here at Chez Atwater, we are also deep in the final details. There are things you just cannot reasonably do until The Day appears; and a lot you can’t really do until the light begins to dwindle a little. How to place the last lights, for instance, so the central lawn display of tombstones, skeletal flamingos and vultures is properly back-lit. The lawn flamingos are our own creations, BTW – ordinary pink ones, some of which have been painted black with white bones, and others of which have been altered to look like vultures – paint them black, but leave the head a naked pink, and give them a ruff of white marabou. They are darling!

The porch is ringed with lights: orange, yellow, red and purple. There are jack o’lanterns ready to light up all over the place, including the enormous one amid the flamingos that requires a dozen glow-sticks to illuminate. The plasma generator is in the front window, framed in black and lending that mad scientist look to the place … and the zombie gnome is in a welcoming pose on the edge of the steps.

And I just set up the fog bubble generator in the driveway. The bubbles and rifts of fogs are always a big hit – sometimes kids have to be literally dragged away by their parents, they are having so much fun chasing the bubbles.

Kimberly, being the one around here with common sense, has put down safety tape on the driveway so the small people staring out of the eyes of gods and monsters don’t trip and go splat. She has swept the dead leaves away, trimmed all offending bushes, made sure no one can run carelessly onto the lawn, and made sure there are no open flames on the porch. She’s even washed the pumpkins! We don’t do spooky music, because it scares the very small ones – and as we live half a block from an elementary school, we get a lot of exceptionally tiny goblins.

All this Kage and I used to do as well – although, living as we did in remote places most of our lives, we seldom handed out much candy. When you live in an oak grove or a sea-side cottage, there are fewer neighbors’ kids around. Kimberly, on the other hand … she has an arbitrary cutoff of 300, and always stocks enough candy for that many. (Plus the extra bag the family has already eaten. Smarties come but once a year, man.)

Kage used to be going insane at this point, trying to get the holiday dinner on the table in time: complete with the symbolic empty place setting, which was for our beloved dead. Kimberly, being knee deep in trick-or-treaters, is sensibly sending out for pizza … it’s a good meal for Celtic holidays, in its avatar as a flaming circle.

The little black cat is bored – she’s a pro at this. The little orange cat is totally freaked, as her familiar house is transformed and she keeps being moved from place to place by expostulating humans who – for inexplicable reasons – keep trying to put weird glowing things where she likes to sit. Harry won’t care until the little voices at the door start – then he’ll be yelling back, all enthusiastic and ready to join in.

We’re a holiday family, Dear Readers. We always have been, in all our branches and roots, in all our locations and beliefs. We are proudly That House. This is one of the ways I remember Kage the most intently.

And at midnight, Dear Readers, I will start my annual National Write A Book In A Month (NaNoWriMo! NaNoWriMo! NaNoWriMo! Rah rah rah!)  marathon, as well. Something good always comes of it – though not always a whole book; only twice, so far, but it’s the momentum that matters. And I always hope that it’s that effort, that movement, that will lure Kage by for a brief visit.

I assume there is enough chocolate and rum in the Afterlife to keep her happy. But maybe she’ll stop by to tell me how to spell something properly.*

One can hope …

 

*My thanks to Maggie and Kate, who reminded me where the apostrophe goes in Hallowe’en. And to Kimberly, who patiently went back in and fixed all the places where I got it wrong.

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Hallowe’en. E’en.

Posted on October 30, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker loved old calendars, old traditions, old holidays. The more weight of years something had behind it, the better she liked it.

Mind you, anything that happened even once and turned out well was an immediate tradition for her.  All it took for something to become what we’ve always done was for it to come off well, once. Whole routes to and from work or the shops became permanent because once we found a perfectly good standing lamp on the curb along that route – it had marble insets in the base and mostly worked and everything …

Hallowe’en was one of her favorites. as I have mentioned before. It’s a favorite with nearly everyone these days (except the recent crop of religious extremists. My apologies if you ARE a religious extremist, but really – you’re an idiot. And you need to find some other blog to read …) Anyway, for the majority of the world these days, Hallowe’en is simply a terrific festival of costumes and sugar,  fun in the dark for all ages.

Kage believed, though, that it was the unconscious weight of the holiday’s age that made it so compelling. It predates most of the modern monotheisms; maybe all of them, its original celebrants didn’t keep very good records. But every human culture celebrates something to mark the harvest and the change to the dark half of the year: it’s an emotional necessity. Something has to see you through the black heart of the winter, some feast and flame and festive mania to assure you that someday the Sun will come back  …

Hallowe’en has emerged as the modern winner: coloured lights, costumes,candles and gourds, the last fresh fruit and grain and meat; a night when monsters are held safely at bay and children can roam free in the sweet dark. One night a year when you can be briefly convinced that there is nothing crouched in the blackness between the stars or the streetlights, waiting to eat your soul and your Snickers bars.

The Celts, who originated this version as Samhain, lit bonfires on this night. They wore masks, held feasts, and propitiated the dead for all they were worth. The dead were believed to be able to come back on this night, when the borders of the world were thin: the honored and beloved dead, with any luck, who would appreciate a pint of ale and an energetic four-in-hand by firelight. If you were not so lucky in your visitants – well, you could distract the crankier dead with games and riddles, and lines of salt and grain; blind them with lanterns made of turnips, and blazing bonfires; wear masks so they’d think you were dead, too. Give food to whomever asked, on the chance you were successfully bribing a hungry ghost.

Christianity appropriated this festival (which they COULD NOT get rid of, no matter how they tried) as All Hallow’s Eve, the night before the Feast of All Saints. Emphasis on the beneficent dead, there; hoping for the best. For a long time, it was only a children’s holiday – the fate of many traditions, just before they vanish. And Civilization survived, so it must have worked.

But in more modern times and in non-Christian places, it’s now gone back to the generic “Let’s hold back the dark with a party!” version. Adults celebrate with determination and all the trimmings they can summon, including booze and sex and far too much sugar. And kids are still out there playing at being monsters, demanding their due of attention and treats, assuring us all that Life will make it through the coming dark times.

Today is Hallowe’en “een. It’s the Eve of All Hallows’ Eve, the preparation time for tomorrow night’s festival. The enthusiastic are getting their costumes ready, making sure there’s a good store of candy by the front door, setting out the lights and the decorations and the pumpkins to hold tomorrow’s brave candles. We know there is a horde of ghosts and demons out there, we know they will assault us in their grim legions: but we hope, with all our souls and hearts, that we can hold them off and hold out until the light returns. It’s why we prepare so readily to propitiate their surrogates tomorrow night; if we can hold off the waist-high hordes of goblins and ghoulies and witches, then we’ve got a chance of winning against their bigger, bad-ass brothers …

It’s pretty good symbolism. It’s a pretty good hope. It’s a good way to hallow a Holy Day, fighting off the forces of hatred and evil with candy and light and the laughter of children.

A holy Samhain to you all Dear Readers. May the ghosts of your beloved dead stop by for a warm dram and a cold kiss on the cheek, and the season of darkness be full of light for you.

 

 

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