New Horizons

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker saw herself as a methodical, orderly person.

Which she was. She was scrupulous about her methods, which she refined throughout her career as a writer. She was dedicated to order, and enforced it ruthlessly – even more on herself than on any of us irritants who shared her space. The only peculiarity was that her style of method and her view of order were at some distinct angle in relationship to consensual reality …

But then, her acceptance of democracy was a polite indulgence at best, anyway.

Lately, I have been thinking much more closely about her methods – the real nitty-gritty of How She Did It. This is because the lovely Stefan Raets asked me to expound on how Kage wrote Garden of Iden for his re-read at tor.com – and refining and clarifying that initial fever dream of creation, so long ago, has cast me back into the depth of memory. It should be posted next Tuesday, by the way; Stefan will send me a link as soon as it is, and I will post it here for you, Dear Readers.

Hopefully, it will amuse. Those of you who knew Kage well will see in it 1) her special form of methodical and orderly, as demonstrated so many years in the beautiful chaos of Faire; and 2) the final construction of her personal style of composition. I hesitate to call it “formulaic”, because that implies a loss of creativity – and that never happened. But it did acquire a pace, a shape, a style of construction: and that all crystallized during the writing of Garden of Iden.

Kage – as attuned to omens as a poker player – stuck to what worked for the whole of her career. It succeeded once; why mess with a winner?

And at the time it succeeded – when Iden was accepted by an agent, and then by a publisher; when the short stories suddenly began to sell – it was against a huge back log of contrary odds. Like all sudden victories, this one had been worked for for a long time; not only the decades of Kage learning her craft, but the several intense and emotionally harrowing years of trying to get published “over the transom”. Classically, this is the time when one re-wallpapers the bathroom with rejection slips – but after a while, the smell of wallpaper paste begins to haunt one’s dreams.

I seem to be on a similar “all of a sudden” crest – short stories in progress, the re-read at Tor bringing increased attention to Kage’s work, a new novel under consideration. And I’ve only been at this for 6 years and 1,170 blogs, after all – do I qualify sufficiently as a flash, a prodigy? I do hope so.

Of course, I lack some important things Kage had. Primary among them is Kage herself, but thanks to the venerable miracle of literacy, I have her memory in physical form all around me. (Literally. I am surrounded by stacks of books and notes …). I don’t have her will of iron or dedication; but I do have my analysis of her methods and habits, and that helps a lot. I don’t have her youth – yeah, I know, starting your writing career in your 40’s doesn’t exactly make you a prodigy. But, leaning on my cane on the edge of 63, I look back at those years and Kage and I seem like sylphs! Nymphs! Gazelles, stotting effortlessly over the beaded ripe grass of the wide savannas!

Still, things are looking up. The IRS no longer thinks I am paying foreign governments, and so I may get paid for some Italian reprints in time to replace the transmission on my car before winter. People – TOP PEOPLE – in publishing are willing to at least look at my stuff. And this blog goes on, keeping Kage’s name alive and me in contact with all of you wonderful Dear Readers; as well as garnering me interesting offers from all sorts of fringe industries online …

And tomorrow is Kage’s birthday. She would have been 64; which would have necessitated a Beatles music marathon and a showing of Yellow Submarine. It also would have initiated our annual ritual wherein I jumped around the living room in a grand display of maturity, gloating over being 2 years younger than Kage …

Well, she’s won the race now. I’m an old crone and she’s still middle-aged. But we still soldier on together, toward those horizons she made me promise to always keep in view.

Excelsior, kiddo.

Kage Hauling The Great Fish of Time Forward

Kage Hauling The Great Fish of Time Forward

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://tinyurl.com/hfwmvkq

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The Process

Posted on June 6, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker was a methodical person. She liked to have set methods of doing things; checklists, processes, standard ways of getting from A to Z on a task. She preferred to know what she was going to do before she even began it.

Impulse – which she also enjoyed – was for shopping, book stores, and catching sight of new roads. Vistas and unknown horizons were to be pursued without goals – chores required practical directions. Among the results of this attitude was that we spent a lot of time being lost; but behind us, the dishes and laundry were done.

Kage eventually adapted this same process to writing. I think it was the clearest sign that she had evolved into a professional – when the way she produced a story became a series of deliberate, logical steps. It was what gave her the speed and ease that let her take an initial inspiration and build it into a strong edifice of narrative. It wasn’t what made her so incredibly prolific – that was her amazing brain, on perpetual simmer and only a flame’s width away from the boil. But it was what let her turn out so much finished product. When Kage got an idea, it turned into a story. She knew how.

When she was a child and a teenager, her constant writing began as vignettes – scenes, sketches, just a few more pages of some story that she loved, usually. But, you know – at least, if you are any kind of a writer, you know – that the act of writing is addictive. Once you start, once you experience that fall into the flow of the pen on paper, the cool grey sea of the computer screen, the light inside your own head: you’re hooked. It’s the lure of clean white paper, Kage always said  – whether it was sweet expensive rag bond, the electronic vista of a blank screen, or the damned crinkly Corrasable typing paper she loved as a teenager: the desire to fill it with words, once indulged, was an obsession forever.

So in order to enjoy it more, she learned how to make it last longer, go faster, reach farther. Scenes became plots, then stories; stories got longer and longer. For years, she wrote stories that just ran on for several thousand words, reached a conclusion – then the next bit started up at random: somewhere else. Later. The next spring, around the next turn, at the Horse Fair they held at high summer in Wellston, just over the county line where the City Guards’ writ ran out … and those turned into chapters.

It was a method long before Kage started trying to sell a polished work, though. She wrote all day – often at home; as long as possible, staying home and writing was her work; it’s how we arranged it. I’d come home from some less-peculiar commerce, and read what she had written. Oh, man, how I miss the luxury of coming home every single night to a brand-new batch of Kage’s writing, white-hot from the forge of her brain! Dear Readers, I lived for years in a Paradise, and never quite realized it …

Anyway. I’d read it, and we’d argue out all the changes and the weirdnesses and the unjustifiable plot twists: brainstorming, Kage’s preferred method of composing.  For years, I would then spend part of the evening typing up what Kage had written – she would re-write the parts that needed it, and get a start of the new stuff for the next day. and that next day, we’d do it again. And again. And again. And this went on for years before ever she set her eyes on eventually getting any of it published – it was just how she dealt with the uncontrollable urge to write. And it was how I dealt with the insatiable appetite to read what she wrote.

When Kage was hot on a particular story, it also required dedicated music, special scents, a customized menu. She cooked as well as she wrote; and she tended to cook what she wrote about, too, the meals she fed her characters. Sometimes a successful dish ended up being written into the plot – more usually, she wrote of a meal and we ended up having it. What we ate while she wrote Garden of Iden was medieval and Renaissance; what we ate during Empress of Mars was a sort of organic farmhouse/freeze dried camping food fusion. During “The Caravan from Troon”, it turned out the Children of the Sun eat enough spice to kill other people – the porridge and rainwater cuisine of the Yendri arose partly from my refusal to eat more dishes prepared with chili oil and Death Peppers.

All this immersive stuff became part of Kage’s method.

The redoubtable Stefan Raets has reached the end of the first book in his re-read of Kage’s oeuvre over at tor.com.  He has kindly invited me to write an article about “Garden of Iden: How Kage Baker Wrote It”. I turned that into him today, and he likes it! It should appear in a week or two. Those of you who have, per my advice, been following the re-read should check that out in a few days. Hopefully, it will be a nice lead-in to the next one.

Certainly, it got me to thinking about how she really did do it. The process was so set and reflexive, I usually never considered it … it was how the household ran, it worked, it shaped our days and our dinners and how we did the laundry and when we had to drive North and find new Mexican restaurants or something. But it all grew out of her simply compulsively writing all day, every day; and it crystallized into PROCESS with Garden of Iden.

So there – I learned something today. And now I have shared it with you, Dear Readers. Order yourselves some nice kung pao shrimp with a side of fried dumplings and incendiary oil, and crack open Anvil of the World. Or try a bowl of mashed potatoes and join Joseph in 15th Century Spain … it’s what Kage did.

 

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Retail Therapy

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker loved shopping: for anything, with anyone, anywhere. She didn’t even care if she bought anything – she just loved to shop. She could really get behind Retail Therapy.

I hate it. I’d like to get behind Retail activity and shove it off a cliff.  Left to my own devices, I get into a store and out again with a completed list as fast as I can scurry. If you want me to run you an errand, I’m great – if you want a pleasant day of perusing available displays, I am a nightmare. And if not for Kage and Kimberly – who have selected and curated my clothes since early adolescence – I would be a nightmare in mismatched rags and no shoes. With my gear in a shopping bag instead of a purse.

Nonetheless, sometimes one must go out and shop. Recently, it became necessary for Kimberly to acquire a new car – because her old one was not just dead, it had become an evil undead zombie car. So we did research online for several days – a task I could handle nicely – and finally decided to take our chances with Drivetime. Kimberly figured, since they seem to specialize in giving credit to morons without any, then she and her husband (who have good credit) should make short work of the process. Sure enough, they okayed them right away, few or no questions asked, right over the phone.

So we went out to West Covina to look at the (really huge) assortment of (admirably priced) cars. Somewhere on the way – with Kimberly and Michael driving the zombie car for a trade-in and me following as back up – we apparently crossed over into the Twilight Zone.

First, they would not accept any of her financial records unless everything was signed off by her husband. Granted, it’s his pension; but it’s a joint bank account, and a community property state. Now, Ray, a physicist who retired with a background as a Naval officer at the Navy Nuke School and teaching physics to teenagers for 30 years, doesn’t like to venture out to places like car lots. He is spending his retirement happily at home, seeing about 4 people a month, thinking about String Theory and calculating baseball stats in his head. He had no intention in Hell (or West Covina) of going out to car shop.

DriveTime wanted a notarized Power of Attorney. Back we drove to get his signature on a POA (leaving the zombie car there, and using my car). And so began the long, long, interminable, unending process of completing Kimberly’s pre-approved car loan contract. Everything had to be signed multiple times. The salesman was a nice guy who’d been on the job maybe a month – so he kept making errors and things had to be done over. And over. And over. Again, and again, and again. In the meantime, Kimberly test-drove cars and found a beauty. Success!

We started at 11 AM.

At 6 PM, they decided they couldn’t take the trade-in, and so we had to park it and make arrangements to have it towed away. Oh, well.

At 7 PM, Michael left a message on the home phone to tell Ray we were not dead in a ditch.Everyone kept a cheerful mien in place.

At 8:45 – as the second complete iteration of the contact began, Kimberly sent me home to check on Ray, the Corgi, the parrot, the cats … she was assured she would be 10 minutes behind me in her new car. At 9 PM, during my drive home, DriveTime technically closed.

At 9:30 – home and still alone, I fed everyone, explained to Ray what the cluster-fuck was and called Michael to see if all was well. He said they were due to leave at any time.

At 10:15, I called the dealership to see if they had been invaded by vegan bicyclists in a Critical Mass uprising., and my family was being held hostage. No – though Michael and Kimberly were sounding definitely strained – but no one there actually knew how to process the POA they had demanded, and the contract was being redone a third time.

At 11:00 I called again, and they were just leaving. All was well.

At 11:10, they called me – all was not well, the car would not go faster than 20 miles per hour, they had pulled off the freeway into the parking lot of a Macy’s somewhere in Covina, the dealership was closed behind them in the dark, what could they do? I screamed, blithered, found a map, figured out where they probably were, and prepared to sally forth in rescue …

At which point, Michael called back, calm as ice, and reported that he had read the manual (his father’s son, all right) and discovered the car had an optional manual transmission mode they had accidentally accessed: the dreaded Flappy Paddle Gear Box of Top Gear infamy. And now, all really was well …

They got home safely 25 minutes later. Ray was amused, the animals were hysterical, I was smoking gently around the edges, and Kimberly and Mike were triumphantly elated: as they should have been. Easier transactions have been accomplished in faerie tales, involving souls, first-born children and magic beans.

The car – a Chevy Cruz with low mileage, great gas economy, and a clean record – is gorgeous and Kimberly loves it. The old car is still in West Covina; I’m arranging to have it towed from there. DriveTime can live with it until Monday. Kimberly says they did their best, and I cannot write them nasty letters nor try to sic the zombie car on them. I say she’s just blind in the bliss of her new car.

So that is where I was all day yestreday, instead of writing. It all worked out. But I hate shopping more than ever.

And I just know,  Kage would shake her head at me and say, “But it’s such a pretty little car!”

 

 

 

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Baycon Day 4

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker always enjoyed moderating panels at a Con. She didn’t preach, or especially dominate the lecturn; she was scrupulous about making sure everyone got a turn, the audience questions were answered, and the nutcases – on both sides of the stage – were discouraged from highjacking the conversation.

She did enjoy not being talked over, though. She was gracefully stern with the microphone.

I myself do not enjoy moderating; I’ve spent too much time directing actors, which is one of the classic examples of cat-herding available, to usually enjoy controlling a half dozen writers, for gods’ sake, and a bunch of over-stimulated fans. (Yes, I am a curmudgeon. Curmudgeoness.) Nonetheless, I do my duty when tagged for the moderator’s chair. My last panel on Monday was as moderator, on the topic of Writing In Someone Else’s Space – which is certainly something I do know about. And since the main speaker was the Con Guest of Honour, the formidable David Gerrold – famous for not only his own writing, but his contributions to the Stark Trek Universe – it was really an interesting and easy gig. A splendid time was had by me, certainly, and I hope by everyone else.

Then we hit the road for home. The physics of Space Time being bent most weirdly in the vicinity of the San Mateo Marriott, I needed Neassa to guide me out. She did, and even got me on the right freeway when I took the wrong fork. I did it again twice in the 10 minutes after she left us, but Michel managed to get us back on Highway 101 North, where we headed for the 580 and the I-5 South.

And this is where the trip got weird … for quite some time we went along beautifully; but when we pulled off for gas and cold drinks, the transmission began acting up again. As in, it didn’t want to change gears. This is usually more survivable in a manual transmission than an automatic (one of the reasons I drive a manual) but it’s never a great time. It always come down eventually to getting into the highest gear you can, and driving like hell while hoping your transmission doesn’t fall out until you get home.

And we did fine until Lost Hills. Between Lost Hills and Buttonwillow, the I-5 South – simply – stopped. We proceeded, when we did at all, at about 10 miles per hour. This is first and second gear territory, and my Cruiser was wildly unhappy with the circumstances.

We found out, as sunset advanced and night fell, that our predicament was due to a massive mudslide on the Grapevine. Yeah, pretty unusual at the end of May, but that’s the I-5 for you. Kimberly called us at intervals to keep us posted on the state of the highway and traffic, from her vantage point in LA with wi-fi and television; my phone, of course, had literally blown up on Friday, and Mike couldn’t find internet coverage as we limped along. But Kimberly managed to get us enough news and encouragement – like, when lanes finally opened up at Tejon Pass! – so we didn’t throw ourselves out of the car in suicidal despair.

By Buttonwillow, speeds were nearly normal. We could replenish gas, food and drink, and empty our desperate bladders. Fortified by AM PM hot dogs, we got the Cruiser into 4th and sped on as fast as the road would permit. Fortune was with us – we made it over the Grapevine and down into the LA Basin without ever dropping much below 50 mph – our very last bad moment was trying to coax the poor Cruiser into reverse literally right in front of the house, and we succeeded!

Safe home, I slept for 14 hours and then rented a car to sustain me while the Cruiser in in the shop. Whew!

This was just the sort of adventure that is mostly only fun when you tell the stories later: Kage dreaded them, until it was time to relate our tales of wild roads. Michel held up well, under only his third or fourth such escapade, and I never would have found my way even out of the Bay Area without him. And hot dogs and Cherry Coke restored him something wonderful, so our last hour on the road was jolly and crazy.

More tales of the road tomorrow, Dear Readers, and BayCon. There were entire crews of starships, with no crew under the rank of Captain;  there were genies and faeries and physicists. There were tsunamis of perfume and mud and dust storms and weird drivers and what may have been aliens stealing power lines and transformers, and stars so thick they looked like special effects; cows, likewise.

But tomorrow I have to limp once more into AAMCO, and I am still worn out from the Great Trek. So now I going to bed. Still, we made it!

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BayCon Day 3

Posted on May 29, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker loved eating in hotel restaurants. She loved room service even more, but due to the built-in expense and delays involved in ordering food to your room, she mainly used room service for late night drinks and desserts.

And of course, we have provisions to hand this year, as well, Yestreday, turkey jerkey and graham crackers contributed hugely to my recovery from a migraine (it kept coming back). But we still managed a lovely dinner with Tim and Sandra Cadell, which was a welcome shift into rowdiness with old Faire friends. We even remembered to eat with our forks (mostly) and not wipe our fingers on our clothes. That’s what bread is for …

This morning we also fulfilled my one self-indulgent requirement for conventions, and went for a sit-down breakfast. I love breakfast buffets. No one looks askance at corned beef hash on pancakes, or my attempts to live exclusively on bacon. This Marriott has a weirdly limited dinner menu, but breakfast was wonderful. Three kinds of fresh melons! Sounds like something you’d get in a cavansary in the Arabian Nights.

Lots of good costumes in evidence, too. There are two other conventions in the Bay area this weekend – on the one hand, that has cut down a little ob BayCon;s attendance. On the other hand, new attendees are cycling in every day from the Fanime convention and (I think) Clockwork Academy. So it’s interesting, and people keep arriving. I saw my first pair of fairy wings today – a juvenile female, obviously fresh out of the chrysalis – and a towering green wig on a strampunk lady, that resembled the Eiffel Tower made out of octopodi. Amazing.

The Dealers Room was a little sparse but very choice; stunning jewellry and bone carving and leatherwork. The Art Room has some lovely stuff, too, including more bas relief and model work than usual. Cats and dragons are popular this year, I note. But really, when are  they not?

I’m going to go prepare for my panel. now – I intend to advocate for the necessity of grandmothers and aunties to maintain healthy human society; also the many vital roles of obsessive compulsion and perseveration syndromes. Also, how dangerous it can be to allow Homo sapiens to become a monoculture like corn … corn never reached for the stars, you know.

DISCONTINUTIY

Aaaaaand, all that was hours ago. Did the panel – wildly enthusiastic audience, which was very nice. Not exclusively of the disabled but determined to go to space variety, either: more people who would like to see a wider sample of humanity represented in our putative colonies. There were interesting discussions on the improvements to life for the disabled that have come from the space programs – everything from wireless cardiac monitors to really good pressure stockings. Also, discussion of the fact that, while amputations, diseases and unexpected babies are not actually planned for our colonies or L5 habitats or generation ships – they are  going to happen anyway. As long as we send human beings, these things will happen. We should work out contingency plans now, while we have some time.

There was some slight posturing over who has the “better” disability: the physically handicapped, or the neural-non-typical; ie, is it more virtuous or PC to be asthmatic or have fibromyalgia, or to have Asberger’s? I am of the opinion that space for everyone means EVERYONE; we’re not trying to establish a new class of the privileged, we’re trying to make everyone equal. But people being people (which is pretty much the point) there is always someone who feels their own condition occupies the pinnacle of specialness. No one came to blows, or even harsh words. The attitude just amused me, in a “not my planet, monkey boys” way.

Because I really am superior, of course …

But all in all, it was a good panel. Hopefully my loudly determined insistence that even fat old women have a place in the human space endeavour did not offend anyone who was young and able-bodied. It’s not their fault they’re like that. They were born that way.

Tomorrow, I will be moderating my own final panel – on what it’s like to take over the writing in someone else’s universe. Then the long drive home, which will hopefully not end in being lost again at the end. Probably not. It’s hard to misplace Los Angeles, and I know how to find our house, too.

Events as they occur, Dear Readers. Now it’s time to go glower at the partiers being just a little too loud outside my hotel room door, and settle down to work on a story in one of Kage’s worlds. It can be homework for tomorrow.

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BayCon Day 2

Posted on May 28, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker liked to stay busy at a convention. Mind you, sitting in the bar sipping cocktails and hammering out a plot qualified as “staying busy”. That’s how Bird of the River was written, over the course of a weekend in Kansas City. People watching also qualifies, as you simply never know what amazing and previously-unimagined figure will heave into sight across the lobby.

Best of all, though, was having many panels to attend. Today I had 3 – one on the colonization of Mars, one story-writing contest a la “Whose Line Is it?”, and one on “The Good, The Bad and the WTF of Cover Art”. Sadly, I had to bow out of the contest – after puzzling for 10 minutes or so over why the lights were corruscating so oddly, I finally realized it wasn’t the lights. It was my eyes. I was developing a migraine. I retired to my room and fought it to a standstill in quietude.

The other 2 panels were delightful. The discussion on Mars was moderated by Jay Reynolds Freeman, an actual physicist who works for Space X, and who therefore had scads of fascinating insights. Author Candy Sanford Lowe was also on; she has done wonderful research on the lava tubes of Mars, and the current international regulations that might affect colonization. The audience was enthusiastic, and did not get too carried away with fringe theories on finding life on Mars, suppressing its discovery, finding existing alien bases, etc. Many interesting theories on how to survive excess radiation and low magnetic fields were shared – it’s great to see how many people are informed about these things. And while nothing proprietary was revealed about Elon Musk’s plans, it seems that Kage Baker was right again: Mars will be explored because someone finds a way to make a profit from it.

The other panel, on cover art, was simply hilarious. The moderator, Megan O’Keefe, had put together a vastly entertaining slide show with examples of all 3 categories over several decades of genre cover art. We panelists – writers and artists – shared our analyses of the art with the audience, to the hilarity as well as edification of all. I, for example, am no artist – but I am a dedicated reader, and thus the target audience for covers: and I remember an awful lot of awful covers … and so did everyone. Horizons were broadened all around, I think. A great panel.

Tomorrow I have one I’m eagerly anticipating – Space For Everyone. Do only the young and strong,, the physically perfect and  neurotypical deserve a place in space? I have definite ideas on that question; especially since, at this point in my life, I am none of those things.

The rest of the day I people watched and lolled about in sybaritic comfort in my room. Kimberly sent all sorts of goodies with us, and my day was enriched with dried apricots and graham crackers. I spent some time reading “Bird of the River”, too, in honour of that Missouri convention where it was written.

We’ve had a lot of military types around today – not only most of Honor Harrington’s crew (I think) but the valiant officers of the Artemis Bridge, a starship simulation game set up on the conference room concourse on the 2 1/2 floor … yes, this hotel not only exists in a pocket dimension, it has an entire complex of meeting rooms that apparently exist in yet another one. They can only be reached by a hidden stairway or 2 secret elevators, and they connect to nothing else at all. You can wander for hours looking in vain for your room or your next drink: like the unfortunate officer of the Artemis whom we met repeatedly in the (wrong) elevator, drink in hand, vainly getting on an off on the wrong 2nd and 3rd floors as he sought his crew members ….

It’s a hard life, in space.

There are also a lot of the fae wandering about, hair in a variety of pastel shades. Wings are apparently out of fashion, but hairy faun legs are in. Klingon war boots are popular, but they usually are. Steampunk is always a feature of Bay Area conventions, and it ranges from the Renaissance to WWI here at BayCon. Lots of lovely brass and gears, lots of tail coats and corsets, lots of Dr. Who paraphernalia. Even in my own entourage, Neassa has the hat and scarf of her favourite Doctor (the 4th) and Michael is carrying a sonic screwdriver …

And it’s Saturday night on the party floor, too. That’s where we are. We’ve had dinner with old Faire friends – thank you, Sandra and Tim! We’re probably in for the night, with nothing more exciting planned than over-indulgence in chocolate – but the sounds of whoops and mad laughter from outside is sort of – well, homey.

It’s nice to know someone,somewhere, is having a wild time.

 

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You Can Take A Road Trip On A Cinder Cone, Too

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker liked a nice adventure on the road. By that, she meant a pleasant trip on a good road, with pretty views and frequent clean bathrooms; she liked to reach her ultimate destination in a timely fashion, and find it even nicer than she had anticipated.

She did not like trolls under bridges, sinkholes, plagues of locusts or other insects, feral cows, free-range evangelists or other untoward additions to the planned itinerary. She disliked mercurial weather unless her vehicle or room was weather-tight. She abhorred automotive eccentricities of any sort.

Of course, driving frequently on I-5, we couldn’t always avoid wandering hordes. On the other hand, years of experience gives you foresight – you don’t stop at gas stations with holes shot through their signs, or eat anywhere with “Road Kill” in its name. On the other other hand, sometimes all your fuzzy dice come up snake eyes. And yeah – 3 hands is utterly appropriate in such moments.

We left LA on time and in high spirits, Michael and I. We passed through the Grapevine at a good speed and with no difficulties, and began our long run up the Central Valley. The Valley, by  the way, is much greener than it has been in years; crops are flourishing, there are still wildflowers and verdant edges everywhere. The starlings are thick under the bridges, and the ravens and hawks are hunting everywhere. There are foals and calves. There are brimming reservoirs and aqueducts. It’s lovely and full of life.

However … somewhere past Buttonwillow, the back popped off my phone. This turned out to have been caused by the sudden unnatural swelling of its lithium battery – which Michael, in horror and commendable foresight, yanked out and consigned to the back seat lest it blow up in my pocket. This left us phoneless – not a big problem, except that we had promised regular calls to Kimberly on our progress North, and there are no pay phones left in the wild. Anywhere.

The A/C, which had just been topped up with refrigerant, failed to cool down. We resorted to 4/80 air conditioning: roll down all 4 windows and drive 80 miles per hour. This made the transmission act up again, however, so that every time it got too hot – which was whenever we slowed down and pulled off for gas – we suddenly had no 1st, 3rd or 5th gears.

When we got to San Francisco Airport – where we were due to stay at the Airport Marriott – we discovered that I had forgotten the directions, and that the Airport Marriott was actually some miles behind us to the South, in San Mateo. We drove back. We missed the exit, so we took the next one and went back North on surface streets … but you can’t get there from anywhere else in San Mateo. The streets on either side of the freeway do not connect – in order to get from the East side to the West side, you need to get on Highway 101 and get off an exactly the right off-ramp: one that dead ends in the parking lot of your hotel.

Otherwise, you dead end everywhere else. No streets run straight. Most vanish entirely after a few blocks. No one in gas stations will give you directions – really, they refused to tell us how to reach our hotel. I presume they were waiting for nightfall, in order to eat us. Ha! We found the one sensible clerk in San Mateo, and finally got a phone number for the hotel – then Michael heroically held the battery in my phone in place while he called the Marriott and finally figured out where they were.

We  finally made it to the hotel. We dragged our gear upstairs, where we found that Kimberly had packed us a bag of snacks that included almond M&Ms, Hershey’s Kisses, dried apricots, turkey jerky and graham crackers. Oh, frabjous day! Our lives were not only saved, but made worthwhile.

Then my laptop refused to work … but Michael figured out the problem, so that I am even now typing on it, Dear Readers. Neassa has arrived – scatheless, thank all the gods of going – and we have had a yummy dinner. We have secured our badges and my schedule. All members of the party are now disposed languidly around the room in postures of contentment.

I, for one, do not intend to leave this damned hotel until Monday afternoon, lest I fall through an inter-dimensional rift.

It’s not safe out there.  I think I’ll take the 101 home.

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On The Road In the Morning

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker loved to travel. She loved conventions, she loved making itineraries and lists of places to see and be and eat things. She even loved packing – which was handy, because she did or at least planned all of ours, because she was much better at it than I am.

Tonight, I’m preparing to drive North for BayCon tomorrow morning. Huzzah! I shall be meeting the saintly and patient Neassa, who has been accompanying Kage and now me for years of our adventures, and is a very paragon of an entourage-member. And I shall be travelling with nephew Michael, who has spent his entire life training to be a a traveller, and is superb at it. From his days as luggage – a wee swaddled babe in a Moses basket – to nowadays, when he loads all the luggage and does the heavy lifting, he is my boon companion.

I’m pretty much on my own for packing, but fortunately Kimberly makes list and tries her best not to let me out of the house without all my meds and power cords and underwear. These days, in fact, I think making sure you have universal chargers is as important as having good socks.

All the fluids have been topped up on the Cruiser. The unfortunate contretemp with the raccoon-sabotaged alarm system has been repaired. There is a teeny hole in the dashboard now, where the balefully winking red light of the alarm has been removed, but I think I’m gonna replace it with a glass eye. That would be amusing.

I have Kage’s entire output on a thumb drive shaped like a small, black skeleton. Mine, too, including notes for everything I’m working on. I have my writing hat and my writing necklace. I am prepared for Muse luring. My laptop is in my nifty rolling luggage, and my knitting is in a handsome handy canvas tote. We leave at dawn! Well, 9 AM or so, actually … but it’ll feel like dawn, I’m sure.

Notes from the road, Dear Readers, when I arrive in San Francisco tomorrow afternoon. It should be a fun trip. And who knows what amazing things we’ll see at the new Con hotel?

 

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The Raccoons Are After Me

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker frequently averred that she hated Nature.

“No, you don’t,” I would say.

“Yes! Yes, I do!” she’d insist, waving her hands in the air. “I hate Nature! I hate fresh air and fluffy bunnies and little smiling wildflowers and all that soppy crap! I love – neon! Cocktails! Booths upholstered in red Naugahyde!”

Which is true; she did. But unless driven to distraction, she actually did like Nature. She just usually preferred it through a pane of glass, or on the far side of a nicely burning campfire – out in the damp dark, while she reclined in a comfy camp chair and drank from a glass with a flamingo on a swizzle stick.

When, in The Anvil of the World”, she has Lord Ermenwyr bounding under the canopy of a hotel bed chanting: “I-love-decadence! I-hate-Nature!” – well, she was speaking from her heart. A part of her heart, anyway. While Kage understood the necessity of being eaten by a wild beast if one carelessly fell afoul of a hungry predator, it had better have had clean paws when it grabbed her. And sworn not to drool on her.

Camping with Kage was always interesting. Her preferred technique was a good fire and a good chair and hot food; a secure tent tall enough to stand up in (“No crouching!” she would growl.); an air mattress and a down sleeping bag. Nights when the air mattresses failed – which they did sometimes – were a misery for everyone involved; Kage not only did not sleep, she did not shut up about it. Many’s the dawn it was a miracle she saw the sun with living eyes … She actually slept out of doors about 3 times in her life. They were legendary. And the morning we woke up with frost on the sleeping bags, it’s a wonder I survived her wrath. I had to drive 15 miles in the ere-dawn to secure an Egg McMuffin before she’d pupate and come out of her bag.

Mind you, when we had all our gear and it ll worked according to plan, camping was a most civilized and pleasant activity. Many of Kage’s friends will attest to how charming a fireside companion she could be, as we toasted hand-made marshmallows and Kage assigned Stone Age names and occupations to everyone. But most of them were never with us when we’d forgotten the tent poles or a skunk decided to visit.

Anyway, she insisted she hated Nature. I insisted I loved it. (Well, I mostly do.) Our opposable opinions informed a lot of the Anvil universe.

However, having moved back to the peculiar urb that is Los Angeles, I have take somewhat against our little friends of the fields. Los Angeles, despite its reputation for concrete and internal combustion engines, is actually a very green city. We are lousy with trees, and whole tropical biomes flourish in every empty lot. Only occasional brush fires keep Downtown from being buried in cobalt-blue morning glories. The parks are bastions of animals that no one ever thought would survive the Coming of Man, and they all venture out every twilight to explore humanity’s inadequately bastioned redoubts.

Here on the edge of Griffith Park, we are most neighborly with skunks, coyotes, raccoons and opossums. To be honest, they all have their charms and uses, and most of us have learned to live with them. Newbies from back East tend to freak out, of course, but they also get hysterical at the peregrine falcons hunting pigeons all over the MOMA, and the feral cats forming prides in the foothills … some people just can’t take wilderness, you know? A little thing like a coyote den in the LA River or a bear in the local 7-11 just sends ’em right off the deep end.

However, I must admit that in my encroaching old age I have grown especially opposed to – raccoons. It has become obvious to me that they are minions of Evil, and in the direct pay of some minor Prince of Hell. How else could a nocturnal animal survive when it has NO NIGHT VISION? Because they don’t, you know. It’s why they paw frantically through the garbage and fall out of trees and run unto the walls of houses. The little bastards can’t see in the dark, yet their evil nature keeps them running about in it like more competent animals. It’s positively embarrassing for the skunks and possums, I tell you.

And they are attracted to blinking lights. We keep LED faerie lights in our front yard tree, for discreet lighting, and the raccoons can neither leave them alone nor manage to stay up the tree. They crawl around out there grabbing at the tiny coloured lights, until they fall out of the branches with horrendous squeals. They bite through the wires, too, so occasionally they’re also smoking when they squeal and hit the ground … though I don’t want them to get killed, you understand. But neither do I want them to set the redwood mulch on fire!

They are also intrigued by the blinking red alarm light of the security system in my car. A nice little scarlet monitor light blinks on the dash board of my PT Cruiser, keeping it safe from car thieves. However, it does nothing for raccoons – whose little black hands are just strong enough to pull at the locked doors. That sets off the alarm, horrifying and waking everyone. And after a few years of the raccoons trying to get into my car, they’ve driven the alarm system insane. It goes off and will not stop; or goes off over and over in broad, raccoon-less daylight, and then the engine locks down and won’t start.

It did it again today. Nothing would restore sanity and movement to my car. It was towed away to the mechanic, where the defunct alarm system will be removed so that the greater good may be served. Like, I can actually drive my car.

Somewhere,  I know Kage is laughing at me …

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Who Goes There?

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker did not believe in aliens.

Mind you, she wanted to believe. Or, no, not exactly – what Kage wanted was to know about aliens. She felt that faith should be restricted to certain areas of metaphysics. Whether or not there was non-human life shouldn’t be a  candidate for faith: it required proof. She had sufficient personal proof to convince her of the existence of Divinity, so the problem of mere faith did not apply there, either.

But none of the modern speculations on the almost-certain-for-nearly-sure case of extraterrestrial life convinced Kage. The Drake Equation, exoplanets, random organic compounds floating on asteroids and in deep space,  the hints of buried oceans on Jovian and Saturnian moons – all based, at bottom, on a broad application of faith and conjecture. Obviously, life has demonstrably risen once; but even though we know it’s here (hint: it’s US), we still aren’t sure how it happened. And if we can’t be sure how our own replicating molecule system got its start, how can we really speculate on another?

We only have a sample of one. And we don’t know how even that one works.

Ancient astronauts annoyed Kage homicidally. In fact, Von Daniken and his minions and devotees particularly enraged her. It was partly because their theories are so blithely, determinedly, arrogantly ignorant; but mostly because they all deny that humans could have the brains, guts and creativity to make the wonders we find eroding out of old hillsides. Kage was furious on behalf of the ancients, whose construction of wonders like pyramids (all of ’em) and wet batteries; places like Baalbeck, Machu Picchu and Gobekli Tepes; inventions like beer and bread and automatons were all such extraordinary works of human genius. People like Giorgio A. Tsoukalos – well-know puffball imitator and nutcake – Kage felt were a disgrace to the Greek civilization that produced Archimedes and Hero.

You don’t need aliens to find the circumference of the world or use a lever! Kage would snarl. “Revealed knowledge” is always some jackass talking through his tinfoil hat!

(I must admit, though, that she remained very interested in some, select inexplicable phenomena: UFOs. Sasquatch. The continuing tendency of people to see dwarves. She followed the literature with great curiosity, to see of anything other than faddish insanity was ever proved.)

For the last several decades, the scientific community has grown continously louder and more certain that life must exist Out There. There are all those planets now known to be floating in their parent stars’ Goldilocks Zones. There probably are ice-locked oceans of actual water on Ganymede and Europa; more exotically, Titan does have a functioning atmosphere and robust geology that might harbour some Life Not As We Know It. And something belches methane at irregular intervals and by no known mechanism out on Mars. Until we settle what is causing all these hints and teases of potential life, we can’t give up on it yet.

And that doesn’t even touch on the hopes and expectations of SETI. They’re betting on the probability of aliens at least as technologically adept as us flashing up some sort of electronic signal one of these days. So far all we’ve identified are various forms of stellar death explosions, but who knows?

Even so, science presently is making some tired and uncertain noises. See this article: http://tinyurl.com/huhwpbv for some speculation in the negative zones of the search for aliens; it lends a depth of practicality to the entire thing that is probably badly needed. We need to keep the wish list open on what we hope to find, and how, and where.

Nonetheless, as a writer, especially a science fiction writer, Kage wanted there to be … Others in the world. She sometimes described herself as a wistful xenophile. And in her writing, she followed the time-honoured tradition of creating her own aliens. However, Kage made them all family. She said there was plenty of room for everyone amid the hominids.

Even during Kage’s lifetime, it was becoming obvious that the genus Homo has habitually displayed the sexual selectivity of an oyster. The human seed has always been broadcast far and wide.  The human family tree is not a tree – it’s a big messy hedgerow, because we’ve never thought twice about interbreeding with anyone even faintly related to us. To misquote the inestimable Mr. Jeff Foxworthy: if your ancestors slept with their cousins – and, Dear Readers, they all did, all the time – then you might be a human being.

So Kage made her aliens – us. The infamous Greys she transmuted into a cryptic branch of hominids, one with a tendency toward OCD and a hive mind. She invented the tall, pale, reproductively troubled Crewkern hominids – eventually, they were to have figured as the template for some of the classic Fae. (And they might yet.) She uplifted chimpanzees, in “Hanuman”; she speculated on different breeds of hunters and agriculturists meeting, greeting and eating one another in “Old Flattop”.  She was beginning to postulate yet another new branch of Homo sapiens arising from autistics.

All in the family, you see. No need for reptiloids in the Royal Houses of Europe, or Gandalf wandering South America; no need for the proto-Egyptians to be led by the hand from the muddy banks of the Nile to learn how to pile rocks on one another. Great Zimbabwe was the work of local geniuses. So were Cahokia, and Tiahuanco, and Nan Madol. Maybe the Coral Castle, too; Kage toyed with it having been built by a local lost, last scion of the Little Stupid Guys.

Kage wanted to know aliens existed. On Mars, she gave two aliens life – a lichen and a primitive bryophite analog – and that’s it. Nothing else. Everything else, every one else, is human. Or something so similar it only lives down the block, in that weird old house where the lights flicker green in the middle of the night …

But that’s all right, you know. It’s just the neighbors.

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