Gardening At A Remove

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker loved gardening, as I have often observed. Not just strolling in gardens – she enjoyed making, tending, planning, maintaining them. Her skills and interests were manifold and various: from fragile herbs grown from seed on the kitchen windowsill all winter, to the unmortared stone walls she built with her own hands.

She planted bulbs and deliberately forgot where, so she could be happily surprised in Spring. The yearly selection and arrangement of bright-blooming annuals was a lengthy and detailed ritual – Iceland poppies for grace, and California poppies for the risk and drama: because California poppies will eat your yard unless strictly constrained. Oxalis  (also known as wood sorrel) for impossibly neon-glowing flowers. Primroses because they look like exquisitely painted cookies, snapdragons to play with, hollyhocks to tower, sweet peas to drape, thyme to creep along the ground. Everything, as much as possible, for bees and butterflies.

What I like is sitting in gardens. I used to be a good hedger and ditcher, too, although now everyone in the family refuses to let me dig or trim lest organs fall off me … but I get my share in, buying things and advising on planting, and yanking dangerous volunteer plants out before they can eat the border beds. I scored two lantanas yestreday, evicting the little buggers before they could get a toehold – those things will eat not just the garden, but the house!

Kimberly is also an enthusiastic and skilled gardener – she likes company and encouragement, and it’s always nice to have someone to brainstorm with about where to put the garden alligator (he’s ceramic, and appears to be swimming through the mulch). This year, her plans for the front garden have finally reached an unparallelled peak of triumph, and she is making a heaven out there (with modest help from me). She picks plants and fence pieces; I buy them, and Mike digs holes and hammers in ironmongery. Our concerted efforts have made of the front garden – an arid wasteland a month ago – the  perfumed pleasaunce that it currently is. And will remain.

Replacing the lawn with redwood mulch and then jewelling it with hardy native plants has proved a delightful victory. The old existing plants all seem to revel in the new airy environment, and are rewarding us with flowers already. The camellia is alive with creamy golden-hearted blossoms; the old rosemary is more blue flower than perfumed leaf. All the roses have buds – except my new Wenlock, which has apparently not survived shipping. Woe and alas, but it happens. David Austen will send me another; a Wenlock in the garden is good luck. The Cecile Brunner and the Gertrude Jeckyll, pink climbing roses both, have taken to transplant quite well, and we can look forward to increased thorny security on the front fence as well as world-class scent.

A Chinese Pistache tree is going in, to provide my East Coast brother-in-law with changing leaves in the autumn – while not native, it is drought resistant. And then we can begin whittling down the damned mulberry, which is threatening the plumbing with its ghastly alien orange roots. The squirrel feeder can be moved to the pistache; squirrels are pretty flexible, we have discovered. They are burying nuts in the mulch as energetically as they did in the grass, and are adapting to the changes with squirrely enthusiasm. In fact, yestreday one of them made off with Kimberly’s solar-powered Monarch butterfly chimes  and attempted to eat the plastic Monarch, before abandoning it in the rose bed. We hung it back up, laughing hysterically and embarrassing the squirrels …

One thing Kage taught me was that a garden can be designed to require a week or two of annual hard labour, and almost nothing else. Plant perennials and forget about them ; plant  annuals at regular intervals and save worry . Prune and feed the roses, and then sit back and enjoy. Water things by hand and deliberation, saving water and guaranteeing a constant source, and let the plants run wild. Sit on the porch between times and breath the air of Paradise.

I have recently come to the awareness that I am another of Kage’s gardens. I’ve nearly gone fallow, this last year – it was a touch one, and I have almost failed of my promise once or twice or seventy times … but I feel a resurgence of hope and determination. Maybe Kage’s gardens were also surprised to see what bloomed in them after a hard winter; I think I can feel a tenuous return to deep flooding life, and am feeling a hesitant enthusiasm. Like, maybe things will get wild and crazy. Like, maybe enormous heaps of blossoms will appear. Like, more life has stubbornly survived in old grey wood than I have dared to imagine.

Time will tell. You can’t really stop it from doing that.

 

 

 

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How To Write?

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker, being a methodical person,  had distinct steps leading up to the daily act of writing. They worked, too. She followed her specialized preparation regimen and 9 times times out 10, she settled down at the end and wrote stuff.

Kage being a resolutely self-identified obsessive-compulsive, they were richly detailed and complicated procedures. I think she added frills and furbelows just to amuse herself, or to fill out the corners of the picture frame she was working to create: Kage adored marginal illuminations, and she  added them to her writing routine by way of these rituals. She felt strongly that writing needed illustrations – even if she was the only one who knew that a given story had a motif of waves in the sun and matiljia poppies round the edges, it mattered to her.

Also, it was a way to trick herself into the process of writing. Sometimes you have to sneak up on the Muse, and get him in a hammer-lock before you can start. Sometimes, you have to school yourself to sit still, so he can get a hammer-lock on you. And sometimes, everyone involved has to sneak up on the work or it will go haring off into the high brush, and then there is nothing to do but sit down and read Terry Pratchett novels.

I have rituals of my own. Some of them are Kage’s, some of them I’ve evolved. They’re all a lot sloppier than Kage’s. I don’t start my sessions with single, austere, carefully rationed video game, for instance, as Kage did. But I do have a writing hat, the wearing of which actually seems to make a difference – Kage would laugh that to scorn, as her only concern about writing clothes was colour coordination.

Today I was talking with a writer friend, literally about how to write; how the hell to get all the neurons in line and  so accomplish something with a plot and some progress.  I realized that I do, indeed, have things I must do in order to write. But I also have things I do with appalling regularity that derail me entirely. Fixing those is my new challenge.

I get a lot of ideas, for instance, as I am falling asleep.  I used to dismiss them, assuming they’d come round again come the dawning day. But, guess what? They go up in fiery gauze, like ethanol fumes above a smouldering barbecue.

Going to bed is no longer the careless act of youth, Dear Readers, as many of you have probably also discovered.  I can’t just cast myself down on the nearest flat surface and doze off. I have to arrange the CPAP mask so it doesn’t blow air in my eyes, and sequester the hoses so they don’t strangle me, or attack passing innocents.

Are the clips out of my hair? Am I  still wearing my glasses under my mask? (No wonder it doesn’t fit … ) There’s turning off the computer, the postage meter, the plasma generator; making sure I’ve clicked on the light in the hemisphere of Mars that glows on my wall … by the time I snuggle into my nest of pillows, my brain is back in full gear, even if I was yawning when I started.

So I lie there thinking over plot devices and dialogue and secondary characters … until it all blends into already bizarre dreams of building a Faire, someplace where oak trees have sprouted up like mushrooms and taken over the world.

Splendid writer and all-around good guy, Steve Baxter, recommends keeping a dream journal, in order to mine the gems that burrow to the surface of one’s busy mind in sleep. This is a great idea: but not, so far, for me.  I am just no damn good at dream journals.  Anything kept by my bed to write in is both dangerous and doomed, especially a notebook. I get it tangled in my CPAP hoses. Spiral binders do not mix well with CPAP hoses, especially when I keep knocking off the other vital goodies by my bed – my cane, my stuffed Anomalocaris and spotted owl; a flashlight, six million knitting needles, the glass of water for when my mouth falls open while in the CPAP mask and I wake up with Mars throat … and I keep knocking that glass right off and on to a passing cat, so feline hysteria gets added to the mix.

So I get up every morning and scour my mind for what I can recall, and enter it into my Story Notes File on the computer. It works, but not as well as recording dreams as soon as I have them. And it would probably work even better if I didn’t wait until I was disconnected, dressed, washed and caffeinated until I did it.  I’m working on that. It might be helped by adjusting the timing.

I’m trying to intersperse writing times with other, different, creative kinds of work – answer my correspondence, and read a certain amount each day. Work on this blog. Knit. Get out into the actual sun and fresh air.  The idea here is to stop falling into the inescapable flypaper hours where I spend all day reading Fark and back issues of Smithsonian Magazine. I need to stop expending intellectual fuel, and instead store some up.

How do you become a writer? People asked Kage that, as they do everyone who writes anything at all. Her only answer was: To be a writer, you have to write. Just write. Just sit the hell down and write.

I can hear her grinning at me and saying: Hell, there is no HOW. Because nothing matters. Except the work.

 

 

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New Gardens

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker took enormous pride and comfort in gardening. At heart, she was an Entwife. Gardening was what she went out and did when she was bored; when she was depressed; when she was mired in writer’s block. It was how she challenged oncoming autumn and the last days of winter, going forth to cultivate under grey skies and daring them to rain on her.

Which they did. Frequently. But her ability to stare a storm down for a few hours let us get a lot of roses pruned and vegetables planted early in the season. I was along for the donkey work, and to engage in brain storming as Kage harrowed the cold earth and her mind at the same time.

I liked our gardens just fine, but … I am not much of a gardener. Hauling wheelie bins or watering on someone else’s careful schedule are more my style. I am paramount at standing around and keeping a gardener company; I’m  even better at sitting on the porch and shouting advice. I’m not as good at shovelling and digging as I used to be, nor at mowing the lawn – which was one of my favourite activities for years – but now we don’t have to mow the front lawn at all. It’s covered in redwood mulch.

But I want to garden. I think it might be important to the writing, this year.

Since I can’t do much in the way of useful labour, and there is only so much superintendence available, I’ve been contributing to the physical inventory. The wrought iron fence for the front yard has been bought in sections, carried home in the way-back of my PT Cruiser, and hammered into place by nephew Mike. I’ve ordered seed catalogs, and am mail-ordering interesting veggies and native plants. Xeriscaping doesn’t necessarily mean succulents and cactus, Dear Readers: there are many drought-resistant California plants that blossom copiously. Penstemon, sage, fuschias, ceanothus, and both matilija and California poppies all flower gloriously; herbs like thyme and camomile spread perfume more actively the more you walk on them.

Even roses are, technically, a California plant: that is, a rose grows here naturally … and if I plant lush old-fashioned Cecile Brunner and Wenlock roses, instead of the 6-petalled wild pink Rosa californica; well – they’re still roses, right? I’ll hand-water ’em just as frugally.

The inspiration Kimberly and I are  following is The Lord of the Rings – not Rivendell, nor the homely Shire, nor gold-roofed, gold-floored Lothlorien, though.  Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now desolate, kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness. That’s our goal.

This seems to me to be a model of fertility that is custom-made for my needs and habits. I do my best work with a high wind blowing, and the sound of hoof beats in the distance. I thrive on edges and incoming tides. Like the rosemary and blue sage I hope to plant, a little chaos encourages my blooming. You can’t expect to colour inside the lines with flowers.

Writing needs a dose of wildness, too. For me, 2015 was a lot like the unrelenting drought that has kept poor panting California pinned to the arid ground: there’s not been enough sustenance to keep us going, and what little we do have keeps gushing away out of burst pipes. I ended the year with my reserves gone, my reservoirs shrunk away from the shores of creativity to reveal the beer cans and rusted rebar in the cracking mud of dessicated inspiration. That last turgid line is perfect proof of it, in fact.

But the ground water seems to be slowly returning. There’s snow on the heights; there is rain on the ground. Infant rosemary bushes now line the new wrought iron of the garden fence. My agent wrote to me today, coyly hinting at new deals being negotiated with The Pow’rs, aaarr, of the publishing Admiralty.

I woke up in the night with the realization that my blue squirrels need tracking chips. Also, with the idea that the reproductive habits of Oxytricha trifallax hold interest as a story idea – a combinatio0n of changeling stories and weaponized Lamarkism. I actually began making the last editing changes on Knight and Dei, in preparation to sending it off.

I don’t garden the way Kage did, but I know how to do more than just dig a hole and throw in some seeds – I know how to select likely plants. I know how to water, and feed, and prune.

New gardens can grow with so little encouragement …

 

 

 

 

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The Calm Before

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker regarded February as the last month of peace in any new year. It was usually the last stretch of time we had to sleep late and wander around,  before our annual activities would rev up.

That’s because for, oh, 35 or 40 years, we worked Renaissance Faires. Preparations began in March – digging things out of garages, finding all one’s props, clothes, weapons, cooking implements, and pieces of seasonal domicile – and segued directly into rehearsals and construction on site. Where, due to the season, we had to deal with rain, mud, sleet, hail, snow; bogged-down cars, missing pieces of buildings, sudden droughts of screws and nails and paint, outrageous thefts of lumber and burlap and canvas, and learning all the cues and stops for a stage that travelled on wheels and had to be hauled through dirt streets …

Then we’d eventually open, and do weeks of performance in triple digit heat, living on bread, beer, and (for Kage) Coca Cola concealed in pewter  pint mugs. At some point, it would end and we’d break down the set, and finally catch up briefly on the laundry.

For most of that gloriously insane time, the Season began in March for the Spring Faire. Then we did it all over again, 400 miles way in Marin County for the Harvest Faire. And that continued in the heat and perfumed dust until  we were usually halfway into October and could expect to be back to freezing rain for Breakdown.

And in really crazy years, we then started Rehearsals for Dickens Fair in November. and performed until about 4 days before Christmas. Technically, at least, we were indoors: though in venues where the winter San Francisco rain leaked through the roof, and flooded in under the doors, and whistled through the broken windows in the Victoria and Albert Hall …and eventually, London too had to be packed away.

And this is why the 2-month period of January and February was Kage’s Island of Peace in an average year.

As time went on, we stopped doing the Spring Faire – it changed hands, in so odious a manner that Kage used the basic scenario as the inspiration for Empress of Mars. The Harvest Faire mutated more peacefully, but we still declined to follow it . By the time Kage retired to write full-time, though, the pattern was engraved in our DNA.

And besides, we still did Dickens Fair. Believe me, that makes for a madly busy Year End/Year Beginning! We welcomed winter quiet and solitude with paeans of gratitude.

Nowadays, I do only Dickens Fair. There are still Spring and Summer Renaissance Faires (the Spring Faire is starting its build-up right about now, I think: you can check at http://www.renfair.com/socal/, Dear Readers, if you are interested ), but they are no longer run by my friends and patrons the Pattersons, and so I don’t participate. I missed Dickens last year while evicting my kidney and breaking my ankle, but I will be back – Next Year In London! I have months to get ready for that, though.

Nonetheless, the old seasonal madness is still stirring in my blood. I have the urge to go out and start building something on the new-greening earth; I find myself salivating at fabric sales, and eyeing loads of new lumber with rising lust. I have a great longing to sit somewhere in a cold green place, on a cold lawn chair, drinking a beer that is cold only because my fingers are turning blue, as I direct the raising of the Taproom walls.

Naturally, when this fit began to creep over me, Los Angeles developed a fever and went into a ridiculous hot spell. I did what I could, sitting out on the porch in a lawn chair (for which I had to wrestle the little black cat most severely) and watching the nice young men who converted our front lawn into a xeriscaped garden. But it wasn’t quite the same …

Today, though, the clouds came in with the dawn. The temperature has dropped 30 degrees, from 91 to 61; and it’s been raining for hours! Cold rain! We had to run out front to save the garbage bins, which had all been left by the robot truck with their lids open, naturally. The redwood mulch that now surrounds the roses and rosemary and sage and lemonade berry plants is wet – and it smells like the Faire. It smells like the years and years of wood chips that went down around every Ale Stand and filled the air with the scent of incense, art and riot every day.

So I had rain sliding down the naked nape of my neck today, as I pulled heavy things through the scented mist rising off the wood chips and mulch. Man, it could have been 30 years melted away for a moment there, instead of 30 degrees of temperature.

I haven’t felt so sure of Spring in years.

We may not be able to step into the same river twice. But we can surely keep wading in over our heads somewhere.

 

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The Last Time I Will Cut My Hair

Posted on February 15, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker understood dramatic gestures. She was a writer – her own dramatic gestures were often entire novels; most of which were designed , at least in part,  to articulate deep, old feelings in her heart.

But she quite loathed melodramas in others. And, as is often the Fate of quiet and observant people, she had to deal with quite a lot of them. There were several divas among her relatives, and her mother was a classic Steel Magnolia: her tantrums were rare and cathartic, but oh my! The sugar bowls surely did fly.

And then there was me. Now, I’m not really much of a prima donna. I’m more of the cope with the disaster and sweep up the broken china persuasion – usually. However, being of mostly Celtic stock, I have a profound well of angst and excess in my soul and sometimes I succumb to wild dark passions. Also, acts of idiocy. It’s in the DNA …

Dear Readers, I’ve been – depressed lately. Really, really, really depressed; sitting under your desk drinking cold coffee and eating Christmas crackers depressed. Thus far, 2016 is not a great year. The news is dark and terrifying. Agent Carter has been cancelled. I’ve been sneezing and sniffing for days. It’s been freezing cold and damp, then today it shot up to 90 degrees and the humidity dropped to 16%: all my joints and sinus cavities imploded. Someone I loathe popped up out of the past to remind me of pain and hard times. I haven’t been able to write. I haven’t wanted to read. And – presumably from stress, or maybe from voodoo – my hair has been coming out in handfuls.

So tonight, in a fit of despair and madness, I lopped most of it off.  My hair, not my hands.

Kimberly, bless her patient heart, has trimmed it so it looks halfway human. But it was nearly to my waist, and now it’s nowhere below my jawline. This is the shortest it’s been since I was 7, even shorter than when I caught my braids on fire in a Bunsen burner in high school … But it was an enormous relief. It really was. Whatever symbolic weight could be attached to the two feet of hair I shed does seem to have left me.

Now I’m watching it in some curiosity. It’s suddenly much, much more silver – the new hair is all that’s left, with the old dark locks cropped away. It’s showing signs of resuming the curls I had as a child. It’s – fluffy. It doesn’t exactly look good, because I’m short and fat and have a round face: but it looks sort of lively. I can live with this happily while I see what it does next.

Kage’s hair was about this length when she quit cutting hers, and it grew down to her hips in a year. I’m healthier now than I have been in years; so I have hopes.

I’m going to set out the cut hair for the birds; who, according to Shakespeare, began to build their nests yestreday. It is a sacrifice to the dead, to the past, to inertia and grief and bad memories. I’m paying off Winter in the hopes of a fertile Spring. I feel fresher, lighter, free and young and ready for whatever comes.

And I think it is the last time in my life that I will cut my hair.

Forever.

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Super? Bowl Sunday, Anyway

Posted on February 7, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker detested football. She wasn’t fond of most sports – except some classic ones she only watched at the Olympics – but American football most especially riled her. She wasn’t that fond of British footie, either, but at least it had the dubious benefits of being British and also an unabashed blood-sport.

Super Bowl, however, kind of amused her.

It was because we grew up and spent most of our lives living in tourist towns. She was used to the crowds of gaping visitors wandering around our haunts. One learns when not to go to the grocery store, the mall, the beach, Disneyland. We had t-shirts that said “Leave Me Alone. I’m A Native.” Growing up in Hollywood was especially bizarre – there were movie shoots to dodge, as well as the mindless hordes that flocked on Hollywood Boulevard. There were always tour busses, and crowds of lost foreigners, running one over. At Christmas and New Year’s and Super Bowl, entire marching bands could be found taking up all the seats in local restaurants.

Pismo Beach was just as bad. The entire summer was crowded with tourists, for one thing, and every 3-day weekend. The town had a population of 8,000 – but at those times, that would swell to 30,000. Super Bowl was especially crowded – every holiday rental house, apartment, and hotel room was full of drunken football fans. Their offspring and some females clogged the beach and all the shops and restaurants. A walk down any street during game time proceeded to the chorus of chimpanzee-troupe noises coming from the thronged rooms with television sets. Primate hoots and panting, man, and hardly a spoken word in ’em – we’d walk around and giggle at the primal carrying-on.

Living in Los Angeles, now, it’s a little different. That’s because I avoid the tourist areas, did all my shopping days ago, and there are no holiday rentals on my little residential street. Some of my neighbors are indeed having parties, so the howls and hooting will not be entirely neglected; but they’re the neighbors, you know? I can tolerate the baboons and chimps that actually live here.

My family is ensconced in the living room. The brother-in-law, Ray, is actually interested in the game; physicist that he is, he is happily figuring odds. He’s got no dog in the fight – he’s a Buffalo Bills devotee; and as we all know, Dear Readers, the Cigarette Smoking Man has decreed they will never go to the Super Bowl – so he can enjoy the spectacle and the mathematics untroubled. Nephew Michael and my sister Kimberly say they’re watching for the commercials. I’m not interested  even much in those, though I will run out when summoned to see Clydesdales  or people I know. (The Poxy Boggarts, who sang the deathless anthem “I Wear No Pants” for the 2010 Superbowl, are dear friends of mine.) I even have a bag of potato chips to munch, just to show willing.

2016 has not been a great year, so far. I’m fighting off the 2-out-of-5 flu strains this year’s vaccine did not cover. We spent a whole week replacing Kimberly’s and Ray’s water bed mattress – there are no longer brick and mortar water bed stores in Los Angeles, to my vast horror, and a long complicated adventure with Amazon Prime was  necessitated … as Kage also preferred water beds, I’ve never gotten out of the habits of how to deal with them, bu that doesn’t make it any more fun to drain and fill the damn thing through the bedroom window during a cold snap. We managed to finally get the roof repaired between rain storms, though; and of course it hasn’t rained since … I broke a tooth eating candy (Good ‘N Plenty), but my ankle is almost completely healed; so I figure I’m ahead on points.

It’s warm and clear here today; in fact, it’s 84 degrees outside. A week ago, we had frost until 10 in the morning. The garden has given up on cues and is doing whatever it damn well pleases. I spent a lovely hour or so out on the front porch, enjoying the new front garden – the xeriscaping has at last been completed, and it’s lovely. (More on that later). Now I’m indoors working on story ideas – I have had several these past few days – and getting a manuscript ready to send to my agent. Tomorrow, when it’s quiet, I will do my taxes and actually write.

Maybe 2016 will now consent to settle down and let me be productive. At the very least, I’m getting potato chips out of today, so that’s pretty good. Even the howls from down the street are distant enough to be sort of musical. Not a bad Sunday, at all.

Even, round the edges,  a little bit super.

 

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January 31st

Posted on January 31, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker – born June 10, 1952; died January 31, 2010.

It’s raining on and off in Los Angeles today; which is a nice thing, actually. I’m not doing much; mostly sitting still and reading. It’s a sad day. Not paralytic. mind you – Kage herself would not approve of that – but sad, nonetheless.

Uncomfortable, too. In a childish fit of self-indulgence yestreday, I bought a box of Good ‘N Plenty.  They tasted as good as ever, but I broke a back tooth on ’em. Now I have a busted molar; my dentist doesn’t open until tomorrow, and I can’t chew … so I’m hungry and toothache-ridden and embarrassed  as well as sad.

Kage would scold me. She always said my appetite for black licorice would bring me to a bad end. And, let’s face it, Good ‘N Plenty is not exactly the Dom Perignon of licorice candies … sometimes, one just craves the cheap stuff. And a lot of good it usually does one, too. Ah, well.

It’s a good day to pull the covers up over your head, and wait for the entire mess to end.

I think I’ll have rum and Coke for dinner.

2010 (almost)

2010 (almost)

1952

1952

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What You See Is – What?

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker always said, there are some days that are just weird. And she could always tell, right away, when they happened.

Usually, it would be the  people. Everyone would look odd – alien. There’s such a wide variety in human features that 50 kinds of aliens could be walking among us with minimal makeup – there are lots science fiction stories about that, some sinister and some funny. The main thing is that it’s damned hard to tell if a weird-looking person is a human person, you see.

That fascinated   Kage. The heritage of the human species is suspect, and as twisted as a spider web on LSD. Homo sapiens has bred with every cousin species of hominid it ever found, conserving genes better than a cartoon hillbilly. We’ve also survived at least 3 bottlenecks, where the breeding population got down to a few thousands. The result is that, at this point, there is less variation between any 2 human beings than in most other mammalian species. (Cheetahs are as bad as we are, though.) We’re all pretty much kissin’ cousins, if not outright half-siblings.

So it’s amazing there’s such variety, and that people  can look so different.  We seem to keep all the genes that regulate hair and eye and skin colour. And facial bone structure. And hands, and height …  Mutations rates are high among humans, too, producing little cosmetic novelties all the time. Some of them are horrific and kill us. Some are horrific – and don’t. The ones that are non-fatal and benign are unicorn-rare, and they all manage to contribute a little bit to make their hosts look like Grandad came from another planet.

When everyone we saw on the drive to work looked like they were hiding gills, or extra teeth, or surplus joints in their fingers, Kage declared it a weird day. All expectations were shelved, and anything could happen – a butterfly found in a closed closet when we got back from work. A package full of FREE BOOKS from a publisher. A 4-digit check, an exploding water heater, a VHS rental labelled Classic Looney Tunes and containing a tape of the reconstructed Lost Horizons. A power failure, and an evening of strange lights dancing out over the Dunes.

Sometimes, Kage announced we had driven right out of the Fields We Knew. That usually happened at night, after a nice dinner and some cocktails: but not always. She never liked getting off the road at unfamiliar stops along I-5, because it was more prone to happen then. We’d have to drive around to find the right road again, along back roads and game trails and narrow roads paved with abalone shells and crushed porcelain gravel made from toilets, all shining like silver in the moonlight. That even happened in our home grounds of the Hollywood Hills, or Griffith Park – usually near the Observatory and that damned peculiar tunnel they have there; or up on Lookout Mountain Drive.

You might wonder, Dear Readers, why I did it. Why did I agree that we were on a strange (really, really strange) road, and drive up and down Wonderland, and Crescent, and Oakstone, and Laurel Pass, trying to find our way back to Laurel Canyon Drive? Because I was lost, that’s why. I couldn’t find the streets we’d come up on, or find any that went back down. The only way to get out of the maze on the narrow hillsides was to turn where Kage pointed and drive where she said. Make of that what you will, Dear Readers.

I’ll admit, the cocktails at Trader Vic’s were good.

But still: sometimes the roads were weird. Sometimes the days were, and the people, and the animals glimpsed at the side of the road. Lyre-horned dew-lapped cattle with coats all swirled and spiralled with black, exactly like cave paintings – do they breed aurochs in San Simeon? I don’t think so … Enormous birds. Bright-eyed anonymous critters on the top of dolmens. Road kill animals so twisted, dried and dessicated you couldn’t tell what they’d been, or if they’d ever actually been at all.

Except they were there when we drove by them. Sometimes they were alive, too, staring at us wonderingly as we hurtled past. Once, on a narrow bit of road a half-mile above the Pacific Ocean near Muir Beach, Kage put her hand out the open window as we inched by the lop-eared, snow-white cows that were feeding by the side of the road, and laid her hand on one beast’s vast neck.

“I’ve touched the Cattle of the Sun,” she said in deep satisfaction. “It’s a weird day, all right. Take me home! I need to write!”

Strange times. Good times. But strange. And I miss them.

lascaux 2Lascaux cattle

 

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Getting Warm

Posted on January 23, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker hated being cold.

She also hated bundling up in lap robes or blankets, or retreating to the couch with a coverlet when it was a cold day. What Kage wanted was a shirt-sleeve environment in a perpetually tropical mode – about 80 degrees was perfect for her. Then she only had to wear a hoodie to achieve the perfect temperature; she loved her hoodies, and had lots of them in a wide palette of colours and designs.

Somewhere along the line, she had decided that the hoodie was one of the world’s perfect garments.

Kage didn’t retreat, didn’t surrender, didn’t fort up. Being cold bored her, and she would fidget and mope loudly and finally find something to do that would keep her occupied enough that she couldn’t tell if she was cold or not. Sometimes it was convincing me to take her out driving with the heater turned up as far as it would go; we’d often end up somewhere drinking Irish coffee.

The best place ever was the House of Shields in San Francisco, which might be the oldest bar in the City (Time is strange there, so the claim is not entirely clear.) Its  gorgeous bar was found in the basement of the hotel across the street, when the ruins were cleared after the Great Earthquake. The Irish coffee served there looks as chaste as a nun: a smooth layer of cream on top of a black, black, black well of coffee, in a glass mug: no floofy whipped cream. No ice cream, an American aberration some places. Bushmills. Sigh … wherever we were, we’d drink until the sugar and caffeine and alcohol had us gibbering and twitching. Then Kage would tell me horrible ghost stories as we drove home in the dark, until we were both in hysterics as we sped through the dark … ah, good times.

houseofshieldsIrish-Coffee1

Man, we were warm after that. Twitchy as weasels with hot flashes, but sure enough warm.

I’m much less susceptible to the cold. But as I’ve aged, it’s gotten harder to stay warm. In the last year, especially, it’s gotten harder and harder to stay warm. And when I’m cold, it hurts. The only solution has been to retreat to bed under mounds of blankets, and sleep.

Mind you, it’s getting better lately. The year 2015 was a black hole of chill and pain, and the best parts of it were while I was asleep under a pile of blankets and comforters. But 2016 has been doing better, even though we are now in the coldest part of the Southern California year. (Even here, we do get a cold part of the year. Frost, even.)

When I woke up this morning, I knew at once there had been a cosmic power failure. The sky was a cold, white stone arch – no features, no luminosity, no weather. Just the high pale ceiling that leeches heat out of your bones, where the sun is a featureless point source of cold light that just drifts along like a leaking balloon until it sets again. I got up, did my writing rituals, wrote a little; recorded the completely nondescript dreams of last night in a new, expectant-but-unsatisfied dream journal (where were you last night, Kage?), drank a lot of coffee.

It’s been one of those days when you ponder whether to drink your hot coffee, or pour it in your pants. I can feel a chill radiating out from the marrow of my bones – my shoulders are encased in strange, invisible ices, like a comet in the Oort Belt; I can feel the distinct crackle of eldritch hoarfrost on my bones as I type … you’d think, being as I have indeed achieved the status of fat old lady, I’d have adequate insulation to survive this season in comfort. But noooo … there’s a time and a place for everything, I guess. And that one is past.

I wish I could go out driving, and get Irish coffee, and have someone tell me ghost stories until I see things out of the corner of my eye. Lacking that – well, I’m gonna go pour some coffee, at least, and watch the X-Files for a while.

That ought do it.

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Erinyes, Mousai or Garlic Dills?

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Kate

Kage Baker has been in my dreams a lot lately. Behaving rather strangely, too.

I wish I dreamed of her more often. But I don’t. Often, I have dreams where I know (in the dream) that she is around somewhere – I am usually trying to meet her, or find her, or somehow get to where she is … but I never do. And it’s usually while we’re trying to build for a Renaissance Faire, so there is a lot of around somewhere to hide her. Still, there’s a certain comfort in believing, even for the duration of a dream, that she is just over at Mullah’s, and I’ll catch up to her in a few minutes.

That’s something I dream about a lot. Also, that popular mainstay of sad stories, where you wake up and realize that someone’s death is itself a bad dream and not real at all: until you really wake up and find yourself 6 years older and Kage still dead. Oh, and you didn’t win the Lottery, either.

Lately, though, Kage has been a bit more literally visible in my dreams; and she’s been in a really peculiar mood. A few nights ago, I was hunting for her all over Faire – various friends kept coming up and advising me not to search for her, as she was angry at me. Now, a lot of the rest of this dream was arrant nonsense (like a dear friend in her Queen Elizabeth gown, driving Father Christmas’ sleigh from Dickens Fair through the summer streets of Chipping-Under-Oakwood), so I ignored everyone and kept hunting. But when I found Kage – she wasn’t angry, precisely, but she was too busy to wander around with me.

She was transformed, too:  much, much taller than me, and dressed in a tunic and skirt of russet silk embroidered with Celtic knot work and Greek keys. Her hair was cropped short and standing round her head like flames. There were  flames in her eyes, pupils like candles, and she wore boots of white stone, also all worked with knots and chains. There were chains of opals and padparadscha sapphires round her neck. She told me she had just sold a new novel that was going to be a marvellous scandal and a best-seller, and she was going through the Faire buying everything she had ever wanted with the advance on a gift card.

So she was busy, too busy to talk to me. She told me to get busy, too.

This has bothered me for days. The year 2015 was pretty much a dead loss for me, creatively, and I feel both guilty and persecuted about it. Am I making scary finger puppet shadows on the walls of my skull?

Maybe my unconscious has cast Kage as a Muse, annoyed because I’ve not accomplished much in the last year. Or maybe, against all odds – because I think she has better things to do at the moment – Kage is vengeful about my sloth and is kicking me to get my life back on track. Or maybe I just really have to stop eating kosher dill pickles late at night.

Last night, now … last night we were getting breakfast at one of those hotel breakfast bars where there are giant dispensers of various cereals and toppings for self-service. And Kage was encouraging me to sprinkle pearls and gems all over my Shredded Wheat. When I ate them, they were awfully crunchy and hard to chew – but they tasted like being 17 years old, like rose petals and sea foam and chrysanthemums in the rain …

I started my online screen writing class today. Tomorrow I am going to finish editing an old novel called Knight and Dei, and mail it off to my agent.

I wonder what I’ll dream  about tonight?

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