Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker disliked surprises. She didn’t care for changes, she detested practical jokes, and even “nice” surprises like birthday presents made her nervous.

What if she didn’t like them? What if they forced changes on her routines? What if she had to somehow be seen using them when all she wanted to do was to pitch them in the rubbish tip and forget the entire sordid interlude? Those venerable comedy routines where someone trots out an ugly vase whenever Aunt Mimsie comes to visit filled Kage with sympathetic horror.

The side effects and symptoms and debilitations of her last year were a low-level nightmare for her. She coped with them valiantly, though, mostly by determinedly seeing them through a light of farce and insanity: the entire situation was so ghastly and so weird, it was the only way to survive from day to day. When her assorted therapies required piercings and tattoos (which no one tells you about beforehand, BTW. It was a surprise!), she made the best of it; when they also made her a cyborg, with a port in her arm and a pump in her chest – well, she made notes on the interesting sensation of becoming an Operative.

We laughed such a lot, that year. We found ourselves in lots of weird situations, but that year was the weirdest. It was a case of laugh or give up, and laughing was not only more pleasant, it annoyed the hell out of stuffy medical personnel. So Kage made paper airplanes out of examination drapes, and wore wildly striped socks to surgeries, and we went AWOL from the hospital whenever she got too fed up with it. She always called them to tell them where she was; and it was only funnier when they usually hadn’t noticed she was gone … You have to take your fun where you can find it, when times get desperate.

I have persisted in trying to view my own health disasters in a similar vein. And since my entry into aging seems to be accompanied by most of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse and a minor troupe of Furies, translating the whole thing into comedy has been the only way to stay even slightly sane. Amusement is a much better option than despair.

I’ve spent most of the last month battling diverse infections, and exploring the wonderful world of antibiotics. As I’ve never abused them, most of them still work on me: I’ve nonetheless had to try several over the last several week, though, as the bugs have been strengthened by other people’s overuse … horrid little mutants. Luckily, I like yoghurt, and so have had a good time replenishing my alimentary biome; and Kimberly found me a brand of probiotics that are gummy teddy bears! Useful and fun at the same time! I can enact little Grateful Dead parades with my morning pill routine.

And I have discovered that continued use of sufficiently strong antibiotics can erase your fingerprints. They grow back, of course, but first they are simply sloughed away. This can get slightly awkward when you’re also trying to renew your driver’s license – but my thumbprint was one of the tougher ones, and I managed to produce a sufficiently whorled print to satisfy the DMV.

And now the rest of my fingerprints are growing back nicely. I should have no problems if I attract the attention of the TSA when I fly to Seattle later this month, or when I rent a car to drive to Spokane for WorldCon. Though it’ll certainly be amusing if something goes wrong … I’ll have great stories to report, that’s for damned sure.

I’ll keep you all appraised of the trip, Dear Readers. Adventures At The Hugo Awards, with No Fingerprints!

Kage Baker taught me that a writer sometimes needs to jump-start their writing. Forcibly. Perhaps with explosives.

This means that writers can fall into behaviour totally lacking the energy curve sufficient to make the leap into actual writing. Research slowly devolves into web-surfing, or reading trashy novels or fringe science or Pogo, Calvin & Hobbes and Heavenly Nostrils compilations. Writing shrinks  and shrinks ( …and still I continue to shrink!*) until one is hard put to manage a snappy Twitter caption; indeed, one finds oneself simply ogling NASA photos of the day, or wandering through #fieldworkfail and snickering like a hyena.

For Kage, pitfalls included Monkey Island computer games and cartoon marathons. Luckily for me, she passed on her Monkey Island obsession to our semi-niece Meagan. And I never succumbed to the dubious charms of SpongeBob. In fact, I felt it was a sign of my eventual recovery from Kage’s death when I felt relief that I wouldn’t have to go see the recent SpongeBob movie a gazillion times.

So, I lack Kage’s specific ways and  cues for wasting time. Nonetheless, I have my own; and I’ve done very nearly nothing about writing for the last month. I would not be at all surprised if I am now shouting into an uninhabited vacuum. I have no excuse – several reasons, but no real excuse. It’s been a truly wretched year for health with me, and it just keeps getting funnier (as Beetlejuice says. This is irony, kids.). Various joints are responding to the climate change in Los Angeles by freezing up: I appear to be maturing into some kind of coral organism, determined to spend my Golden Years as a sessile life form. My heart objects to the rising summer heat strenuously – well, no, I tell a lie: my heart does nothing strenuously; it objects to heat by whining, stammering and apparently developing St. Vitus Dance. Or maybe St. Elmo’s Fire; late at night, it’s hard to tell. I must ask Kimberly if I am phosphorescent.

The lifelong attempt to kill me on the part of my right kidney has progressed to Stage 3 kidney failure – this is not necessarily dangerous, and many people stay right there long enough to die of something else decades further on. However, my kidney is an over-achiever: it is trying to make the grade to Stage 4, preferably in one gigantic upgrade,  like a Windows 10 download that can kill you. I am, by now, accustomed to constant, low-level pain: however, the last month has featured episodes of the brain-burning, spine-dissolving, projectile-vomiting pain that only accompanies real kidney trouble.

Luckily, as I learned 50 years ago, when it reaches the puking point, it means the attack is almost over. So there is that to enjoy … until then, though, I am a black hole of muttered complaint and shrieked obscenity as I crab-walk between my bed and the bathroom, unable to stand up straight or actually pee. To make it even more interesting, I have apparently finally developed kidney stones: the sensation of which is a quantum leap beyond the mere strangulation pain of the kink in my ureter swelling shut …

And even the question of the stones is still hypothetical; unless you go out of your way to pee into a strainer (yeah, good luck with that for us setter types) the only way to tell if you might have passed a kidney stone is that the pain stops. At first, you may not be sure if you have simply died and are waiting for the Urinary Valkeries to carry you away to Kidney Pain Valhalla; but eventually you decide the floating sensation of ecstasy means you have actually survived.

Until the next one, anyway. There have been 2, so far. But tomorrow I have a sonogram scheduled, to eyeball my entire damned urinary tract with magic rays and find out what is screwing things up in there. I am expecting something vile and astonishing – a randomly-growing liver. An unexploded land mine. The Lost Dutchman Mine – at the very least, staghorn calculus**. I am also expecting another argument with my doctors as to whether or not I can finally evict the offending organ – because at this point, one working kidney would make life easier than carrying around this one that periodically renders me too sick to write for days at a time.

In the meantime: kick-starting has commenced. I went to Target today, and got new underwear for my sonogram session (it’s a girl thing). I am recklessly glugging coffee. I have gone to the grocery store, and not fallen down in the driveway! As long as I don’t try to alter the plane of my torso too quickly (or much at all), I am fine.

And so, barricaded into my swivel chair with pillows, I essay once more the seas of literature. Wish me luck, Dear Readers.

*A reference for those old enough to have ridden the Disney ride for tired feet that was NOT Small, Small World

**See the white pattern in the kidney? That is solid stone. Ouchie.

Kage Baker adored Pixar.

It’s not at all too strong a word. Animation in general was one of her most emotional passions, and Pixar was like a new Messiah vaulting across the heavens of animated films. She had rejoiced when the New Age of Disney started (with The Little Mermaid) and then watched in horror as Eisner methodically dismantled the animation department  – when he actually closed it, Kage joined the group working to oust him, determined to get him tossed out on his nasty corporate ass. (Which worked, BTW.)

Kage felt Pixar could be the saviour of animation, especially of Disney animation. And as it turned out, she was absolutely correct about that.

She never saw a Pixar film she didn’t like. The last one she saw was Up; not in the theatres, because she was too ill, but at home. When it was released on DVD in November 2009, she was post-operative and feeling pretty good; so I felt safe taking a weekend to go up and get our part of the Dickens Fair started in rehearsals. She stayed home with the new movie. When I came home, she told me how good it was, and advised me to watch it as soon as I could.

“It has really good things to say about dealing with loss,” she said. I remember I was helping her down the hall to her room (she’d stayed up until 1 AM waiting for me to get home that Sunday night) and she gave me a sharp stare over her shoulder as she said that. That meant it was An Important Moment, and I was supposed to heed her.

But I didn’t, of course, because it was definitely not something I wanted to hear. Believe it or not, Dear Readers, I didn’t figure out until 3 days ago what that statement meant:  Kage knew she was dying, long before I figured it out.

I did, of course, eventually see Up. Once. It was beautiful and funny, and I never intend to see it again. I don’t need to; I remember every scene as clearly as sunlight in an empty room. I could feel things breaking open and bleeding inside me, and I cried and cried. It was not cathartic, it was just wet and painful. I think it might have been a comfort, if Kage herself had not told me it would be – if she had not known I would need comfort – and if she then had not died. But she did. And so the film is intolerable.

Tuesday, I went out with my family to see Inside Out. No spoilers, I promise – but I must tell you, if anyone is waiting to see Pixar trip and fall on their face, this is not the film that will do it. It’s GOOD. Pixar has done it again. It too is beautiful and funny, and contains the best explanation for cats I have ever seen.

But as it rolled and the heroine faced the inevitable disassociation between her memories and her life (okay, slight spoiler there, but don’t worry) – the pain in my heart grew worse and worse. I’m not talking about a heart attack. It’s just grief; no one dies of grief, but it hurts, and it never goes away. You just learn coping techniques. Sometimes they work for long periods of time, and you can rebuild things that have broken. But sometimes they don’t work, for months and months, and you move in a constant fog of pain that never stops; and you get so tired …

By the time midnight rose amid the stars of June 30th, I had achieved a realization: I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t go forward with Kage’s work, I’d never sell my own, I had wasted the last 5 years and all the goodwill of my family and friends. I felt like an enormous rock had fallen out of the sky and flattened me under it. However, as despair often does, it felt sort of comforting to lay down all the burdens and just consent to be flat, so at least I got to sleep.

And when I woke up … the Italian publisher was confirming the failed sale, and the Virginia Kidd Agency was delighted to take me on as a client, and there were 147 affectionate emails on my computer, and it was still my birthday. The best birthday in years, Dear Readers, I do assure you: the best birthday in at least 5 years.

So why am I going on at gloomy length about this? Things are better, and right now I do feel as if things may work out after all.  But I think that I need to admit the pain and difficulty a little more often – at least to myself – so there are fewer moments when I am overwhelmed by despair and loss. I don’t want to trouble anyone else, and I’m not fishing for comfort or compliments – everyone I know is free and honest with both, and I don’t lack for them. But I need to stop running around with my eyes shut, pretending I can see. I need to stop running into the walls, and falling down in surprise.

The road thus far runs between that moment in our hall, with Kage giving me a sharp, meaning look that I didn’t understand; and a clear moment of thoroughly erroneous self-realization in a darkened theatre 2 days ago. It runs between Up and Inside Out. It runs, for half a decade and 24 hours, between me giving up in abject failure and suddenly finding some success in my grasp.

It runs between Kage thinking she was giving me a hint, and me not knowing what she was talking about for 5 freaking years. Holy shit, Dear Readers, what else is out there for me to discover next?

I have no idea. But I don’t mind at all.

Kage Baker always had a plan.

She made plans compulsively, determinedly. She made lists, with headings and sub-headings and all the alpha-numerical descending gradations we learned in high school essay: 1,2,3 to A,B,C to i, ii,iii to a,b,c and down into some sort of nano-notation you needed a magnifying glass to read or write.

The timeline for her first Company novel was 27 feet long – made of taped together pages of typing paper, in a spectrum of inks and all the fancy scripts Kage knew (which was a lot), it ran around 3 walls of our spare bedroom/library and was notated in English, Latin, Greek and some laboriously reproduced cuneiform symbols. I’m not sure she knew what they meant, but some of them were numbers and she said they were in there for “Sumerian flavour”.

Kage could barely manage Western numbers, and she had all 10 fingers needed for base 10 calculations. The Sumerians used a base 60 system … and evidently “Sumerian flavour” was beer, bread and beans, with garlic and cucumbers.

But her penchant for plans got us through all manner of hard times. And we had our share – evenings that descended into despair by the light of the Lava Lamps, the two of us staring at one another and asking “What the hell do we do now?” It always resolved with Kage grabbing up a pen and a legal pad and making lists: and that always worked. It calmed us down enough to sleep, it gave us a place to start digging our way out of whatever hole we’d fallen into, and we always got out.  Lists were Kage’s ultimate fall back plan.

She made a lot of lists, her final year. Almost none of them were about how to survive – she left that up to me, and medicine; her contribution was to work hard at whatever we came up with that might save her. She was brave, steadfast and never shirked; and believe me, Dear Readers – the responsibilities that devolve upon the dying are as tough as can be. She never wept or whined. But she swore me to those carefully outlined lists.

The main one was what I was to do about The Writing. I was to continue it. I was to keep her own stories going, and I was to add to them from her notes, from our conversations, from whatever surfaced in my own rattled brain. It was why she went through all her notes in that last year, getting them into a sort of order – piles, mostly, but sorted more or less by subject and on the stratigraphic  system: which, Kage said, worked for geology and so should work for me.

It was why she left me her high school notebooks – her first plan had been to burn them, but instead she left them to me to explore. It was why she left me not one, but two agents; in case one failed. Mind you, Kage never thought either of them would fail – her faith was steady. As it turns out, things have gotten rather wonky; but her plan still works. Because she left me a backup.

This year has been hard and painful. Who knows why? Not me. The psychological analyses, the DYI grief counseling, the Hallmark cards – they all say that by 5 years along, I should find myself content, resigned and functional. Well, they’re all wrong. I feel worse than I have since the first few months Kage was gone, and despair has been my constant companion this year. I’m climbing a cinder cone – climb 13 inches, slide back a foot. I’ve been staycationing in the Slough of Despond, and I don’t even like that damned book … and all of you, Dear Readers, have been inhumanly patient.

But I have The Plan. Kage’s Plan. I know where I have to go, what I have to do.

I’ve spoken severely to one agent, and unhappily terminated our relationship. But that will let me deal better with Kage’s legacy, and it gave me the time and room to plead with an uncertain Italian publisher about a seriously endangered deal. Today I found out that I have saved it – Mondadori will be printing the first two Company books in Bella Italia, in a mass market deal that will give Kage enormous coverage.

Armed with this success, I am negotiating with the backup agent; and I think that all will be well. They are interested, they know Kage’s work and like it, they’re willing to deal with me (and mine) and are already talking about how to announce it. Publicity! Professionalism! A way out of the Slough of Despond! I’ve been leaping up and down for months like a crazed marmot, and suddenly my little claws have caught the edge of a root!

And it’s all happened TODAY. Which happens to be my 62nd birthday. I see the left hand of Beneficent Fate here.

The next story to finish will be “The Teddy Bear Squad”, and that starts today. (Somebody remind me about “mammatus clouds” tomorrow.) The next book to finish will be Marswife; and in the meantime, I have a completely different kind of story done and ready to be examined by my (interested and competent) agent. Those tasks  I have feebly plugged away at this last 7 months are not for naught after all. Suddenly, there are lots of nice little check marks to be noted down in the margins of my life.

So happy birthday to me, folks. This may just work after all.

Kage Baker loved Midsummer. What’s not to love, after all? Midsummer, St. John’s Day, Litha, the Summer Solstice that marks the longest day and the shortest night of the year – it’s the very peak and pivot of summer.

And summer was Kage’s own season, daughter of the Sun Triumphant that she was. Midsummer’s Night and its Eve, she happily dedicated to Shakespeare. She always tried as hard as ever she could to spend it in that Wood Outside Athens, regardless of whether it was in the eucalyptus groves of the Hollywood Bowl, or the long ballroom beach at Pismo. But her heart was really given to the daylight.

By this time, most years, the morning marine layer could be depended upon to have burned away by afternoon – long golden twilights happened, softened by the remaining mist into a false clarity that made the hills look miles deep. It’s nearly 8 PM as I write this, and the sky is still a well of light. It’s blue in the east, lilac and orchid in the west, where the setting sun is dissolving into silver-gilt smoke … Kage always wanted to see this day and night in England, where all the stories of our childhood promised us sunset at 10 PM and a twilight that lasted half the night …

But California’s pretty indecision between the desert and the tropics was enough. The particular loveliness of California’s oak savannah is made for Midsummer; the wild oats soak up the daylight and breathe it out again into the evening, so the shadows beneath the trees are full of faerie luminescence, and smell of spices and rum. Kage would eat hoarded plums, we’d roast beef in the back yard and eat with our fingers, and sit by the bonfire as the stars pricked out late in the sky, drinking beers … us, drinking the beers. Not the stars. Or maybe them, too; who knows?

Plums, apricots, Italian ices (Kage had permanent dibs on the cherry ones), bomb pops on those few Hollywood summers when an ice cream truck braved the vertiginous Hills. The red, white and blue ones are good, but the fudge Bombs are simply amazing, and you can never find them in the grocery store. They have to be bought from a diesel-fuming truck in the last light of the longest day, with frost gleaming blue on their wrappers.

So, tonight is Midsummer. And it’s also the Summer Solstice, which makes it the beginning of summer. I know of no explanation for this mystery, except for a paradox of Time. No one remarks on it, no one worries, no one cares – because Summer is Timeless, and while it’s going on, it’s also eternal. We are all dancing in a ring,  on point at the border of Forever; twirling on one foot on the edge of luminous twilight, of a night that never really falls.

That’s the natural law. I hereby declare it.

So keep dancing, people. Keep dancing.