Once …

Posted on January 20, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker did not believe in Once upon a time.

If it happened once, it will happen again, was her reasoning. The motion of the Universe is repetition and reiteration. Whether you think that motion is an endless expansion and the place is doomed to become one vast, chilly, empty room; or you think the Universe will take a deep breath when it hits its limits and re-coalesce into a new Cosmic Egg – either way, it goes through the same smaller cycles over and over and over. And if you do happen to prefer the “breathing in and out” model (which is more cheerful, with its implied phoenix lifestyle), there is also that enormous overarching repeat each time the walls of the Universe close in.

Life becomes a light show with a BANG! at either end. Kage liked that idea.

She also did not care for Once upon a time as a story lead-in. She felt it cheated the auditor.

First, it was a cheat because it deliberately obscured the basic boundaries of the story – it  set “Anywhere, anywhen” as the frame. Kage felt the audience deserved better directions than that – in her own fantasy books, she deliberately dumped the reader straight into the world at hand; she trusted them to figure out it was a world to which they could relate, with a story they could understand.

Second, it was a cheat because those very stories that most needed a clear compass rose in the margin – i.e., fairy tales – used it the most. Just when you needed to know for sure where you were, you couldn’t. Kage didn’t want her readers to have to spend so much time figuring out where was North, how many moons there were and which way was up – she wanted them to hear and see the story, not the stage directions. So she usually made them simple and quick, and trusted her readers to know that unless she specified otherwise, her characters were breathing air, walking on the ground and wearing bodies.

When they weren’t, of course, she tried to make that plain.  But only when she thought it mattered. It wasn’t a lot of foreign (and, incidentally, made-up) words that set an alien scene; in Kage’s opinion, it was a scene that pretty well went along as it might in the readers’ ordinary day: until it abruptly didn’t. We’ve all had to deal with ants in the kitchen, mice in the walls, raccoons on the roof – where it gets interestingly freaky is where the hero has to deal with dragons in the eaves.

Everyone has had to deal with land developers, rental offices and HOAs – and Kage figured they were all pretty much Minions of Evil anyway. So in her fantasy world, the misty sacred place is menaced by a real estate office, and it’s the Dark Lord who’s working to save it: by buying it up and making it a nature reserve.

This is where Once upon a time fails. You need to connect the story to the reader; you need to connect your world to theirs. As Kage was fond of pointing out, even starships need bathrooms. Eventually.

It’s the throwaways that really made the world memorable, she felt. She made chocolate a drug – as indeed it is, being of the venerable and ancient plant alkaloid family.  Kage just tweaked its effects a little for her Operatives. And as far as I can see, that became one of their favourite attributes with the readers. Demons are renowned in stories for odd and often unpleasant habits: Kage made them prone to OCD, which might result in an urge to eat left ears, but might just as well lead to collecting fine china.

You can distract vampires or the Devil with a handful of millet seeds, she mused while designing demons. That sounds compulsive to me!

Last of all, Kage felt that Once upon a time was used far too often, to describe quite mundane things.

There are all sorts of flat-out miraculous things that have happened once. And only once. And the world we know would not exist if they had happened any other way.

Let us return to the birth of the Universe. Again, whether you hold to one model or the other, you only get ONE Big Bang per Universe. While it comforted Kage to imagine the entire thing falling back in on itself to form a new Singularity – well, by its very definition, a Singularity is … singular. Once upon a time – It happened. Once. The next Universe may happen because of the last once collapsing; the Bang, the expansion and the Singularity might repeat, but it’s only once in the life of each Universe.

Theoretically, each snowflake is unique. So is each human being. There’s lots of good fodder for self-esteem philosophies there, if you believe it. At the least, it might prevent people from getting treated like identical units. Once upon a time, nothing like the child born this morning had ever existed before. Pretty cool.

Once upon a time, a large cell engulfed a smaller cell. Or maybe a smaller one penetrated a larger; eating was still pretty new, and sex hadn’t been invented yet. But what we are pretty damned sure of, 3 and half billion years later, is that this ONE time, the two cells struck a balance. They cooperated. They formed a new kind of life. The unique footprints of that one single act of unnatural (at the time) union are still plain and clear in every cell of our bodies. And every cell of everything else’s bodies, too, who have any claim to the exalted high Domain of eukaryotic cells.

And this doesn’t even touch on the greater still Once upon a time that probably started life in the first place.

Once. Once. Once upon a time.  The things happened that produced birds, and cats, and primroses, and mantis shrimp, and algae, and Yersina pestis bacteria, and wombats, and barley, and human beings. That’s too big to waste on glass slippers and eating disorders, don’t you think?

Kage did. And so do I.

 

 

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A Brief Observation of My Personal Nuclear Winter

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker was born June 10, 1952. She died January 30, 2010.  That’s nearly 5 years ago. She was a primarily visual person, and always pictured her own moods, thoughts and feelings as landscapes. Then she translated them into words. Usually. Sometimes they stayed as landscapes; some of those became worlds.

She published some of the lovelier ones.

I don’t think in pictures. I think I think in words, but that’s probably an exercise right beside trying to see the back of your own neck. I may be thinking in smells; or undiluted frequencies of light so rarified they don’t show colour except as a notation of angstrom length.  Or in a harmony of two frequencies so far up the hertz scale that I’m listening with my marrow instead of my ears. Maybe I think in grain-based beverages.

This is how I feel today:

burnt ruin

I just found out that there is fan fiction of Kage’s stories, but I’m not brave enough yet to read it. The idea makes me feel like a private garden has been plowed under a storm of ashes. It’s winter in all my bones.

Tomorrow will probably be better.

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Sunday In The Void

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker: my perpetual lead-in, topic and inspiration, but not one that leads automatically or easily into many areas. She doesn’t guide one instantly into something like  Oxygen: Why It’s Still Poisonous! Or  How Do New Islands In Indonesia Affect the Sunda Plain?  Or Just In Time For Lent, 10 New Recipes for Lamprey!

That last one was one of Kage’s favourite examples of DIY titles from Elizabethan England. As it happens, there was a large and healthy publishing industry by mid-16th century, and a lot of the new titles were aimed at the recently evolved middle-class housewife. That one about the lampreys is a (rough) translation of an actual pamphlet … and she was willing to bet there were similar masterpieces produced all the way back to cuneiform.

However, Kage’s name itself does not lead so easily into many topics. Time travel. Women in science fiction. Redheads, left-handers, creativity on the autistic spectrum; all those are possible if I want to get really personal. And from time to time, I have.

But today, on this dim, quiet and quickly cooling Sunday afternoon, my brain and my funds of energy are alike empty and echoing. I managed to get two socks that matched this morning, and realized as I pulled them on that my willpower had peaked for the day. I know I have blog and story ideas; but I can only see them faintly, obscured by some mental and obviously low-quality isinglass.

Iisinglass, Dear Readers, as you may or may not know, is traditionally made from the swim bladders of various fish – especially catfish, if you want nice big pieces of it. Since it was often used for window panes in things like roll-down windows on sports cars and fringed surreys, big fish yield better bladders. If you’re using it as a clarifying agent in your ale – Guiness does – then any old scrap will do … however, as a focus for cerebration, it sucks.

Checking my various favourite timelines (also a trick Kage often employed) I see that today is the anniversary of the Nika Riots – which figure prominently in my story “Pareidolia”, which comes out next month, Huzzah! It’s also the wedding anniversary of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, when that gentleman founded the Tudor dynasty on that lady: culminating in the reign of Elizabeth 1st, Gloriana: Live Forever, Great Queen! Henry Morgan captured Panama; James Cooke discovered the Hawaiian Islands (they were both sorry later).  The Bentley Motor Company was founded.

There are, of course, simply scads of historical war events on this day, which grow thicker and thicker as you approach the 21st Century. They are all balanced against a pitiful few visitations of the angels of our better natures – like the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, officially celebrated nationwide for the first time on this date in 1993.

But aside from these peculiar bits of facts that leap into my barely-turning mind, there is nothing at all moving in the halls of my cerebral cortex. The bridge of my corpus callosum is empty of idlers and fishermen. Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas are like empty bars, dust sparkling faintly in the breath from a slow, slow overhead fan while the lone barmen polish glasses.

It’s dead  in this town, Dear Readers.

But, hey, it’s late in the afternoon on a Sunday. The liveliest sound in my neighborhood is the primate hoot-panting chorus from the football fans – the Seahawks clobbered the Greenbay Packers a little earlier, and now the Patriots are decimating the Colts. All else is sleepy digestion and outright snoring; the cats are purring, and Harry is making a lovely little noise like water droplets chiming into a fountain. And all thought of Kage is leading me to is dreamy quiet and the urge to re-read something she wrote.

Excitement tomorrow. Rest today.

 

 

 

 

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The Aether Is Thin Today

Posted on January 17, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker never did entirely trust the Internet – or any other highly complicated and “advanced” system. She figured, the more bells and whistles a program had, the more it was designed to do, the wider its range of effectiveness out in the real world, the more likely it was to be intrinsically screwed up.

Biologists sometimes describe the various portions of the human brain by identifying them as the “reptile brain”, the “rat brain”, and such. It means that that portion of the brain was new and cutting edge when most of the owners were actual fish, lizards, shrews, etc.  Innovations to brain structure just kept piling one on another, and the success of the higher functions of the human brain are all literally riding on the brains that evolved when knowing how to regulate your own body temperature was a slick new trick.

Kage took this analogy one step further, and maintained that she did a lot of her thinking with frontal lobes developed in prior centuries.  She thought with a Paleolithic brain, a Bronze Age brain, a Renaissance brain – and insisted she had not yet acquired an Information Age brain. Her intellect, she felt, was constructed along lines that were popular when rational thought was emerging from one of its periods of eclipse – right on the edge of the Renaissance, peering suspiciously into the bright informational future from within the comforting shadows of instinct and lore. She was comfortable at a point where the Industrial Revolution was still a glint in Father Time’s eye, mathematics  had reached its peak with Eratosthenes, and science ranked astrology at the top of its pantheon.

This was mostly a pose. I’m pretty sure it was …  although I did have to argue quite a lot with her about the advantages of nanotech over clockwork in her Operatives. And I have always suspected that Kage believed a lot more in the magic of her Anvil universe (where she made sorcery into a very orderly science) than she did in pineal tribantine 3. She always did feel that Clarke’s Law more or less freed her from the obligation of choosing between magic and technology, or even identifying which one one was which.

Which leads me to today’s labours and woes. On Saturday, I tend to visit my favourite aggregator sites and look over the new offerings in scientific discoveries, historical mysteries, insane labour-saving devices, and so on. These sites are an unending source of ideas, snapshots of what might be the near future.

For instance, sex toys and masturbatory aids have reached new pinnacles of technical excellence and consumer availability: I now get descriptions of 1 or 2 in every upscale catalog in my email. Aides d’amour are on the other side of a recent paradigm, and are now light years from mere blow-up dolls and rocket shaped vibrators. They now look like aquarium lights and art objects.

The newest antimicrobial drugs are being developed out of weird programs from the former Soviet Union. Substances produced during the rule of Lysenko are being sifted for functional drugs, and actually yielding compounds that work. It’s a great endeavour, where Western money is reviving moribund Soviet sciences; if only they can track down all the secret records, and labs, and scary little glass vials …

Kakapo parrots are having a population boom, on their newly rat-free islands. Galapagos tortoises are breeding successfully for the first time in 150 years, and actual babies have been seen on their newly rat-free islands. Ditto a number of songbirds, insects and rare flowering plants. The trick seems to be controlling the rats – not something at which we have ever excelled, but it’s obviously time to really try now.

3-D printing has gained a steady population of active DIY-ers. They are making all sorts of things, but especially customized limb prostheses. Who could have imagined that artificial limbs would become a cottage industry?

As you can see, Dear Readers, even this brief list is simply chock-full of wonderful story possibilities. However, the medium has been blinking on and off all day. The winds here in LA are not high, nor are the temperatures extreme, but my access to the aether keeps  thinning out and vanishing. Every time I try to travel from one site to another, for instance, I’m informed that the server has reset and I must try again. The home network seems to be fissioning into several independencies – it’s the Deutscher Bund around here, and no one is working with anyone else.

It’s just the sort of thing that happens sometimes. It makes me want to scream and smash things, but it’s become a regular feature of modern life. Our invisible connections to the aether reach all over the world, but they can fail. Then we’re left confined to the single glowing box on our desks or in our hands, pounding on the glass walls that have suddenly gone infuriatingly opaque …

For all I know, I’ll set this thing loose and only later discover that half of this entry has been lost. Or translated into the Tupí-Guaraní dialect of the Ache hunter-gatherers. Or that the comments files are full of alien messages. It’s been that kind of day …

But Kage wouldn’t be surprised at all. She’d nod with that vaguely satisfied air people get when their worst expectations are fulfilled, and remind me that at least I got something done. I’ve been leaping from rock to rock in the Sea of Information, but some interesting ideas have resulted just from my frantic jumps and clutchings.

And that’s not a bad thing.

 

 

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Red Tape Doesn’t Hold Anything Together

Posted on January 16, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker  faced all the wretched details of her mortal illness with extraordinary courage and grace. She didn’t cry or whine, she remained polite to nurses and technicians, and she always tried to treat her caregivers with courtesy.  She said Please and Thank you, in situations where behaving like Virginia Woolf would have been excusable. Not even the Southern ladies in her ancestry could have faulted her behaviour in this worst of all possible difficult times.

But she couldn’t cope with bureaucracy.

Paperwork was something she loathed and despised; it carried a curious power to shut down her higher mental functions and instill a gazelle-like panic. You could tell, when she was facing some vital piece of legalese or contractual crap, that she was on the verge of eye-rolling terror – she was just inches away from leaping straight up in the air and running for the horizon at 40 miles per hour.  This is not an exaggeration. Full blown panic attacks resulted from Kage trying to find her way through official documentation.

Paperwork was, and always had been, my domain. After an initial bout of cursing, I can settle down and sort through paperwork: it’s a Zen thing, almost, and whoever does the taxes in your households, Dear Readers, undoubtedly knows what I mean. It’s just what one does, if one can. If one cannot … one finds someone who can.

So I handled all Kage’s contracts, all her editorial notes, all her tax and employment paperwork. On the few occasions she had to file for unemployment, I did that, too: those 2-weeks-at-a-time forms drove her insane. With me handling things, all she had to do was sign where I said and things got returned in time, to whatever soulless organization was demanding them.

When she  was diagnosed with cancer, the second thing her doctor handed her was a list of places to apply for financial and medical assistance. This was in the Bad Old Days before Affordable Care; Kage hadn’t had health insurance in 20 years. Even if she had been inclined to try, the combined weight of her diagnosis and all that paperwork would have been too much for her to shoulder,  especially when it became clear – as it quickly did – that it was going to be hard as hell to get her admitted to a program that would help her.

Ultimately, we managed. I resorted to ruthless bullying, callous lies and shameless histrionics to get Kage the care she needed; and it still turned out to be too slow, too little and too late. Bt at least she didn’t have to try and do it herself while she was also busy trying to survive. She’d have been too paralyzed to do anything, and her last year would have been much more painful and hopeless.

As it was, her first disability check arrived 2 weeks after she died. When I called her case worker and asked where to return it – seeing as how the recipient was, you know, dead – the woman was so flustered she could barely talk to me. Evidently the paperwork required to reverse the claim payment would have broken the entire State benefits system; she just closed the case and told me to keep the check. So, if the State of California ever cares to double check, I guess I owe them a few bucks …

I came out of all this hating the paper mill as much as Kage always had. But I can still mostly fight my way through it.

That’s where I was  for a large part of today – trying to prove that I am still disabled with the same incurable conditions that disabled me last year. (The faith of the Great State of California in sudden miracles is amazing.) Somehow, my appointment had been scheduled during my case worker’s lunch hour; I waited an hour and a half to see her for 5 minutes. She handed me a new sheaf of forms, and told me to go home and bring the forms back when they were done. I believe she had some specific instructions for me concerning special forms she also needed, but I couldn’t understand her – and I discovered a couple of years ago that asking for an interpreter because your caseworker can’t speak English badly impacts the enthusiasm of the Social Security office.

Anyway, I took all my booty home – it’s a success merely to have winkled the forms out of them! – and am now printing, filling out, signing, collating, and attaching sticky notes to all manner of paperwork that will hopefully prove I am still alive,  still sick,  still at the same address and have not changed my blood type or eye colour.

Which all boils down to: I’m not writing anything today except for explanations of why I glow in the dark (or don’t, depending on what they demand), why my family doesn’t charge me market scale rent,  how an independent writer cannot forecast how much she’ll make in a year, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings!

Instead, Dear Readers, I’ve taken a therapeutic half hour to whine to all of you. Thank you for listening. We’ll resume real life tomorrow, when I’ve put all this damned paperwork away. And poured myself a beer.

Excelsior!

 

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Searching For Content

Posted on January 15, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker usually affords me a blog topic with no difficulty whatsoever. Our life was so entertaining (at least for us) and her mind so wide-ranging and fertile, that it’s been easy to keep riffing on it through nearly 5 years and just over 1,000 posts.

Tonight I am feeling unusually foggy, though, so I thought I’d reverse my usual practice. Instead of noodling my way through a blog and then applying myself to an orderly bit of work on a story, I’m going to try it the other way around. I could claim it’s a clever exercise in isolating story points, but it’s not. I’m just awfully prone to talking to myself. That’s been a big help, too.

Of course, native verbosity (mine) also helps. One of my natural skills has always been to go on at audience-stunning length about nearly anything. I competed in Impromptu in Forensics contests in high school – huzzah for the alternate NFL! – and even lettered in it. The jockesses in our all-girls high school held my letter sweater in utter scorn, too, since as far as they could see, I was being honoured merely for being the over-erudite motor-mouth I was in class anyway …

Impromptu, by the way, is not the same event as Improvisation. The latter requires you to memorize 12 to 15 minutes of a dramatic or comedic speech, and then deliver it in character. It’s hard;  I could never do it Impromptu, on the other hand … you get a subject assigned at the beginning of the round; then you have 5 to 15 minutes to come up with a speech on that topic. Then you have to give your own, noteless, just-composed 10 minute speech. It’s like competing in luge as opposed to bobsled – it’s faster, it’s crazier, and the chance to wipe out and kill yourself is just soooo much better!

I loved it.

It was also excellent training for many important parts of my adult life. Doing Faires called on improvisational skills at every moment – eating your lunch, snogging your sweetie, heading to the privies – under the rule of “If the audience can see you, you’re in character” all sorts of conversations had to be improvised in character, in accent and on the fly.

Office work, especially in customer service, also required considerable impromptu skills. No matter what kind of script you have developed for dealing with the public, you’ll get a rogue every now and then. How do you handle a gentleman who tells you he wants to place an ad for someone to kill his wife? (Kage said he was kidding. She thought.) And you must be able to control your voice when someone on the other end of a call informs you that her name is Contessa Divine Gaspang. And that she is calling to change her name – to Imperatrix Divine Gaspang. (Our company insured aaall the Gaspangs. And they aaall had names like that.)

And, of course, when you come down to it, writing too is a form of impromptu. The writer sets her own topic – but sometimes finds she knows nothing about it, and is forced to scramble for a way concoct an entire plot. The length of the presentation is set by the hopes of the author and the dictates of the publisher: many a novel has only seen the light of day after being carved into chunks and used to seed several other projects. It doesn’t work if you can’t keep to your topic and your plot all the way through. Stammering, stuttering, repetition, too many “ums” and “ahs” will condemn you to the outer darkness. And you’ll find out everything anyone thinks you did wrong, too, because you get reviews from all the judges …

Kage didn’t compete in the NFL, but she watched me do it. She herself learned impromptu skills from an ex-Mouseketeer standing on a hay bale, and practiced them in the streets and in all her cubicles in what she called the Pink Collar Ghetto.  And they turned out to still be just what she needed when she began attending Conventions – because people ask questions, some of them quite bizarre, and you’ve got be able to answer quickly, completely and (ideally) entertainingly.

And by being sneaky, Dear Readers, I’ve managed to fill in 700-odd words about another facet of Kage’s process – and, by extension, mine. I don’t think every writer needs to try their hand at public speaking. But if they do well, most will find themselves someday facing an expectant crowd, eager and willing to be dazzled by real live words.

It helps if you’ve had some practice. Get a friend or family member, and ask them to throw things at you – something soft, like marshmallows or socks or kittens. Then CATCH! And deliver a speech about it while you do.

After a while, it gets easy. Almost …

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Candy In The Twilight Zone

Posted on January 14, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker hated change. Not all change, of course – though she at least resented most of it. Change that affected her personally was what she always regarded with a leery eye; she expected the worst of it, and was seldom entirely disappointed in that expectation.

She was particularly perturbed by physical changes. Old buildings coming down, old brands disappearing, old roads being replaced – they were all wounds in her world-view, and it was very hard for her to come to terms with them. She might no longer eat Life Savers on every car trip – though once she had – but she was outraged when she discovered that her favourite flavours (violet, clove, tangerine, cinnamon) had vanished.

Candies, in fact, were one of the Great Ghastly Sargasso Seas of lost items: and a large proportion of her time on line was spent finding old favourites, or a modern equivalent. Some can be found – if you loved Mars Bars, the Almond Snickers will do. If you loved the Chicken Bones that only showed up in Halloween bags, try Chik-O-Sticks.  Milky Way Midnight approximates Forever Yours. Black Jack and Clove gums occasionally show up, but Beechnut Gums are among the vanished.

Regal Crown Sours, Flicks, Caravelles, Adams Sour Gum, Sugar Mama,  Pom Poms, Brach’s Neapolitan Cocoanut Sundaes: gone, all gone. They belong to the distant lands of childhood, and as Treebeard laments, All those lands lie under the wave.

And if you think that the sweeties that formed the landscape of Kage’s youth are not worthy of a good lament – well, loss is in the eye of the bereaved. She loved ferociously, and she hated change, and she mourned every alteration in the geography of the past.

It’s a good thing that family and friends mostly did not begin to die until she was a grown woman. Though one grandmother and Betty Jean, Momma’s first child, did die when Kage was tiny, she remembered them. She remembered them  clearly, but with the toddler’s world view that was hers when she knew them: I think they were never really gone for Kage. Not the way our parents were; or later, our playmates …

Those losses are impossible to fill. They can be survived, but they cannot be un-made. And there you have the deepest source of Kage’s Universe. What could not be replaced was memorialized, and immortalized, too; from tailor’s shops on Hollywood Boulevard to specific rose bushes on the driveway up to the old Japanese embassy above the Magic Castle.

It helps. I learned that writing Nell Gwynne II, when I wrote Kage into the Ladies’ household. And writing stories like “Pareidolia”, where I had to write in her voice: that helps too. It’s one the best reasons for me to keep going, that I can hear her while I work.

Maybe I can go on EBay, and find me some Milkshake Bars. Or Merri Mints! I loved those things, and the only thing that comes close are pastel mints from See’s, that they only make for Easter … but! You know what, Dear Readers? I’ve just now been informed that some other fanatic has re-produced them, and I might be able to find them freshly made at oliverscandies.com!

Oh, man, I gotta have those. I’m off to check this out, Dear Readers. Because Merri Mints will be just the fuel I need to power through the end of the Teddy Bear Squad vs. the Purple Squirrels …

Yoiks, aroo and tallyho!

 

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Hitting A Mark

Posted on January 13, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker, as part of her general tendency toward a ritual life,  enjoyed anniversaries. She liked making time to commemorate times, and places, and things: whether it was a birthday or turning on to a previously-untravelled road, Kage honoured it with a toast and a cheer.

She was very into clinking glasses – not so much throwing them in the fireplace, although we tried it a couple of times as adolescents. It’s really only enjoyable if you use glasses you don’t like and have someone else to clean up the mess.  As Kage opined, why bother to make a toast in the first place using an ugly glass? And we were the usual clean-up crew, so there was no Under Parlour Maid to come sweep the shards out of the fireplace.

Although, if the glasses were thin enough – brandy balloons, say – and the fire was hot, you did find some interestingly melted glass blobs the next day. You had to be sure there was no brandy left in the glasses, though, or you got a ball of fire. Oh, and fireballs, being spherical, expand equally in all directions open to them – if you’ve blocked them on three sides with a fireplace, that means they expand into the living room and set the hearth rug on fire.

Kage had a way of making sure that an event was memorable afterwards, even if it had been not so much to being with.

In keeping with the realization that we didn’t always have brandy balloons to hand, we made it a habit to clink together whatever we were eating or drinking. Lots of chocolate bars and hamburgers and jam rolls and cartons of Chinese food were clinked. Apples, plums, peaches, single cherries knocked delicately together:  plip. There were no end of cans, bottles, glasses, cups and pewter vessels of diverse descriptions, all heavily loaded with alcohol and/or caffeine. Those midget bottles you get on airplanes, or the special displays on liquor store counters. Bottled pre-made cocktails were a particular favourite of Kage’s; they came in all sorts of peculiar varieties and were very portable. I doubt she’d ever have had the courage to order a Brass Monkey in a public bar, but in a bottle off a shelf there was no embarrassment.

Another nice thing about the pre-mixed drinks – which got packed on a lot of our trips – was that Kage liked musical comedy drinks and I do not. So she could have her bottle of Sex On The Beach or a mug of Planter’s Punch, while I drank ascetic silvery gin and tonics or neat whiskey.They were all clink-able; that was the ultimate point.

Kage simply adored goofy cocktails with lots of fruit, and garnishes, and preferably based on rum. She liked them in tall glasses, and if the glasses were shaped like tikis or mermen (there was actually a bar in Pismo that served drinks in those), so much the better. And they should be bright red, or striped red and gold., or blue. One of her late-in-life favourites was called A Lonely Island Lost in the Middle of a Foggy Sea; it involved 3 kinds of rum, pineapple and lime juices, Demerara sugar syrup and cold black coffee.

Just for the record, I’d like to state that the Lonely Island Lost in the Middle of a Foggy Sea tasted vile. (In my opinion.) On the other hand, it did indeed reduce you to the condition described in the title … Zombies, too, infuse the imbiber with the characteristics of their name, especially if you drank 3 of them in the giant clam shell bowls they were served in at the late Trader Vick’s in Hollywood.

I don’t know what we’d be clinking together tonight, if Kage were here. Probably Coke and coffee, which were the usual drinks sitting around near dinner time on a Tuesday. Maybe some mild red wine, tasting of warm dust and blackberries; or a couple of strong imported ales. But I’m fairly sure we’d have raised a glass of something, and I will do so here at my desk, saluting the pale light of my computer screen.

Because tonight, Dear Readers, I have hit a mark unlooked-for and undreamed-of: this blog entry, which I am about to publish for today, January 13, 2015 – this very entry is my 1,000th  published blog.

As Miles Gloriosus observes: “Even I am impressed!”

So – a glass with you, Dear Readers.  *clink*

Double Dragon Ale!

Double Dragon Ale!

 

 

 

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Madam, Will You Talk?

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker often talked to the telephone.

Not on the telephone, mind you. She hated being on the telephone, despite  – or more likely because – she spent most of her 9 to 5 career as a Customer Service representative. That meant she mostly talked to people who were already angry, usually wrong, frequently traumatized, and flat out insane a surprising amount of the time.  People don’t call up Customer Service to commend a company.

Kage worked most of her life in various forms of the insurance industry; you get some of the worst situations there, as most people are already up to their ears in shit by the time they remember about their policy. Funeral insurance is probably the worst. It doesn’t pay a lot, it’s frequently borrowed against (which diminishes claim value), and people call the company because – well, someone they know has died. And it goes downhill from there.

For the 20 years we lived in Pismo Beach, Kage worked for one of those tiny little magazines that are all advertisements; like the Pennysaver, EasyAd or PhotoAd. People who call in to place cheap ads for weird objects and services are not as angry – but they are a lot crazier. The good thing about the job was that it gave Kage constant human interest scenarios to mine for stories – because what people want to sell (or buy) is really, really astonishing. You learn that some amazing things are actually legal … except when they’re not, but some airhead wants to answer or place an ad for them anyway.

Anyway, the bottom line was that she rarely accepted phone calls at home. We always had an answering machine and we never picked up until we knew who was calling. Sometimes, not then.  And  Kage never picked up at all – unless she was home alone and it was me calling her. When I was home, I picked up any call we decided to answer; and Kage only took them if she felt like it. That was seldom. Many of our family and friends became convinced we were always sitting there listening to the machine and making rude gestures; but we weren’t. We only did that some of the time.

However, Kage would talk to the phone while the hapless caller was leaving a message. What she said was usually rude, frequently derisive but always honest – things like, I will never in life speak to you, you horrid little man! You dwarf, you minimus of hindering knotgrass made, you bead, you acorn! – to a particularly annoying editor. Shut up, go away, I’m working on it now! – when her agent called about a project nearly due. Or often, a simple, heartfelt Screw you! to the entire universe of people who wanted her to work faster, buy a condo, let them power wash the rugs, donate money to causes. She didn’t have to answer them, but she could yell at them. And she did.

I assume it was cathartic. It seems to be for Kimberly, who also does it. And after all, some people talk to the television – I do, and there’s nothing wrong with me, he he he. But that drove Kage nuts; she hated it when people talked to the television shows. Sadly, the entire family did/does it … but we never watched much television anyway, she and I. So my occasional outbursts weren’t so bad; and half the time, she was doing it as too.

We had to stop watching the news, though. We’d gotten into the habit when CNN first came on the air; watching its birth in the light of the tracer bullets over Baghdad  was mesmerizing. But somewhere along the way CNN lost its mind and its mandate and became too painful to watch. The local and national evening news programs were no replacement; they were even worse. Unless we were looking for news of something that had happened in Pismo Beach, we tended to get our news from the papers and the Internet. The traditional sources just went sloppy nuts …

They’re even worse now, most of them. My family talks back to the few mainstream news media we watch, and I do believe it’s largely self defense. If we just sat there and absorbed the crap being spewed from even the good ones, the entire lot of us would likely die of apoplexy. We don’t dare watch Fox News; nothing could prevent my head from exploding, I am sure – I can barely make it through the choice bits excerpted by the few news people I can bear to listen to at all.

Sometimes Kage and I recited along with the television, of course. We were the generation that grew up with Sheriff John and Engineer Bill and Captain Kangaroo – interactive television was soaked into our genes.  Then there were the cult-level call and response movies like Rocky Horror, and the rock concerts that invited 18,000 voice choirs to join in, and then the street shows of Renaissance Faires. Our life was interwoven with things that expected us to join in; nay, required us to do so to keep the story rolling!

Small wonder we talked back to the telly.

Even smaller wonder that Kage held conversations with the telephone. Though she often denigrated and cursed people she didn’t like – especially while they left desperate messages on the answering machine – at least the process got it out of her system. She never let loose with the truly creative damnings and obscene speculations where anyone but Harry and I could hear; her emails to these unfortunates were always a model of ladylike professionalism.

Personally, I wish we could put Harry on – all he’ll say is Hello? Hello? in his funny high-pitched parrot voice. Plus whistle like a steam engine, and then sing Rule, Britannia endlessly …

Kage would approve of that.

 

 

 

 

 

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Just Whistle

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Kate

Kage Baker is, as ever, my goad and reminder. I need to write, which she never lets me forget; her voice is my constant companion, in memory. And when I find myself considering doing something that is a flagrant waste of time – like watching television while doing nothing else at all – hers is the wry and disapproving glance I catch in the corner of my mind’s eye. If she’d ever managed to master that one-raised-eyebrow trick, she’d be using it on me.

Luckily for me, she never did learn that. It annoyed the hell out of her that I’ve been able to do it since age 11. Now I feel compelled to raise a sarcastically inquiring eyebrow at myself whenever I pass a mirror. And what are you doing with your time today, hmmm?

This weekend, as little as possible. I plead ill health and elf-bolts; migraines, melancholy and heartburn have rendered me wan and listless, a veritable mushroom, a pale and fungoid sufferer in stuffy rooms. I’ve had an urge to wear purple, and fuzzy socks. I haven’t even had the energy to read; and when that happens I must either cheer right up or die outright: I have reached the utter dead end of my resources.

And it’s been raining all weekend, too. That’s actually a good thing, and I have been pleased to lie warm abed and listen to the soft rain drip off the roof. It’s been a lovely soaking rain, and the earth has rejoiced considerably under it. It’s also been a perfect rain for sleeping through, and I’ve made an honest effort to do that.

Having finally gotten myself out of bed, out of my nightgown and into some real clothes today, I managed to go shopping for wooden clothespins. Those are an essential item in my household, as they are Harry’s favourite toys. They can’t be found just anywhere – not many people still hang their clothes out on lines – but craft stores carry them as dollie blanks. Harry has a coffee cup always full of them by his daytime perch, and he spends a little happy time each day industriously turning clothes pins into tooth picks and tinder. And when I get lazy and he runs out … that’s when he attacks my knitting and shreds my knitting needles. And then laughs at me.

I did sit up long enough to chat with my family and watch some movies, and finally pin down my charity blanket project to a pattern that will work. I messed up the one I had planned a half a dozen times; I finally settled on simple stripes, and it’s finally beginning to advance in length. High time – Kimberly has nearly completed the first colour skein in her classic afghan.

Of course, the real purpose underlying all the activity – the shopping, reading, knitting, family time – is that these are the battery-chargers of the domestic writer. They drive the inner heat that keeps the vital kettle simmering on the back burners of one’s mind, so that eventually a full head of steam is built up and it begins to whistle urgently, ululating back there like a ban sidhe, ordering me to lay down all the other excuses for creativity and get me back to my keyboard.

Kage used to describe its wailing. I suggested she try thinking of it as a train whistle, calling her out on adventures; she fixed me with her black, black eyes and said, “Ha! Just you wait – it’s a  summons, is what it is, and there’s no invitation about it. When it calls, I go. And so will you.”

She’s been right, usually. It was, after all, her habit to be so. Of course, my own habits do tend to tunnel in like dastardly moles, and change all the careful flower beds so neatly laid out by Kage’s care. That’s why this meandering blog entry is being composed at half-way to midnight, to make my mark and keep a New Year’s vow.

The lovely thing, though, Dear Readers, is that once this duty is done and pinned up – well, the soft rain is still falling outside my window, and the few lights in the house are low and comforting; it’s quiet enough to hear the moth-wing flicker of the candle flame in the jar on my desk.

Now there’s plenty of time to write. So I’ll bid you all goodnight, and be off to do so. That’s no train whistle out in the dark – Kage was right. And I know it.

 

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