Writing In The Heat

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker enjoyed, and approved of, modern conveniences. As long as they worked. And behaved themselves.

She loved someone in her immediate vicinity having a phone that would work anywhere; she preferred that it not be her, because she didn’t want to be easily found nor to answer the damned phone.  She liked electricity – she liked even more having battery operated standbys for all her toys that needed electricity to work. So she had a hierarchy of devices: her desktop computer – then her Buke, that would work on batteries – then my Smartphone, ditto – and then pads and pens for when she needed to write, all the batteries were dead, and one of the smaller devices was busily recharging on the hand-cranked charger.

We were saving up for a generator, too.

Lighting was no problem, ever; we lit the house by candles and oil lamps at need and whim, and had plenty of both. We had fire-starters ranging from the culinary blowtorch I used for creme brullee to the flint and steel Kage kept on her desk (and knew how to use). At one point we had a power outage during a move, when most of our stuff was still in boxes – Kage made a rush light out of pencil-sharpener scraps and olive oil in a big clam shell, and we were fine.

We kept sensible emergency kits, of course. But a mere power outage isn’t really cause to break into the Armageddon supplies; not when 30 years or so doing historical re-creating has littered your house with 2,000+ years of retro tech ready to use. I even have a time-keeping candle that can be calibrated down to a quarter of an hour, which is more than detailed enough for me …

Anyway, the system worked for us. It still works; Kimberly keeps her house in the heat just the way we did.

Right now, it’s 91 degrees here. A hot wind full of the scents of hot stone and grilling meat is blowing outside. There are waves 15 feet tall expected down at all the beaches, but there’s also a couple of million overheated people down there lusting after them – I’ve got no desire to join the heat lemmings.  And at least the humidity is behaving itself. Everyone is watching the hills anxiously for signs of smoke, but at least no one is having to grow gills.

Here in our household, all the drapes were drawn at dawn. (Say that 3 times fast, as Kage used to challenge …) All the windows were wide open all night, to let the coolth in; now the house is shut up and radiating heat in all directions except inside. The A/C cools the core of the house, and then a series of fans – staged in overlapping zones, like mirrors lighting the tunnels of a pyramid – stirs the cooler air out to the edges of the building. Getting near the windows on the borders is thus like strolling by a furnace, but no one’s really inclined to stare out at the heat shimmering above the street anyway.

The lights are all off – I believe, virtuously, that this will lessen our load on the electricity grid. Which is nice, since at least 3 devices with self-illuminated screens are lit all the time. The cold blue lunar light of the cathode ray tube no longer spills from the telly or our computers: it’s a fuller spectrum light, now, LED or high-definition pixils or (for all I know) super-excited atoms of noble gasses phosphorescing in 16 million colours. Not the light that lit so many of our childhood insomniac  nights, Kage and I – but one softer and more like the daylight we daren’t let into the house with its freight of unwanted IR and UV.

Man, Kage loved those glowing screens! So much easier to write in the cool dimness when your “paper” sheds a helpful glow over your fingers!

I’m combating the heat as best I can, and writing as much as possible. Blue squirrels are continuing their adventures,heading into a space that is still wrapped in fog for me –  although I believe a Bambi-style forest fire is going to provide an epic denouement to “The Teddy Bear Squad”.  And when it all get just to wearisome hot to cope, I can retire with my Kindle and read off yet another glowing screen.

Kage would have loved it.

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Labour Day

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker, like most American workers, had a cyclical relationship with Labour Day.

When she was a kid, she hated it – it meant we were soon to be back in school. And in Los Angeles, September is often the very hottest month of all. So, as Kage reckoned it, we were more or less going to Hell.

When she was a teenager, she’d developed enough sense of time to realize it was a 3-day holiday. However, it still fell outside the limits of the school year (this was a long time ago, and we went to Catholic school.) and so she crankily considered it a total waste of perfectly good time off.

“It’s like being sick during Christmas vacation,” she would pronounce in tones of outrage. “It’s a Cosmic Injustice. And when we Take Over, that will be fixed!”

We kept enormous lists of what would be done to improve the world when we Took Over. A lot of them involved putting the vanished animals, plants,books, candies, etc. back where they belonged; also, razing all the ugly buildings in Los Angeles. Kage gave a lot of those jobs to the Company Operatives later on. A startling amount of the Company agenda rose out of things Kage saw and disapproved of from a passing station wagon in her school years …

At last, of course, Kage joined the working class in earnest; and for many, many years she welcomed Labor Day as an extended holiday. For a lot of those years, it was a 3-day weekend at Northern Renaissance Faire,  a sojourn in the fabled Wood Outside Athens: those may have been the best years. But the best ones may also have been in her last decade – when she worked from home and we had both retired from Faire, and the Labour Day weekend was full of friends and relatives come for a last summer party at the beach.  Those were amazing times, Dear Readers.

Nowadays, it’s pretty much a mark on a calendar for me. Everyone in the household is retired, working at home, or in the final run-up to entering the job market. But Kimberly inherited the barbecue gene and also passed it on to Michael, so they grill if the weather isn’t too hot to step outdoors. We watch marathons on telly. I sing a few union and Luddite hymns to myself; I can hear Kage singing harmony in my head.

But mostly, I avoid the heat. This really is hottest time of year in L.A., usually, and going near the windows is like loitering near a blast furnace. I’ve been pretty wilted the last few days, and have accomplished nothing at all but napping and reading.

However, the marine layer is due back soon. The temperature is predicted to drop a good 20 degrees, into the 70’s, and the environment will become survivable for me again. I can go to the grocery store! I can drive out to my storage locker and unearth the autumn decorations and the spare toaster! I can summon enough brain wattage to write!

So here’s to General Ludd, and my Grandda who fought the blackleg miners and smuggled beer into a New Mexico jail, and my other Granddad who held the picket line against the studio scabs with a baseball bat and a burning Buick.

And in the meantime, I’ve honoured today with a bit of actual labour.

 

 

 

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Too, Too Hot

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker loved heat. But she was nuts.

Whenever summer reaches the inhuman levels of heat – as it is presently doing in Los Angeles – it comes clear to me that Kage was insane. Even before the days when my metabolism short-circuited if the temperature got over 80 degrees, I wondered about it. I was so miserable in the heat, and she was so happy! Triple digit heat, and Kage’s solution was to put on a silk pajama top and pin her hair up. Even more frustratingly, it always worked for her!

I don’t think she even usually sweated. Not like me. I start deliquesing when it gets hot; which is an interesting phenomenon when observed in exotic salts, but grotesque in a human being. Kage just glowed like metal in a forge. I suspected she might, if it got hot enough, either dissolve into white-hot droplets or simply burst into flames: but it would never be, you know – sticky.

After a mild July and August, Los Angeles has begun its annual end-of-summer heat wave. The temperature is into the 90’s, and expected to stay that way for several days. I have changed into nocturnal mode,  observing the heat and light from the safe side of the windows. I wander from fan to fan, clutching my spray bottle/fan combo, flinching like a vampire playing chicken with the daylight.

In fact, it’s too damned hot to write. My writing hat is sticking to my brow. I shall regale you all, Dear Readers, with my amusing adventures in Nuclear Medicine later on – there were some interesting moments – probably late tonight, when I can sit in the cool (er)  darkness and write for a while without melting on the keyboard.

For now I’m just hitting my mark, in a heat-exhausted effort to maintain the bare vestiges of discipline. Most of you are probably in similar shape … go drink iced tea or cold beer; eat frozen grapes and get into the Magnum ice cream bars. Sit as close to your fans and A/C as you can, and try to stay cool.

I think Kage was maybe part dragon. Or something like a cactus dryad. Me, I’m more like a Jello salad …

 

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Tests

Posted on August 26, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker hated tests, Any and all tests, for anything at all; she simply detested being evaluated. It was mostly for things in which she had no interest anyway; and often considered were no one else’s business.

She knew she could read. She knew she could write. Both abilities were self-demonstrating, if a teacher were paying any attention at all. For the rest … maths, geography, all the varied sciences: Kage figured there was either nothing that could make them explicable to her, or that reference works would be available to her in adulthood. She was pretty well convinced, though, that nothing she learned would ever again be of use to her, at least not in that specific form in which it was presented and tested for in her school days.

She was probably right. Kage was certainly not one of those kids who fit well or easily into the assembly-line format of standard schooling. She was one of the ones who slips through unseen, a shadow in the doorway, on her way to somewhere else. It was obvious to all her frustrated teachers that she was very, very bright – and also that she had no interest in taking part in the aspects of scholarship to which they thought that brightness should have led her. Why doesn’t she live up to her potential? countless teachers wailed.

Kage said later that there was no greater curse for a bright child than potential.

School systems have always struggled with kids like Kage, and more often than not they have failed. Standard classes have almost no way to reach that elusive spark of potential, and in their efforts to expose it they usually put it out. Kage was tougher than most, and more stubborn – she put her head down and slogged her way through 12 years of lessons and tests. Then she ran away with the circus and spent the rest of her life writing.

A lot of writers have childhoods like that. In Kage’s case, she maintained that she just too private a person to put up with being tested. Being published was much easier – because she got to decide what was going on display, and no one had to read the answers unless they wanted to.

Medical tests, of course, were different. They were inescapable. And by going to a doctor in the first place, one sort of requested them. That was one of the main reasons Kage put off going to a doctor in the first place – she didn’t want to ask for tests; she didn’t want to know the answer. Besides, as she said, it was bloody depressing to have passing the test be the problem.

I’m going in for some more tests on my eccentric heart tomorrow – stress testing. Hopefully on a treadmill, because the chemical alternative is an amazing drag – one ends up strapped to a table, head downward, while weird chemicals race through one’s bloodstream and aggravate one’s heart into beating too fast. Or, in my case, usually don’t … the techs get very annoyed then.

Of course, I usually fall off the treadmill. I have the last two times. I tend to pass out before any useful data is gathered; except the dubious information that if I run too fast, I faint. But I intend to try, because I really don’t enjoy that head-down-drugs-in-your veins route.

However the stress test happens, I am hoping it will supply the answer to why my heart is not beating fast enough. The tide of my blood keeps stalling out; then I get dizzy and fall down. My blood pressure is ludicrous, and reads like something someone calls out just before the patient codes.

At least I’ll be a part of the campus that has lots of aquariums. I’ll just think of it as going to visit the fishies.

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Doctor Day

Posted on August 23, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker  was a firm believer in the delights of anticipation.

It came under the same heading as “getting there is half the fun”. The journey is in itself a goal – the process is a purpose. Sometimes the purpose, if the ultimate destination turns out to be a bust.

Which sometimes it does. We once spent a magical weekend wending our way along the Northern California Coast and through the yacht clubs and oyster farms of the Back Bay. We were looking for Bolinas Bay. And we eventually found it – or what was very possibly a Twilight Zone version of it.  The town was … inhospitable. People stared unsmilingly at us; clerks lingered in back rooms rather than come forward and serve us; signs near all the beach access roads indicated that only locals were welcome. The clothing, the architecture, the hair, the public art – all straight out of the 1960’s. The attitude – more like the 1560’s. In Spain. And us with English accents, and PROTESTANT written on our brows.

We left in haste, looking back over our shoulders.

Anyway, getting to a goal can be better than arriving. And even when it’s not, it is still a distinct joy and adventure of its own. Ideally, the run-up is as much fun as the actual performance: that was how Kage liked things to work out.

Today, Doctor Who begins not only a new season but a new Doctor! BBC America has been showing more and more Dr. Who all week; today, they are showing nothing else. The living room has been echoing with favourite episodes all day. As I write this, John Hurt is doing his brief but brilliant turn as the un-numbered Doctor, and Matt Smith is courting Queen Elizabeth the First. Or maybe a Zygon who just thinks it’s Elizabeth Tudor; plots get a little confused when you’re listening, while writing, from another room.

But the point is, Dear Readers, the actual point here is: the process of waiting out the countdown to the new Dr. Who is as much fun as watching it will be.

So I’m returning back to the enterprise at hand. I’m hanging my writing cap on the stag’s head handle of the cane that now lives beside my desk, and settling in to listen to someone else telling the story for a while.

I shall meet a lot of you, I suspect, on the aethereal plane when the new Doctor debuts at 5 PM Pacific Standard Time. BYOB and pass the kettle chips!

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Do I Have An Appointment?

Posted on August 21, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker once observed – during the long, Machiavellian saga of her mortal illness – that sick people need service brains.

Being sick is so exhausting, securing care is so complicated, everything you need is so specialized and yet so far apart, that one brain isn’t enough to deal with it. It wouldn’t be enough even if that one brain were the healthy one. And since it isn’t, you really need an extra one to manage everything that must be done.

I’m fairly lucky. Most of my health needs are met somewhere amid the ever-growing halls of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. But at the moment, it covers close to 4 square blocks; it rises a dozen stories into the air, and dives at least 4 below ground level. In some buildings, you can’t even reach all the floors on one elevator – you have to find the right portal to get from your car to wherever your doctor needs you to be that day.

It’s possible to wander amid the buildings for quite some time and never find the lab you need – I once spent most of an afternoon hunting through 3 different buildings to accomplish all the testing ordered for me. Most of that time I was under ground, and I know I went briefly through at least one RESTRICTED area. The trick there, of course, is to clutch your electronic device to your chest and look scornful; everyone assumes you are either a specialist or a researcher, and doesn’t dare question you …

And of course in Cedars-Sinai, you wander everywhere in the lambent luminescence of the aquaria. Long corridors open out into vaulted spaces all dappled with the reflections and shadows of fish. Waving weeds and bright corals guard all accesses. Somewhere are probably the tanks where they are storing alien bodies and regenerating organs; but I haven’t gotten lost enough to find those yet …

And in all this time, I haven’t found a single cafeteria. I do know where there is a cold drinks machine, and a snack machine – both on a floor of the Cardiac Pavilion (which is in no way tent-like) that cannot be reached from ground level. Should I ever lose my way completely, I at least will not starve to death – the machines, like the parking lots, take credit cards. Combined with change-making machines and the automatic deposit of funds into my bank account, I could contrive a successful life of medical nomadism there.

Just as I was Kage’s extra CPU, Kimberly is mine. As my exploration of all the testing facilities and cardiac floors of Cedars-Sinai goes on, Kimberly has formed the habit of coming with me. Maybe it’s got something to do with my getting lost in the Undercity that time … or her suspicion that, faced with some grisly test, I’ll simply go AWOL. The bottom line is that she gets me there and gets me out, and keeps much better track of my paperwork than I do.

It’s part of the phenomenon that you become incompetent at that, in particular. Health care paperwork is especially eccentric – it tells you either nothing or far too much; and what it does impart, it tells you in ICD-9 codes and jargon. The ICD-9 isn’t so bad – the whole point of the thing is uniformity – but jargon can vary wildly between facilities or even just departments. And the proliferation of computers in every examining room is offset by the fact that no doctor actually knows how the damned system works. Thank God Kimberly was there to make sure I didn’t lose my appointment record, my meds list or my mind.

Still, we managed. I am told that my heart is doing very well, considering the mess that it is; despite which, I get to go back for a stress test on Wednesday. I hope I do better than the last couple of those – I fainted and fell off the treadmill, and then when they shot me full of stimulant to fake heart stress, my heart was unimpressed and refused to speed up.  It’s unnerving to have the tech fix you with an accusing stare and tell you you’re being anomalous.

I hope we don’t get lost trying to find the Nuclear Medicine Lab. I only know where one snack machine is, and I noticed today that they were out of beef jerky.

Though I guess we could always raid the aquariums.

 

 

 

 

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Happy Birthday, Howard Phillips

Posted on August 20, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker had a deep respect for H. P. Lovecraft, whose birthday it is today. She wasn’t very fond of horror in general, but she had an enormous fondness for good writing by anybody. And she was always in support of American genre writers.

Those are the same reasons she admired Stephen King. She didn’t read much of  their work, though, because both King and Lovecraft scared her out of her wits.  That increased her respect for them but decreased the likelihood of her ever reading them – again. She had tried it, once.

When fantasy had its enormous re-blooming in the 1960’s and 70’s – after The Lord of the Rings was a unexpected cultural blockbuster – Lovecraft’s works were resurrected, ha ha, along with many other 19th and early 20th century fantasy writers. Kage read them then because we – Kage, Anne, Kimberly and I – were greedily reading all these “new” writers we could find. It was an overnight cornucopia! Haggard, McDonald, Lindsay, Mirlees, Eddison, Morris, Pratt, de Camp, Howard, and Kage’s lasting favourites: Lord Dunsany and Mervyn Peake.

As the 20th century trundled on, both modern fantasy and horror arose from their combined roots into separate genres. King became the standard-bearer for modern horror, and although Kage read his first few novels, he wrote too well for her peace of mind and ability to sleep. I remember when she was reading The Shining (once she wrenched it from my greedy hands): she couldn’t sleep until she’d put the book in a desk drawer. A locked drawer. In my room.

She kept reading fantasy, but it went down two different roads and Kage preferred the lesser path. She felt that most modern fantasy can be traced to influences by either J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis – and she preferred the latter. Lord Dunsany predated Lewis, but she saw a similar spiritual approach; the American Mervyn Peake was definitely more of Lewis’ kidney than the Elder Edda-flavoured epics of Tolkien. Most everyone else, though, took up residence in the Tolkien camp.

Kage just about stopped reading fantasy altogether. McKillip, de Lint, Lee and lots of books that were technically juveniles (like Rowlings) she still read – heroic epics left her pretty cold. She was just beginning to appreciate writers like Neal Gaiman and China Melville – whom she especially saw as an intellectual heir to Peake – when she died.

A similar dichotomy grew up in horror: blood and steaming entrails vs chilling, unspeakable, wordless dread.  After about 1980, Kage got her reports from the advancing edge of horror second-hand: i.e., she would listen to me tell her the plots. Only if the books were good writing on their own; sheer gore bored both of us,  so I was never moved to share the modern blood-fests with her. She endured my re-telling every single King novel, though – and she read his essays on writing herself, and considered them excellent advice. But those were technical manuals.

Anyway, between busyness and queasiness, Kage wasn’t very fond of horror. However, no one can completely deny the weird and original charm of H. P. Lovecraft … and when we moved to Pismo Beach – a small, peculiar beach town in its own right – Kage began to assign strange stories to its environs. God and the Devil contested for souls along its beach; the Sea herself seduced local sailors from their wives, behind the wheel of a gleaming convertible. A sacred grove collected sacrifices along the borders of Pismo’s butterfly groves. The place was riddled with dimensional portals, giant apes roamed, and aliens were simply everywhere.

And finally, there was “Calamari Curls”. It’s my favourite Pismo Beach story, wherein a certain celebrity cthonic god breaks through the walls of human sanity in a local bar lounge. She wrote it in tribute to H. P. Lovecraft, and finished it on his birthday in 2004. Best of all – it’s based on a true story!!!

So, happy birthday, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, in the shadow of whichever mountains or fungoid gardens you now reside. I advise you, Dear Readers, to peruse one of his tales in honour of the anniversary today. He died too young, not even 50, in 1947.

At least, it is supposed he died. It’s the other date on his gravestone, at any rate.

Ah Lou-ah Lou-ah eh, ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

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Fanboys

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker was always cautiously willing to like her fans. Being almost paralytically shy, getting used to meeting them in real time and space was one of the most arduous author’s challenges she overcame.

But she loathed …   fanboys. (Insert theremin music here, and a faint, background scrabbling noise – like a million tiny filthy claws.)

They aren’t fans. They may not even enjoy the genre, and prefer semi-scholarly works like The Physics of Star Trek; or maybe The Tao of Pooh. They live to embarrass authors. They read to pick holes in the plot, they usually exhibit allergies to character development, and they do not like either humour or sex in their stories.

Being an observant member of the artistic class in Los Angeles, as well as a reader of letters in science fiction magazines, Kage was well aware of the lifeform. She knew all the stories about science fiction being a boy’s club; about the ladies who wrote under male pseudonyms and carefully initialized by-lines. She had encountered cousin species in the worlds of art shows, Holmesian scholarship, and live theatre. And she knew that the typical fanboy was a particular kind of larval male. Even the ones that were technically  female.

However, Kage also knew about the growing and splendid community of science fiction writers equipped with 2 X chromosomes: Ursula K. Le Guin. Madeline L’Engle. Lois McMaster Bujold. C.L. Moore. Sheila Finch. Joanna Russ. And those were only the ladies who wrote fairly hard science fiction, and whom Kage had found (on my shelves, mostly. I read everyone). She only learned about Alice Sheldon and the James Tiptree Jr.  Award when she had published a few stories. However, armed with example and anecdote, Kage was ready to survive fanboys when she had to.

The Internet made that much easier for her, too. She met the first examples on open forums in online  chatrooms like Asimov’s,  Analog, and several of the defunct communities Gabe Chouinard left behind him on his scorched-earth progress through fandom.  They taught her when and how to hold her ground, and when to slip her anchor chain and set sail for Tortuga; the special qualities of aetheric gathering sites let her meet, contest – and sometimes escape – from fanboys at need.

Meeting them at conventions was easier than she expected, too. Being at a convention exposes you to fanboys, yes – but it does so behind a palpable energy field of friends, positive fans, psychotic retinues (me and my minions) and the impassable event horizon posed by the edge of a speakers’ panel table. Once Kage found her feet as a writer and speaker, she could not be intimidated.  And she was always polite, no matter how daft the question or objection from a fanboy might be.

Because those questions and objections from fanboys (as opposed to other correspondents) did tend to be fairly peculiar. Kage was many time challenged to prove how her version of Time Travel worked. Fanboys objected to her establishing a magma pool under Olympus Mons. She was informed that immortality was impossible. She was accused of “making things up”.

That last one left Kage in hysterics. Of course I’m making things up! she would howl in disbelief. Don’t you know why they call this stuff science FICTION?

The disgruntled fanboys would usually mumble that she wasn’t making it real enough, then. And Kage would share with them the advice her own mother had given her – if you don’t like the way the story goes, then write your own.

Her responses online or in person were courteous. Her responses to mail – e or snail – were usually not. That was because she didn’t write them: nor did she read the letters that came in complaining, for example, about her postulating frozen aquifers on Mars (which are actually there, by the way.) No, fanboy letters were my purview. And I am not nearly as nice as Kage was, Dear Readers. No, not even in the blossoming days of our youth.

Now, of course, I don’t see as many fanboy objections. I do get a few, though; they seem to be picking up a bit as this blog spreads and as the new, me-written stories get about. There are new things to which to object. There are most of the old ones, too, and so there will be in everything I write in Kage’s Universe. I’m not going to alter the rules she laid in place. And I’m still not nearly as nice as Kage was.

So: I’ll answer questions. I’ll explain science, pseudo-science, para-science, and the stuff Kage concocted out of Archimedean special effects and The Martian Man Hunter. But don’t tell me I’m wrong unless you can prove it – because I will be stern with you if you can’t. It’s still science FICTION we’re dealing with here. Don’t tell me how to do it, because odds are you are not a science fiction writer yourself.

And even if you are, you aren’t me. And you sure as hell weren’t Kage Baker.

 

 

 

 

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What Lenses Reveal Gold?

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker was not much given to moodiness.

She had moods, of course – anything with a biological rhythm and chemical responses to its environment can claim that. If you are one of those sensitives souls who are also susceptible to sea-changes at every tide of the world – if you are brought to tears by Hallmark commercials, and frenzies by a hot tune on the radio – you know how easily one’s emotional chromatosphere can alter its colours in response to every change in the environment. Some people are just easily overcome by vibes.

Kage was not one of those people. She could be preternaturally responsive to vibrations, groups feelings, whatever you want to call them – she could also be as deaf to the voice of the zeitgeist as your average rock. Quite deliberately, too; she was happy, more often than not, to live unaware of what people were saying about – well, anything. Kage enjoyed blissful ignorance in many circumstances. High on the list of what she never wanted to know anything about was whatever was a current event, including what the rest of the world felt about it.

So, moods – yes. Moodiness – no. She preferred her emotional states to be expansive and in primary colours, with lots of gold embossing. And very probably glow-in-the-dark. She always claimed she didn’t want subtlety in what she felt; and she was suspicious of it in other people’s feelings.  Honesty, she believed, called for strong colours and clear outlines. Pastels were sneaky things.  Uncertainty was a probable sign of moral weakness.

I used to occasionally observe that, considering the complicated, conflicted and downright moody characters she wrote about so well, hers was an attitude walking dangerously close to hypocrisy. She didn’t agree. I write stories, she would explain to me airily. I write fiction! People shouldn’t behave the ways I write about – it’s dangerous and neurotic. But that’s not my fault; you have to exaggerate to make a story interesting.

I’m not the one moping around over lost loves, she’d say virtuously.  I’m not even going on binges! But who’s gonna buy a book about a middle-aged lady making the best of things in a small town?  You gotta be Jane Austen to make that trick work. Readers want glamour. Romance! Excitement! Really wild things! But the writer can’t be like that, not and keep her focus.

And she’d go back to writing. Until it occurred to her that she needed to see a particular hillside road above Cambria, where bramble bushes were hung with enough ripe berries to make one really ill – and we’d head off into the slightly-known, looking for the barely remembered turn off. When we got there, we’d fill empty Slurpy cups with dusty sweet faceted blackberries, until a bobcat or a wild pig or a herd of deer sent us scrambling desperately for the car, laughing and cursing. And we’d flee somewhere that had restaurants, and stop for dinner, and spend the first 15 minutes taking turns in the ladies room trying to scrub berry stains off our hands and beat golden dust off of our boots  …

Kage had no idea these things don’t happen to most people. She had no idea that what made the world around her scarlet and gold, embossed and bejewelled, was her. She had no idea that nothing dared stay pale and thin and moody in the flame of her regard.

It’s why I am so busy these days, making masks  heavy with  goldwork and gem-pure colours; trying to fashion something like her eyes through which to see the world. Because I didn’t figure it out either, until she was gone.

And I want to see the world like that again.

 

 

 

 

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The Doctor Is In

Posted on August 15, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker invented Dr. Zeus Inc., as the lynchpin of her time travel stories.

Dr. Zeus became semi-affectionately known to its Operatives as “The Company”. The Company invented Time Travel, and immortality. The immortality process was an addendum to the Time Travel project, developed when the Company realized that it would take extraordinary people to actually survive travelling through time. Somewhere during the process of justifying these corporate decisions, Dr. Zeus …  morphed in Kage’s vision.

Originally, Dr. Zeus was an heroic organization; its cabal of businessmen and scientists were wise, wizardly  – you know, white beards and clear eyes, paternally omniscient. By the time she was really into the first story, though, Kage had actually begun to work for a few corporations. That changed her viewpoint pretty quickly.

The idea behind Dr. Zeus remained one of high ideals and human compassion, but the agents of those sterling qualities became the individual Operatives. As they themselves morphed from clockwork (she did so love gears … ) into cyborgs, the Operatives also were endowed with all the human virtues Kage realized could never be embodied by a corporate entity. Her vision of the Operatives worked on her conviction that long life would enhance – not diminish – human-ness.

And conversely, she saw that no amount of legislation, clever names or even artistically designed mascots would turn a corporation into a Real Boy. She had Dr. Zeus finally embodied by a desperate madman,  as a bronze automaton with no soul  and the self-protective instincts of a shark. Kind of prescient of Kage, eh?

In the meantime, though, it amused her enormously to be occasionally identified with the fictitious Doctor herself. When she registered new software, she put “Dr. Zeus” on the line asking for company. Ditto for mailing labels and packing slips. It’s a silly but enjoyable game that I have continued since the mantle of being the Company’s amenuensis fell on me. I get advertising addressed to “Dr. Zeus, Inc.”, often with cunning samples of tiny flashlights and emery boards and pens and plastic magnifying bookmarks marked Dr. Zeus attached. Levenger’s, that delicious candy-store of professional leather goods, sent me a passport holder embossed DZ in one corner.

Of course, there is the occasional drawback. Dr. Zeus may decide to shut me up and collect me one of these days; not that I would mind too much being incarcerated on some version of Catalina Island. However, I did not enjoy the months-long struggle with the City of Los Angeles, proving that I was NOT running an illegal business out of my home … I’d be pretty damned sloppy as a Facilitator to get caught by so purblind an organization as the City of the Angeles. That made it doubly offenseive.

I think I have finally convinced the implacable clerks that Dr. Z. is not operating within the legal limits of the City of the Queen of the Angeles (It is, of course, but not from my sister’s house …) However, unable to resist the ongoing joke, I may have just shot myself in the foot once again. Word Press, my redoubtable hosting platform here, has offered me a personalized domain all my own – and I’ve yielded to the temptation.

Kage always wanted a site called Doctor Zeus. Well, Dear Readers, if you examine the URL of this blog, you will see that goal has finally been accomplished. If you type doctorzeus.co into your address bars, this blog is what you will find – as well as access to all the past blogs, of which there are very nearly a thousand these days … so it certainly took me long enough to get this done, but at last I have.

I hope Kage’s shade is pleased, if she looks up and notices between snogging with God and sipping rum cocktails. I’m gonna giggle every time I see it.

Let’s hope, as well, that the City of Los Angeles doesn’t.

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