Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved the road. She loved new roads, and always announced gleefully when we turned on to one – nothing thrilled her more, I think, than a new world coming into view around a curve of road.

She also loved familiar roads, if they had been good roads in the past. She never, ever warmed to the 10 Freeway, for instance, because in the years we took it out to the Southern Faire in Devore it was a Trail of Tears. Also fires, killer winds, floods, landslides, wild dog packs, flying roof tiles, 18-wheeler suicides and filthy bathrooms in gas stations staffed by zombies and possum mutants. But she loved the I-5, even at it’s scariest.

I drove to Santa Clara today, in Northern California. A long haul along the familiar and weird I-5, then a dogleg through the pass at the 156 -Fossils! Cherries! Casa de Fruita! Garlic! The rising bare bones of the dying San Luis Obispoi Reservoir! – to the perfumed paradise of Gilroy. And hence to the BayCon 2014 venue, where I am presently ensconsed in a nice hotel room.

Pandora Radio playing English folk rock – oh, the Faire is haunting me tonight. On my Buke, no less, while I type. Man, I love techno toys! Gives my memories jet packs to go with their wings.

I shall regale you, Dear Readers, with more details of the drive tomorrow. Also of the Con, which is barely begun tonight – ConOps is valiantly insomniac downstairs, setting up with frantic speed as really strange people come crowding in, scaring the hotel staff. The hotel itself has undergone a refit, which will generously supply me no end of commentary on the morrow – someone on the design staff is on (or needs) serious drugs.

In the meantime, here we are again! Back at the old taco stand, to see friends and fans and Faire people; because BayCon is heavily populated with Faire people, and was Kage’s fave rave convention thereby.

You know what, though, Dear Readers? I can actually sleep tonight, I think. All I have to do is drive hundreds of miles! Wonder why I didn’t think of that before?

And so – goodnight.

Kage Baker treasured the periods in her life when things would be … quiet. She liked the subdued times, when she could plan a daily routine and actually stick to it. Rise mid-morning to hand-ground coffee and a bowl of Wheaties; write for exactly so long, inventory the cupboards, plan a dinner and cook it and eat it and watch something on BBC. Go to bed at a reasonable hour, and sleep the sleep of those undisturbed by interesting times and the attention of the mighty.

Until she got bored, anyway. Sooner or later, either Kage herself or life in general would enter a period of sunspots and solar prominences, and we’d be dancing madly between the flaming bombs again. Luckily, our life produced these alternating states pretty naturally. Kage was seldom provoked into artificially initiating either serenity or excitement, but could enjoy them as they ripened naturally and fell on our heads.

My own life has tended more toward the active phase since her death. It seems domestic tranquility arose from her influence. Maybe the fire in Kage’s brain outshone the sunspot cycle. For me, though, it’s still a case of unexpected incoming.  When I’m not active, I seem to be comatose … On the other hand, I don’t get bored. Just tired.

But my somnolence is now doomed to end! My doctor was delighted to inform me that I do indeed have actual apnea – severe apnea, no less. I wondered why this seemed to please him so; then I realized that it was because he knows how to treat apnea, and when it’s severe like this, the ameliorating results seem all the more miraculous. So I am told to expect great things, when I get fitted for my very own sleep mask next week. I’m beginning to get rather pleased myself …

It appears that the frequency with which I stop breathing in my sleep is so frequent that I am not really sleeping: it’s more like I faint and revive at short intervals all night. My blood oxygen falls to half normal then, too. No wonder I go through the day like a zombie! I’m spending time when I should be refreshingly asleep soddenly unconscious, instead. Hell, I could do that myself with a pint of Darlmore if it was needed … But soon I will sleep well, rise rejuvenated and – so I am assured – lose weight, acquire more energy and develop random superpowers.

I can hardly wait. Especially since normal use of the CPAP will not include Silly Putty in my hair all night. I am also wondering what the cats in my bed will make of this, and how I could capitalize on the outrush of air through my mouth with some carefully placed bubble solution. Maybe I could rig something like one of those Pustefix automaton bubble-blowing bears:

One of these used to sit above the door to a toy shop in the Encanto Mercado in Avalon on Catalina Island. Kage and I would sit in the courtyard (where there was also an excellent restaurant) sipping endless margaritas and watching the little furry arm move up and down and blow bubbles out into the summer air. Kage would make up stories about what the bear saw, and thought, and what it was doing nailed up there over the door blowing bubbles night and day. Some of them were pretty weird …

Anyway, I seem to be entering an active phase now, and so my brain is coming up with peculiar speculations like rigging my CPAP to blow bubbles.

Linn the agent is entering into negotiations with someone who might then want to enter into negotiations to market Kage’s Company story arc to television or movie studios. In support of this effort, she needed a comprehensive precis of that story arc. Since it covers eight formal novels and two semi-attached story collections and covers more than half a million words, it took me several hours yestreday to get it all in order. I did it, though, and at a manageable length, I think: meaning the precis wasn’t quite as long as the originals.

And I just got the hitherto-unpublished J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf. This was apparently never quite finished, and so is being published with the caveat that it is a snapshot of a work in progress: but even so, I’m eager to see how Professor Tolkien dealt with this, the non plus ultra of Northern European hero tales. The jacket has a charmingly whimsical dragon tying itself into a lovely skaldic knot and smiling demurely – it’s unmistakeably Tolkien’s work, and is all the colours of a beryl.

I’ll take this with me to while away the spare time (on the off chance I have any!) this weekend: when I shall be at BayCon in Santa Clara, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. I seem to be on the program most of the Con, but I’ll have Beowolf, and my Kindle, and some knitting, and the company of the stalwart Neassa in the quiet times, as well as that of anyone I know who manages to find me in the chaos.

If anyone does find me, Dear Readers, I’ll be happy to sign any of Kage’s books – or even mine own singleton thus-far effort.

Anyway, I seem to definitely entering a new cycle of activity. Which is remarkable for being any activity at all. I’ve been far too sedentary lately.

Time to move, time to bustle. The sun is brightening to Summer.

Kage Baker closely monitored how her works were received.

A writer should do this, of course, to some extent – not so much that they get paranoid, but enough to be aware of what their readers want to see. It can lead to madness of various sorts, though. The writer can end up enslaved to public opinion, writing  stories at emotional gunpoint, in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome affair that is basically channeling fan fiction. The weird side to this is that they may make obscene amounts of money, yet end up writing shit – but, you know, if you’re into that …

Some writers get so squirrely over the comments of critics and readers that they end up  in the antagonistic stance of an affronted chimpanzee.  They can’t tell me what to do, such a writer growls, and proceeds to punish his audience by killing off favourite characters.  Or she changes the setting of a fantasy cycle to the Auto Supplies section of a WalMart. Worst case scenario, they stop writing and hold their breath until someone turns blue.

The most common response is just to try and ride the various hobby horses of your readers: try to enjoy the good letters, try to avoid the bad ones. Have someone vet your reviews before you read them (and maybe never read them at all, if they’re really bad. That was Kage’s solution.) Answer politely when possible, even if the questions are stupid, but never ever get into an argument: especially online, these days. Don’t give out your real address!

Kage retreated into a self-enforced purdah whenever arguments got out of hand. She left several sites behind rather than keep exchanging fire with some blowhard. And she ultimately took her name off ALL our mailing lists, catalogs, utilities and magazines, after a (self-described) retired CIA spook got obsessed with her and boasted he could find her no matter how she hid her address – and then actually did so. That was scary, and we undertook some rapid covert camouflage and complaints to his State Senator until someone apparently came and took him away … the VA helped, too. Daddy was OSS.

Anyway: if you would make your living by the pen, be prepared for people to tell you how they feel about it. Brace yourself. Come up with a script, if you’re secretive or otherwise on the lam; remember your answers! Get several layers of screens, especially some one you can trust to read your mail and translate the nastygrams into bearable words. Learn how to use a postage meter, and read a franking stamp. Get a PO Box and resign your membership in any embarrassing organization – or join some, if you think you need the publicity, because sure as shoe polish, someone will find out.

One of the many, many reasons I write this blog is to attract attention – to Kage’s memory, oevre and CV, but also, frankly, to myself: because, you know, I am trying to be a writer. I think I’ve managed to do that, at least; the next step is making some money at it. and then making lots of money at it, and then acquiring several acres on Catalina Island and building the Casa Mombasa Retirement Village for Aging Faire Performers and Company Operative … you know, a nice, simple plan. And since I am by nature verbose, and like typing, this as-often-as-I-can-manage-it blog has been a perfect way to keep both Kage and me in our little spotlight.

To my great astonishment, the eyes turned my way have steadily increased over time. You Dear Readers have been encouraging and faithful; and there are a few more of you all the time. From time to time, I write something that generates more than usual amounts of attention – and it’s usually a surprise to me what does it. Blogs on mass fish deaths. Blogs on extinct candies. Blogs on stick insects. Blogs on the incredibly stupid things two foolish young women did  on the road in the middle of the night for 30 years.

Yestreday I wrote a completely self-indulgent eulogy for a woman who inspired Kage and me. And the quarter of a million people a year who came to the shows she invented. I tried to write well. I checked the punctuation and everything and I only mispelled one friend-of-30-years-duration’s name;, and another friend caught it for me, thank the gods and goddesses. I tried not to repeat words or use too many adjectives or too many quotes from people who wrote better than I do. But it was still intensely personal and narrow of focus – it was my version of standing under the uncaring sky and screaming in outrage that another of my loved ones has gone. My only excuse for the selfishness of it all was that it was composed beginning to end of tears.

And yet … what I thought would be of interest to a few dozen Faire friends has been shared by hundreds. In the last 24 hours, this blog has garnered more than 1,000 hits. Many of them were people I don’t know – though I hope to. Many of them have signed up to follow me.

(Some one of you, Dear Readers, should maybe tell them I don’t reach these heights every time. Hell, I frequently don’t reach any heights at all, and am delivering my sermons while clinging to the muddy edge of my trench.)

See, you always amaze me, Dear Readers. I really never know what the result might be when I launch these homely missives over the edge into Eternity and the Intertubes. I guess no one ever does …results may vary, as we are always cautioned.

As I approach 1,000 postings, though, I gotta say: mine have been great. Thank you, Dear Readers. And welcome to the madhouse, nice new people.

Excelsior!

Kage Baker credited a good part of her inspiration and writing career to a lady named Phyllis Patterson.

Phyllis herself demurred, assuring Kage that all she, Phyllis, had done was create an opportunity for Kage to find out what was inside herself. For Phyllis Patterson, the ability to create that opportunity, that setting, that entire world that could nurture people like Kage and a thousand other creative minds, apparently seemed obvious. Simple. Easy.

It wasn’t. But Phyllis was a fountain, a bottomless spring of ideas that she poured out for the world like Magna Mater and the Ocean-Sea combined; she was the source of a flood of creative power that changed the structure of the world for thousands and thousands of people. She called herself, modestly, Chief Instigator – but what she was, at her best, was the voice of the Goddess of creation, alive and walking among Her sons and daughters.

Phyllis Patterson created the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

Not just any Renaissance Faire – she created the first. The original. All the thousands of faires that have sprung up in its image over the last half-century rise directly from the minds of Phyllis Patterson and her late husband, Ron. And whoever you are – whether you go to the RenFaire for too much beer and exotically revealed tits, or are an intellectual who dismisses the rout and panoply with a sniff – I dare you to deny that the idea has NOT changed the artistic, cultural and historical face of America. And if you do deny it, you are flat-out a liar.

If you, Dear Readers, were ever a happy patron buying a ticket at a gate, you owe that happy afternoon of make-believe to Phyllis. And if you were ever a participant – anywhere, really, but most especially at her own Faires here in the dreamland of California – then you spent your time wading breast-high through the shining waves of her imagination.

Phyllis Patterson created the Faire, and the Faire re-energized the crafts movement in America. All those people who worked in ancient arts like glass-blowing, enamel, every variety of smithing, any hand-done works, ad infinitum … the Faire was where they first began to sell their exotic goods again. Leatherworkers, embroiderers, armourers, spinners and weavers and dyers and people who made risque codpieces and wooden toys and natural cosmetics: all of it. It came out of garages and crafts classes full of middle-aged ladies and struck a pose in the middle of the road, crying See me! And Phyllis gave it a place to be.

Historical re-creation owes a huge part of its existence to the Faire, and to the precepts of authenticity Phyllis encouraged. (Sometimes she regretted it, I think – some of us got pretty obsessive about  it …) Without historical re-enactors, with all their psychotically correct gear and clothes, the History Channel at least would lose most of its extras for all those shows on everything from Roman soldiers to the American Civil War – and Phyllis’ mark is on that.

The extremely clever gentleman who runs the re-enactments for the Tower of London, the ever-exquisite Mark Wallis (Hello, Mark!) had his copious natural talents and inclinations honed and encouraged through his years-long association with the Renaissance Faire. Oh, how I remember him shining in the sun, the most resplendent Raleigh ever! I remember him and Kevin Brown  (who was then splendidly Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester) conferring over Phyllis’s head in the shade of the oaks. Now Kevin and Phyllis are both gone on ahead, into the Uttermost West …

Kage and I joined this moveable feast and annual insane asylum when we were 19 and 20. We walked into Faerieland and never, ever came back again; nor wanted to.  It was Goblin Market and we were home. The stories were already sizzling and capering in Kage’s head – but it was at Faire that they took shape and life.

She wrote behind stages, where she managed African dancers, and magicians, and the troupe of loonies who became The Reduced Shakespeare Company; under the oaks and bay trees and jewel-coloured burlap sunshades. By lantern light in inn yards. By flashlight on busses racing along I-5  in the dark, while a shaum player serenaded her with Beatles’ songs. When she was home, that home was decorated (and usually awash) in props and costumes from the Faire. And among the improbable, fantastic and frankly demented denizens of the place, Kage found her Operatives.

Shakespeare, of course, had something to say about that:

The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

It was our habitation; they were our names.

So, Phyllis, my very dear Lady, you were wrong. Just a little … Kage did indeed owe you thanks for the world you created and let the rest of us run wild in. So do I. So do the thousands and thousands of others, who came for a shining day or for the rest of their lives, and found their hearts under the oaks. You stand forever on a hay bale in the light sieved through a roof of bright-dyed burlap, arms spread wide and welcoming, bidding us all to come and make merry – merry, and love, and a richer, deeper life than was ever found anywhere outside one of Shakespeare’s plays.

It’s why Kage dedicated one of her novels to Phyllis –

This book is dedicated to Phyllis Patterson,
Instigator, with respect and affection;
And to the village she founded under the oak trees
And to its people. Et in Arcadio ego.

Et in Arcadio ego. Once I dwelt in Arcadia …

Kage Baker never liked to admit to any physical problem.  I’m still not sure if she thought it was an admission of weakness, or just terribly gauche. She was a firm believer in the old adage: Don’t tell your friends about your indigestion: ‘How are you?’ is a greeting – not a question.

Anyway, she didn’t like to talk about the aches and pains to which flesh is often, and usually banally, heir. She’d squint over her keyboard for hours, chugging caffeine and swearing, before she’d take action against a head ache. Ditto cramps, nausea, a head cold, a hangover … about the only reason Kage would indulge in palliatives was for aching feet. Her feet were a conspicuous weak point. She was a total sucker for a foot rub.

It’s one of the reasons I didn’t figure out she was ill until it was almost too late to do anything about it. Unfortunately, that delay was just enough to eat up all our safety margins; by the time I was raging to get Kage proper care, it really was too late. Turns out she could convince even herself that nothing was really wrong.

Of course, one of the reasons that worked was because, in all our day to day lives, our malaises and megrims usually are next to nothing. Let’s face it – as we all progress into the Uttermost West, we learn to deal with that hitch in one leg, the sore shoulder, the increasing difficulty in finding 4th gear on an upward climb … personally, when I first began to feel constant pain in my left arm, I thought it was arthritis due to knitting too much. Most of us expect the hoof-beats in the distance to be horses, not zebras.

But zebras are real, Dear Readers. It serves us best to remember that from time to time. That familiar ache is not necessarily the light-hearted old foe you may think it is; it might well be some badass young punk gunslinger, all rude tattoos and no manners, ready to knock you down and stomp the shit out of you.

Right now, I am being utterly stalled in all my plans by the newest eccentricity in a life-long dance with sleep dysrhythmia. What was once a simple, carefree and easily managed insomnia has degenerated into chaos. Basically, I stay awake until I pass out from exhaustion, and then I sleep until my body must wake up for maintenance. In between times, I dream that I am up and writing, but then can’t summon the brain wattage to actually focus  when I’m awake. This kind of fatigue isn’t alleviated by unconsciousness.

Sleep is not restful nor restorative; wakefulness is neither active nor alert. I have all the stamina and sparkle of an elderly turnip. Nor is this subject to any sort of logical rhythm: I can sleep for 20 hours, then barely stay awake long enough to eat and drink before I fall asleep again. On the other end, I’ll  stay helplessly awake for 2 or 3 days – an hour’s incautious nap, and I’m stark staring awake for another day and night.

I’ve tried to stay awake, and I fall asleep at my desk, in the bath, standing in front of the sink washing out a bowl. When I’m awake, sleeping pills are pointless – I acclimatize to any given drug faster than a Borg to a phaser setting; my doctor simply won’t give me anything strong enough to make me sleep more than 2 nights in a row.

Hence the recent sleep study. I am earnestly praying it will reveal severe sleep apnea, because that is something my doctor knows how to treat. I will happily wear an oxygen mask to bed – or bat bones, or a necklace of garlic, or any other fetish he prescribes if it will let me sleep. Anything, as long as I can shed this albatross of inconstant, incomplete and unsatisfying somnolence that my damned body has substituted for healing rest.

Of course, I am not assisted in this fight by the fact that Los Angeles is going into another heat wave. But sweating doesn’t keep me awake; I’ll consent to being parboiled in my bedsheets if I can just sleep.

I see my doctor on May 20th – no use going until he gets the wretched report, and that takes at least 10 working days. And nights. Long, hot, aching, exhausting nights, observing the strange transformation of my cool feather pillows into bags of tapioca pudding. Discovering I’ve had my nightgown on backwards all night. Debating my odds of slicing cucumbers for a snack in the dark without cutting a finger off. Listening to the crickets and mockingbirds sing; listening to the little black cat snore while the orange kitten chases the moon across the floor.

God, I’m tired. Those hoof-beats may be horses or zebras, but they sure aren’t sheep. They’re much. much, too loud.

Kage Baker loved heat. The dry heat of California was exactly the environment she liked the most – the air like heated silk, the scents of millions of naturalized tropical flowers mingling with the shipyard-smell of hot asphalt.

When the blacktop and concrete roads get hot, they put out a smell like warm milk – it’s weird, and I don’t know what cocktail of partially burned hydrocarbons causes it: but it’s a quintessential smell of Los Angeles in the summer. Mixed with roses, eucalyptus, jacaranda, bougainvillea, jessamine, lilies and lotus in this sub-desert land, it was the perfume of Kage’s childhood.

And she loved it. And so do I. But when those smells are all loose on a hard, hot wind … Kage would toss her hair and roll her eyes like a nervous mare, and announce: “Fires are coming.”

California is not, by nature, an oasis. The desert hangs perpetually over her shoulder, breathing hot and heavy. When the desert gets excited, we get winds that can run up to 80 MPH; the humidity, always rare, drops to single-digit values and the temperature goes up like a flaming rocket. And then, we burn.

The new normal around here seems to be hot spells. Every week, a day or two gets insanely hot – from 60 degrees to 90 in 24 hours. That’s what is happening right now, and the winds have arrived as well to add to the party. Where I live, beside a living section of the Los Angeles river and under the eaves of the Hollywood Hills, it is presently 90 degrees and 8% humidity. Yeah, that’s hot – but I can survive the dry heat and so could Kage. We knew how to handle that. I won’t be complaining about this heat until (and if, all gods forbid) the humidity rises.

But the swift hot winds and the heat and the dryness have loosed our other perpetual danger on the hills. We are on fire – small ones in the San Fernando Valley, in Riverside, in Hollywood,  in Castaic, in the dry-as-dust old wooden commercial warehouses that line one edge of the railroad tracks in Glendale … small sudden fires, that send the fire engines racing madly in all directions to stomp them before they grow dragon’s wings.

It appears all these little fires may have been a distraction, because a real fire hatched this morning in Rancho Cucamonga. It’s now spreading its fire-gold wings over a thousand acres out there, frantically opposed by hundreds of fire fighters as it heads down the canyons to feast on the new suburbs.

Ah, lovely Rancho Cucamonga!  Long the darling of cartoons and comedians, its faintly silly name is famous. It’s a nice little city, really – it runs along the bottom of the San Gabriel Mountains that stretch out toward San Bernardino, and everything above the flats is still wild and empty land. In recent years, vast stretches of homes have been built there – walled and stuccoed and red-tiled like the settlements of retired Roman soldiers, places where kids drive dirt bikes in the middle of the broad streets, and bears come down to raid trash cans and hot tubs.

Twenty-five years ago, you could drive along Baseline and have to dodge flocks of sheep. You could drive down the empty streets of housing developments that had failed, and find packs of dogs chasing your car. You could drive over rattlesnakes basking in deserted intersections.

We lived there at intervals when the Renaissance Faire was in a park in Devore, and I have lots of tales of its vast desolation. Now … it’s a sea of suburbia. Good schools abound. Green parks have replaced the fields of feral grapevines and coyote bush. People drive new SUVs. The kids are still racing around on dirt bikes, but they’re more expensive ones now, and the kids all wear helmets. It’s really quite civilized.

And it is on fire. Of course it is – its almost 100 out there, even less humidity than here by Griffith Park, and even higher winds. The fire has been burning down Etiwanda Canyon since 8 this morning, and is now being fought back literally on the edges of schools’ playing fields and nice neighborhoods. A thousand people have been evacuated and a thousand more are waiting to see if they’ll have to scarper as well. The fire fighters must have their god’s hand over them, because they have held the fire line for 6 hours now and not lost.

If the winds die, then backfires will work and we can even get some planes and helicopters into the air for water dumps. Right now, they’d burn like moths in a candle flame, blown right into the heart of the fire. Pilots would be blind in the smoke that is rolling down over Baseline like a wall of hot fog. And even though the flames are being held back from the houses, in that land where the buildings are a line of stony lace around the ankles of the mountains, the fire can run sideways for miles.

Will the dragon turn east and descend on La Verne and Glendora? Will it veer west towards Fontana and Rialto? Livestock is already being sheltered at Devore Regional Park (erstwhile home of the Faire, now a park once more) but that green place is also tucked under the flanks of the mountains …

Only time will tell. This is, I suppose, the formal beginning of the fire season – dragons, it seems, hatch in the spring these days.

And it’s Walpurgisnacht, too. Man, Kage would laugh at that!