Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker was particularly susceptible to spring fever.

When the vernal equinox approached and began to manifest – that was when she was most likely to drop everything and take off. She’d have the urge to find some newly green place, beginning to inhale the softer airs and breathe out perfume; she’d settle down and just absorb the atmosphere.

I think she photosynthesized. God He knows, her hair was photo-reactive. At the end of winter it would be a fairly flat dark red, maybe even dulled down to a russet brown. But give it 24 hours in the equinoctial sunlight, and all sorts of colours began to come up in it. Every conceivable shade of red, even the metallics usually found in model car paint: maroon, burgundy, crimson, scarlet, garnet. Pink. Strands of gold like fine-drawn wire; strands as burning white as salt. All hot colours, all flame colours. Not especially human colours at all … but redheads have always been suspected of that.

The same sun would bring up rose and scarlet in her cheeks, and make all her thousands of freckles glow like drops of bronze. No hint of a tan, of course. Kage never tanned.

And the new spring warmth and sun didn’t exactly inspire her to mad energy, either. Spring cleaning was not a visitor in our home, unless it was finally unpacking the suitcases from Dickens Fair … no, Kage was given to long dreamy fits of boneless langour. She’d  take in all that new season energy in the air and light, and refine it in a decorous silence to some herb as rare and rich as saffron; a pinch of powdered gold and silk gathered from 10,000 nodding blossoms. Like saffron, too, it lasted a long time, and a very little bit flavoured thousands and thousands of dishes.

The air is warm today. Within a handful of days, it’s expected to be in the insane and unseasonable 90’s; I’ll be confined to the house during daylight hours, only venturing out with the other crepuscular life forms after the new sun is down. But there are new leaves and buds on everything right now; the wisteria is blooming, the plums are swelling on all three trees in the back yard, the bottle brush has scarlet blooms as big as squirrels and all the roses are unfurling tiny blood-red leaves.

It won’t be technically Spring for a week. But I can already feel that luxuriant tide of stillness and expectation, that irresistible urge to sit in some cool green place and just … breathe.

Which is what I am going to go and do, Dear Readers. Time for a fresh pear and a cup of water with orange blossoms in it, watching the sky turn silver and lilac in the West; time for some Vaughn Williams and a sprig of fresh mint to chew.

Time to break out the runcible spoon. See you all later, by the light of the moon.

Kage Baker was entertained by the proliferation of e-culture.

Not so much the etiquette of how to use electronics – though that has been proliferating as well. There are acceptable, mainstream and also rogue and outlaw ways to use one’s personal electronics these days, and they all say something socially relevant about one as a user. A Bluetooth in your ear means several things, depending on the prejudices of the viewer; so do headphones, and now GoogleGlasses. And there are correct or absurd ways to use them, which reveal precisely where you stand on the  “bourgeois to hipster” scale.

What intrigued Kage was mostly what was and was not cool to possess. Because possession is a state incredibly finely-tuned to what is cool. Kage, a born collector, knew that in her bones.

All the cool toys and accessories I have are due to Kage: except my beloved Kindle. I bought that one because of my own life-long habit of diving into books when I was traumatized; so in a way, Kage is responsible for that as well … but everything else was her, without argument. Because I have no real taste at all. Kage’s taste evaluation was exquisite, even though she usually declined to participate: considering abstinence from fashion to be the true fashion.

I don’t really know what any of the new social cues and displays are. I’ve never cared; and I have been notoriously bad my entire life about how to use same. For example, I wear round steel glass frames because I still love John Lennon – but these days, I get approving remarks based on their being retro hippie, 40’s chic, and even industrial art. I think Blueteeth (Bluetooths? Who the hell knows?) are elegant because they look like Star Trek communications sets: but evidently they are no longer acceptable fashion, being instead a sign of middle class coolth lag.

There must be classy ways to wear one’s smart phone, but I don’t know what they are: mine just sits in a purse pocket until I need it. I suspect that the fashionable choice is to never set the thing down at all, since most users I see clutch them constantly, like pilgrims’ talismans. Tablets and various shape-shifting half-sized laptops are carried in sleeves, mostly with no straps or handles so you grapple them to you like a diplomatic pouch at all times – my Buke lives in a small wooden case.  Covered in travel stickers. With a handle.

My one concession to sheer beauty is my Kindle cover. It’s leather, hand-tooled by Oberon Design (http://oberondesign.com/). That is because I have adored their work through all my decades of working Renaissance Faires, and when I needed a cover for my e-book, I turned once more to an old love. I’d like to claim my innate taste – but I don’t actually have any.

All the taste in our household was due to Kage. She had an innate elegance, a recognition of what was cool. Not necessarily popular – she scorned popular subjects, usually; sometimes it delayed her enjoyment of things she later turned out to like, because she had rejected anything that had more than a couple hundred fans. She prided herself on liking things before they were cool, and equally as much on refusing things that were widely noticed … she said that if trendy things were really good, they’d last until she felt comfortable enough to give them a try.

She wore Converse Hi-Tops into her 30’s, until they suddenly became haute couture again. Then she rejected them for plain white Chuck Taylor boating shoes, with as little trim as physically possible. I found more than a dozen pair of them in her closet after she died. She loved tapes and CDs as they came around, but never, ever stopped buying vinyl as “backup”; if an album she wanted was pressed, she found and treasured it. Now, of course, vinyl is the hippest option once again; and Kage’s cherished turntable is now a bottom of the line model. Still works just fine, though.

She had Beatles albums that would reduce a hipster collector to tears. Including the infamous “Butcher Cover”.

In the meantime, I slog along in my special reverse arrogance, deliberately not finding out what is cool and what is not. I have long held firmly to the concept that I am, myself, so au courant that whatever I do is appropriate. If I’m wrong, I rarely find out. And it gives me tremendous self-confidence and increases my chances of success. I think it comes under the “dazzle ’em with bullshit” heading …

My current alien artifact is hashtags. What the hell are they for, and how do you use ’em? I have no idea. I don’t really care. I’m getting along without them so far, and will probably continue to do so as my loyal minions multiply; though they’ve a long way to go to match my peerless Dear Readers.

Still, there are 11 of you now.  And I, at least, think that’s cool enough.

Kage Baker was a great admirer of labor-saving devices. They were a fervent goal of domestic society when we were growing up, the pinnacle of every housewife’s dreams: machines to free her from the tedious labour of housework.

While we didn’t grow up in anything remotely resembling a “normal” household, no woman in mid-20th century was going to turn up her nose at modern conveniences. Especially not one with children – Momma had a profound and emotional relationship with devices like her washing machine, her refrigerator, and her electric vacuum cleaner. (Hey, I remember carpet sweepers and brooms – I still marvel at the ease with which my Dyson sucks up dirt.) Even though the first washer I recall had an open tub and a wringer on top through which you had to hand-feed the wet clothes instead of a spin cycle – the thing had wheels and ran on electricity, and my mother adored it.

So, Kage was all in favour of better living through machinery; she was just picky about what constituted a necessity. She actually did not own a television set for the first several years after she left home: but she spent freely on audio equipment, because music mattered. It was computers and hand-held electronics that totally won Kage over, though – big machines, like microwaves and Cuisinarts, were just not as interesting as mobile phones and laptop computers and DVD players.

Kage had more computing power sitting on her oak roll-top desk than the astronauts had in the Shuttle; that enthralled her. She loved her Buke, a computer the size of a paperback – had she lived to see my Kindle and my smart phone, she’d have been fascinated. She saw the first models in friends’ hands and was just waiting for all the bugs to be worked out – but her time ran out before she had a chance to try the newest techno toys.

She just learned about Twitter a couple of years before she died. It was explained to us while careering through Las Vegas on a night-time tour of the Strip, by a very electronic-savvy friend (Hi, Becky!) who was intrigued by the brevity and ease of “Tweets”. Kage was not impressed, though she was amused; what could you really say, she protested, in 144 characters? Texting was already permanently changing the way English was written and read – Kage, old-fashioned wordsmith that she was, didn’t see how giving those puerile abbreviations more scope would enrich the human condition.

And, of course, as it has turned out, Twitter may be playing its largest role in the dissemination of rumour and gossip. But it’s also being used to run revolutions and make knowledge of all sorts free to people of all sorts. Those are mighty and noble changes, and things no one really saw coming; not even when the world watched Tianamen Square unfold though FAX machines. And FAX machines themselves are all but obsolete now, over run and outdistanced by email and Skype and Facetime and Twitter.

That would really be zooing Kage.  It’s the noosphere happening, she remarked in  amazement, when she first ventured into a chat room that merely spanned the North American continent. And it was, and it is even more so now. And if we are, indeed, using it to send one another knock-knock jokes and homemade gynecological exams, we are also using it to  educate and liberate one another. There’s no human activity without its sordid side, and Kage knew that very well. She wouldn’t be surprised that the advance of knowledge is speeding round the globe on the wings of Nigerian scams and Justin Bieber’s jailhouse photos.

But she might be surprised that I myself have now branched out onto Twitter. Of all the new social media that were cropping up near the end of her life, that one struck her as the silliest. Possibly the idiotic name. But it can’t be denied that it is an astonishing tool for getting attention; it’s the biggest blank wall ever, and the paint cans to write on it are free. If, like me, you have discovered the satisfaction of shouting into the void – you can’t get interrupted and there are other people shouting back! – Twitter is another cliff from which to bellow.

And I have 8 followers! That is 1 billionth of the global population! The most recent came in in the middle of the night, because it turned out to be someone from England (!!!), marvellously yclept Yaffingale, kindly letting me know the link to this blog worked. I was thrilled. And it taught me not to leave my phone on vibrate while it was in the china Jubilee mug on my desk, because it rang and vibrated like hell and woke the parrot up. But it was a Tweet from England!

So there you are. And there I am, too. I have a modest plan: I’ll use Twitter to advise when each of these blog posts is up, and I will send ONE (**1**) daily Tweet to mark my place. The Wit of Kage Baker, or Static From The Void, or To The Voices In My Head – some painfully clever crap like that. Just a way to bark at the sun rising, I guess.

How do you get around a limit of 144 characters? Use ’em to send people to where your larger efforts lurk, that’s how.

Kage would understand that trick.

Kage Baker loved to travel. Not just to get somewhere, but for the sheer joy of movement. She loved the road, she loved the landscape going by at eye level and in arm’s reach, right outside the window. She was a born passenger.

All she needed to keep her happy in her seat were a good view, good music, and occasional snacks. Everything else to entertain her was generated by the interaction of those few items and her own mind. Maps, if available, constituted a condiment to the feast, but were not necessary. When we got lost, Kage could always get us back on a road to our own dimension by sighting in on prophetic flocks of birds and landmarks.

Most of her travelling was done by car. We couldn’t afford anything else, usually. She would have dearly loved to wander up and down the coast by boat, but we couldn’t afford so much as a dingy and neither of us ever learned how to sail: though I’m sure she would have been good at it. (I’m sure I would have fallen overboard with alarming regularity, too.)

She hated flying. When we absolutely had to, of course, she did it – as long as she had a couple shots of rum and a window seat, all was well. The view out the window wasn’t frightening for her; the actual height at which a plane flies was utterly unreal to Kage. But being able to see the clouds and the land below actually made her feel better about spending several hours in what was, basically, a sub-standard bus …

What she longed to do – and what we only got around to once or twice, briefly – was to travel by train. She’d gone to San Francisco twice as a very small girl – once with both parents, once just with Dad. Both trips lived in her memory as expeditions of glory and delight. Sleeper cars were, to Kage, the veritable pinnacle of luxury; dining cars were incarnations of the Brown Derby and the Cocoanut Grove. And dome cars were on  a par with flying carpets. She used that fascination in the story “Her Father’s Eyes”.

That story was itself conceived on a train. We were taking the train home to Pismo from Los Angeles, because just before Christmas I had been in a car accident and broke several ribs and the car. Consequently, we were journeying back and forth on the Pacific Surfliner; first class, replete with windows and cocktails.  As we passed the various small towns on the Central Coast, Kage speculated on their histories (which she knew, of course) and made up mysteries to enliven their tiny lives … and when we passed lovely, weird little Summerland, Kage mused aloud: “What would the train station be like in a town called Summerland?”

“I don’t know. Make one up,”  said I churlishly. (The sway of a train, while wonderful, loses some pleasure when you have 3 broken ribs.)

And so Kage did. Oak trees, she decided, would overhang it; it would be bare undecorated wood, with iron railings painted black and brass. No taxis, ever; no estate wagons – just long, low, shining limousines and touring cars, with elegant white-faced people driving them. And there a strange little girl would meet a strange little boy, both of them being towed along by negligent parents.

This is where Kage came up with the idea that the modern Fae drive expensive cars and are The Beautiful People – though they still steal children, and pay the occasional tithe to Hell. As far as I know, Summerland did not then and does not now boast a train station. Though it’s in a oak grove if it’s there at all, I bet.

Anyway. Kage loved trains, and never got to ride in them enough to please herself.

The point of all this – or one of them, anyway – is that I have recently been made aware of Amtrak’s intention of starting a Residency Program. (Thank you, Mark Shanks!) It is intended to foster creative people, especially writers, by giving them free train rides to places. Amtrak promises a round trip, 2 to 5 days on the rails, with a berth in a sleeping car plus a desk and a window … they’re hoping for some wonderful copy in return, of course, and in order to ensure that they are requesting applications from writers with a media presence.

I’ve applied. I gave Amtrak my email, my blog URL, my Facebook page; and I actually broke down and joined Twitter. Which I am slowly figuring out how to use – my natural verbosity is against me, here, but I’m trying. I even have two followers already, neither of whom are at all familiar to me; I suspect they are the sort of media remoras who just attach to anything. I myself am following Scientific American, NASA and Stephen Colbert – baby steps there, but I had to start somewhere.

And beginning today – if I did this right – this blog will also post to Twitter. Or notice of it will, or something. I mean, 140 characters? Can you imagine my long-winded perorations as a Tweet?

Anyway, my handle is MaterKathleen. I would appreciate it, Dear Readers, if any of you who notice these things could let me know if notice of my blog actually posts.

And if I get a residency, I shall write and post madly from wherever they send me. And I will try to watch everything I pass through Kage’s eyes.

Kage Baker, for all that she lived largely in her fantastically furnished mind, liked tangible links to things.

To reality, if she had already established that a particular reality was acceptable and should be maintained. But if not reality, then some phantasmal bit of architecture that she could designate as reality. Then she would scour the worlds to possess physical reminders of its existence. Anchors, links, talismans – just, you know, fabulous things that evoked a particular world for her. Sometimes these were classical objects like jewels, books, maps, pictures; sometimes they were a time, or a light on the sea, or a specific angle of NNW on a road in April where silver lupin bloomed no less than 20 feet away …

Dwarves and elves had nothing on Kage for specificity of time and place.

All of this was in service of the stories, and their casts. Kage needed to invoke a world totally in order to write about it – she defined what that totality could be, and how little of it we could get away with in order for her to bring more of it to life. Wherever a red wine and a good pizza are gathered, she sometimes intoned, there are also gathered the Children of the Sun. True, usually – but sometimes that pizza had to be cooked on Catalina Island or in Pacific Grove; or summoned – somehow! – to be eaten hot in the fields of wild oats 100 feet above the surf at Plasket Creek. And it was.

Kage had cups she drank out of while she wrote about specific people; food she prepared to eat while writing of special places. Sometimes the place she wanted to use didn’t exist where she wanted it, or even at all anymore: no problem, she’d shift a restaurant or an inn or a Vista Point anywhere, as long as she had the drink or snack or incense or plastic action figure that typified it in her mind. And anyway, all Vista Points are connected to one another through R-Space; park in one, you get free parking forever in all the others, no matter where they are.

While Kage wrote about time travel, and had to eventually invent some machinery and mathematics to explain it  – her own heart did not believe it really worked that way. Not until she came up with the way to free Mendoza from Time, which turned out to be suspiciously spiritual and practically require sex with Alec or Nicholas or Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax … that was how she thought Time was actually turned on God’s Big Bow-lathe, and how she thought it should be travelled, too. And then all those magic items she had designated – all her Time festishes, as she admitted once – came into their own as useful tools.

I thought of this at once when I found the photo below. Know what it is? Not a clerestory window in a dormitory for for fairies; nor yet a chapel door in the cliffs below Tintagel (both of which leaped immediately to mind. Really, they did.) It’s not even the stone arch in which Edward lurks on Kage’s Page for Graveyard Game, limned in Crome’s Radiation.

It’s a zircon.

Yes, a zircon, that gem of burlesque dancers and cheap engagement rings. But also, in its natural state, a tiny marker of time wherever it forms and can be examined; these little bits of glass can be dated pretty precisely, and have been used to identify all manner of fascinating antiques.

This one is 4 billion years old. The freakin’ Earth is only 4.6 billion years old. This sparkly formed in the ground as soon as it was physically possible for ground to form at all; it is a scale from the first World Serpent, a piece of the oldest bit of dirt that anyone has ever found. When the planetary crust was brand, sparkling new, this little gem formed amid the mud geysers and soft-serve lava and the rocks still deciding if they were going to settle down and be igneous some day.

It looks like a door. I choose to consider that significant, as well as just downright beautiful. So here it is for you all, Dear Readers: a shining door more than fit to be one of Kage’s talismans and eternal portals, leading directly to the new, green bones of the borning Earth. All one need do is step into that long blue hall. Or if the step through the crystal door onto a new-minted Earth is too scary, or high a doorstep, or just nowhere you’ve ever longed to see: why, indulge the universal urge through some less perilous doors. They might be less perilous – I don’t have the actual specs, but I do have endless faith in Kage’s idea that the doors to new worlds are everywhere … so try some of these, Dear Readers, just for fun.

http://www.safestyle-windows.co.uk/secret-door/

And be sure to make note of what you eat or drink or kiss or pay. You might need it to find your way back again.

Kage Baker had a real fondness for The Weird.

It always merited the caps. It came in cycles, or pulses, or at least in lengths that might have been considered seasons if they had not been so arbitrary and impossible to predict. But from time to time, it would become obvious that a time of The Weird was upon us, and peculiar things would be happening all around us for a while.

It is specifically not the constant low-level flow of Company antics that make the news all the time. Lost cities, animals, art, and literature being recovered are business as usual, if you are in the know (and you, Dear Readers, tend to be); The Weird is something else altogether, not a single event but a span of arrant peculiarity.

We’re in one now. Maybe it’s the approach of the vernal equinox, which looks as though it might be observed in the breach in all of North American except California. In California, aside from one 4-day storm, we have apparently been in summertime since, oh, around last Halloween. However, just over the Rockies, the next Ice Age is beginning in the Midwest; Niagara Falls has frozen solid (again) and the Great Lakes are obviously giving birth to the sort of glaciers that gouged them out in the first place.

Ragnarok reportedly began on February 22nd, according to at least one Viking festival and an ancient horn in York, England; not to mention the local weather in Europe. It takes a while to get going though, requiring at least 3 winters to reach its peak, so they’re still on schedule so far.

In other arenas of The Weird, it is asteroid flyby time: which is the best asteroid time to have, of course. A biggie flew by last month, but we don’t know where it got to – it’s been missing since shortly before it was expected to whizz by, and we seem to have lost it … in the meantime, though, another one is zipping by today (more or less as I write this) well inside the orbit of the inconstant moon but not low enough to get sucked in and put an end to our civilization. Which it could probably put a fair dent in, as it’s the size of 3 double-decker busses.

Apparently inspired by all the traffic, the Sicilian Space Program has launched a model cannolo into the edge of Space. The SSP is three guys with a camera, a helium balloon, a cannolo made of plaster of Paris (organic cannoli being of doubtful survivability at heights) and a space capsule made of a plastic cooler. You may admire their epic feat here:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/03/06/the-sicilian-space-program-has-launched-a-cannoli-into-space/

The US, in the meantime, is still considering sanctions against Russia for their invasion of Ukraine. Which is definitely the moral high ground, except that Russia is the only country still getting people to and from the International Space Station – where I believe we still have a guy. How are our relations with Sicily, I wonder? Probably weird as hell.

It has been discovered that young alligators and crocodiles can climb trees. And do. The weirdest thing about this finding is that no one noticed before. I’d have thought crocodiles in the trees would have caught someone’s attention before now.

A species of shark thought extinct for decades (the smoothtooth blacktip shark) and previously known only from a specimen in the Vienna Museum, has been found! In accordance with my personal theory of what happened to the Paleolithic megafauna, the sole specimen was located dead, on a slab, in a fish market. In Kuwait. The original specimen in Vienna was found in Yemen. This seems to indicate that somehow, when not being eaten by humans, the smoothtooth blacktip shark  lives in the desert. Weird.

Some archeologist has declared that Stonehenge is a giant Neolithic musical instrument: a sort of xylophone, evidently. He has demonstrated this by eliciting bell-like tones from scraps of bluestone at the Preseli quarry. So far, no one has allowed him to take a hammer to the actual stones of Stonehenge, which is nice considering it is a World Heritage Site and has already been considerably messed about with over the last 1,000 years. On the other hand, archeologists and religious fanatics have sometimes been actively encouraged by the UK government to mess about with them, so I am sure he’ll be out there whacking the dolmens before long.

Then the various UK Druidic sects can rally in a rare moment of unity and fight him off. In the meantime, Fenris will be seen stretching out across the sky over the hills  of distant Wales, And Storm Giants will be wading in from the North Sea …

Watch out for the alligators in the trees, folks. It’s the season of The Weird.

Kage Baker loved the little town of Pacific Grove.

It’s an exquisite small community of highly individualized shops, world-class restaurants, Victorian homes in all sizes from estate to seaside cottage, and paradisial natural beauty. It’s one of the few places in the world where Monarch butterflies winter over; when they grace its trees, the air is full of floating embers. Otters loll about just off-shore, being criminally cute. Whales sport in the deeper water further out. Cypress trees are everywhere, frozen in dancers’ poses. The waves are huge and majestic, and even the foam carries a tint of cobalt blue.

Being right beside Monterey – itself a treasure trove of food and art – doesn’t hurt, either.

What drew Kage there originally, though, was that Robert Lewis Stevenson spent a lot of time in Monterey (and Pacific Grove) when he came to America in looney pursuit of his American divorcee. He won the lady, and eventually wrote Treasure Island based on the wild rocky sea coast. So for Kage, that indicated that the area was a cool place to pursue personal art and dreams.

When she had tracked Stevenson’s progress through every section of both cities he had ever visited, and visited every adobe in the area (Monterey is reputed to have the most adobes still in use of any city in the U.S.), and taken all the tours including the Ghost Tour (where we were pursued through the Old City Cemetery at night by geese) – Kage decided the charm and beauty of Pacific Grove was perfect for Writer Escape Weekends.

These were predicated on being someplace here we could not be found easily, in peaceful and amiable surroundings, and doing nothing but eat, sleep and write. No tourist activities. We started out in motels with kitchens, so we could do our own cooking and only go out once a day for dinner; we eventually graduated to the all-embracing comfort of the Green Gable Inn. Our room was a temple of quiet and beauty and the view was nonpariel. Being a B&B, the Green Gables provided us with breakfast, afternoon wine and cheese, and cookies and sherry at night. It became an annual retreat.

When Kage died, Pacific Grove and the Green Gables went on my emotional “Never Again” list. I didn’t see how I could bear it, or justify it, or ever need what those weekends had given. But I did have to write …  So, last year, I screwed my courage to the sticking point and went back. Sniveling coward that I can be, I persuaded my friend Neassa to come with me for emotional support – and, mirabile dictu, it worked! I wrote stuff, stuff worth keeping! It was pleasant and calming and downright restorative!

This year, I reserved my favourite room in my favourite B&B once again. I took us to dinner at The Forge In The Forest, a restaurant that some portion of Kage must surely haunt from time to time, enjoying cocktails by the lit forge in the bar. Writing happened, and I found the seeds of a new Ermenwyr story, and we got into such a fit of giggles in the room Saturday night that the next-door neighbors came knocking on our door at 1:30 AM to suggest we might want to shut the hell up … I think they expected a pair of college-age idiots doing all that giggling. But it was only two middle-aged ladies, telling Faire stories till way too late at night.

It can be rather healing to get busted for loud giggling late at night, when you’re as old as I am. Thanks, grumpy neighbor. I needed that.

I don’t think we’re going to repeat the Ghost Tour, though. Kage must have been rolling her eyes quite enough as it was.

Oh! To top the grand weekend off, I got home and found that my stuffed Anomalocaris had arrived by mail. A picture is enclosed, just because it’s cute. Explanation to follow!

Kage Baker used to say that a real writer could write through anything. She really believed it, too, apparently never remembering the times she accused me of turning the pages of my books too loudly. Or why I took up knitting with wooden needles (aluminum needles click to0 much). Or how she would turn and glare at Harry, when he fluffed out all his feathers with a noise like yards of tearing silk – Harry would glare right back, and then usually meow for half an hour. So that didn’t go too well.

She could be forgiven for forgetting these things, because she really did write through nearly anything. She preferred silence or carefully chosen soundtracks; but if she had to, she could write through family parties, domestic disputes downstairs, intermittent gunfire and construction noises. When Pismo Beach was building a new boardwalk, our days were punctuated with the sound of a crane ramming entire telephone poles into the sand for use as pilings – an enormous WHUMP! every 5 or 10 minutes, 8 hours a day, for a year. The house shivered, vases fell of shelves and tiles off the roof – but Kage typed on, resolutely ignoring it.

She had an inhuman focus. Once she engaged it, it took a powerful and deliberate act of will to disturb her. Which was why she was so often in a semi-daze, unaware of the time, the company, whether or not she had eaten that day … and she did it deliberately. When she was a teenager, it was how she survived the world (which eats a lot of teenagers …); Kage could go right into another universe, building it around her with a keyboard or a pen, and be untouched by a hostile world.

It was always how she dealt with pain and misfortune, from worries over money to worries about why her periods had come back in her mid-50’s. I wish her iron control had slipped a bit on that last one – I might have had as much as 6 months more to find her treatment – but it was her habit of many years to deal with fear by writing. I’m not surprised she did it. I just resent it, even now. Bad enough she grumped when I read aloud some especially droll tidbit from Steven Jay Gould – but then she had to go get distracted and die.

But even Kage liked to be surrounded by special landscapes. While she could write exquisite prose while stage managing an outdoor venue filled with African dancers and Morris men, it was so much nicer and easier when she was instead able to set up under an oak tree in green, fragrant quietude. She arranged her desk and its immediate environs to enclose her with sensory delights, so a deep breath or a swallow or a glance around would reveal vistas of beauty.

It was why her desk was set up by the front room window that looked out over the roofs to the Pacific. It was why roses were planted below those windows, so the summer wind filled the living room with perfume. It was why her desk was made of oak, that she could run her hands over while she composed; why it was covered with small treasures – shells, beach glass, plastic crabs, miniature cannons – for her to handle while she thought.

And it’s why she took writing weekends. Well, we took them, of course. My job was to drive us to wherever had been selected as a short-term hermitage, and try to remember not to turn pages so loudly. (Man, would my Kindle have been a godsend then!)Kage would set up looking through the window at whatever gorgeous view she had selected, and write whole other worlds up around herself like rose-covered trellises.

I took my fixations along, of course – knitting. Books. Crossword puzzles. I taught myself how to purl and then how to knit cables on a long weekend in a nearly deserted motel north of San Simeon, while Kage wrote Lewis through “Hellfire At Twilight.”  I completed my first sock in the room where I am sitting now, staring out at the sea through the old oak casement windows of the Green Gable Inn. I understand exactly why Kage chose this place as the ultimate writing weekend destination – the room is a hymn of comfort and delight, and I think I could happily live here forever, writing.

I’ve brought both my Kindle and my knitting, but I have mostly been pounding away on the Buke.  The sight and sound of the Pacific – literally across the street! – has been like draughts of whiskey and water to me. I’ve been snacking on See’s licorice kindly brought by my friend, Neassa, who came up from Santa Rosa to keep vigil with me here – though she has temporarily set aside her own writing, in order to hand-stitch sequined green trim on pair after pair of black costume pants … she sings with Sounds of Sonoma, a ladies’ choral group, and handles a lot of their costuming as well. Between sequined trousers, she adds rows to a Dr. Who scarf for a niece, and eats molasses chips.

So it’s a proper writing weekend. One of us is writing and one of us is sewing, and we share things out from our Bukes and IPads and phones for general amusement. And while i don’t have Kage’s adamantine focus, I am forging resolutely ahead.

And I don’t mind the snap of the molasses chips, either. So there’s that going well.

Kage Baker readily admitted that every writer needed a brain trust to assist with research. She herself cultivated relationships with engineers, librarians and historians, and kept a scholar in ancient languages on retainer for those sudden Greek translation emergencies.

I have my Dear Readers. You wonderful people form the corp of a group that sends me weird history stories, and news of sudden findings of “lost” art, literature, music and animals. You send me photos of old portraits of people who looks like Joseph. Or Lewis, or  Mendoza, or Budu (frightening me half out of my mind); though mostly of Joseph … which probably says a lot about Joseph.

All those articles and pictures are highly appreciated, Dear Readers, and socked away carefully in my archives for eventual use. They also help keep alive and healthy my conviction that the world is weird as hell and Kage had some personal insight into it.

But yestreday, you all rallied around and helped me find my lost story. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Thanks especially to Maggie and Sue and Neassa, who remembered where they had seen the errant pieces of my mind, and were able to send me right to them. This, BTW, after I had tried the search function on my Buke here in the Green Gables, and gotten nowhere … but last night, the Buke was having some sort of cerebral incident:  no matter what I asked it, it informed me it could not locate the driver for Yahoo …  which I never use.

I ended up downloading 23 updates last night in order to subject the Buke to protracted diagnostics. Sometimes life just gets weird, you know?

But now I have the two missing pieces! They are rejoined, and I can resume work from where I left off. There is still about a third I need to either locate on a UCB drive at home, or reconstruct from scratch – but the whole is much less than I feared. I think it happened over the summer, when my desktop had a sudden stroke and had to be revived.

Still, as lost bits go, this was ever so much easier than it could have been. And I owe it all to you, Dear Readers. My gratitude is eternal and heavy-duty. With chocolate and marshmallow ribbons in. With pineapples.

In the meantime … the storm has but glancingly pawed at Pacific Grove, like unto a playful kitten. The days are full of sunshine, there have been rainbows, there are otters in the bay below our hotel, and now the waves are singing a loud but comforting lullabye. however, I’m informed that Los Angeles is filling with mud, like an over-sized Nine Men’s Morris. There has been thunder and lightning and flash floods and debris flows. I’ve missed the worst storm in years, apparently, gadding about up here with the butterflies.

But stories are happening. The new notes, which I found last night and have never, ever seen before, are for something doubtless picaresque and hilarious and titled “Smith Goes To The Hardware Store”. With Lord Ermenwyr pressed into service even while attempting to press Smith into some sort of service. I feel I owe it to the world to try and get this one written out in full – if only for the scene where Smith tries to explain a shoe plane to a bored Ermenwyr. And despite detailed descriptions from Kage like: “The ladies are busy doing Something.”

I liked living in Kage Baker’s mind. Whenever I start to feel sorry for myself because I no longer do, something like those story notes comes along and reminds me that I am still there.

Or something like having dinner tonight at The Forge In The Forest in Carmel – a wonderful restaurant that has wonderful food, walls of stone and hammered copper, fires in every room and a full-sized forge in the bar. Planted in Kage’s mind, that place seeded and grew into the Shrine of the Father-Smith of the Children of the Sun. The copper walls fertilized the oaks that guard the courtyard there, and became the sacred grove of metal trees in Bird of the River.

Time carries us on, Dear Readers. And not every curve hides a deadly snag.

Kage Baker was deathly afraid of losing her stories.

She was a bit of a packrat by nature, hating to let go of anything she had ever once loved. A great deal of her adult life 9and earnings) was spent replacing dearly beloved books, games, toys, films, candies etc., that had vanished into the mists of time. I was was perpetually amazed at the number of things she did indeed manage to find again.

Ultimately, I was also fairly appalled. Most of the trove is now in boxes in my storage unit … and, in fact, most of the boxes in my storage unit are the trove,

She had good and valid reasons to fear losing her stories, though. She liked to keep her notes in legal steno pads or loose pages of typing paper, crammed into and around her desk so as to always be in reach. Some of them inevitably fell victim to mice, cosmic rays, very localized fires, being inundated with Coca Cola (disastrous if you write in Higgins Black Erasable Ink) and being accidentally swept into the trash when she was forced to clean up the mess that was her desk.

Kage also had frequent quarrels with her electronic media. She had a tendency, in the earlies of her computer use, to yank pertinent things out of the disk drive without closing them. I’ve resuscitated every kind of data storage dating back to 5-inch floppies.

Despite these little problems, Kage rarely lost a story or plot idea permanently. I have been rather proud of myself these last 4 years,because not only have I not lost anything, I have found several things even I did not know about.

I’m still perfect where Kage’s stories are concerned. But I have misplaced the  progress to date of “The Fog King”. The story is based on one of Kage’s ideas, part of the mythology of the Anvil of the World universe; I wrote what there was of it so far …. and I think some of you, Dear Readers, read it.

Does anyone remember reading it? Did anyone save a copy? Can anyone remember where I sent them to read it online? Did I email it to any of you?

Please oh please: if any of you Dear Readers have any of it, send me a copy! I am losing my mind, and have clearly already lost my grip. My email, should someone find a bit of the story, is materkb@gmail.com.

In the meantime, I shall continue hunting through all the USB drives I brought with me to the wonderful Green Gables Inn, a B&B in Pacific Grove where Neassa and I are having a writing weekend … which would be working even better, had I remembered where to find what I meant to write.

In the meantime, though, the search through the USBs has already yielded notes on a story about Smith, Lord Ermenwyr and a trip to the hardware store. Kage tried to never throw anything away … and nuggets like this are worth every old Altoids tin full of ticket stubs from Grauman’s Chinese.