Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker made some pretty elaborate plans for what I should do with my life after she died. Some of them I have only discovered well afterwards.

Most of her motive, I am sure, was natural sisterly concern for me as a survivor – we’d been one another’s primary support systems for a long, long time. Some of it, though, I am equally sure, was her deep conviction that – although I was quite intelligent – I had no common sense and should not be running around without a keeper.  She was probably right. I’m pretty sure Kimberly agrees.

One of the things Kage told me, over and over, was not to try to live alone – I’d forget to pay the bills, or eat, or something.  I would die and mummify; or worse, do it the other way around : I’d be found dead amid a sea of books, with an empty coffee cup beside me and dust on my staring eyeballs …

She told me not to stay in our old apartment, either, but to light out for somewhere with no ghosts. Even though that is what I did – I was back in Los Angeles within a month – I didn’t understand for some time what Kage had meant. Only when I realized that I could only remember her  alive here; that I could only see her young, and strong, and madly in love with the world – only then did I figure out why she’d sent me home. If I had tried to live these last 4 years in Pismo Beach, I would have shrivelled, like the Little Mermaid, into strands of sea foam and blown away on the waves.

Don’t pick out your own clothes! warned Kage. You’ve got the taste of a four-year old. Cruel but true, that – but Kimberly picks out most of my clothes, so I only display my appalling taste at home, while I’m writing. Or at science fiction conventions, where my fondness for Gothic black and Hawaiian shirts is de rigueur.

Put your books away occasionally, or they’ll collapse on you! was another good order. She was a fine one to talk – I could have built her a tomb out of her own books – but I have managed to prevent my living space from murdering me. The best aspect of this is that I have acquired a Kindle! My books now reside largely in the aether, and I can carry hundreds of them with me in convenient L-space.

Write. I know you can write. You better write!  Kage told me.  It’s more than I know, but so far she is seemingly correct. I haven’t written as much as I think I should, but I do write. My name is on published works. I dream of plots. I’m wearing the “e” off the computer keyboard that was new 4 years ago.

Kage said she would haunt me if I didn’t obey her orders and write. I admit to being tempted, too. But I couldn’t resist writing; I think she knew that, knew that I would be too selfish to try and hold the stories to ransom. After all, she produced some of them. (Lots of them. As long as we’re being honest.) I want to see them as much as anyone else. And also, the act of writing itself is more than I can resist – and Kage knew that, too, although I hadn’t put pen to paper in a decade before she got sick. She knew that old solitary habit was just waiting, and that before long I would find a quiet place and indulge the sweet, sweet vice again.

Kage made it easy on me, though. She told me to do it. She let me pretend I was doing it as a favour to her, out of loving memory, as a tribute or something. But, Dear Readers, it hasn’t been. I write because nothing else is so fine, so satisfying. Nothing matters but the work – true enough. But you know what? I don’t care! I don’t write because I have to, but because it give me joy.

I haven’t written anything here for a week, which is shameful. I apologize, Dear Readers. But that little contretemp regarding Company of Thieves has been settled with less sturm und drang than expected; none of your copies will be rarities, I am afraid, but none of them will be tracked down and seized, either. And a few days ago, I got an invitation to submit a story of Kage’s to a podcast due to air in March – stories about aliens, by women, to be read aloud. So I’ve been pondering what of Kage’s might do.

I settled on either “Indian Tony” or “Pueblo, CO Has The Answers”.  But I did wish there was something new – and after staying up too late reading through Kage’s notes and Steven J. Gould’s Wonderful Life, about the Cambrian Explosion and the Burgess Shale … I had a dream and woke up with an idea.

For the last 3 days I have been writing frantically. The finished product has been run through the assessing eyes of Kimberly and Neassa, relying on Kage’s own method of using as beta readers one’s sisters and sister/analogs.  Besides, they can both spell much better than I can.

And, behold! It was accomplished. The story is done and has been sent out, and we will see if the podcast people want it. And if they don’t, we’ll see how the magazines might feel.  I know how I feel. Satisfied.

I think Kage might be, too.

Kage Baker rather liked Valentine’s Day. As she was wont to say, “What’s not to like? Birds’ nests are a nice thing.”

The reference there is to the old Northern European tradition that Valentine’s Day was the day the birds begin to nest. (There are even comments about it in Shakespeare, in  A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) Kage, though, just tossed that out to confuse people.

Most folks, of course, associate today with Hallmark cards, chocolate, jewellry, romantic dinners, enforced social engineering at the grade school level, and just generally heart-shaped everything. Kage disliked all the cutesy stuff (though she liked romance and chocolate). Hence the commemoration of birds’ nests.

Various of my friends (an odd bunch, admittedly) have been making semi-sarcastic remarks about the unpleasant martyrdom of St. Valentine being commemorated with pink cards and chocolates, but that’s just an historian’s affectation. For one thing, there seems to have been about a dozen Valentines on the rosters of the Roman Catholic and various Orthodox Churches.  For another, he is reported to have died by being beaten with clubs, beheaded, and/or shot full of arrows – though Kage felt that last one was probably reverse contamination from the Cupid figure attached to the day by  later romantics and card manufacturers.

It was probably the Catholic Church’s usual trick of assigning a saint to an existing pagan holiday, and letting people commemorate both. February 14, being honoured as the day the birds begin to nest, is obviously a spring event – you know, vernal rites, virility and fertility and so on. By the 1300’s or so, all that entertaining stuff was combined with the growing success of courtly love. All else since then has just been increasing the trimming.

This year’s addition, by the way, seems to be “chocolate’ diamonds. That one would really have cracked Kage up. Chocolate diamonds are the genius-level marketing ploy of Le Vian Diamond company, turning brown-coloured diamonds previously used solely for industrial purposes into a new symbol of romantic love … she’d have loved the clever chutzpah of that. Her research into diamonds had taught Kage that “Diamonds Are Forever” because it’s damned hard to resell them: the price is artificially maintained by the diamond dealers.

Kage was not much into the cards exchange thing. A lot of us who grew up mid-20th century were left a little scorched by that in grammar school. I am sure you recall, Dear Readers – who got Valentines? Who got the most? Who got cards from the cool kids? There was either class warfare wherein someone in the class was always left out (the smelly kid, the fat kid, the weird kid, the smart kid) or egalitarian unity was enforced from on high and you only got to bring Valentines if you brought one for everyone in the class. That not only stirred the masses into hatred of the mind-control authorities, it embarrassed everybody.

In our young womanhood – well, we grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, when most of a young lady’s wardrobe was optional. We had fun. We each ran the gamut of Valentine’s Day games, good, bad and hilarious: from chocolates shaped like things we didn’t tell Momma about, to being abandoned on Little Santa Monica in the middle of the night by some unworthy cur.

By our 40’s, it had become obvious that we were neither of us the nesting type, and decided to leave it to the birds. Kage declared we were forming St. Ermenwyr’s nunnery, and we thereafter made our own trips to See’s to get the sweeties we liked. Kage always enjoyed a reason to get See’s seasonal specialities – she was especially fond of the solid chocolate hearts in scarlet foil.

I’m eating one now, as I type. I’ll set the red foil out for the mockingbirds to use.

Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

Kage Baker always enjoyed the Winter Olympics.

Me, not so much. I tended to read and knit while she gasped at the ski jumpers and swooned over the beauty of the figure skaters. Her favourite events were men’s speed skating; which, she cheerfully admitted, won her heart for sheer male pulchritude.

She liked Olympic swimmers even better. Michael Phelps delighted her. I wish she’d seen the 2012 Summer Games …

I never did care about them much, Summer or Winter. Until the winter Kage died; when I suddenly needed distraction and company as I had not in my entire life. I watched damn near everything of the 2010 Winter Games, with Kimberly – an actual fan – to explain the more esoteric events to me. Like the differences in all the  varied figure skating. Or the weird vocabulary of snowboarders. I don’t know how she knows all this stuff, but its an aspect of our family – when something interests one of us, we learn everything we can about it. Kimberly likes ice dancing and half-pipe …

Anyway, Dear Readers, that’s what I’ve mostly done this week. The strange tales of Sochi have utterly captured my attention, not to mention amusing me beyond all reason. So I’m not writing much. But I wanted to check in and assure all and sundry that I am here and fine.

Also, I urge you all to check out some of the Olympics. If you are not at all into winter sport – even such gentle ancient skills as curling – at least take a look at the blogs about the hotels and local politics. It’s hysterical. And, with all these genuinely talented athletes making the best of inadequate housing and peculiar venues, it’s heart-warming as well. It takes more than killer ski slopes, duplex toilets and trapping the US bobsled pusher in his own bathroom to get the Olympians down.

That’s a good lesson. I can testify to that.

Kage Baker loved spring in California.

She was aware that it was popularly supposed not to exist. She knew all the jokes about the faux seasons of California. She regarded them as some of the many ignorances (which ought to be a word, if it is not) and calumnies spread by an East Coast that was still basing its image of the West Coast on lurid tabloid cowboy stories.

The cattle industry in California predated the Yankee immigrants to the state, anyway; it was the gracious ranching culture of the rancheros that dominated California. You can still see the remnants of it in rodeos and  civic festivals all over California – Old Mission Days, Vaquero Fiestas. You can even still get glimpses in the cows – in Central California there are heritage herds of beautiful old lyre-horned cattle, dew-lapped and hunch-backed and coloured like the wild bulls on French cave walls.

California spring is likewise esoteric. It can start as soon as New Year’s and run until May Day, or it can go up in cold flames over the course of three weeks. It’s sudden and glorious and not attached to a human calendar; it’s a wet season, a rainy season, a madly determined green season. The hills go emerald and wildflowers blossom everywhere – in silty roof gutters, on freeway verges, between the carefully selected tame plants in office lobbies. Downtown is first covered by the green lace of vines – copa de oro, convolvulus, wild rose and the very queen of flowering vines, morning glory. And then every old wall and abandoned warehouse is covered with gold, vermillion, pink, white, and that deep, oceanic, heart-stopping blue …

Our spring hits its stride in February and March. By the time the Vernal Equinox spins into view, the wild oats are already in their silvered beards. By May Day the hills are a golden sea. And if you’re not used to it, you can mistake it for some tropical oddity of winter. You may not notice it at all, especially if you’re sheltering under an umbrella while our entire annual share of rain falls in a month.

Those proto-Euro cows can be seen in the spring, hock deep in flooded meadows. The fields here turn green and break out in lupin and poppies, and paleolithic cattle wade breast-high through them like boulders in a glacier. Kage loved to drive North this time of year. The blossoming orchards, the flowers on every bank and hollow, filled her like wine. She would roll down the window and let the cold new winds fill the car with perfume. Also rain, the only time she’d consent to get wet in the rain. The water would bead in her hair like  pearls and crystal, and under it her hair would darken to improbable shades of burgundy and scarlet. She’d put De Falla’s El Amor Brujo on the CD player and shout the Spanish lyrics into the storm. Oh, it was wild!

This year – well, it’s been a dry couple of years here in the Eye of the Sun. In January, we had a heat wave, temperatures running over 80; I hid in the house and became a crepuscular organism.  February was cooler, but it was conspicuously not damp. But in the North the rains began; the green tide began creeping South to us here in the Los Angeles Basin, and finally – it rained. Yestreday. Last night, too. Even more importantly, though less carnally delightful for us, it snowed in the mountains. And since that is where our summer water sleeps the winter out, every inch of that snow is literally a godsend.

We need all the rain we can get. In all likelihood, we’ll get more – not enough, but “not enough rain” is the default setting here. In fact, the only other setting is “far, far too much”. But I don’t think the hills are likely to walk this year, nor Highway 1 fall off the edge of the continent  (as it often does). The rain will be sparse and soft. The gasping earth will soak it up instead of drowning. The wildflowers have started, the hills are going green. In the Northern coastal meadows, calves and foals and lambs are beginning to skitter.

As Kage was wont to say, casting her eyes skyward: “Whichever one of You is responsible – Thank You!”

Kage Baker loved spring in California.

She was aware that it was popularly supposed not to exist. She knew all the jokes about the faux seasons of California. She regarded them as some of the many ignorances (which ought to be a word, if it is not) and calumnies spread by an East Coast that was still basing its image of the West Coast on lurid tabloid cowboy stories.

The cattle industry in California predated the Yankee immigrants to the state, anyway; it was the gracious ranching culture of the rancheros that dominated California. You can still see the remnants of it in rodeos and  civic festivals all over California – Old Mission Days, Vaquero Fiestas. You can even still get glimpses in the cows – in Central California there are heritage herds of beautiful old lyre-horned cattle, dew-lapped and hunch-backed and coloured like the wild bulls on French cave walls.

California spring is likewise esoteric. It can start as soon as New Year’s and run until May Day, or it can go up in cold flames over the course of three weeks. It’s sudden and glorious and not attached to a human calendar; it’s a wet season, a rainy season, a madly determined green season. The hills go emerald and wildflowers blossom everywhere – in silty roof gutters, on freeway verges, between the carefully selected tame plants in office lobbies. Downtown is first covered by the green lace of vines – copa de oro, convolvulus, wild rose and the very queen of flowering vines, morning glory. And then every old wall and abandoned warehouse is covered with gold, vermillion, pink, white, and that deep, oceanic, heart-stopping blue …

Our spring hits its stride in February and March. By the time the Vernal Equinox spins into view, the wild oats are already in their silvered beards. By May Day the hills are a golden sea. And if you’re not used to it, you can mistake it for some tropical oddity of winter. You may not notice it at all, especially if you’re sheltering under an umbrella while our entire annual share of rain falls in a month.

Those proto-Euro cows can be seen in the spring, hock deep in flooded meadows. The fields here turn green and break out in lupin and poppies, and paleolithic cattle wade breast-high through them like boulders in a glacier. Kage loved to drive North this time of year. The blossoming orchards, the flowers on every bank and hollow, filled her like wine. She would roll down the window and let the cold new winds fill the car with perfume. Also rain, the only time she’d consent to get wet in the rain. The water would bead in her hair like  pearls and crystal, and under it her hair would darken to improbable shades of burgundy and scarlet. She’d put De Falla’s El Amor Brujo on the CD player and shout the Spanish lyrics into the storm. Oh, it was wild!

This year – well, it’s been a dry couple of years here in the Eye of the Sun. In January, we had a heat wave, temperatures running over 80; I hid in the house and became a crepuscular organism.  February was cooler, but it was conspicuously not damp. But in the North the rains began; the green tide began creeping South to us here in the Los Angeles Basin, and finally – it rained. Yestreday. Last night, too. Even more importantly, though less carnally delightful for us, it snowed in the mountains. And since that is where our summer water sleeps the winter out, every inch of that snow is literally a godsend.

We need all the rain we can get. In all likelihood, we’ll get more – not enough, but “not enough rain” is the default setting here. In fact, the only other setting is “far, far too much”. But I don’t think the hills are likely to walk this year, nor Highway 1 fall off the edge of the continent  (as it often does). The rain will be sparse and soft. The gasping earth will soak it up instead of drowning. The wildflowers have started, the hills are going green. In the Northern coastal meadows, calves and foals and lambs are beginning to skitter.

As Kage was wont to say, casting her eyes skyward: “Whichever one of You is responsible – Thank You!”

Kage Baker’s standard response to any query regarding payments, royalties, e-books, audio books and contracts was always the same.

“I’m an idiot, and I have no idea,” she would say, grinning. “That’s why I have an agent.”

Her back up plan was to hand me her contracts before she signed them, and ask me to see if there was anything odd in them. That’s if she signed them at all; she was liable, when time was tight, to simply direct her agent to sign them in her stead. Because that’s why she had an agent.

And a good agent she is, too. I inherited her, and she has been as good to me as she was to Kage. Linn is an enormous part of how Nell Gwynne II got completed at all –  she never gave up on me, defended me from non-supportive publishers, and has encouraged me to keep at the writing ever since.

However, Linn doesn’t live in some blissful fairyland where nothing ever goes wrong. She’s a real-live person with, you know, real-life stuff happening to her. Bad eyesight, and cranky office help, and a little dog – not that Wiley is a problem, but he does require time and attention. Anyway … things happen. Shit, especially, happens. And since publishing is not so much an industry as a commensal life-form of differentiated but symbiotic organisms, what goes around doesn’t even have time to come around. It hits everyone involved right in the face at once.

It appears that when the TOC and contracts for the last collection – In The Company of Thieves, out of Tachyon (publisher #1) – was received, reviewed and processed through my agent’s office, it included a piece that was still under contract to another publisher (publisher #2): the reprint and e-book rights were still owned by publisher #2. Who just recently noticed what has occurred with a book that has been available (and selling) in hard cover and Kindle editions since November 2013.

I imagine many of you, Dear Readers, have copies of this book. Don’t fret, if you do (and don’t tell me if you don’t, please). Just enjoy them. At the moment it looks as if you may have an edition that will never exist in just that form again …

I’m still unclear on exactly everything that is going to happen – because I seem to be the closest to a calm person involved in this, which is not a terrific situation – but apparently what is left unsold will be recalled. If the book is then re-issued, it will have a different story in place of the currently offending one.

Kage always liked the stories about gypsy horse traders. You know, you buy a horse from the nice colourful Rom salesman; but in a night or two, the horse escapes and vanishes. He hasn’t been stolen – he’s gotten out on his own and trotted off to make his fortune. Which happens to be with his original owner … he’s a homing horse, as it were. Kage compared selling all the different possible rights to a story to this business, in that you can happily – and legally – sell the same story over and over and over …

But you can’t sell the same rights. Not to two different people. Unless, of course, you do so by mistake; but then the person who gets holding the empty stall is not the unlucky second owner: it’s you. In this case … Publisher #2 needs recompense. Publisher #1 needs a story he can print. I really, really want to have this title still available to be sold …

Hence the recall/replace/reprint plan; although I suspect I am the main proponent of this idea, Linn is supportive of it as well. Thus I have spent this afternoon combing through Kage’s back list, to see if there is anything that could match an anticipated hole of approximately 25,000 words. If I am lucky, there will be another edition of In the Company of Thieves ( a title that now makes me wince), but slightly different. Book Mark 1.5. Edition B 1/6. The alternate history version.

In the meantime, Dear Readers, hang on to your original copies. They may be slightly enhanced in collectibility.  At the very least, they can serve as a bad example. Because errors will be made, and shit can happen to anyone.

And it could be worse. I don’t have to face it alone.

That’s why I have an agent.

Kage Baker didn’t really care for winter weather – at least, not if there was any chance she would have to be personally out in it. For her, winter was best as a spectator sport. She was designed to live in some halcyon tropical zone on the edge of a warm sea.

Mind you, she did like to observe its alien ways. Our years in Pismo, we were never more than 3 blocks from the ocean; watching the winter storms was one of her favourite past times. The wind howling round the eaves was thrilling, and she loved being safe and warm indoors while the black winter waves beat on the sea walls. You could feel the pulse of those waves all the way up to our house, shaking the air and the earth.

When she was growing up in Momma’s house, the best views of winter storms were from the cupola on top of the second story. Kage claimed it for her lair in early adolescence, and would watch the storms galloping across the San Fernando Valley with great glee. Often the show would be enlivened by exploding transformers; the Valley flooded regularly (and still does, when we get any rain) and a ghost sea comes into existence. Three stories in the air atop a hilltop in the Hollywood Hills, Kage watched ages of the world rematerialize beneath her gaze.

Her interest in history and time travel was really inevitable, you know?

Of course, California has an infamously dysfunctional relationship with winter. Droughts are common, and more frequent than most inhabitants realize: people here have been building dams, storage ponds, canals, and catchment basins for as long as they’ve lived here. (Hint: looong before the Spanish.) From time to time, the rain – just – stops.

Then we have a drought. Between droughts, we get years where it rains for 5 or 6 months at a time. That happened in the 1860’s, and several small towns washed away. After that it didn’t rain for 3 years, and the statewide cattle industry failed. Several times in our lifetimes, the rains have overstayed their welcomes – rivers rise,  the hills walk, and the earth slides, and all the valleys become lakes. Cemeteries wash out and coffins come drag racing down the broad boulevards into the Valley.

Spielberg didn’t go far from home for the imagery in Poltergeist. The tide of bones has crested along Devonshire and Tujunga three times that I can recall.

Before long, I fear, we’re all gonna be missing the mild inconvenience of the  recreational dead boating in the Valley. The snow level in the mountains is less than 20% of normal, and it hasn’t really rained in months. We’re halfway through our rainy season, and nothing has come. Reservoirs all over the state are showing muddy bottoms. The Governor has already declared us a disaster zone – which, I must admit, is a fair cop for California most of the time, but this time it’s for the drought.

We’re the salad bowl of the United States, and we have no water. Never mind if your lawn is dead; the rice in the North is gasping. The winter wheat is thirsty. Tomatoes and peppers and lettuce and strawberries are not beginning to shoot in the Salinas Valley; there are dead orchards standing skeletal in the great Valley between the Diablos and the Sierra Nevada.

Time to plant the front yard in cedar shavings and gravel. Time to fix leaks and teach the youngsters about Navy showers. Time to plan the spring garden plot in pots, to be watered sparsely by hand.

Kage would not have been surprised. It’s happened before. Mind you, the climbing temperatures are a new variation, but she’d been expecting sea level rises for years; climate change is a whole other ball of mud, and being aware of it or not will make no difference this coming dry year.

Nonetheless … there’s been a hint of normalcy these last few days. January warmth, which has been hitting the 80’s for days and days, has calmed down to the 60’s. The temperature is nearly normal, and clouds have wandered in from the forgetful Pacific. It’s been cool and grey and even moist, suddenly: not actually wet here in Los Angeles – just a sheen on the streets, a faint scente of wet stone under the naked sycamores – but it’s been enough to feel on your cheeks as you go outside.

It’s been enough to make the sidewalks slippery, too, Yestreday I slid in the driveway and went face first into the street. I’ve got a nice case of road rash down my left leg, and I’ve scraped up my knee and elbow as neatly as any afternoon on the playground; but while I was down there on the ground, I noticed that the dust had been laid! There was a thin wet shining making its way hesitantly through the gutter. The asphalt smelled of chrysanthemums and milk: which, if you never fell down on a Los Angeles street, Dear Readers, is the native perfume of beginning rain.

Rain is coming. Virga can be seen in the middle air, getting closer and closer to the ground. There is mist on the wind; glass is beading over ever so slightly.

Better late than not at all, Kage would say. And, as usual, she’d be right.

Kage Baker will have been dead 4 years as of 1:15 tomorrow morning, a time and date yet to come. Just barely, but at this moment it is still a nebulous unknown; a figment of horological patterning that doesn’t quite exist.

The date and the hour, though, arrive behind an enormous bow-wave. It’s like the searing heat and exotic radiations of a nova blasting through space,  destruction galloping ahead of the actual light. By the time the light of a nova blooms in the night sky – a supernal white blossom outshining, for a brief time, the whole of galaxies – the edge of the conflagration has long since passed the observer. But if the distance and the angle and the timing are just right (which means, in this context, appallingly wrong) that observer will have been incinerated by those advance riders. They’ll never see the eventual light, but will have been reduced to wisps of organic ash in the solar wind. It’s all rather romantic, in a deeply morbid way; though not so much to the randomly placed world that might have been swept into sterility by someone else’s cataclysm.

Kage’s death comes at me like that.

But that’s life in the big Universe.

As a matter of fact, a perfectly respectable little nova has just become visible via telescope in galaxy Messier 82. Also known (uninspiredly) as the Cigar Galaxy, it can be seen in the constellation of Ursa Major, also known as the Great Bear. Or, if your granddad was from Britain, the Great Wain. Messier 26 is one of the “stars” that make it up to the naked eye. Right now, one single star is burning as brightly as the whole freaking galaxy, at least through a telescope.

You can get a good look through a 4-inch telescope; in all likelihood, you will be able to see it through a pair of decent binoculars before it fades completely. Go out and look North and a little East, after 7 or 8 PM. It’s only 11,420,000 light years away.

We’re not in any danger from the heart-hollowing fire of the star’s death. We’ll only see its light. And the dust of its passing will settle somewhere and maybe seed a new world with gold and silver and salt and iron, and have another go at making life. That’s how things work.

Like that distant star, Kage is dead; the news of her death comes from farther away each year. It’s never diminished for me, though. It’s a wide wave front that rolls over me from that event, and I don’t think it will ever stop washing round my feet. The sands under me shift constantly, and will never be quite as firm again; this tide never rolls out as far as it rolled in.

But today our agent Linn called me – some lady wants to buy a marketing option, to try and sell the Company stories as a television series. I said YES, of course; selling options on stories is like selling gypsy horses, you see.  You can take the buyer’s gold, and like as not the dear horse will come trotting back after a while, happy to be in his own stall again and eager to be sold to the next hopeful gorgio … it’s an industry that delighted Kage no end.

And I found that Linn, being caught between assistants, had not gotten the story nor the novel I sent her. And – lovely to hear! – she wants very much to see them! So I sent them off again, and got confirmation back at once that, this time, they had arrived.

And I’ve worked the bugs out of the timeline for Marswife, so I can proceed with something like a plot and even recognize some of the characters through the red, red dust.

An explosion, a distant light, a wave of star dust curling over us like a comber full of gold. Somewhere a new world is planted with the seeds of diamonds, and in our own sky a million dust motes burn like quick candles and form raindrops round themselves. So life goes on.

Now I’m going to sit here a while, Dear Readers, and watch the clocks tick over to 1:15 on January 31st. Rest well, everyone.

Kage Baker was very good about keeping records of her writing.

That is, she kept every version of every story she wrote. She saved portable copies to her Buke and on thumb drives, to be carried along when we travelled, and worked on in hotels and comfortable bars. She used and kept hundreds of legal pads.

Consequently, I have zippered plastic bags full of unlabelled thumb drives. I  have boxes full of manuscripts, galleys, and printouts that got sent to editors and were then returned for corrections. I have all those notebooks – usually the legal sort, with green lined paper about as thick as toilet paper but with cardboard covers as tough sheet metal. I have pounds of hand-written drafts on correctable typing paper – Eaton’s Corrasable Bond, most of it – which has aged to the consistency of dried rose petals: you can now read both sides of them simultaneously, so diaphanous they have become. Or, more accurately, you can not read either side, because Kage’s bold and wretched handwriting covers them like spiky black rose vines.

What Kage seldom did, though, was update her manuscripts. She didn’t bother to go back over older copies, paper or electronic, and make them match the finished copy. Sometimes she’d append a note – something like Edited in November 2003; changes everywhere, on a sticky note. Which is less help to the adventuring archivist than you might think.

I tried to make sure that the final, finished versions were all retained on thumb drives or disks: something permanent, that wasn’t subject to the vagaries of life in a hard drive. Kage thought that was a great idea; she kept copies, too, but on her hard drive. They were never dated or titled, so as to indicate what version they were. Sometimes there’s an explanatory note in the text that tells me this is not a complete copy, or not the final cut – but she saved them for herself, to preserve what she’d originally written in the white hot passion of the first draft.

“Yeah, you have to kill your darlings to be a writer,” she’d concede. “But you don’t have to throw them away. Anyway, they might be good for something someday.”

And, in fact, she managed to sift several stories and at least 2 novels from her hoard. She also made me promise to burn them all when she was dead …

That’s the only promise to her I have not kept.

Among all this paper are the notes for things Kage wanted written, of course. Also among them are other notes, speculations and outlines that I have pulled out and laid aside as potential treasure. Some of them take the form of page after page of notes passed between us – a scene, a sub-plot, a sudden image, and then one or the other of us scrawling What Happens Next? to the other. These are incredibly helpful to me, sometimes. Sometimes they’re just hilarious crap – Ermenwyr’s adventures as a pool shark come to mind – but even those turn up the volume of her voice in my head. And I need that.

Right now, I need to be working full speed on Marswife. But I’ve discovered that my grasp of the time line is very vague. It’s meant to be post-apocalyptic, beginning just after the pyroclastic blast fries Mars Two. But nowhere in Empress of Mars – for example –does Kage give any tiny hints about what is to come – though even I’m not sure what some of the Heretic’s  more opaque predictions are meant to mean …

I think there will be more details to glean from some passages in Life of the World To Come. That ones includes the disaster of Mars II, and I’m pretty sure Kage gave it a date – 2351 or ’52, just a few years prior to the Silence falling in July 2355.*  There will also be – or should be – some dating landmarks in Sons of Heaven, too. I need to figure who, if anyone, of Mary’s Miscellany is still alive when the bomb goes off in Olympus Mons. I have to come up with names for the next generation of Vespuccis. Doesn’t someone eventually marry the youngest Griffith girl, Mona? And I don’t remember how old Mary’s granddaughter Mary is by the end, the little girl whose foster father is the Operative Eliphal De Wit of Amsterdam.

And I also just need to steep myself in Kage’s Mars, to get used again to the charms and peculiarities of Mars II, that shining city built on beer and rebellion. So I’ve been collecting the pertinent Mars stories – making sure I have a format of each of them that my Kindle can read – and uploading them to be my special reference section. Kage’s habits with the original copies of her stories, as outlined above, have been making this a very exciting affair

Most, by my great good fortune, are accessible on my computer; I moved them all into the same carefully safeguarded folder in an external drive after Kage died. I’m always on the hunt for the ones I couldn’t find easily, to upgrade the collection. Yestreday I read through Empress; on my breaks today, I’ve been reading “Maelstrom”. I’ve also been searching for what was Kage’s last Mars story, “Attlee and The Long Walk”.

At first I couldn’t find it at all, not even any references in her correspondence. I finally found it in a PDF format in MY email, of all things.  The PDF document was majorly strange, being a scanned side by side of all the pages, 2 at a time, of the collection for which it was written. Conversion dissolved all the formatting, and putting in a single-page format resulted in each page being sort of inside out – paragraphs appearing out of sequence on every one. It took me most of today to get it all cut, pasted back together, and saved as a .doc attachment.

But now I’ve got it. And a small voice in the back of my mind has been whispering , Alessandro, Hadrian, Giovanni: which I am assuming are the names of the little Vespuccis. And now I know that would-be ecdysiast Mona’s beau is named Durk … jeez, what a dreadful name, Kage!

Oh, screw you! says the very faintest voice in my very furthest mind. And I know I am on the right track.

*That date, by the way, is pretty much smack dab on the 24th and A Half Century, you know. Kage’s little tip of the hat to Warner Brothers, which very few people have apparently figured out …

Kage Baker really needed her sleep. She was one of those people who actually require 8 hours per night, and wilt like a dandelion if shorted.

Kage and Kimberly were and are, respectively, prone to go into a coma before midnight. If prodded, Kage could stay up a couple more hours to work; Kimberly fades like the signal from a satellite passing below the horizon, and her corgi herds her to bed each night at 10 PM. (They even used to do this at Faire – whereupon, with no one left to play with, I would wander over to Celt Camp and listen to Steven Gillan read aloud from Heaney’s  translation of Beowulf … I wish you were within walking distance these days, Sir.)

Kage was able to do this because she didn’t ever reach that treasonous age where you suddenly discover that you body WILL NOT perform as it used to do. She was still operating on all cylinders, as it were, when her head gasket cracked and her drive train fell out. Her body spared her a lot of the tiny losses that tend to swarm over one in the late 50’s – true, it did it by slamming her with one enormous deadly problem, but she said she preferred it that way.

And it all happened so quickly – over the course of a single year, really – that Kage never reached that horrible point where you stand on the edge of the precipice of time, and realize that your wings fell off somewhere 30 years behind you. What killed her was an ambush and it outgunned her from the start. Disaster can warp us into different creatures, unrecognizable even to ourselves: Kage dodged that. She didn’t fade so much as she was honed to a thinner and sharper edge – at the last, photons were flashing as they split themselves on her cheekbones.

“I feel like hell,” she said, “And I know I’m probably going to die – but at least I don’t feel old. ”

I’m feeling old for both of us, I guess. My sleep cycle has been a joke since infancy – I’ve gotten up to play quietly by myself since Kimberly was in a crib, and Kage used to wander out to the living room wondering where the hell I was. These days, I seem to have achieved permanent insomnia. Not that I don’t sleep – I’d sleep all day with little effort, but then I’d just stay awake more of the night. And I’m seeing far too many dawns as it is.

I generally like being awake at night. But I find dawns unbelievably depressing. Kage regarded this as a perversion unique to me, and tried all her life to convince me I was missing the best part of the day. I can say with complete certainty, now, that she was freaking wrong.

My insomnia is a mystery. No one has ever found out what causes it. And, of course, I am still finding new ways for my health to screw me over. My heart is playing up – skipping beats, slowing down, speeding up; shortness of breath has become as common as sneezing. More so, actually, since at least I still rarely catch colds. I just completed two weeks on a cardiac monitor, which about drove me insane. I should, I know, be in grateful awe of the technology that allowed me to actually go home and about my normal business with the damn thing stuck to me – but it was such a literal and many-faceted pain! I’m absurdly sensitive to adhesives, and developing intractable itching from the thing …

At least it’s gone now. And so are the shingles. And if I turn out to need a pacemaker, that should become apparent as soon as they analyze the monitor’s findings. In the merry meantime, my insomnia has found a new way to torment me – it turns out that chronically disturbed sleep plays havoc with blood sugar … So I can be a good girl as far as diet is concerned, but if I stay awake until 5 AM, I’ll still come up with a blood sugar over 200 after fasting all night.

It is so bloody frustrating. My cardiologist – whom I judge, from his complexion and earnest air, to be a recently confirmed Eagle Scout – suggested I give up coffee. The only immediate reaction to that was that I began dozing off more in the daytime, taking longer to wake up – but by the time I tried to sleep at night, it was the same old story. I can’t even reliably just switch my daytime and nighttime around and go nocturnal. There actually are things I need to do by daylight, and all that happens is that I become a crepuscular life-form … active at dawn and dusk, awake but slow and drowsy by night, and mostly asleep by day. Rabbits can make a living like this – but not me, apparently.

And I’m desperate to write, I really am. I have ideas for at least 3 stories, and the need to work on Marswife is becoming a physical pain … for those of you who are not writers, Dear Readers, it feels like a charley-horse in your stomach, along with a generalized tic in your hands. You wander around your desk slightly hunched over and twitching: a grisly sight, I assure you. And I talk to myself while I do it, too.

Anyway, I’m re-reading Empress of Mars and the pertinent portions of Life of the World To Come, in an effort to force my way back into Kage’s frame of mind. The best part of this plan is that, even if it doesn’t work, the scenery is grand. This evening, over self-indulgent fried  rice and shrimp egg fu yung, I shall be re-joining the redoubtable Ottorino in the Shootout At the Vespucci Emporium.

The hell with sleep. Who needs sleep, when you can stay up all night with heroes?