Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved techno toys. Which was to say, elegant machines or advanced electronics; things that were cunningly made and worked as if by magic. She was absolutely enthralled by shiny mechanicals that did something silent and complicated, with the mere push of a button.

It was what she always hoped for in her computers, from the first little desk top I brought home to her. That one still used 5 x 8 floppies, but it was such a wonder to get thousands of words on a piece of black plastic, that Kage was thrilled. After she learned about Moore’s Law, she considered it a pact between her needs and the computing industry, and expected improvements to show up on time.

As domestic IT staff, it was my job to make sure that the computer was configured so as to keep its operation as close as possible to the Magic Button Model. Every IT person, professional or amateur, knows about that Model. It’s what your user is invoking when they’ve just converted the word processing language to Croation or deleted half the security system; and they turn wide eyes on you and say, “Well, can’t you just press the Language button?” Or the punctuation button, or the Restore Everything I Triple Deleted Over The Last 8 Hours button: in other words, the button that dispenses Magic.

They are always quite certain it takes only one button to effect repairs, too. It’s a bizarre syndrome that would probably bear some research by neuro-scientists. Or maybe voodoo priests. It readily illustrates Clarke’s Law, while we’re on the subject of recently-described laws of nature; but it would be fascinating to find out why so many computer users think that way. Why do they believe that repairs to the most extraordinary machine ever built – with almost no moving parts, composed of electricity and magnetic ink, its chips of rare metals designed to simulate the billion neurons of the human brain – would be effected by pressing One Single Button?

The only possible answer is Magic. And the fact that people do, yes, believe in Magic is nowhere so aptly demonstrated as in this way they regard their computers.

It soothed Kage’s Luddite tendencies to do so. She’d pat her computer – or make obscene gestures at it, depending on the situation – and invoke Clarke’s Law. That reconciled her basically mystical  soul with the hard reality of needing to use a machine. It allowed her to write with speed, comfort, and faith in her magic typewriter. It gave the machine a soul of its own, look you, to which she could relate in the close personal way she required.

A side effect of coming to terms with scary modern technology was that playing with each new techno-toy became (as it should) an endless source of fun. Computers shrank steadily over the 20 years Kage used them; her last one, the tablet she called her Buke, was barely the size of a paperback book. She loved it. She ignored cell phones until they got tiny and did tricks – then they were fascinating artifacts, and acceptable to use. She never saw my Smart Phone, but would have loved it: once I got the touch screen tamed so she could zip around without accidentally sending mass emails or automatically ordering Chinese food.

My Kindle – well, it wouldn’t have been my Kindle. The first one would have been hers. It would have been a grand piece of magic to spring on her, too.

These last couple of days, I’ve been wrestling with the Kindle, figuring out how to upload documents from my desktop computer to it. I need to be able to consult various stories to continue with some of the ones I’m working on now. It turned out to be pretty easy, once I had the right USB cable and had argued my desktop computer into compliance – it’s getting up there, and I’m going to have to replace or upgrade it soon.  But four years ago I added a dedicated hard drive to hold all (and only) writing projects – all of Kage’s finished books, and my ongoing ones. That made it a lot easier than trying to remember which part of C Drive they were in – Kage herself stored things in more than one place, because she tended to forget where she’d put them in the first place …

And I had a hankering to re-read Maid On The Shore, the first of Kage’s pirate stories. Well, now I am. I can upload her entire oeuvre, and carry it with me everywhere.  That gives me such a feeling of safety, and satisfaction. The Kindle just gets more fun all the time.

I’ve gotten it a cover of tooled leather, showing oak savannah and wild lands. For Kage, though,  I would have had to get one done up Steampunk. She’d probably have decorated it herself, with brass gears and wee diodes … A real techno toy.

She’d have loved it.

Kge Baker loved Saturdays. Even after she left school, even after she left work – Saturdays were holidays.

It was a state of mind, I think. That, and the fact that Kage loved the Melendy books, and so was attuned to the sacredness of Saturdays long before the art shows and and book signings and living history events took us all over California.

Many of Kage’s Saturdays were spent at historical re-creation events, working hard: but for her, they were holidays. On Faire Saturdays, it was true, she had to get up earlier than she liked. And breakfast was usually coffee, Coke, a pint of ale and something weird in a wooden bowl; but they were still, technically, holidays. The ones out of Faire season, when she could also sleep late and have fresh bagels for breakfast, were simply even better ones.

After all, she used to point out, Kage Baker didn’t do much during a performance day. Mostly she lurked behind Rose Drumm’s sharp black eyes and took copious notes on the human carnival. It was Rose who pulled beers, bussed tables, directed street plays, sang and postured and yelled “God Save The Queen!”  None of that actually changed once we were only doing Dickens Fairs, either – except that Mrs.-Drumm-my-housekeeper was a trifle more respectable than Rose-Drumm-who-serves-beer-at-the-Green-Man.

You could tell, ’cause she wore a sober black dress and a clean apron, and had her hair pinned up under a lace cap. Still yelled “God Save the Queen!” right lustily, though.

Today is a Saturday. These days, I can usually sleep as late as I like – hell, I can be nocturnal if I like! Nonetheless, the bliss of waking up at dawn and deliberately going back to sleep is so keen, that I usually am out of bed by noon. At the latest. Ordinarily … without a bit of contrast, the indulgences of a Saturday lose some savour. No bagels today, but I did have some truly exemplary toast: with Trader Joe’s Fig Jam,  which is amazing stuff. Then I watched the last episode of Season 2 of Shylock, with Kimberly and Michael – now we are caught up for the beginning of Season 3, which starts tomorrow night!

And I’m writing, as I ought to do; and getting some research out of the way, as I also ought to do. Just for fun’s sake, I’ve checked out some of the notable happenings of the day – Kage taught me to love time lines, and almanacs, and all such compilations of what happened Once Upon A Time today … and which are so delightful to share, Dear Readers, with you.

In 532 C.E., the Nika Riots happened; those were the sports riots in Constantinople that ruined the next to last Hagia Sofia, and eventually gave Joseph a bad time. It’s also the day in 1486 that Henry VII, that canny Tudor ferret, married Margaret of York and assured the throne of England for his eventual, remarkable grand-daughter Elizabeth – God Save The Queen!

It’s a good day for naval exploits, which would certainly have thrilled Kage. Today in 1670, Henry Morgan took Panama – I’ll have a tot of rum later and re-read Maid On The Shore to celebrate. Also, in 1778 James Cook discovered the Hawaiian Islands; and in 1788, the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay to found a nation  amid the most lethal zoosphere on Earth with 736 doughty British convicts.The first plane to land on a ship did so – in 1911, on the U.S.S. Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay, thus of necessity inventing the aircraft carrier. A Greek flotilla defeated the Ottoman Navy in 1913 at the Battle of Lemnos in the First Balkan War.

Happy Birthday to Daniel Webster, A.A. Milne, Oliver Hardy, Cary Grant, Danny Kaye, John Boorman and a lot of other people about whom Kage did not know or care. RIP to Rudyard Kipling, Sidney Greenstreet,  and Wilfrid Brambly, ditto.

Oh, and it’s Thai Royal Armed Forces Day, an unusually literal holiday commemorating the day in 1593 when King Narensuan personally killed the  naughty prince Uparaja.

Which is all certainly enough to be thought-provoking and amusing on a Saturday. I know Kage would have been moved – moved right out of the house, likely, and off on the North-bound road. Looking for someplace with a good beach, where we could toast the naval heroes in bottled Bass and eat Chinese food out of cartons in the car, with a fortune cookie sacrificed to Harry to keep the noise down.

Happy Saturday, Dear Readers.

Kage Baker didn’t like to give writing advice.

She enjoyed teaching, especially lecturing to large classes; there is an element of distance to a lecture class, which eased her native discomfort in close social contact. She enjoyed  conversations, too, but only conversations with people she knew and trusted.

In fact, you couldn’t stop Kage from discoursing on  a subject that interested her, if she felt safe in the available social context. She could barely wait to tell a new joke she’d heard, or a fascinating factoid. She’d run right over other speakers to be the first one to make a revelation. When one of our our bizarre adventures would come to an end and leave us panting on the edge of a cliff  – she never said Oh, God, don’t tell anyone! No, what Kage always said was Let me tell it!

People who somehow got to know her – Faire friends, some folks at conventions, select family members – knew that she was an hysterically funny raconteuse.   She’d tell campfire stories and hold people spell-bound. People-watching with her was a nonstop commentary on the crowds passing by; and dangerous, too. Because she’d eventually have you snorting and hiccoughing at her speculations on the passing crowd, and then everyone would be looking at you like you were an escaped lunatic.

The Internet allowed her to expand her number of friends tremendously. It was more comfortable for Kage to talk to people long-distance over the Net. There were many people who learned how warm and fascinating her conversation could be only through the medium of email.  She was a good correspondent – she thought that literacy was going to survive the 21st century mostly through the medium of electronic letter writing: all the people who – like her- found live conversation trying would keep the skill alive.

It was like passing notes – for which she had a passion; we were in the same office a lot, and we passed notes like the schoolgirls we had been.  It combined the charm of real-time communication with the comfort of distance. And your ear never went numb from the phone handset.

Kage barely had time to discover Skyping, and it rather horrified her. I might have been able to persuade her to try it, but it would have taken a while. She carefully had me disable the cameras on our last couple of computers.

So Kage did enjoy conversational chat in her own way, as well as pontificating in a friendly environment. But she still hated to give writing advice.

Like any writer, she frequently encountered folks who wanted to tell her their story ideas. If they were people she knew and trusted, she’d at least listen. But if they were strangers, she would actually stop them in mid-spiel (and that was an act of profound social courage for Kage) and tell them urgently, “Don’t say anymore! For your safety and mine, do NOT tell me your plot ideas. People get sued for things like that.”  I think she quite frightened a few nascent writers, insinuating that some shadow organization was listening to everything they said. All she really wanted to do, though, was avoid  someone claiming she’d stolen their ideas.

One or twice, when approached by editors for “on-order” contributions, she wouldn’t even reply to them without verifying they were really editors.  Editors, luckily, are unfazed by just about any weirdity displayed by writers …

Sometimes, conventions have their guest writers vet stories by ticket-buying participants. There are actual Writers Conferences and Workshops, of course; these others are sort of mini-workshops, and apparently very popular with folks trying to break into writing. They were agony for Kage – she did say YES once or twice, because it was the polite thing to do, but she absolutely hated it. We ran our brains in tandem for those occasions, because she couldn’t do it except as a gestalt. We even scripted her comments for the face-to-face workshops.

Had Kage ever attended Clarion, it would have ended in a massacre. Probably with an axe.

Kage said there was really only one piece of writing advice she could convey, anyway. Anything else was just English 101, corrected grammar and spelling and developing good research habits. “All of which,” she would remark darkly, “they should have learned in high school anyway!” And she did put in that one special direction into every story she critiqued, into every conversation with a friend who had a great idea for a story but didn’t know how to use it.

WRITE. That was it. Just WRITE. Writers WRITE, and the only way to do it is to sit down and make marks into words. Do it over and over and over, 100,000 times, until your fingers smoke and smoulder and your brain bleeds out your ears like oil and the hot white flame of PLOT rises above the keyboard.

All the rest is triviality.

Harlan Ellison legendarily had a repeating student in one of his writing classes. The guy kept coming back, and he was astonishingly terrible, and finally Harlan asked him why he kept undergoing this torment. And the man said, “I’m a writer. I need to write. Please don’t make me stop.” And Harlan Ellison recognized the desperate fire in that man, and let him stay. He had, after all, learned that one vital trick to being a writer. He WROTE.

Now, writing well – which is what the hopeful are actually asking – that’s a different matter. Kage hated to give advice on it because she didn’t believe it could be taught. And getting published is at least half luck anyway, so there wasn’t any sacred, secret knowledge to impart there.

Every day, every free moment. Make more free moments and WRITE in those. Make it your first and foremost devotion. Food, drink, rest, bills, jobs, lovers, family, natural disasters and flights of angels and aliens arriving at the White House … be damned to them all. You. Just. WRITE.

Because nothing else matters.

Except the work.

Kage Baker was fascinated with the idea of cyborgs – as you all know well, Dear Readers. The idea of cyborgs is central to her Dr. Zeus/Company series of time travel stories – she needed operatives who could survive time travel, and it was her opinion that un-augmented humans would make a pretty bad job of that.

It was Kage’s observation  that most people can’t even manage the changes that time inflicts on their own lifetimes. It’s axiomatic that the elderly insist on living in the past – their own, personal past. For each of us, our youth, our “salad days”, are considered preferable to whatever modern life is serving up in our 70’s or so. Actually, the preference for the Golden Age starts in our adolescence and is pretty much writ in stone by the time we hit 30: the old days, whatever the hell they were, were always better. People’s minds and bodies get stiff and unwilling to learn new habits, as their time goes on – most folks are just not flexible enough to cope with several decades of constant change.

Old people who can cope, tend to live longer. They tend not to go senile. Everyone knows some bright, capable nonagenarian who may creak when they walk – but who remain vital and competent. Kage figured that attitude was paramount to permitting the human mind to survive immortality. Her original plan for How To Make Company Operatives revolved around a careful regimen of philosophy and mental discipline.

Then she decided that humans really couldn’t be relied on to do that. Mechanics had to be added, since almost no one has the attention span and motive to convince their kidney cells not to senesce. Fruitarians, Breatharians, yogis and swamis and the more ecstatic sorts of Christian saints all purport to do it – but, you know, they die. That automatically renders their method irrelevant. “Immortality that works until you croak it,” Kage commented, after researching someone’s claims to have survived for 50 years on one cream biscuit, “is a fucking failure.”

So she went to machinery. She was more comfortable with it anyway, being a hands-on sort of person herself. Clockwork was regretfully rejected as both too detectable and too fragile; also, the business of aging – or not – occurs down at the cellular level, and so the devices to control it had to fit into cells. Thus, nanobots to keep constant vigil on friable telomeres; nano-machinery to produce new chemicals and redesign old organs into useful, immortal new ones. New bones, new skin, new blood; all better than new. Your cyborg will never need their wombs or testicles: think how much brand new machinery you can pack into those spaces!

And of course you’ll need nano-electronics to wire it all together – that’s pretty much what the human nervous system does, after all. It can be done better too.

Prostheses and molecular machinery is what Kage settled on. finally. But she kept the programming, too; because, she said, “Corporations would program their employees if they could. Dr. Zeus can.”

So, Kage was always fascinated when someone got augmented in some way. The innovations in prosthetic limbs just fascinated her; she used to sketch decorative schemes she wanted if she ever had to replace a limb. She really liked the flame motifs you see on trucks and motorcycle tanks …

None of us managed to get really interesting surgical amendations, though. True, one of my ureters has been partly made of Teflon since I was 18; and I do have five platinum stents in my cardiac arteries. But those are only brute-force plumbing, no more advanced than the Romans spiling a stream. She’d was delighted when she herself was fitted with a permanent port in her arm, complete with teeny pumps in her chest – she said it felt just as she’d imagined: which was, she could barely feel it – except when she was asleep, and dreamed of the humming machinery no one could see beneath her skin.

She would love the clever little machine my brother-in-law wears under the hollow of his shoulder. It monitors his laggard heart, and broadcasts its activity several times a day via a dedicated modem. The modem sits next to a Lava Lamp on a living room shelf, under a pretty tea towel to hide its glowing green eye … thus do we shroud vast changes with homely familiarity, so we sleep at night without an eldritch green light painting the walls.

My monitor is not so fancy, because it’s a temporary measure. A recording device. Someone asked me yestreday if I was sure an actual doctor had installed it as it seemed to be bugging me. And yes, it does; but also yes, it was – it’s just freaking inconvenient.

I understand that for men it’s easier to use, being stuck on lower on the chest – in my case, it had to go above the swell of the breast in order to hear my heartbeat. And since I have the remains of what was once an heroic bosom, they practically had to wrap it round my throat. Also, I have (amusingly) a slight case of dextrocardia, meaning my heart is a bit further to the right than is standard. Not a true situs inversus, just enough to make it harder than usual to locate my heartbeat. So the ZIO had to be lined up with my sternum.

The ZIO is a way to monitor my heart without sticking me in the hospital, of which I approve. It’s a prelude to deciding whether or not I need a monitor/pacemaker installed permanently. If that happens, my life will be a lot easier! In the meantime – I have this weird rubbery lorgnette glued to me for another week. But Kage would be better pleased with it – it looks so modern. It’s plastic, it’s an awkward shape and an unnatural colour, it’s uncomfortable to use. The very soul of modernity. If that’s not an oxymoron …

Could be worse. No one’s started in on my brain.

Yet.

Kage Baker held obsession as an old friend.

She was much given to it – as a tool, as an escape, as a recreation. As an outre form of personal discipline.  It was always her approach to any project. She felt the best results could be achieved by making what she had to do into what she ardently desired to do.

“In a perfect world, we’d all be given tasks we adore to make our living,” she observed. “But it’s not a perfect world, and we have to carry crap to get a paycheck. The best way to deal with it is to get really, really interested in handle design and the history of the bucket.”

That was what she was naturally inclined to do, anyway. When something intrigued Kage, she researched it long, high and wide. For instance, a type of pottery might grab her attention: she’d find out all there was to know about it, read all the books available, find ex-potters and interview them. She’d hunt down examples in antique and thrift stores, saving up for months sometimes to acquire a perfect piece. She’d track the history of the clay to the original quarry, and then go to the abandoned site of the original factory to sift through fallen bricks and the incoming tide for shards of rejected cups and tiles.

It was Catalina Island Pottery. And she really did all that, including hiking into the interior of the island in search of clay slicks and played-out cinnebar deposits … and we found ’em, too. Along with lots of other very peculiar things. The search went on for years, growing wider and stranger all the time; but eventually Kage had a nice little collection of Catalina Ware, and knew enough about the Island’s strange history to make it a central location in the Company series.

Every one of Kage’s novels was written in a state of white-hot obsession. Sometimes she had to provoke that high-focus attention, with immersive trips and research and brain-storming and evocative foods and signature candies; but usually, obsession was the natural course of an idea for her. She got that way on her own. “It’s a natural high, man,” she’d croak,  and mime drawing on an imaginary joint until she hacked. Only Kage could get high on pretend pot …

It’s how she wrote so many novels and stories in her brief 13-year career. Laser focus, single-mindedness. Obsession. She had an FTL drive in her brain. Fire in the head, the Celts (and William Butler Yeats) called it. And when Kage was hunched over her keyboard, writing insanely, raking her hair into upstanding flames on her head – you’d believe that fire was burning its way right out of her skull.

Of course, there was a downside. Obsession could also suck her away from the writing; not often, but with an irresistible geas. It was usually research or video games, and the games were the worst. When a fit for Monkey Island took her, she’d play through all the games, one after the other, nor stop until it was complete. Old cartoons could do it, too, or the entire ouvre of a favoured actor. Did you know, Dear Readers, that Harry Houdini made movie serials? Well, he did. And I have seen every damned chapter.

I don’t have Kage’s focus, or her tendency to get shanghaied by her own obsessions. Nonetheless, the Irresistible Object can come roaring out the sky and plop down, flaming, in front of anyone from time to time. I’ve had a couple of those consuming my time and attention lately, and it’s just not been a productive week.

First, I have this ZIO cardiac monitor literally glued to my collarbone. It’s aqua-coloured soft plastic, and looks like a couple of gummy teething rings stuck together. It records whatever errata my heartbeat produces – oh, and I can press a button sunk into the squishy plastic to notate when I feel something funny. A palpitation, an incident of SOB, angina; presumably aliens in my chest cavity, or a sudden syncopation in my systolic beats would be included. I keep a log of what I notice, which will be synched to the record this doohickey is recording. After two weeks, I mail it to the lab for analysis.

I don’t know precisely what happens then. What I do know is that it pulls with every breath or movement, and cannot be ignored. The glue itches maddeningly. And I find myself anxiously aware of every heartbeat, every cramp in my left side, every hiccough. It can’t really be determined if I am obsessed or the ZIO is – it doesn’t  make much difference, since the damned thing has taken over my life. And there’s still a week to go.

And it looks, as my dear nephew observed, like the worst Borg cosplay in the world.

Oh, and I have suddenly discovered a hitherto-overlooked television series: Sherlock. I am very fond of The Canon, and so very picky about dramatizations; I’ve ignored this show while most of my friends developed swoons over Cumberbatch. But since seeing The Desolation of Smaug, I must admit he has a marvellous voice … and Martin Freeman is adorable. Anyway, I finally gave in and began to watch episodes on my Amazon video feed.

Well, that was a stupid thing to do. Now I am hooked. The first night, I stayed up until 4:30 in the morning watching the first season repeatedly. Oh, the horror when I realized there were only 3 episodes per season! Who the hell came up with that one? It’s fiendishly cruel, and now I am rationing Season 2;  which is equally, inhumanly brief. Last night, I watched A Scandal In Belgravia …

Oh. My. God.

Kage would be entranced. Feverishly enchanted; pulse-racing, pupil dilating, breath-catching  fascinated.

Not to put too fine a point upon it … obsessed. And oh my goodness! So am I.

Kage Baker did not trust machinery – at least, none with moving parts. She wanted to trust them. Kage liked personal relationships with her tools. It was just hard for her to trust anything more complex than a draw knife, or a croquill.

After long acquaintance, she did reach emotional compromises with our car, her computer, some of the kitchen appliances … The food processor, for instance, could be relied upon to crush ice to a cocktail-usable consistency, and that won Kage over pretty much. The KitchenAid mixer was not only Empire Red but came with an ice-cream maker attachment: Kage got very chummy with it, due to these exemplary virtues; although she never managed to make the bread hooks work.

She never really came to terms with her computer. She depended on it, needed it, lavished praise and love on it – but she knew it could fail at any moment, for (by her reckoning) totally insane reasons. Everything she knew how to do with computers was skill learned by rote. It might as well have been a ritual; she followed the instructions like a voudon rite or a Wiccan spell, and absolutely did not understand when it didn’t work.

I think most of the problem was software. Kage’s was not compatible with anything commercially produced. From time to time, inevitably, I would hear a rising howl of profanity, accompanied by banging noises: I’d go tearing in to find Kage slamming her fists on the desk and yelling at the computer. The computer, in turn, would have inexplicably converted a mordantly hilarious soliloquy by Joseph to gibberish in a size 36 Wingdings  font … Kage had an unparalleled ability to unwittingly input and activate macros; and since she didn’t know how she’d done it, she never knew how to reverse them.

And although computers have very few moving parts, they are not entirely free of the weaknesses of the flesh – belts can snap. Fans can freeze. Cunning little slidey parts can jam, usually with the only copy of her current writing project stuck in them.  Things along those lines got better when thumb drives came along, but until data storage became a portable plug-in, Kage fought bitter wars with every permutation of electromagnetic media.

What with its being so vital to her work, and so possessed of an alien and antagonistic intelligence, Kage had a stormy relationship with her computer. It’s much less vicious nowadays – I can keep it clean and functional and freer of eccentric input than she did – but it does seem to me that it runs more slowly. Even the newer bits. It misses Kage. But we slog on together, it and I. I’ve even carefully put up various bits of juju to keep it happy – not the ones best beloved of Kage, like the hand-scripted invocation to Poppa Legba (whom she felt was the loa most likely to look after computers)  but genuine little thingies that mean something to me. You have to be honest with these things.

The most important of which, of course, is the box with Kage’s ashes in it.

My lares and penates, they are: the little household gods that keep the milk fresh and the fire going and the temporary files cache from incubating malware. A ceramic hare that looks like she’s made out of chocolate. The plastic skeleton that holds my daily pill cup between his bony knees. Various candles, all half-burned or battery-powered; I’ve yet to try and light one of the battery lights, but you never know … there’s a rose-scented Yankee Candle, and the Lamps of the Weird, and a miniature Stonehenge set in a little box. Outsized glass gems tend to roll out between the stacks of Kage’s books and fall into my coffee cup.

Kage’s own magic tokens ran heavily to maritime tools and action figures. I’ve kept her windup crab that she used to set dancing sideways on the desk, and the yellow jackdaw that hops. What with climate change and the weather going nuts round here, I mean to add her barometer to the mix as well. It can go on the wall under my Kit Kat Klock.

It’s the approach if Spring Cleaning that sets me thinking and cataloging my charms and talismans. With Dickens and Christmas and New Year’s done with, it’s time to dust and reduce last year’s clutter somehow. I’m sure I’ll find things that took up residence last Spring that I have since forgotten, buried under the pile of dried tulip petals on the top right corner of the desk.

That’s half the fun of the household gods – finding new ones in the corners where you least expect them. Or old ones that you thought had buggered off. Clean faces for all! And a hopeful renewal of luck.

PS: Dear Readers, I will indeed get around to describing the interesting monitor currently glued to my chest. It’s named Zio …

Kage Baker had a personal fascination with the idea of melding machine and Man. She eventually turned it into millions of words and an entire other Universe. But first, she was simply taken with the idea of someone being partly a machine. Or maybe a machine being partly a person …

When she was a child, she often had dreams of cutting herself and finding  clockwork under her skin … tiny gears like meshed lace moving her fingers; escapements as fine as eyelashes ticking away behind her eyes. These were livid nightmares when she was little, but by adolescence she was thoroughly intrigued with the idea, and beginning to toy with story ideas.

The Tin Woodsman was her introduction to the concept; but while she liked him well enough, she did feel he was failing to develop a full and proper use of his machined additions. She liked The Tick-Tocxk Man of Oz better, but he really was completely a machine: no hidden humanity there. It was always implied that somewhere under the Woodsman’s tin, there was some real meat and juices. Just not much of a spine, Kage grumbled.

Oddly enough, she wasn’t very taken with the famous Isaac Asimov’s robot universe (though I loved it). Dr. Susan Calvin drove Kage insane, with her cold indifference and furtively concealed maternal urges toward the robots. And Kage didn’t think the 3 Laws would ever work for real Artificial Intelligence; the laws were mutually self-contradictory, and would be ignored, sidestepped and manipulated time after time. Maybe she had something there: many of Dr. Asimov’s most moving stories center around humans and robots doing exactly that.

It was the combination of human and machine that most fascinated Kage. She had an immediate and passionate response to the idea of cyborgery. Some of her initial horror she bestowed on Mendoza, along with all the poor girl’s other emotional problems. To be fair, Kage then used Joseph and, even more so, Lewis, to illustrate how a cyborged sapient could actually be happy about his condition.  But always, it was the tension of the opposing systems cheek by jowl in one person’s body that powered their character development.

Kage herself came to a full reversal of her childhood abhorrence of the idea. Clockwork – which she both loved and suspected – was simultaneously replaced in her cyborg designs, and elevated to a a splendid genre of its own by the rise of steampunk.  Her own cyborg characters replaced gleaming gears and pistons with infinitesimal machines and microscopic wires, plated with strange chemicals. Clockwork went back to being a charming toy, and Kage stopped waking up afraid of the phantom metal beneath her own skin.

By the time medical science actually did cyborg her, it was something of a lark. Having subsidiary plumbing and tiny pumps inserted delicately into her chest cavity amused her; being infused at regular intervals with alchemical mysteries was hilarious. The morphine pump was the best toy she’d had in years … and really, with its huge glowing green button and lollipop shape, it did look like Fisher-Price for druggies.

And Kage was always fascinated when someone she knew got fitted with interesting machines. I was almost a disappointment when I started collecting cardiac stents – sure, I have more jewelery in my right coronary artery than in both my earlobes: but it doesn’t glow or tick, and there are absolutely no moving parts.

Well … now I have something that would amaze and delight Kage. I spent most of the day at my cardiologist’s office, and came home with what I hope is high tech machinery but suspect is a bath toy glued to my left clavicle.

On which, Dear Readers, more anon. (See what I did there? Segue and foreshadowing!) Tomorrow, to be precise. Right now I gotta go watch a new TV show about some guy with a computer chip in his brain … wow, what won’t they think of next?

Kage Baker liked to celebrate the traditional 12 days of Christmas. She felt that the modern Christmas tradition had truncated the season, and callously robbed January of its own rightful holidays. Christmas is supposed to run on through January’s first week, after all: that’s where the 12 Days of Christmas go.

Today is their  end, being 12th Night; according to the old European calendars, Christmas begins on the 25th of December and runs for the next 12 nights.

Of course, as Kage pointed out in several of her stories, modern usage has altered that progression somewhat. In America these days, Christmas begins about a week after Halloween (making for some hilarious multi-use displays on candy shelves) and runs until the morning of December 25th. Then it’s gone, man, and we’re in free-fall through an amorphous time called “Post-Christmas sale season”, until the merchants settle down to start pushing Valentines’s Day.

A lot of our neighbors dumped their trees on Boxing Day; an alarming number of them had them in the trash by the time Christmas dinner was over. Slackers, say I – slackers! Kage and I followed every step of Christmas, with customized displays and decorations; and Kimberly does the same.

Our tree is still up, and will be until tomorrow – then, and only then, with 12th Night decently put to rest, will the glorious tree come down.  White candles will go up instead of red and green; fresh flowers in the vase at the end of my desk. Living in California, I am fortunate enough to have fresh blooms in a a wider selection that just yew and holly, and I like to take advantage of that – Trader Joe’s is my friend there. In fact, I could probably actually find yew and holly at Trader Joe’s …

Before Christmas shifted seismically and ate the next month’s holidays, January 6th used to be quite a multi-faceted celebration. And in several separate parts of our present global society, the individual bits still shine. Kage, a party girl par excellence, liked to give all of them a nod today.

It’s 12th Night, of course – still celebrated in most of the UK, and by myriad Anglophiles  everywhere else. Various of my re-creator friends are holding 12th Night parties, dances, and dinners. And it’s a great occasion to eat up the last of the Christmas pudding (which really isn’t bad, fried …). Bonfires are fun on this night, too, and a lovely way to get rid of the Christmas tree – although not in Southern California right now, where we are having hot, hard winds and are under a red flag fire warning. It’s sometimes hard to be an English re-creator in California …

It’s also the Epiphany, celebrated by most of the Western tradition Christian churches: that is the day when the 3 Wise Men finally got through Herod’s TSA and made their way to Bethlehem. It’s regarded as the point where Christ was made manifest to the Gentiles: which is rather amusing, when you consider that most of Christendom holds the big party on December 25th and that non-Gentiles don’t observe it at all.

The Eastern Christian tradition mainly celebrates January 6th as the day Christ was made manifest as God in Man: sometimes it commemorates his baptism in the River Jordan, sometimes it’s celebrated as actual Christmas.  Armenian Christians do that. In parts of Greece, the commemoration of the Incarnation skips both December 25th and January 6th, and move the whole thing to January 19th. There it is called Theophany, endowed with all the spiritual weight and import of the previous two dates – but they’re still using the Julian Calendar, while the rest of the world uses the Gregorian.

There are probably more holidays attached to this that I don’t know or have forgotten. Kage and I collected the many uses of these layered days, and tried to honour all the old meanings; all those days and deities that got their serial numbers filed off by the early Christians. It’s hard to keep up with all of them, and they haven’t all worked out too well over the centuries. January 6, 1066 is the day Harald the 2nd was crowned in England, for example, and that was a bad day to be King of England if you weren’t William of Normandy.

But Kage felt that any and all reasons for a party should be remembered whenever possible.And so do I, especially in winter. This dark center of the year needs all the lights, colours, tinsel and goodies we can find.

So, Dear Readers, a Happy Twelfth Night to you all! Merry Armenian Christmas, and a Blessed Epiphany! Happy Birthday to Joan D’Arc, Monsieur Montgolfier and Heinrich Schliemann! Rest In Peace, Teddy Roosevelt and Nureyev! And let’s all raise a glass to poor old Harald II, while we’re at it, too.

Kage always did.

Kage Baker liked to drift slowly into the new year. Ideally, the resumption of spinning – round the Earth’s axis, round the sun, round whatever business was top of the list to be seen to – could be made gradually, with dignity and ponderous grace: like an ocean liner coming into dock, she used to say.

What the world generally imposes on us, though, is more like a Carnival Cruise – that modern successor to slavers and plague ships – careening onto some reef in its death throes. That first week or two back at a desk job is notorious for disasters and catastrophes, as the amount of crap your co-workers hid in their bottom drawers ripens, decays and becomes obvious … Kage hated the the first part of January. And unless you are among that happy crew of ne’er-do-wells who leaves their garbage for after the New Year, I bet most of you, Dear Readers, do as well.

Despite all the insecurities and terrors of being self-employed – especially as a writer, the gods save us all – the freedom from the deathly cycles of the office was Paradise for Kage. It took her a few tries to make working from home work completely; there were some years when she still had to march into what she called the pink-collar ghetto at least part time. But freedom became hers for longer and longer periods of time. She achieved her goal years before retirement age, which was what she had planned; she could make her living from her desk, looking out the window at the sea.

Her ultimate goal was to make both our livings doing that. She came damned close, too. Another year of health and her inhuman pace of writing, and I too could have stayed at home as Kage’s own office staff. That was our plan, anyway. And with the way the American economy has been behaving these last 20 years, it wasn’t the worst retirement plan I’ve heard. It almost worked.

Kage, not too surprisingly, was cleverer than Congress.

When she became aware that her last New Year was coming – the last horizon over which to march out of the winter dark into light – she set about making sure the plan would work for me in her absence. She sent me home to Los Angeles, where Kimberly could keep an eye on me. She drilled me night and day on story ideas, told me where to find her notes: what she could remember of them, anyway; I’m still finding take out Chinese menus and old green pages torn from legal pads in various boxes, on which Ermenwyr or Joseph cavort in unlikely heroism  … she made me haul out my own writing, laid away 30 years and more, to renew my interest. Or at least to frighten me into improving it.

“You can write,” she told me fiercely. “And you will. I order it.”

Kage never took No for an answer. I never found a way to say it to her, either.

So, here I am. Another New Year has passed, in a slowing blur of coloured lights and mirrors: the dark heart of winter has frozen Time in place for a while right now, and it’s very slowly resuming its gyre. Which is just the way Kage liked it.

It will be 4 years since her death at the end of this month. Things aren’t going quite as I expected. This year has been the hardest yet for me, just when I thought I was getting better. It turns out that looking round with a suddenly clear head, I am appalled and staggering with the blow of her loss.

Hell of a way to run things, I fear. I think, though, that if I am sliding backwards from time to time, it’s only 11 inches for every foot I advance. That’s progress. Sort of.

And hey – I’m freer than I’ve ever been; and if creativity is slower for me than for Kage with her mind like a chest of sky rockets. that’s just the way it goes. The ideas continue. The writing goes on. I’m already booked into one Con for this year, and the newest books continue to get good reviews and sales. I’ve been in my pajamas since Christmas Eve, and I can stay in them until 12th Night tomorrow if I want to. (And I will. They’re new blue polar fleece, with snowflakes on. Ubercool.)

I’m making my living, working from my desk and looking out the window at the mountains. I’m surviving.

Slowly.

Kage Baker didn’t think much of January 2nd. It’s pretty much overtaken by its predecessor, when all the fuss goes on … and through most of her life, Kage found herself returning to either school or work on the second day of a new year. That added no bloom for her, I can assure you.

Beginning on January 2nd, the world starts to come back into focus very, very slowly; like the Hubble, straining its servomotors and mirrors for one long last clear look into the light of the Big Bang. The world takes its time to return to firm reality. Kage never bothered to hurry it, either. January is largely a drag, especially for school kids. It’ll be weeks and weeks before one can even look forward to a chocolate heart, or those nasty hard little Candygrams that tasted like aspirin.

Once Kage was a self-employed writer, though, she grew fonder of early January in general. The holiday rush was over; Dickens Fair had been survived, the costumes washed, the props put away. Kage had time to eat her Christmas goodies and play with her Christmas toys in an atmosphere free of guilt and hurry. Most years, anyway – there were a few times she had to immediately wade heart-high into the stream of a neglected story; but when you only have to do that as a rare emergency, it gets a patina of romance and heroism. And that makes it a lot more entertaining to get through.

Anything was better than dragging one’s unhappy self to school, wrapped in blue wool and ugly plaids; with white polyester blouses that went transparent if it rained on you, (and NO interesting underwear), socks that wouldn’t stay up even with garters, saddle shoes like huge albino potatoes … the lot of a Catholic school girl when Christmas vacation ends is not a happy one. At least one silly hopeful tries out her new earrings or makeup in the hopes they won’t be noticed – but that trick never works. Though it’s amusing to watch, for those of us who didn’t have a brain fart big enough to think Mary Quant eye liner was going to get past Sister Callista’s scrutiny.

Having to go back to work, in later years, was actually easier than going back to school. At least you could wear your new clothes, jewels and makeup. And no office, thank all the gods, ever had that winter smell of oranges, wet wool and sour milk that was exuded in classrooms. Kage used to wrap her tartan scarf around her lower face like a Celtic Bedouin, breathing through its scents of Coca Cola and Red Door, her black eyes flashing with disdain.

How she got away with that scarf, I’m not entirely sure. Maybe because our high school was an ancient pile of rotting stone and wood, that closely resembled a model of Gormanghast faced with graham crackers. It was cold enough in there to hang meat, so she probably convinced her teachers the scarf was to ward off the mold and cold … in the spring, I recall, she’d tie it round her arm and claim it was a political statement.

(Note to any younger Dear Readers, or those whose next generations are entering the world through Catholic schools: you can get away with a lot more if you pick a radicalized order of nuns as teachers. It’s more interesting, too.)

Kage’s last January – well, in the first week of it, we were still convinced she’d get better. We were planning a trip to Pacific Heights in February, so she could work on a story about trolls and witches: some Icelandic illustration had caught her fancy, and started up a story line in her head. She told it to me, but I’ve not been able to make it come to life. Maybe a trip to Pacific Heights would help, even after all this time.

Looking through her books of history timelines – Kage collected them, and wrote comments and gibes in the margins – she decided not to die in early January. She said it was boring. Except, oddly enough, for January 2nd – today is the anniversary of the deaths of both Patrick O’Brien (1914 to 2000) and George McDonald Frazier (1925 to 2008), who are two of Kage’s very most especially favourite authors. If you, Dear Readers, are not familiar with the works of these gentlemen, I abjure and direct you to read them. They are magnificent.

But the anniversary date came too early for Kage to join their party; she still felt good and was sure she was going to live. So she dismissed it. I brought her home from the hospital a few days later, post craniotomy and with her long braid shorn to high school length again.

The world was coming into focus, all right, but it wasn’t the world we’d left on the other side of the New Year. We didn’t know it yet, but all of Kage’s time was rushing for the shore in a great King Tide. Everything was coming in, coming back, coming home; and the vessel looming into focus beyond the breakers wore the long white sails of departure …

But, hey – we didn’t know it. We ate leftover Hoppin’ John, and Kage watched her new restored copy of The Wizard of Oz.

You need something like that to liven up January 2nd, you know.