Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker felt that seasons were not only arranged chronologically, but geographically.This is easier to demonstrate in chimerical California than in most places; our seasons are subtle and given to makeup and costumes.

A certain characteristic winter light, for instance, can always be found in the Northern skies, though the air through which it falls may be sweltering hot. Spring happens in the sea hills when they turn silver-green with wild oats and sweet herbs: never mind if the calendar says December. Summer shows up for 24 hours at a time at all random points of the year – usually at night, when warms winds freighted with the perfumes of orange blossom and hot stone will blow mysteriously down from the canyons: I’ve danced in the moonlight and that wind as often in January as in July.

In Kage’s personal calendar, Halloween marked the end of Autumn anyway. That was the more so this year, when the day after All Hallows found my driving North for the first Dickens Fair rehearsals – we open the last week of November this year, and so rehearsal began only two days past Halloween.  And, Dickens being Extreme Christmas, we drove straight into Winter.

My co-pilot this year is my nephew Michael. Mike is 22 now, tall and broad and neatly bearded – though he began his pilgrimages up and down I-5 in his cradle and swaddling clothes, cooing and laughing at the truck lights at night … he’s a Faire Brat, though now he is a large and competent one, and is playing a young solicitor at Dickens Fair. He also keeps track of the maps, hands me coffee and water bottles, and handles the CD player. His grasp of technology is light-years further on than his Aunt Kage’s was: he was burning CDs off his laptop while we roared along singing our lungs out to  Battlefield Band …

Kage would approve. She was one of the grownups singing “Go Down, Ye Blood Red Roses” and other nursery favourites (for Faire kids, anyway) to Michael when he rode in a car seat. His fondness for the road and technology has informed the characters of a few boys in her stories, too …

We clearly drove from Autumn to Winter on Friday. The San Fernando Valley was full of pumpkins and corn shocks (decorations, mostly, but hey – they were there) but we came down into fields full of haycocks and cotton bales on the far side of the Grapevine. The vineyards are limp and lank, the fields of peppers and herbs and cauliflower are all flattened, gleaned remnants; yellow and white dunes of sulfur and bone meal stand outside the apricot orchards to be spread among the trees. The stockyards are full of fattening cattle, but the corn fields are down to rattling bones of sheaves. Harvest is everywhere.

We saw no Redcaps on the road near Kettleman City this time, but we did pass a white dog with red ears. He was lying by the side of the highway, nose on paws. It was too sad to think he might be a family pet lost to the traffic, so I told myself firmly he was one of the Hounds of the Wild Hunt.  It was the day after Halloween, after all. He was just going home, and fell asleep on the way after a hard night. It could happen.

As we drove further Winter-wards, the numbers of road kill grew larger and odder. It’s always that way this time of year, a mark of the seasons changing. Summer on I-5 is marked with unlucky and suicidal birds: ravens, hawks, owls, scattered like feather bouquets on the verge. Winter runs to coyotes – though old Coyote is faking when you think he’s dead and approachable: ladies beware! You find more cats and dogs then, too, and occasionally an escaped and flattened cow. Deer appear as you near Winter lands.

Badgers also show up around now. (Yes, there are badgers in California.) We saw four of them terminally reclined by the side of the road this weekend – either that, or the raccoons are mutating into something closer to bears. These sure looked badger-y, though. Those claws are unmistakeable, and their masks are not in the least comic. I should have stopped and collected one – I have a dear friend who has long coveted a badger skull – but he was busy moving this weekend, and I don’t think a dead badger is really a good housewarming gift. Also, with badgers as with coyotes, one is never quite sure they are actually dead …

By the time we made it into Marin, the roadside casualties were ducks and Starbucks cups. And we were firmly within the boundaries of Winter: the vineyards there are heraldic gold and burgundy, there is the smell of frost in the mornings and wood smoke at sunset. Fog reigns on the coast. The transformation happens as you cross the Bay; all the bridges traverse dimensions and worlds up there.It was my deep delight to re-introduce Micheal to the magic act of passing from one season to another – just as his Aunt Kage loved it, just as I do.

Good thing the kid grew up to like wool coats. Winter is here, and so are we.

Kage Baker sometimes declared that some days were just … gone. Wasted. The sun comes out too late and watery to do one any good, and yet the weather will not do anything hearty. Like rain.

Rain would be nice. It would give me an excuse to go back to bed.

Kage called this condition “mumping.” She would announce her condition of, and intention to,  mump, and then bundle up in a lap robe and watch cartoons. She never went back to bed – that was for weanies. She just mumped in place. “I am a mump bud,” she would declare. Thouogh when she got into her 30’s, she decided maturity called upon her to become a mump blossom, instead.

Apparently, a mump blossom looks like a cross between a squash blossom and a used datura flower.

I am a mump blossom to day; one that’s going to seed. It’s a slightly grey, sort of chilly, vaguely sad day. My experiments with a new oatmeal and the microwave resulted in paving the oven with semi-congealed rolled oats. The parrot insisted on eating my yoghurt. Lou Reed might be dead but probably isn’t. He’s always been tricky … I missed the observance of St. Crispian’s Day two days ago. Halloween is in 4 days, Novel In A Month begins in 5 days, Dickens Fair Rehearsals begins in 6 days: and I am not ready for anything. But in 3 days, I have a lovely doctor’s appointment to complain that my diabetes meds are not working and my blood sugar is still too high – and I haven’t even gotten into the Halloween candy. Yet.

The Esselene Indians (whom I am supposed to be researching today) had a tribal saying: Xue elo xonia eune. “I come from the rock.”

Yeah, me, too. And now I’m gonna crawl back under mine.

Kage Baker seldom explained herself.

In part that was because she seldom felt that she needed to explain anything. She was a very private person, and abhorred drawing attention to herself – she always felt that being noticed was an imposition on her privacy. Being invisible, she said, was always the most elegant fashion choice.

So if you witnessed something you didn’t understand, you probably weren’t meant to see it. And if you were meant to see it, Kage would have put it in a book or done it at a convention. Those were the times and places where she was officially Visible, and her actions invited analysis and required explanation. Some of the time, anyway. It was only the week before her cancer surgery that she consented to reveal to the world that she was ill at all: and that was mostly because she spent her final Convention in a wheel chair, and felt she ought to explain our roaring madly about the halls at full speed …

I know for certain that some folks didn’t figure it out, what with the laughing and carrying on and side-swiping doorjambs and Kage majestically flinging Halloween chocolate to all and sundry as we ran around. Those folks were very surprised when she died three months later. But Kage felt she’d explained all she needed to back in October …

Of course, part of her not explaining was that she could leave it to me. That was part of my responsibility in the Writing Enterprise of Kage Baker. But Kage took it on herself to explain to Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore in San Diego, the time she was scheduled to do a signing and never showed up … she confused the date and we were off adventuring out of reach of all phones while people from the Mexican border to the Canadian one, and from West Coast to East Coast, exchanged frantic phone calls. We got back to Pismo Beach in the middle of the night to find a note from the Pismo Beach Police Department pinned to our door: Call Your Agent. She Doesn’t Know Where You Are.

Mucho hysteria, mucho apologies, mucho penitential boxes of doughnuts taken to the Police Department. Kage apologized to Mysterious Galaxy for the rest of her life, and many readers got a giggle out of the entire incident. I did, too.

And now: what a lot of new responsibilities are mine, and what bizarre things are getting in the way of my achieving them! I didn’t expect my health to collapse when Kage died – I figured a lot of things would happen, but not that – and so I’ve been fighting all sorts of odd impediments these last almost 4 years. I still tend to be awake all night and sleep all day, which is not convenient; I have the stamina of a wet Kleenex. My heart is being annoying. Diabetes has handed me a whole new universe of Brand! New! Problems!, all of which impact trying to write. Old friends keep dying.

Right now … I’m supposed to go see my doctor for mandatory flu shots and a weird pain in my leg. My blood sugar refuses to stabilize. I sleep too much and at the wrong times. I have Dickens Fair rehearsals beginning next weekend, and National Novel Writing Month beginning 2 days before that. Halloween is in a week, and I can’t have candy. I have a new Dan Simmons book, but I’m supposed to be doing research on the Tharsis Bulge and the Eselene Indians. And I am not being regular at all, Dear Readers, with this blog. Now you know why. Sort of.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! – as we used to sing out in three-part harmony from the loft, while the priest and altar boys prostrated themselves on the sacristy carpet. I always felt like an avenging angel, smugly calling for repentance from on high.

Not nearly so much fun when it’s you who are pushing that culpable max, though. But in a day or six, that Night of All Souls will be upon us, and I can abandon the religious memories of childhood for some other, more topical faith. My Celtic ancestors celebrated the New Year at this time; they lit lights and wore masks to confuse the angry dead, and offered goodies to the rest to start over again in blessing and plenty.

Farewell to guilt, then, and welcome in you newest year of sacred nights! That’s all the explanation I need to give or get.

Kage Baker had special rituals in place for all the events of a writer’s life. Rituals to honour the receipt of a contract, or a check. The special dance she danced when her author’s copies arrived. The rite to heal the psychic scarring of a bad review.

Many critics would, I fear, be alarmed to discover their names were scribed on parchment, burned to ash, and scattered on the relentless waves of Pismo Beach … or maybe not. Writers are rarely as shy as Kage was. The livelier members of her genre have been occasionally notorious for the retribution meted out to those who displeased them. All Kage did was cleanse the aether.

The rite for finishing a book was a prize ceremony. She kept a wish list – things encountered on the Web as she researched, or things she had somehow lost since childhood, and (being Kage) wanted to get back. When a project was complete, she turned to her wish list, and we figured out which item on it was immediately achievable. The prize was less if she’d just completed a short story than for when she finished a book. And some of them depended on our cash flow – she sometimes had to wait for a big prize (like coffee table editions of Disney art, or chrome fittings for the Cruiser) until the advance check came, or I had a payday.

One of her favourite RIGHT NOW! rewards was a new computer game. She liked pirates  (the Monkey Island series was her utter fave rave) and RPGs with really good art and engines (like Planescape: Torment). She discovered a rather frightening talent for gunnery (it scared me, anyway), and so would play a few First Person Shooters: if they contained large artillery, anyway.

I’m afraid Fruit Ninja or Angry Birds would have been scorned to oblivion by Kage.

Of course, her heart truly belonged first and foremost to pinball games. She was a deadly serious and preternaturally skilled player, racking up replay after replay and often running the scoreboard all the way around to zero again. The arcades of Pismo were her childhood holiday nirvana; once we moved there to live, she tended to hit them mid-week. Then, fewer people wondered at a middle-aged woman with red hair to her waist crouched with cold-eyed concentration over some Bally table.

I suggested once she add an actual pinball machine of her own to the wish list – her advances and royalties would have bought her one, no problem. Kage, wise woman that she was, said NO. “If I had a pinball machine of my own,” she said, “I’d never write again.”

Good point.

Well. Last night, I finished a novel. Not only that, I finished what will be the last official rewrite before sending it off to my agent, the lovely and patient Linn. This thing has been rewritten so many times over the years that – well, I’m not even sure how many times it has been. The first version was handwritten in Higgins permanent black ink on erasable typing paper – one of our most asinine choices of medium, by the way, as nothing will stay on the damned page. Not if you need to store it for a few decades, anyway …

Kage and I wrote it together, in turns, in our very early 20’s. Write what you know, one writer’s proverb goes: and what did we know at 22 and 23? Damned little, but we worked a long, complicated, picaresque saga out of it, wherein a pair of fairly idiotic and unworldly nuns are loose on a Sacred Mission in a battered world poised between apocalypses. If what you know is that you don’t know enough to come in out of the rain, well: a pretty weird buddy story can be woven out of that.

I wrote the technology; Kage wrote the religions (two, at war) and the folklore. Everything else was a collaboration. Much of it was unbelievably bad … but over the many, many years, as it was transposed to type-written text, then floppy  floppies, then hardcase floppies, then disks and now an absurdly tiny thumb drive: it’s changed a lot. It’s a lot more readable. It’s a lot more polished. Somehow, though, it’s not appreciably shorter than it was originally, despite what Kage removed and used elsewhere over the years …

I even found an error that dates to the first translation from handwritten to typed,  a character name change that Kage came up with some 100 pages over the character was first introduced: I had to go back and retype every reference with the new name. It scarred me for life. No Find and Replace on an IBM Model B! Somehow, despite all the reworking, that error had survived 35 years to surprise me last week.

Sometimes I think we are pressed between the pages of our memories’ books, instead of the other way around.

Anyway: it’s done. Next week I will send it off to Linn, and hope she doesn’t promptly return it with wild and raucous laughter. Or if she does, that it will sell anyway. In the meantime, though, I will reward myself with … books. Some entire series that I can stack up and read all in one greedy go.

Then I’ll resume work on Marswife. November is NaNoWriMo time and I’ll be aiming at 50,000 words in 30 days.

By that time, a new game should due out from the folks who made Torment. I’ll have to get that.

It’ll be a reward for Kage.

Kage Baker  was picky  about her monsters. Zombies never really made the cut.

She did have a slight soft spot for 1932’s White Zombies, but it was only due to loyalty to Bela Lugosi. Lugosi is interesting in it, but the rest of the film sucks – and not in that good Lugosi way. You could claim it’s a metaphor for the paternalistic use, abuse and acquisition of women – the “hero” hires a witch doctor to bend his desired lady to his will, but accidentally turns her into a zombie instead. However, that’s a metaphor blunt enough to cause brain damage, and most of the cast emotes by frenzied weeping or staggering around glassy-eyed like Millie the Moocher on the opium nod.

When George Romero achieved the modern zombie paradigm of decaying, brain-eating revenants, Kage opted out of the genre altogether. While she conceded the Romero films had a definite black humour and cinematographic skill,  they were just too disgusting for her. I’d like to think that some of the recent efforts – the hysterical Zombieland, say, or Simon Pegg’s incomparable Sean of the Dead – would have pleased her more. But maybe not. Flying eyeballs, oozing brains and peekaboo viscera were just not her style.

She didn’t even like to watch the Thriller video.

Anyway, here we are coming on apace to Halloween and the walking dead are much on my mind. Not the television show – the synthesis between fantasy and soap opera leaves me cold. I found myself rooting for the zombies to eat all those self-absorbed whiners very early on … the modern fondness for injecting decent horror, science fiction and fantasy with the febrile plot devices of General Hospital is booooring. Hell, the Munsters were a better show.

No, it’s my own dead that haunt me this autumn. I’ve hit a bad patch. On the one hand, I am in a perpetual black mood; occasionally it lightens to a really, really dark grey, but, like Batman, not really very often.  Grief is a constant stone in my breast – or maybe it’s my heart acting up, but I really don’t think so. At worst, it’s indigestion, as I am now conscientiously eating 5 or 6 tiny meals a day: high in protein, low in carbs, and about 10 times more than I used to eat at all.

I miss bread. I miss Kage. I miss being carelessly strong and capable, able to get by on a few hours of sleep in a night. I miss the interesting high of being wide awake and  hungry, burning my candles at both ends and refining spiritual lamp oil out of exhaustion and sensory overload.

I am quite detesting this getting old business – life most emphatically does not begin at 50 (or whatever catch phrase  age is now in vogue): it begins where it always did, in the cold grey light before dawn, where you are always the same age. And you’d better harvest all the strength you can from yourself there,  because you’re not going to get it from anywhere else.

On the other hand (there is another hand; several, usually, Fate being as many-armed as Kali Ma) – on the other hand, I am writing. I’ve been neglecting this blog, Dear Readers, because my waking hours have been focused on getting an old, old, old novel fit to show to my agent. It might be a waste of time, but it’s something I have to do. It knows it, too; the damn thing runs riot through my sleep and is evidently building a time distortion field around my desk – I cannot lose any portion of it, though it’s made of a dreadful patchwork of typed and handwritten sheets of all sizes. Every time I need something I’m sure was eaten by mice 40 years ago, it inexplicably shows up – Kage’s distinctive, wretched hand writing, good expensive black ink clinging to cheap paper.

I am now so far in re-writes, it’s going to be easier to finish it and send it off, than to do anything else. At least then it will be Linn’s problem for awhile, and stop haunting me.

I hope so, anyway. I am so very tired of all the insistent ghosts outside my doors. It’s time and past time for some of them to walk on a little ways.

Whaddaya say, dead people? Bug off awhile and let me work. This is real life here, not some silly TV show.

Walk on.

Kage Baker was energized by autumn.

It was part of her inner squirrel sympathies. Ever since she was very small, she had liked to pretend to be a squirrel; as a child, she would scurry about the enormous yard that surrounded the house, collecting things for a winter stash. An extraordinary variety of things grew in Momma’s garden: berries, grapes, nuts and corms and seeds.

Lots of them were edible, and even the ones that weren’t could be pressed into service as pretend food. Bee balm and rose petals make splendid pretend candies; the inflorescence of calla lilies can be ground into pretend flour, though it’s actually thousands of tiny flowers. Eucalyptus nuts come in several interesting shapes and sizes, and can be nibbled for a refreshing burst of menthol flavour.

Not that Kage actually ate any of them (well, she nibbled). Mostly, the point of the game was the storing up – the selection and curating of a hoard of goodies against the coming winter. She’d take real snacks out into the yard in the long autumn twilights, and eat amid her squirrelery before being called back into the house for the night.

When Kage grew up, she was able to play this game in earnest. We kept ample stores of dry goods; the pantry was never complete unless we had flour, salt and sugar in ample amounts. Our freezer was full of cuts of meat carefully divided into meal-sized portions; Kage got a real thrill out of cutting up some enormous roast that would last for half a dozen meals. Whenever we were flush, we stocked waaay up on whatever needed it – paydays were a carnival of acquisition. And she adored CostCo – the first time I took her to one, she exclaimed, “Oh my God, it’s the perfect squirrel paradise!” And promptly went happily mad.

None of this went to waste, either. Kage was a sensible squirrel – true, she enjoyed the mere act of acquisition, but the actual point of the exercise was to be able to be safe and comfortable through the coming season. She was an excellent and inventive cook, as well, so nothing we carried home in bulk was abandoned to go stale: she found ways to use it. She experimented with historic recipes (turnips poached in cream; venison with fruits in syrup; pottage of leeks) and with the cuisines she invented for various of her novels – Bandit Beef with tangerines and green onions was from the Children of the Sun. Chicken broth with sherry, ginger and teeny little pasta pockets full of herbs was a Yendri dish.

The winter delights Kage would concoct for Dickens Fair were all practiced during autumn. Her determination to make the perfect boiled pudding was a delirium of tastes – she experimented with all sorts of fillings for both sweet and savoury puddings – jams, slivered or pureed meats, fruits dried and fresh … the best were the apricot jam pudding, and the sticky toffee one.  Though the plum was astounding. And the spotted dick, the steak and onion, the toad inna hole … and a semi-comic variation, toad onna stick …

Let no one wonder how I mostly avoided processed food, and yet ended up spherical in my old age. Kage was a divinely inspired cook who didn’t know diddly squat about portion control.

Nor is this to claim I was innocent in gustatory experimentation. I can cook, though my specialities in our household were primarily baking: all sorts of breads. I make killer pies – potentially literally, sometimes, as I learned how to produce giant coffin pies a la Mendoza. And for years, Kage’s bag lunches were anchored by fresh scones that I baked every Sunday and apportioned into her daily lunch. Her favourites were the parmesan ones.

Good times. Good eats, good games – a little girl’s squirrel fantasy, grown up and broadened to use all the riches of the harvest season. This time of year, we forted up and settled down; the time that wasn’t spent in frenzied Extreme Christmas was spent on the thorough enjoyment of security and warmth. It’s a pretty nice way to live.

It’s quite true, alas, that I have lately also been fighting off the tendency to hibernate. Now that the season is finally changing in Los Angeles, the nights are growing cold: wonderful, perfect weather to sleep 14 hours at a time. Narcolepsy has spread shining wings and revealed itself as an incubus: I am drunk on sleep, in love with my bed.

But when I achieve something like consciousness, I am going over some of the other autumn store Kage left me. I’ve sent another story to my agent; I’m looking over the notes on urban fantasies, because a nice editor actually asked me to consider submitting a story to a new anthology! I’m making the last-for-now corrections to an entire novel to send to Linn. Kage and I wrote it together, in turns and with much hilarity and acting out of silly scenes and characters, long long ago … she mined out much of her work (and a little of mine)  later, and turned it into Anvil of the World and House of the Stag and Bird of the River. But a lot remains. We shall see.

So it’s fall housekeeping now. The season of the squirrel! Time to finalize the full pantry, the groaning shelves, the shining bits of fire and glory in the dusty caverns of my desk drawers. Who knows what I can find, to stave off darkness and the killing cold?

Well, Kage, of course. She left it there for me, after all.

Kage Baker had a will of iron. This led to a lot of unfortunate confrontations in her childhood – she had a quiet but unbreakable adamancy that drove many adults to hysteria. She couldn’t be bought off with one treat in place of another, already-promised one; she never forgot and seldom forgave, and she would not compromise.

She was once promised a tricycle for being calm and good while rushed to the ER for a cut hand. On returning home un-exsanguinated, it was decided that a trike was too dangerous – the house being perched high above the street on a hill crest, with no flat land around it – and she got a 6-pack of Coke instead. Which she had to share with all her younger siblings.

She was still recounting this incident with grim disapproval in her 50’s.

To her credit, Kage held herself to the same high standard as everyone else. She disliked outside direction, and was wont to perform an assigned task her own way – but she always got it done. If the assigning adult couldn’t cope with Kage doing something her own way (and a surprising number of them couldn’t), then fireworks and frustration arose. But not for Kage. She went right on and did things her own way, and more often than not she was right.

She ultimately came to believe that this was one of her best traits as a professional writer. The same determination that led her to do all the homework in her take-home English book in one long weekend – and end up in detention for the sin of pride – ensured that she missed only one deadline in her entire career. And she then turned in the commissioned novel within a 60-day extension, producing Empress of Mars in a frenzied 6-week marathon.

Obviously, Kage resented all distractions: one of the ways she managed 12 hour days that really were spent writing, was to establish an armed perimeter round her desk. That was why she loved her computer -she could maintain her self-imposed purdah from there.Some of you, Dear Readers, had deep email relationships with Kage; believe me, she answered much more readily from behind the rood-screen of her keyboard. She was more relaxed as an anchorite.

It was why we had an answering machine on the phone, and that no call was ever answered until callers identified themselves. This led to much profanity and threats of violence from friends and relations, who were sure we were there and just hiding (because  that’s precisely what we were doing); we got some extraordinary messages left for us. It also led to our friends and relations talking to Harry, in hopes we’d hear them, relent and pick up the damned phone. To this very day, Harry gets excited when the phone rings, and jumps up and down calling hopefully “Hello? Hello?”

It was why Kage sometimes complained of the noise made by Harry preening, or how loudly I turned pages or knit. I remember her clutching her head and growling that the pulse in her ears was too loud.

The bottom line of all this domestic security was that Kage tried to be completely undistractible. It worked, too. Between me walking the perimeter and her own will-power, Kage could focus with inhuman intensity. And the more she wrote, the more she wanted to write, so that something very like a perpetual motion machine was set going … or maybe like the nuclear fusion in a star working its relentless way up the elemental table in its urgency to create light.

I’m not so happily armoured. I am wildly distractible – and years of being an aunt, a director, a foster mother, and a general herder of cats have honed my hearing to a kind of radar. I have no OFF switch. I can’t not hear stuff. Somewhere, someone way be about to fall in the toilet or make a poor tool use choice or set themselves on fire. Noise level has nothing to do with it; noise doesn’t bother me. What bothers me and yanks me out of the creative daze is suddenly realizing I cannot account for all my beloveds’ activities or locations. Or that funny noise coming from the kitchen.

I’m afire to write just now. But things keep interfering – episodes of mad cat syndrome, the Corgi detecting the approach of hobgoblins and badgers, my tendency to fall asleep for hours at a time when my blood sugar dips too low. The little black cat adores the heat exhausts of computers, and when she comes to snuggle with my hard drive, she disconnects the leash of the modem hub and my internet access goes down.

Mendicant vendors have been coming to the door, inquiring whether or not we want to sell our house, buy their candy, sign up for automatic tamale deliveries. We keep getting calls (3, so far, today) from earnest people assuring us in broken English that they are detecting malware on our computer long distance, which they will gladly remove if we will just give them control of our computer. Does anyone ever say YES to this? I cannot believe there are people more ignorant than the poor dimwits making these calls, who do not know how to pronounce “technician”, think all computers are Apples running Windows, and advise me to beware “The Hacker”: singular and with audible caps, like a super-villain.

However, despite the allure of World’s Finest Chocolate and world’s stupidest cyber thieves, the voices in my head are the louder. Even the monotone that recites scene seques and descriptive background (it’s dove grey and smells of violets. Devon violets.) is more commanding. That alone can keep me from being distracted, can prevent me from deciding I need a game of Mahjong or an episode of Supernatural.

You have to listen to the voices in your head. And if they are faint, you have to block your ears and concentrate.

Kage said so.

Kage Baker was invited many times to write a blog.  One blog site owner demanded she do so, stating no one would read her books unless she also published a blog. Kage declined both kind invitations and blackmailing attempts, saying (honestly) that she just did not have the time.

When she had something to say, she averred, she wrote a story. That worked well for her. She didn’t like wearing her emotions on her sleeve, as it were, and solved the puzzle of how much to share by restricting her reveals to her books. Some of them are obvious; some of them are in code: but all of them were displayed only and exactly as Kage designed. She was generous with her heart, but she didn’t make it easy for people to translate.

“I proclaim. I orate. I explicate, explain and expose. I even pontificate,” she once said. “But I do not freaking share. That’s something you do with socks and chocolate bars.”

Though, truth to tell,  Kage didn’t share chocolate all that well …

Anyway, I am a little different. I’d like to think I have a certain mature reserve when it comes to emotional displays, but actually – if I hurt long enough, I yell and whine and complain. And you, Dear Readers, have been a wonderfully sympathetic and intelligent sounding board for even my most puerile maunderings. Thank you, Dear Readers, and please accept my apologies for my lapses.

For the past 3 3/4 years, I’ve been finding my way along the path Kage laid out. I’m walking in her footsteps, and most of the time I am acutely aware that her stride was 4 inches longer than mine … but for me, blogging and writing have fit well together. The creative tavern puzzle they form has been a good one for me; I’ve produced over 800 of these little lectures, finished Kage’s last novel, written 3 short stories.

When Kage first died, someone told me to expect a month of mourning for every year of a relationship. Depending on whether you charted ours from childhood or from adolescence (when the writing collaboration began), I figured I had between 4 and 6 years of mourning. And I assumed it would gradually get easier, through this period, to re-invent my life.

I was wrong. Or the person who quoted that time scale was wrong. It’s possible I’m just not the sort of person for whom such a sliding scale will work; it’s also possible that time period was made up by some refugee from Hallmark cards who’d never lost anyone and had the sensitivity of a brick. All I know is, grief has admitted to no diminuation. Whenever it seems to die back a little, it apparently simply retreats to some hidden volcano lair; from whence it inevitably bursts forth to ambush me as soon as I relax …

And, of course, the world continues to wag on in its usual way, as well. Only worse. The news is full of terror and tragedy. Africa is wounded near to death, and appears to have contracted a continent-wide case of gangrene. In India, Thailand, Myanmar, and Malaysia, militant Islamic and Buddhist gangs are  attacking one another. Buddhist gangs? Surely, that should be an oxymoron! Russia is regressing to a repressive theocracy. The Middle East is fuming and erupting like the mud pots in Disney’s Painted Desert – loud, improbable, uncontrollable. Europe is bankrupt and drawing lots to decide who in the lifeboat gets eaten first.

And as I sit here writing, the US government is shut down; in a fortnight, we’ll be defaulting on our international debts. A woman ran her car into a security barrier at the White House gates this morning, and was chased into the Capitol building complex by police before being stopped. She is reported dead now, so it’s anyone’s guess why this happened. But I doubt it’s a nice story.

These last couple of weeks, I have been increasingly depressed. It took me a little while to realize that – getting depressed feels amazingly like coming down with a cold, you know – but sometime last week I hit bottom. I’ve been living in other people’s books (my standard refuge) all night, sleeping all day, cringing from sunlight and holy water and all that darkside stuff. Even frequent applications of a new kitten has had but temporary affect.

I miss Kage. I miss what my life was 3 years ago. I feel like this will never end, and I’ll be grimly hacking my way through a jungle of thorns forever. I am really, really sorry for myself; which is no great help to my mood, either.

But … I have obligations and duties. Even more importantly, I seem to have developed some actual desires lately.  My mind keeps having ideas, which it leaves all over the floor of  my brain so I fall over them every day: and I want to do something with them. In fact, I just sent off a story to Linn-the-patient-agent. It should be followed sometime this month with the latest last draft of an actual novel. And November is heaving on the horizon, which means it is almost time to write 50,000 words in 30 days again – a devotional manic episode I must indulge.

And there are Halloween Oreos out now. And candy corn. And orange chocolate marshmallow pumpkins. The temperature is dropping, the nights are cool, the leaves are turning. The geese wing over the house every dawn now, singing like French horns.

Time to pick up those tavern puzzles again; time to see if I can untie the knots in cold iron. Time to get back to work.

Because, you know, nothing matters. Except the work.

Kage Baker loved late summer. Especially as a child. Her summer routines were all well set by midsummer, and she could drift through the hot days and warm nights with absolutely no thought of boundaries in her mind. Even as an adult, even after she had quit her day job and was a happily home-bound writer – the cusp of August  and September was the very peak and pinnacle of summertime. Everything was in fruit and flower then.

One of the things that she viewed with fear and loathing, though, was the annual blooming of the crepe myrtles. Now, the crepe myrtle is a lovely tree, and it blooms in a palette of white, cream and a  rainbow of pinks and reds: from seashell blush to dark wine. Roses are its only competition for the spectrum of red it produces. And Kage loved the colour. What she hated was that it bloomed late in the season, and was therefore a sure-fire indicator that summer was going, going, gone.

But even the myrtles give way to autumn, and that was a season Kage adored. What she liked about it was were the colours – red and gold and black, flame colours and smoke colours; trees turning gaudy and then stripping wildly. Chrysanthemums and the last sunflowers all the same fiery hues as the leaves; and then the ecdysiast trees revealing shapely bare limbs cast in marble and pewter …

The plants that die back in the garden uncover treasures when they fade: pumpkins under the broad vine leaves, corn stalks fading to soft beaten gold and learning to sing under the hand of the wind. The last roses. Piles of bougainvillea petals piling up in dunes against white walls. The endless bounty of apples.

And then the whole spectacular carnival of October culminates in Halloween; and that was Kage’s favourite holiday. She loved our Dickensian Yule and threw herself whole-heartedly into Extreme Christmas – but she loved Halloween. By the time it comes round, all the flowers are dried, bowls are filled with fragrant petals and pine cones are stacked on the hearth. The bushes are full of glowing eyes after dark (ours are, anyway; plugged into extension cords … ) and faerie lanterns adorn the bare tree branches.

Kage forgave the year its dying in exchange for the wonders of Halloween.

The Autumnal Equinox, of course, was a few days ago (and a belated Happy Equinox to you all, Dear Readers!); now we’re spinning briefly in place, the days and nights equalizing. Right on cue Autumn has appeared, hitting its mark flawlessly – blue skies as smooth as enamel and a rising wind; still warm while the sun shines, deliciously cool when it goes. The air smells of wood smoke even before anyone lights a fireplace.

Though it is still the season for real fires. Wild fires. We always light the hills before the jack o’lanterns here in California. The hills above Pasadena, Altadena, La Verne have burned three times at least this year. Riverside smoulders at intervals; there can hardly be an unburned empty lot in the place. And Devore, where the 10 and 15 freeways meet and the Renaissance Faire once blazed – is blazing in earnest now.

Those are the brightest flowers of the autumn. The scariest, too. Kage watched for them fearfully and guiltily: thrilled by their colours, dreading their blooming on the golden hills. The autumn fires are the penultimate blossoms on the annual flower clock. After these shed their petals, the hills will be black and grey until the winter rains come and drown them in a green flood.

Tick tock …