Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved science fiction conventions, She hadn’t thought she would – she went to her first couple in anticipatory terror and distrust, prepared to be made mock of by hundreds of other people’s fans with bad pointy ears and too much sugar in their bloodstream.

What she found was a really strange bunch of people whose manners were occasionally a bit raucous but whose hearts were kind and welcoming. Some of them were brilliant costumers and prop makers. Some of them were Kage’s own fans! The pointy ears were better done than she had feared, and everyone was willing to share their sugar. Plus, they wanted Kage to be there; and there were dealer rooms full of books and toys; and we got to stay in nice hotels and visit elegant bars.

So going to conventions was ceremoniously entered on her list of Things We Do.

Baycon – a staple of Memorial Day Weekend in the Bay Area of Northern California – was always on that list. For one thing, it’s reachable by car; which is always preferable to f lying. Kage hated to fly. Even more than flying, though, she hated getting on board and taking off; which she regarded as a tour of Hell. I poured cocktails into her and steered her carefully, and she always survived. But Baycon was practically in our back yard!

I am going up to Baycon tomorrow – a little early for the Friday events, but I have other errands in the North as well. Kimberly is making sure I have the tools I need – pens, pads, the Buke, the manuscripts I agreed to critique for several hopeful writers-yet-to-be, clean underwear. Neassa is meeting me at the Con to be my entourage and see I get in and out of my room and to all my panels. Last year, I think it was, I locked myself out – Neassa ran off and found a spare key.

Apparently, when you are the entourage – as I was for Kage – your brain still works. When you are the writer (as, most unlikely and insanely, I now am) the survival portions of your brain evidently subsume into scented mist, and you wander around glassy-eyed … Neassa is used to this by now, though, and at need will simply knit a quick leash and tow me around like a helium balloon.

So tomorrow, I head out along I-5 with the A/C cranked up as far as it will go. I’ll travel through the heated dreams of the Great North Road, and hang a left at Gustine; speed through those dinosaur-rich hills, stop at Casa de Fruta for some of the best dried fruit in the world, and so on up to Santa Clara. And by the time the sun sets over the Bay, I will be sitting – glass in hand and Kindle on my lap – watching the western sky go up in flames and enjoying the delights of the Hyatt Regency.

Reports from the Road, Dear Readers. As they occur and as weirdness merits.

Kage Baker, as I have often noted, was heavily in favour of voting.  The exercise of one’s franchise was a dearly bought privilege, as her studies of history taught her: she appreciated that. And we were in the first batch of under-21’s to be allowed to vote in California, which was a memorable honour.

Also, being strongly opinionated but dreadfully shy, Kage loved a way to express herself that did not involve arguing with other people. Also, a way that  could not be dismissed out of hand: her side might lose, but no one could automatically discount or ignore her vote. It had to be counted.

She kept close track of politics, feeling that as a corollary to voting, one ought to be informed as to what the hell was going on. Besides, doing the research herself let her check what she wanted, not be force fed by some partisan volunteer. Volunteers are frequently uninformed, unscrupulous and untruthful. Please try not to take offense if any of you are or have been political volunteers, Dear Readers. Heck, Kage and I both did it in our youth. But that was how we discovered that some people volunteer because they desperately want political power but are not even as electable as a popular cartoon …

They are the folks who have made life in Los Angeles a living hell the last month. Today we all go to the polls to elect a new mayor in a close-run and contentious campaign; raving, hair-burning, wild-eyed party flacks have been knocking on our doors, littering our lawns, monopolizing our telephone lines and buttonholing us in front of all the local grocery stores the entire freaking time …

It’s almost enough to make one withhold one’s vote, out of sheer pique. Not to mention the frustration of getting 4 calls from some candidate’s flunkies in an afternoon: obviously, they don’t have the manners or competence to keep track of who they have called. Then there are the knocks on the door, usually well after dark – you can hear them coming up the street by the sound of hysterical dogs howling. This morning being The Day, the first  door knocker arrived at … wait for it … 5:30 AM.

Guess what, Eric Garcetti? Had I been considering voting for you before, I sure wouldn’t be now.

The Corgi – who nearly went through the front window in his urgent desire to eat the dawn intruder – has since frightened off three more of them. They’ve been wandering up and down the street like zombies.

We’ve gotten calls today from all candidates for every office, Speaker of the House Willie Brown, and Bill Clinton.  They were all recordings, sadly, or I would have told them what I think of all of them by this point.  If I hear about Garcetti’s childhood memories of Carvel soft-serve one more time, I am gonna scream … anyway, Carvel: small potatoes, Valley boy. I remember Currey’s.

Nor do I care about anyone famous’s opinion for or against marijuana – famous people have no trouble getting marijuana if they need it, so their opinion counts for nothing. And if they are against medical marijuana, they can afford plenty of other medical care and their opinion counts for even less.

I have researched the issues. I have made out my sample ballot. I will indeed be voting. But I am sick of all this grand-standing and yammering. The only reason Kage still walked to the polls, really, was that she liked the stickers they handed out … as do I. I like keeping score. But this is ridiculous.

Next election, I am mailing in my ballot. I am putting up a NO TRESPASSING sign on the lawn. I’m hanging a chain, a gate and a row of barbed wire on the porch. I may wire the door knocker to give electric shocks. And I am recording a new message on the phone:

You have reached XXX-XXXX and no one wants to answer the phone. If you are calling for normal business, leave your name and a number. If you are calling for anything political – anything at all – hang up now. We will not talk to you. Now go away or we’ll subscribe your candidate to the nastiest magazines we can find.

-CLICK-

Kage Baker regarded writing as a natural art, one she was compelled to follow. Whether or not she had had any talent, whether or not she had ever collected an audience, she would have been a writer. She started writing in 4th grade, and never stopped until, literally, the day she died.

It was her natural state. She was permanently in a switched-on creative mode, though; and in fact tried several other arts along the way. She sketched, she painted murals and signs and water colours, she illuminated and did calligraphy; she embroidered, and designed sets and costumes. She carved wood, made stained glass, did copper enameling; and longed all her life to try her hand at blacksmithing. Never managed that last one, and while she went at all the others with her habitual ferocity and single-mindedness: none of them lasted. Ultimately an idea for a story would begin to haunt her, and she’d lay down her brush or her needle or her wire tool and return to the pen.

When she set out to become a published writer, though, Kage realized she was entering a trade. She approached it with a solemnity and professionalism that was almost medieval in its formality; there were duties and obligations attached to being a writer, and she took them all seriously. There were implied contracts far and away beyond the boiler-plate she signed for publishing houses. There was the compact with the readers, which she took as a sacred duty – to tell the story as well as she could, every time. And there was a compact with the future of the craft, as well: to pass on the help she received from older writers, when first she ventured out into the world.

From her very first sale, Kage was offered invaluable advice. That first time was from the godlike Gardner Dozois: who kindly told her that when he returned a story with notes, it meant he wanted to see it again! That had never occurred to Kage. Her first editor, Michael Kandel, gave her copious notes on how to improve her writing. Older writers sent her notes, praising individual stories. Harland Ellison called her, live on the phone, to frighten her out of her mind and tell her he bought every Asimov’s with her stories in them, and his wife made petit-pointe covers for them … it made Kage determined to pass on the favours when she was one of the Elders.

She didn’t really live long enough to become an Elder in her chosen genre; but her reputation was wide, honourable and exemplary. And every time she got a request from a younger writer, she made sure she answered it. Her advice was given carefully, with auntly care and caution: Don’t pay “agents” up front; money flows from them to you, not the other way. Don’t tell me your story ideas – someone unscrupulous might steal from you. Do pay attention to spelling and grammar. Do your research.

Here’s who to talk to if you want representation; here’s what to avoid if you don’t. Yes, I know someone at such-and-such; here’s their name. Yes, I’ll blurb your book.

People did these things for Kage. She passed them on to other writers.  And she made me promise to do the same, should I be asked. I’d have done so anyway, of course, because these are the guild courtesies and charities of writing. What goes around, comes around. Do unto others, and cast your bread upon their waters.

Next weekend, I am going to BayCon – an annual  SFF convention in Santa Clara. Kage went every time she could, because it’s run by really good people and is also a good time: and those don’t always go together.  They are most politely taking me seriously as Kage’s amenuensis, and have assigned me to several panels. They’ve also invited me to take part in the Writers Workshop, and so I will be critiquing 4 manuscripts by brave souls who really want to be writers. At this task, I have 30 years of hard experience. I was Kage’s first copy editor on everything she ever wrote, and went over every professional manuscript she produced. I have a red pen and everything.

And besides, and most important – I owe it to them. I owe it to the wonderful people who put on BayCon, and the brave-as-nails writers who’ve given their precious babies into the hands of strangers for criticism. I owe it to Sally Rose (Hi, Sally Rose!). And I owe it most of all to the spirit of Kage Baker. I saw how this sort of kindness and care nourished her like rain on roses, and if I can pass on any of that to someone new – well, I’ll be paying some of my karmic debt.

If any of you, Dear Readers, make it to Baycon  (http://www.baycon.org/2013/) next weekend, come look me up. We’ll have a seat in the bar, and raise a glass to the scrupulous spirit of Kage Baker, and to paying one’s debts to the future.

Kage Baker was a firm believer in the use of domestic magic.

She said she didn’t care what other people thought. (Which was a modest understatement.) Nor did she care for cute or soulful systems of cantrips and prayers. She simply had ritual acts she performed to keep the household, the income, the writing all going on an even keel. And she learned not to discuss this with most other people, because they would get astonishingly aggressive in telling her what she was doing wrong.

But Kage was of the opinion that whether she was right or wrong was irrelevant. (And anyone else’s belief system was doubly so. We were never at home to Mr. Proselytizer.) Merely doing these things calmed her and made it easier to get things done. She was a woman of iron faith, which was her bulwark and shield against adversity. She lit candles for novenas; she lit candles for the loas. She especially like the big pink cup candles for the Madonna, for the very simply reason that they smelled like Paradise. If something worked – whether to bring in an unexpected story sale or just ease her worries over someone’s illness – Kage added it to the Approved Magic List and did it again.

She herself claimed that all these little acts were, indeed, mere superstition. They were spiritual placebos that just made her feel better. I myself, having observed them for decades, am not so sure: Kage had both an enormous reservoir of faith, and an adamantine will. I think she could and did alter probability in lots of small, homely ways; literally remaking the world to her desires. It was certainly a factor in many things she wrote, wherein were righted, avenged or corrected the myriad happenings she felt had impoverished the world.

Hats on beds were anathema to Kage. Since we did a lot of re-creator work, we had a lot of hats: I learned never to cast off my headgear on a hotel bed or a laid-out sleeping bag. Spilled salt was immediately seized and tossed over her left shoulder. Wood was knocked on. Whenever she spilled a drink, she declared it toll to the gods. We washed our faces in the May morning dew. At Halloween, our ceremonial dinner had places set for absent loved ones. In her early 20’s, Kage carved and painted a doorward in the style of the Children of the Sun – it hung beside our front doors for the next 30 years, and dispelled countless Jehovah’s Witnesses with its oddness.

Every New Year’s Eve, we sat up to watch the ball fall in Times Square. Then we stood on the porch and drank champagne. The years we lived in Pismo Beach, we would then walk down to the beach and Kage would wade knee-deep into the icy winter waves and re-dedicate herself to writing; and she hated cold water. Her last New Year’s was spent in the hospital, fresh from brain surgery – so once she was asleep that night, I drove down and waded in for her.

Objects in the sky thrilled her: fireworks, flights of birds, airplanes towing advertising banners. They were all signs from God, Kage declared. Even the advertising banners, because you usually can’t tell what the hell they’re touting anyway, and are free to make up divine messages to your heart’s content. Meteors – or more correctly, bolides flaming their way across the dark sky – were her utter favourites; and since we lived in a lot of places with little urban light pollution, she watched for them succesfully on thousands of summer nights. Comets, too – there was an entire summer in the late 1990’s (I think) where some comet was sharply visible late and low in the west, every time we drove home from Southern Faire. Kage loved that.

She loved rainbows, and thunder and lightning. However, hail upset her. Probably because it flattens plants. She was always collecting stories of enormous hail stones and showing them to me, saying, “See! I told you these things were dangerous!” It was half a joke, but half a real suspicion that someday I’d be brained by a chunk of ice – she just felt that that was the sort of thing that would happen to me.

So when I found a picture of a killer hailstone yestreday, it evoked all sorts of bittersweet memory. It was just the sort of thing Kage would have seized upon and brandished triumphantly under my nose … I wanted to tell her about it, and couldn’t. That made me very sad. I haven’t passed that border yet, where you stop saying to yourself, “Oh, I must tell So-and-so about this!”

But here it is, Dear Readers. You can alarm and amuse yourselves, imagining how Kage would have warned me about the frozen assassin …

I must admit, that’s a freaking huge hailstone. Maybe I should light a rose-scented candle tonight. Just to be careful, you know?

Kage Baker actually enjoyed the processes of editing and re-writing.

She had expected to hate them. (I had expected her head to explode.) But what happened was that she happily accepted direction, correction and changes. In fact, she said she enjoyed the process of re-writing; all the real work had been finished, she said, and it was relaxing to just polish the results.

Since I had long been the only person she suffered to read her work, I was astonished. I really had thought she would have a hard time letting an editor tell her what to do, no matter how gently. But in that, Kage was blessed with some remarkable editors. Chief among them were Gardner Dozois, who is a god among editors, for Kage’s short stories; and then Michael Kandel,Marty Halpern and David Hartwell for many of the novels. Michael was Kage’s editor for the first three Company novels, and David oversaw the resurrection of the Company series at Tor Books; Marty has stepped in on so many of Kage’s books since then – mostly for Golden Griffin, Subterranean and Tachyon – that I’m not even sure which ones he did. But all of them are gentlemen of the first water, who dealt kindly with Kage and taught her invaluable things.

Along the way, they taught me, too; because I went over the changes they wanted with Kage, and served as her sounding board when she worked out how to accomplish them. At the very, very beginning, I read the edits and translated them to Kage. She was too wrought up to read them herself. Ultimately, she came to trust her editors and would read their notes herself, if she knew them well.  But if she didn’t … that was my job, to paraphrase the editors’ plaints and prayers, and then translate Kage’s answers back into prose.

Now, of course, the whole thing is in my hands. I am favoured by fortune most extraordinarily in this, as I know the folks at both Subterranean and Tachyon; I’m used to them. And Marty is handling the copy edit for the new collection – so there am I lucky as well. When and if it comes to someone new – well, I’ll read my own notes (I’m tough enough for that) but if they render me insensible, I can always pass them on to Kimberly to tell me what to do. When you, Dear Readers, made suggestions on the beginning or “Pareidolia” (the portion that is now “Ikons In Babylon” and being redone as a stand alone ….) it was my friend Neassa who translated for me to figure out what Show, Don’t Tell meant. I recognized all the words but I couldn’t translate them into any language I knew.

That happens sometimes …

Every writer needs a Constant Reader, you see, someone to soothe and calm and (at need) whack them about the ears to keep them on track. Sisters are incomparable at this. I recommend the Bronte Model to any aspiring writer. Without Kimberly to urge me to keep writing, to make it possible for me to have a comfortable place in which to write, none of this would be possible. And if you’re low on literal sisters, you can always acquire one: my dear friend Neassa is an acquired sister, and she is nonpareil.

The only problem that has so far arisen is the unexpected pain. I am re-reading stories of Kage’s that – in some cases – I haven’t read in years. when Marty has a query for a specific tale, it would be wrong to rely on memory alone to answer the question and suggest a solution. I have to read the story. Sometimes, that hurts most amazingly.

Yestreday, I had to read “The Carpet Beds of Sutro Park”; hardly an onerous task, it’s only 3,700 words. But when I had finished it, I sent Marty his answer with tears dripping on the keyboard. Then I lay down and cried for half an hour. The heroine, Kristy Ann, is not Kage and when Kage wrote Kristy Ann’s ending, she had no idea she would herself die of cancer … but, you know, she did. And so Kristy Ann is very hard for me to take. It’s all the sorrow and despair of that night Kage died, forged like Gronw’s year-wrought spear to fly true and strike me at this impossible distance.

That’s the hardest thing. But I know it will happen, again and again. If the pain of missing Kage lets me carry on her work, then I don’t mind if the wound never heals. It reminds me I am still alive.

Kage Baker was,  in her heart of hearts, an illuminator. Barring the problems of being the wrong nationality, the wrong gender and being born half a millenium too late, she’d have loved the life of a book-making Irish monk.

When she was in her early teens, she hand-made several books.Typed them out, sewed the little packets together (and she was no seamstress) and then bound them in the cardboard backings from yellow legal pads and covered them with gaffers tape; which she then painted, in order to make them more glorious. And all of them were copiously illustrated, in inks and water colours.

They were her own stories, of course, furiously typed with her patented Chico-Marx-playing-the-piano two-fingered staccato style – she never learned to type. She had an old black Royal that Momma got her, and it worked pretty well. Some of the keys were askew, wrenched out of their alignment by the unexpected Superbaby grip of our youngest sister. And the E was worn nearly away on its button, so that Kage had inked it in with a Cro-Quill and Higgins black … but she could go along at a furious rate on the thing.

Since the narrative was typed on onion-skin paper, while the illustrations were done on water colour paper, the books all had an interesting … rippled quality. And the acrylic clung oddly to the metallic gaffers tape, although from arm’s distance it made them look a little as if they were bound in rough leather. Which was cool.

They were labours of love, because Kage loved illustrations and thought that no book was a real book unless it had pictures. So her first ones did.

When her mature books began to sell … well, she desperately wanted pictures. However, grown-up hardcovers don’t get those. And to her vast disappointment, new authors get, like, zero input on what appears on the covers. Kage grew resigned to the problem very quickly – she was pragmatic, she wanted the books published most of all. And so she learned to be amused at what turned up on her book covers, and occasionally delighted by the surprises various cover artists wrought.

The cover of the UK edition of In The Garden of Iden, for example, was a right bodice ripper: some dark-haired wench staring off all mooney-eyed into the distance, dressed like a genteel Gypsy. Kage guessed the Brits figured a Spanish heroine had to be dark. The US paperback, though, had stained glass and a lady in almost-perfect headgear: it was done by the excellent Tom Canty, who was immediately entered into Kage’s list of secular saints. She loved all his covers.

When Tor – bless them! – set out to re-publish the entire Company series, they did all the covers in matching styles. Not a bad style, mind you, but very science-fictional – Iden has a monorail rushing straight at the viewer. The Tor cover for Sky Coyote has an actually grand illustration of the gates of New World One – it’s an enormous improvement over the original from Harcourt Brace, which has a guy in a coyote head hood, evidently projectile vomiting flying saucers … and even that was better than the Israeli version, which has a bipedal German Shepherd in a trench coat.

Tor’s covers went on to showcase an inexplicable portrait of Patrick Stewart on Children of the Company, which cracked Kage up: her personal vision of Labienus, who figures largely in that volume, looks a lot like Sir Patrick, but she never told anyone that but me. Oddly enough, the secondary figure on that cover is an excellent representation of Porfirio, of Mendoza In Hollywood; who isn’t in that book at all.

This uneven quality continued all during her career. Hence the amusement. But often, the covers – while nothing Kage would have done herself – were beautiful and thoughtful, and she loved them. Some  unknown genius did the cover and copious illustrations for the Russian version of Anvil of the World. The pictures were so beautiful that they became Kage’s favourites, and quite offset the fact that the text was apparently printed on toilet paper. Mike Dingenberg did a gorgeous cover for Mother Aegypt. He also did an hysterical interior illo of its wretched hero dressed as the Devil and riding on a giant mutant rooster, and he let her post it on her site. J.K. Potter did a number of utterly exquisite covers, including the lovelies for all 3 Nell Gwynne books: Kage only ever saw the first one, but I can testify that she was thrilled – she’d have loved the new ones, too. And Tom Canty’s work always delighted her.

The only cover on which Kage actually had direct input, though, was The Hotel Under the Sand. The wonderful people at Tachyon listened carefully, and produced exactly the cover that Kage wanted. It was her first (and only) children’s book, and written for our niece Emma in the literal twilight of Kage’s life. So bless you all at Tachyon, for giving her that.

And now Tachyon is about to publish In The Company of Thieves. Obviously, I am leaping about in delight at this, since it will include my very first effort at a Company story. I am so, so, giddily happy that it is from Tachyon .. being me, and not really thinking about covers, I had never even asked what they had in mind. But when they sent me the cover today – thank you, Jill! – I was stunned.

And here it is:

It’s by Tom Canty, which is only appropriate. I think it’s wonderful. And the strangest thing is – if you look at the hair, the chin and jaw, the narrow, long-fingered hand – it looks a lot like Kage. Around age 17 or so; and in the last few days of her life, when the cancer had pared her down to a glowing memory of youth.

She’d have loved the goggles.

Kage Baker, as I have frequently observed, was fond of heat. What she preferred was a dry, moderate heat; mid-90’s, maybe a breeze off the sea, low humidity. The exhalation of the desert, as a dear friend once called it – the particular hot weather that means Southern California to the natives.

Humidity was bad; Kage wilted like a tissue paper rose under a mister. Austin, Texas – where we sojourned a couple of times – appalled her. She said she’d need gills to survive there for more than a few days, and I think that estimate was generous … New Orleans, although a city of delight and amazement, should require habituation training, like climbing Everest – the best thing about the atmosphere there was that it smelled like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Kage never made it to Florida, but I did – and the only reason I survived was that I stayed on the coast. I know how to survive next to an ocean …

Whether it’s climate change or just weather cycles, the weather has being unusually improvisational these last few years in Los Angeles. We had a dry winter, though it got cold enough for night after night of frost. Frost! In LA! Last week it rained, with thunder and lightning: unheard of in May. We’ve already had several big fires on the hillsides, and the temperature keeps spiking into triple digits from the more normal 70’s.

That last bit is what has largely laid me by my heels, Dear Readers. My internal thermostat has grown eccentric over the years; when it gets over 80, pertinent portions of my central nervous system start breaking down. My feet swell like pallid loaves of Bridgeford bread and my ankles lose all mobility: I walk like a duck because vital joints won’t function. I am enervated and exhausted. I can’t walk more than 10 feet without panting. Which is not nearly as attractive on me as it is on the Corgi. My only hope of survival is to stay indoors with the fans and the AC on, all the curtains drawn, subsisting ascetically on ice water and Fudgesickles … hard times, Dear Readers, hard times.

I am Writer; hear me whine.

However, while I have been lax about blogging, I have been writing. The good people at Tachyon accepted the story (now called “Hollywood Ikons”) on which I have been labouring! A real copy editor is going over the stories – and,  joy to relate, it’s an old friend of Kage’s and mine, the inestimable Marty Halpern. He is already going over the older stories. And since I returned the penultimate edit to Tachyon today, that will soon be in his hands as well!

The collection is called (at the moment, anyway)  In The Company of Thieves. It will be the host for the first new Company story since Kage died. That sounds weird – although not as weird for something involving Kage Baker as it might sound for other writers

Also, I just received news  that Kage Baker is up for a Locus Award, for the posthumous collection “Best of Kage Baker.” Which is grand. I’ll be heading to Seattle with a small entourage at the end of June to bite my nails and see if she makes it. At the very least, it will be a change in weather, which will be divine. As long as we don’t drive through the portions of Washington State where they have Tsunami Warning signs nailed to the trees, or get lost on a military base … both of which we did the last time Kage won a Locus, 3 years ago.

Kage’s spirit was with us. That always makes things interesting. Sometimes you get lost on an Army base – sometimes you finish one of her own stories. Sometimes you drive 1,000 miles never being sure what dimension you are in, or headed to.

Summer fun is here, Dear Readers. Summer fun is definitely here.

Kage Baker loved fire. Anything that blazed or leaped or exploded – especially in colours! – she adored. We usually kept a brazier in the back yard, and we would light fires just to sit beside them and talk and watch the stars and flames.

Being as well a California native, though, she had a deep respect and wariness of wild fires. In California, we are acutely aware of the difference between wild and domestic fires. Anyone who has lived in the hills or on the edges of the empty lands – and we did both, Kage and I – knows that under the golden skin of the land fire runs free as a river. Tempt it too much with a fire on the surface, and the subterranean fires will leap up to the air and beckoning freedom, and consume whatever they can. Dragons sleep under our hills.

Technically, fire season is not quite here; Memorial Day is the usual marker. But we’re having triple-digit heat right now, as well as uncanny winds – just the sort of weather when broken bits of glass or maniacs do their work in the hills. And the hills are dryer than usual this year, because we had so little rain. Only yestreday I was noting that the hillsides had already gone quite golden – and the news of the fire in Camarillo was being announced as I came indoors with the thought.

That’s a major fire – 10,000 plus acres burning just North of the end of the San Fernando Valley, in a swath from the 101 Freeway to the Pacific Ocean. It’s a pretty settled area, too, but the fire crews have so far prevented houses and offices and at least one college from burning. It’s a few miles from Malibu – and that’s a town so expensive that if the fire gets to it, one can expect the fires to burn in colours like a peacock’s tail.

Already there’s toxic air, from burning fertilizer and other agricultural chemicals – it’s on the edge of major farming areas, too. Fire fighters from all over the Southern half of the state are out there, trying to prevent the fire that began in brushfire from becoming an urban firestorm.

And now Glendale is burning, too, in a similar area: rich homes, schools, a college, lots of churches … the posh end of Glendale. This one is a mere bagatelle compared to Camarillo; a mere 100 acres or so right now, and it’s looking as if it might be contained tonight. If the winds cooperate … it was windstorms that fanned Camarillo to its present inferno, and while we have only breezes here near Glendale so far, in California that can change much too quickly. Evacuations are already being ordered, just in case.

I live on the border of Glendale. My sky to the south-east is a wall of smoke right now, and helicopters are roaring overhead regularly, scooping water out of Silverlake Reservoir. We’re watching the fires on the television, all doors and windows shuttered close and our fans on in every room. No danger to my house – unless Griffith Park decides to get in on the act – but we’re sure not going to drive out for bagels tomorrow morning: our favourite bagel shop in on the far side of the Sea of Fire in Glendale.

This is where we natives just sort of shelter in place and pray for the fire fighters. California is usually burning somewhere every day between May and December; the huge Camarillo fire is unusual but not unknown, for this season. Three days past May Day, and it’s 95 degrees and we’re on fire – that’s California for you.

But tonight, fog is forecast to creep in from the Pacific, if it doesn’t evaporate to steam where the Camarillo fire is dancing on the shore. And tomorrow, the temperatures are supposed to drop 20 degrees. And by Sunday, we are expecting rain; actual wet rain, falling down over all the blackened acres and sending up sweet smoke to the welcome clouds … and that is California for you, too.

The weather here is science fiction and special effects. The hills are full of dragons; the sea is held by sea kings, pearls in their beards and tridents in their hands. Storm gods are rising now from the dark depths, to debate the coast line with the rampaging fire drakes from the golden hills. Somewhere out West and North, rain is coming to dance madly over the embers and make the earth drunk.

Wildfires are frightening, destructive things. But, as Kage always observed, when smoke would rise about of the hills and turn the sunlight red, it’s all so huge and insanely glorious that you have to love it. The hand of God lies heavily on us here on the edge of the continent.  Miracles catch fire in all the bushes. We were a furnace of dreams long before the movies began.

It’s always dream season here.

Kage Baker hated change. She loathed it with a deep and personal loathing, and the requisite heat of a thousand suns. She went to truly insane lengths to try and avoid it.

This required her to cling to favourite garments until they literally came apart in the wash, and to books that had to be bound in protective Saran Wrap and gaffers tape in order to be read, and to games and music in media formats for which we no longer had any system capable of playing them. When I cleaned out her bedroom closet for the last time, I found 7 pair of worn-out white Chuck Taylor All-Stars;  concert t-shirts from when Ian Anderson was thin and lithe and wore tights and a codpiece on stage; and a box of 8-track tapes. Among many other weird and fabulously antiquated items …

I don’t mind change. I’m not a knee-jerk innovator – it usually takes me a while to get into a new fad, or read a popular book – but I really rather like new things. My hesitation in seeing new blockbuster movies or turning up my nose at fads in chocolate (if I never see another acai berry, it will be too soon) is not caution but merely arrogance. I simply don’t like to be told I ought to like something. And it did save me from the Twilight books.

However, once I get something the way I like it, I want it to be stable. If updates or alterations are required, I prefer to make the decision myself. I don’t even let Microsoft or Adobe load updates automatically – they have to flash me an “Attention, please” screen and humbly explain to me what they want and why they think it’s needed. About 1 in every 10 updates is pointless – but I want the chance to catch the little parasite, and prevent it from eating up space on my hard drive.

That attitude has saved me from many viri, and much malware, and untold cookies, too. However … nothing is changeless. Rocks erode. Liquids sublimate. Radioactive elements decay into stolid lead, and one dark day the universe will be a thin soup of nothing but autistic hydrogen from one end to another. Last week, something supposedly incorruptible on my hard drive was corrupted, and my computer system died a swift and inexplicable death.

Well, Dear Readers, it was awful. I managed to keep some work going on my Buke and a borrowed laptop, and luckily I was between deadlines … but it was irritating and slow on the borrowed machines. And the tech working on my hard drive was apparently a whiz of a technician, but was human as a second species: he had such difficulty in actually talking to me and explaining what he was doing that I eventually lost my mind, my temper and my shit and subjected him to a tirade. When I ran out of breath, he said (I swear), “You’re mean,” in a quavery little voice and refused to speak to me any further. I suspect he was one of Kage’s Little Stupid Guys (or a hybrid thereof).

I had apparently sent him into a coma under the counter. His supervisor took over, and behold! My computer was ready in under a day. All Kage’s work, all my writing, all our photographs (including rare family photos and the only recordings I have of her voice) were already safely stored in backup. However, despite the initial assurance that all my nifty customizing programs would also be saved – none were. I think my rabbity little tech just agreed to everything I asked or said, so I would eventually shut up and go away.

The result is that I do have the most important things back safe and sound, and my OS is shiny new, and my system is working. However, it has none of the special files and plug-ins and programs and gadgets that smoothed my way and let me sail among the pixils … it took me quite some time to get back into Word Press here, and finally enter a new blog entry.

So now I am busy downloading all the goodies I’ve loaded over the last 8 years (!) that vanished into the void. Be patient, Dear Readers; I’ll get there, and things will finally be back to normal.

Then I can start reconstructing all the amazing bookmarks that Kage had saved so carefully. Language, history, literature sites; weirdnesses and lost cities and rare viands. Nightengale-studded truffle tongues: recipes for, location of, cheapest vendors for. All the stuff she saved on her computer so she never had to let it go.

I’ll find it all.

Kage Baker wrote that line referenced above to describe Mendoza’s reaction to Joseph’s initial lecture about what lay ahead for her. Of course, he was talking about her fate as a mortal – but the line has stayed with me for the nearly 30 years since I first read it: it’s such a perfect description of the dark side of the learning process.

It’s more prevalent when you’re little; 5 and 6 and 7 years old, newly sent to the nuns (or whatever votresses handled education in your town), and being exposed the Big World for 7 hours a day. There’s so much to learn, so much to realize. A lot of it is scary, and it’s not an unusual reaction for small kids to develop stress problems. Especially in these days, since the domestic television tends to be ON damn near 24/7. What the kids hear in school, what they see on the television – what they experience walking home on the streets between those two fountains of wisdom – is enough to frighten any kid. The shining horizon of the new world is suddenly perceived as being lined with glittering razor wire.

Sister Anne developed a fear of the Communists somewhere around 2nd grade: she was scared constantly for years, too aware of the Cold War at too young an age. Anyone remember the illustrations in LIFE magazine, of bomb shelters in the buttresses and stanchions that hold up the L.A. freeway system? I had to explain to Kimberly, who was even younger, that those were just a guess, not a real thing. But I worried …

It’s gotten worse since then. When Katie, the eldest niece, was about 6, someone famous died of old age. It wasn’t traumatic, he’d reached a goodly age, and when it was announced on the television no one was surprised or upset. Until little Katie looked up from her dolls on the floor and asked matter-of-factly: “Who shot him?”

At the age of 6, she couldn’t envision any other way for a person to die, except by murder.

One of the reasons that Kage’s personal view of current events stopped in the 18th century was the everything after that was scary as hell.

So what does she choose as a career? Writing, which is as full of scary moments, processes and events as Spotted Dick is full of currants. (That’s a lot of currants, in case you have never had a Spotted Dick pudding …) And she leaves it to me – or me to it – when she sails into the Uttermost West.

This week I have discovered my own new horizons in terror. I finished a story! I sent it off! And I got back replies from both agent and editor saying, Um … not quite. Not enough cilantro, too much vanilla. Lose the peppermint entirely, please.And cut the recipe in half. All perfectly valid comments and queries, but … I am new at this part of the process, and my first reaction is to run around in circles howling. But I used to talk Kage through this part; I knew I needed to just sit down and work my way through the referenced difficulties.

So I did that. I think. Cutting the story into two pieces was the easiest part, and now I will have a spare story to do something else with when I am done. But now I am sitting here gnawing on my fingers (waaay past nails) hoping the fix worked. wondering what I will do if it didn’t. Trying to read the comments sent back to me that are only readable in Word, which I do not have …

I am firmly convinced, Dear Readers, that I will indeed be able to take control of this re-write process and produce a version of the story (now entitled “Hollywood Icons”, by the way) that pleases my patient publisher. However – and here’s the terror part – I am also firmly convinced that it will never work, that I have taken on a job I cannot do, and that I will end up writing copy for soup can labels and disgraced political candidates.

New horizons in terror … oh, why does that line have to echo so resolutely in my memory? And under it, behind it, I can also detect Kage’s faint rely: “Oh, screw you. The world is round, dummy; you never hit the horizon! So shut up, sit down and write.”

World is round. Write. Right.

Write.