Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker liked designs. And pictures. She really liked stories with pictures, and would   rather have been writing comics, I think. Her first books – written in her early teens, typed and bound by herself in the incense-scented eyrie of her tower – all had copious illustrations.

Eventually, though, she decided the illustrations were taking too much time from the writing process. She stopped drawing, to my sorrow – I spent 20 years watching her draw all over every half-way flat surface in sight. I grew to know many of the people she drew – almost none, of whom, oddly, showed up in the stories she wrote later … different universes, I guess.

Anyway: designs. Kage especially loved fractal designs. She said the mathematics of them didn’t matter, because they were beyond her anyway. That didn’t bother her at all. What she liked was the smooth progression of forms that was produced, each growing smoothly from the next. She loved the idea that each smaller iteration of the design would reveal the same kind of pattern that the larger whole displayed. She said you could see the mind of God in them.

For similar reasons, she liked Mandelbrot sets – which are images of a point set that produces two dimensional fractal designs. In the ’80’s they were often produced in bright colours and used as screen savers – instant psychedelia! Kage loved that.

This was her favourite screen saver in the early days – evolving Mandlebrot fractal towers, that formed immense kelp-like pylons. At least, Kage saw enormous depth and volume in them …

The image on the left below is a fractal design. The one on the right is a classic Mandelbrot.

Kaleidoscopes also display them, and those Kage particularly adored. From dissecting her many, many kaleidoscopes over the years, she knew that the formal patterns in the tube were random bits converted from chaos to order with, literally, the use of mirrors. Good stuff.

They also occur naturally. They’re said to be the underlying pattern in coastlines, especially fjords. Kage, being a long-time fan of Douglas Adams, thought that was hilarious just on the face of it. She said she couldn’t see the fractals in coasts, but she loved the idea that they were there; hopefully designed into them by a fussy old alien designer …

They also show up easily in many plants.  And crystals, like frost:

Cauliflower Mandelbrot! With the additional weirdness of being green …

Frost ferns are a classic display.

Recently, I came across an article on 3-dimensional Mandlebrot designs. They’re called Mandelbulbs, because I guess they couldn’t come up with a better identifier and wanted to make sure people understood the source. Marketing is everywhere, even in physics and mathematics. I wish Kage could have seen them. To my delight, these are even prettier than the standard kind:

This is not crocheted, tatted or knitted! It’s not even quite real; it’s a manipulated mathematical formula rendered in 3-D form. It is more tenuous even than the sea foam it resembles …

Isn’t that a thing? Kage would have loved it. I think shapes like this bloomed in her mind all the time; somehow, this is the seed of a story, wound all about itself and gently biting its own tail, an Ouroboros of quantum lace.

Maybe I can find a way to unravel it. Or at least knit it into reality. It would make a great hat …

Kage Baker would have been glued to the television today.

She had what she called “a vulgar fascination with current events”. It was the recently-developed ability to see things all over the globe in real time that did it. Webcam syndrome, an outgrowth of the 24-hour news cycle. We were adults when CNN burst on our television screen in a ghostly green storm of tracer bullets over Baghdad – we got used to it so quickly, so thoroughly, that for a year or so I turned the telly on each morning before I even lit the burner under the tea kettle.

When we realized we were mindlessly gobbling down local sports in Warthog, Nebraska along with the daily briefings from the Pentagon, we made a conscious decision to stop. It just didn’t seem healthy; we were getting information, true, but it was like being a goose with a funnel down your throat – we couldn’t control the amount, the speed, even the substance of what we were ingesting.

So we quit.

However, Kage remained interested in the occasional extreme LIVE BREAKING NEWS that would sneak by in crawls under some episode of Spongebob Squarepants. She admitted freely to a truly plebian love of high-speed chases – she’d sit and watch and comment in sardonic amusement as the night-time landscapes flashed past the fleeing prey in the burning lens of a helicopter’s spotlight. “Oh, look, we had a flat tire there once!” she’d exclaim as some desolate intersection in the wilds of San Berdoo was briefly illuminated.  “Jeeze, all those streets are dead ends; what a maroon!”

It was even more mindless than playing solitaire. She used it like soma or the fabled narcotic lotus; something to stimulate the visual cortex while giving the frontal lobes a break.

And, of course, from time to horrible time … the news was real. Important. Devastating. A child down a well (happy ending there); a landmark burning to the ground (not so much). The World Trade Center. The Japanese tsunami. The Boston Marathon bombings this week past, and last night’s fire fight through the dark streets of Watertown and Cambridge.

I remember that she watched the footage from 9/11 until I took away the remote and turned it off; it was more than she (or I) could stand after a while. I am thankful she didn’t live to see the footage of the 2012 tsunami rolling inexorably through Fukushima, carrying burning buildings over the tiny cars with tiny desperate hands flailing out the windows …

Yestreday, I was all mad with triumph, having finished “Paredolia” and therefore feeling like a real writer. I managed to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room, elated as I was by simply completing a task Kage had left me. That’s not so easily done, today. The elephant is raiding the pantry and practicing plies in the living room.

I stayed up very late, listening to the unending coverage of the search for the bombers through Boston’s suburbs. Just when we had thought it was over, the alarm went off for the encounter at MIT; even while we scoffed (“MIT? Come on, what could be happening there?”) a policeman died, shot in ambush. Bullets were flying, bombs were flung from stolen cars like a bad Warner Brothers cartoon. Then one of the bombers was shot, and fell, and was run over by his brother fleeing the scene: more WTF insanity.  And so died Tamarlan, most inappropriately named for a legendary Tartar fighter …

Today, Boston and its environs have been under lockdown (that is being relaxed as I write). The second bomber, Dzhokar, is still at large. He could be dead in an empty house or dark garage; they found his car, and there was reportedly blood in it. The young men’s uncle is calling for Dzhokar to surrender – his father in Russia is claiming the boys were framed. Fenway Park is shuttered, and the Red Sox are once more the bad-luck kings of the world. Most of Boston is shuttered and shut down: except for the Dunkin’ Donuts shops, which someone on CNN made sure to check on and report were open for business.

There is an element of bathos to this. Kage wouldn’t have been able to take her eyes off of it.

And in the meantime … an Elvis impersonator has been sending ricin-contaminated letters to the President and Congress of the United States. A compost heap is burning out of control in Camarillo, and an exploding manure plant has taken out most of a Texas town: Night of the Flaming Shit! A SYFY Original! Los Angeles, last night, had a rash of bomb threats all over the landscape – I had to rush to the CSULA campus to evacuate my nephew Michael. Good thing I’m a native and know all the side streets, or we’d have been trapped in the most enormous cluster-fuck traffic jam I have ever seen … bomb threats went on all night, but none yielded anything tangible except the one at Hooters on Hollywood Boulevard. That guy at least had a lunch box, which was detonated by a robot that looked like the Mars rover while the half-naked wait-staff stood squealing on the sidewalks …

Am I the only one, Dear Readers, who thinks this litany of dementia reads like one of Kage’s more insane cut-scenes? You know, like the fertility parade in Anvil of the World? Gods and goddesses, I hope I am not the only one. I can hear her so clearly in my mind right now, sobbing a laugh and praying a curse, and quoting Walt Kelly …

Man, that is one big, fat, elephant.

Kage Baker felt very strongly that work was an an anodyne, a panacea. It was a refuge from sorrow and an antidote to care. “All that matters is the work,” she gives Mendoza to say, in her very first novel – the statement was carved on the bedrock of Kage’s heart.

Of course, first you had to find the work. That was the trick of this philosophy, because mere busyness wouldn’t do. It had to be the real thing, the work of the heart, the endeavour that defined and formed you. Only in service to that work could you be assured of comfort and healing. Anything else was just fidgeting.

When she first began to write seriously, hoping to make it as a pro, getting into the mood to write was a big problem. She knew she had to have a foolproof method of guaranteeing she could sit down and produce, and she worked very hard to establish that. It’s not as easy as it is to slouch into the office, sit down at your desk, sign in to the soul-less company website and start processing orders or claims or ads. But you had to have some way to approach the daily work just as if it were something so orderly and mundane. Even though it was world-building, or spell-casting or evolving entire civilizations out of air and the scent of the sea …

Kage, who indulged her superficial superstitions with great enjoyment, therefore built an entire ritual liturgy of “Getting ready to write”.  She had to have a view of the outside, and it had to be to the West or North; South and East were not conducive to industry. She had to have a special glass to drink from – it had to actually be red glass. (EBay was our constant friend.) She would carefully touch all the juju she had adorning her desk; figures of Eugene Krabbs and Zeus the Thunderer, Churchy La Femme  and Shan Yu,  the marmalade jar of sea-water she kept beside her sextant. She would play as many games of Free Cell as it took to win one – only one, no indulgences, then it was time to work.

I don’t have Kage’s well-adapted skills at personal rituals. I have the sort that just make you nuts until you satisfy them, and then the only reward is that you don’t go nuts.  I’ve consciously adopted some of Kage’s pre-writing rituals – the sites she checked, the webcams she looked through each day. It makes me feel good, but not ready to write. Just a little more connected to her. And that’s an undeniable comfort, but she was absolutely right about one classic thing – you don’t write because you feel good.

You write to make yourself feel good. You write because life is unendurable, and a new life must be sought and wrapped around your shoulders like a magic cloak. You write to distract yourself, to hide from the monsters, to block the view of Hell outside the shattered windows of your life. Do you really need to suffer to make art? I don’t think so; a lot of artists have said so, but I think their art and their misery were coincidental. Being happy didn’t prevent Kage from writing, for all that it comforted her when she was sad.

I don’t think it hinders me. Being happy, I mean. When I am … I’m not as mindlessly joyful as I used to be, but it sure doesn’t seem to screw up the writing. And while I don’t have the knack (yet) of drowning my sorrows in work that Kage so ably demonstrated, I feel I am approaching it. I can see how this thing works, a little. I am beginning to believe I will master it someday.

I have been working on a story for a collection of Kage’s stories from Tachyon, Dear Readers, as you all know. It’s based on a half page of Kage’s notes and a lot of conversations on Highway 101. That is “Pareidolia”, which had to be doubled in size at the last minute. This morning at 3 AM I finished it. My first beta reader has read it and pronounced it good. My second beta reader has it now. My publisher has it also, and I am awaiting his judgement on changes, deletions, additions, or the kindly advice to give up and find some new obsession for my old age …

But the final few sessions of writing – ah! That was incandescent! I could feel the momentum bearing me along like the jet stream last night, the words coming so fast I couldn’t type fast enough. I was in the groove, I was at the peak, I was nothing but eyes and a voice on the wind and I loved it …

I could get used to this.

Of course,  the wonderful Jacob Weisman may hate the story. Even if he doesn’t, I know I will, by the time it sees print. It’s postpartum blues for a writer, and Kage went through it with everything she wrote. I felt the same way about Nell Gwynne II, at least until I held the finished book in my hands. Even so, I haven’t gotten the courage to read it through yet.

But … I could get used to this, too. I feel alive tonight. I feel like I have a right to be alive, and work to do, and matters to accomplish.

Lizard men. That’s it. The lizard men of Los Angeles are calling me …

Kage Baker distrusted most technology as a matter of course. She gave her heart to those she did trust, trusting them as child trusts in the mysterious powers of her blankets when confronted with midnight monsters. They always worked; they had to. Failure was not an option, and no explanations would excuse it.

The increasing number of ways to screw up online postings would have driven her nuts.

I don’t place such emotional trust in my machines, because – well, they’re machines, you know? Kage had a more universal interpretation of sentience and personality, I think. I find I don’t blame the machines when something goes wrong. But it’s still annoying.

Pursuant to this line of thought, I’ve been unable to post here the last several days, Dear Readers. Most days, I have not even been able to sign in –  I’ve gotten error messages, been informed that the site was taking too long to open, been notified that the URL was too long to process. Which is a definite WTF … I’ve gotten caught repeatedly in circle jerks that kept just taking me through the sign on process partway, and dumped me back at the beginning like a Helter Skelter.

Well, I have just discovered that poor WordPress  has been under a massive cyber attack for the last few days. Some folks have been able to get on – some have not. The differences seem to be a product of users’ individual browsers, use patterns, security and other ancillary software. Something about mine has combined with the attack to keep me out of the site altogether.

So I guess I am safe. Wordless outside the gates of communication, though; throwing rocks with hastily scribbled notes on them over the guardian walls. Of course, I have needed the time to work on a story, so that is good, at least. I guess.

Supposedly, though, all is well now. To cheer you all on through your day, here is picture of brand-newly discovered bat. He looks like a tiny badger; or a winged gremlin.  Niumbaha superba is his name. He made me smile.

Kage Baker liked museums.  What she liked, though, was art and cultural artifacts – nothing messy. She often said, regretfully, that she’d have loved to study archeology except that bones (except cardboard ones at Halloween) made her queasy …

Me, I like bones. Paleo-anthropology fascinates me. Kage was good about coming with me, but Kimberly actually shares my interest. So we went to the Bowers Museum, a gorgeous little private museum in Santa Ana, this Saturday. Visit it you can, Dear Readers, because it’s really keen. And the exhibit we went to see will be through April 29th ..

We went to see Lucy. Even if you’re not into paleo-anthropology, you might know that name. She is the 4 million year old hominid found in Ethiopia by Tim White in 1974, an amazingly nearly complete skeleton of a tiny little lady who was just about certainly one of the people on the long road to us. She walked erect, she had a pelvis shaped like ours, her face was much less like a chimpanzee (our mutual ancient cousins) and much more like one of us with an overbite. She had long clever hands and feet designed to run, not cling to branches. And in her little, rounded skull was the best brain yet evolved on the planet.

This was not a reproduction. It was really her, the iconic little bones laid out in the pattern I know from so many pored-over photographs. I wept, looking at her. So tiny! So fragile! So new in the world, and so full of potential! I could have held her bundled limbs like twigs in one hand, cupped her skull fragments in my palm like an opened eggshell. Her ribs were as delicate as silver wire, and not much bigger.

There are many reconstructions of her, of course. The one in this exhibit is one of the newest interpretations, and stared up at us gawking giants with human eyes in a gently prognathous – but not muzzled – face. The lips over her very human teeth suggested a smile. She was poised on her new-minted feet as if about to run, or dance.

I have to admit here, Dear Readers, that I am, yes, one of those folks who sits and goes through family photos and cries nostalgically over baby pictures. My grandfather in a sailor suit, my dad with muscles and all his hair – unknown cousins in their baptismal gowns. I am a completely soggy, Hallmark commercial sort of person. It’s just that I feel the same way about ancient hominids as I do about pictures of my Great-Grandmother Kate in her black Victorian satin. Family! something in my heart cries.

I wasn’t the only one, either. There were lots of people there, and the sort of reverential quiet you find at a funeral viewing. The docent had nothing to do, because there was at least one person in every group who was narrating Lucy’s story to their companions. Those folk knew what they had come to see. And I wasn’t the only one who wiped wet eyes.

There were also splendid time lines, instructive film clips, tons of good books to be had, keen T-shirts, and lovely stone tools from Lucy’s people, Australopithicus afarensis – beautiful little obsidian blades, and chert hand axes that would have been too small even for my hands. And other wonders …

At one point I looked up from Lucy’s lovely bones into the smiling eyes of a man standing beside me. He had a wide, pleasant face, with an enormous nose and no chin; I’m afraid I stared, and he grinned with extraordinarily big teeth. His forehead had a nice slope, but when he turned, his skull was both slightly elongated and flat, with a bulge at the back. I stood there trying to figure out a polite way to get Kim’s attention and point him out to her, and he grinned at me again over his shoulder as he turned away.

While I was gathering my scattered wits, a woman bumped into me. I looked down – I’m only 5’4″, but she barely came to my shoulder. Delicately Malaysian features, not a dwarf, big eyes and buck teeth and hair like black silk … she smiled at me, too, before she moved away.

So, who else came on Saturday to see little Madame Lucy? Homo neandertalis, Homo floresiensis? Just folks who looked a hell of a lot like them? The gentleman with the heroic nose seemed to know what he looked like, and was certainly amused by it. The little lady was working hard to hit 4 feet tall even in chic little heels, but she was most certainly a totally civilized person. She had a 3-figure handbag!

Were they Operatives? It was appropriate on more than one level that Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was playing softly in that exhibit hall all the while.

Man, it couldn’t have been weirder – or better – if Kage had been with me.

Kage Baker – as is pretty well known – loved the Renaissance Pleasure Faire. And for her, there was only one: the event started in the 1970’s by Phyllis and Ron Patterson,  started more or less in an empty lot on Ventura Bouelvard. In time it moved to the old Paramount Ranch in Agoura, where it stayed for many glorious years and where Kage joined it.

She followed it to San Bernardino and Santa Barbara. She joined the Northern Faire (same folks, but in Marin County) and followed that one too – to Blackpoint Forest outside Novato in one direction, and to Stafford Lake outside of Novato in another direction. Thirty-odd years passed, with all the attendant jokes entailed. There finally came a time when the Pattersons could no longer hang on to the Faire, and Kage was getting tired and beginning to develop a strange stitch in her side …

These days, there are descendents of that One, True, Original Renaissance Faire at both ends of California. The Northern Faire runs July-ish, at Casa de Fruta a little south of Gilroy. The Southern Faire opens TOMORROW (!!!) in Irwindale – you can find information on them at http://www.renfair.com/socal/. I mention them because, while the Faire has changed a lot since Kage and I ran away with it in the 1970’s, that Faire in Irwindale is the descendent of it, still inhabited by many of the people I love. And their kids. And in growing numbers, their grandkids …

Today has been the last day to build the set – which is largely done by the performers. The Company builds generic stages, ale stands, security bases, etc. Specific stages, booths, eating houses – all those are built by those who use them, the people selling chicken and candles and blown glass and rare incense; the people demonstrating spinning and weaving and sword-play and child care and the art of being alive 500 years ago … and all of them have only until 10 AM tomorrow to finish the work.

I used to do this. It takes all of three weekends and then some; and you have to fit rehearsals and workshops into it somehow, too.  By this time on the last Friday, the hammers and screw guns and paint brushes have been going since dawn; they will keep on going until the sun rises on Saturday. The night will be loud with drill motors and sweet with the smells of sawdust and paint. Meals will be taken standing, often at perilous heights.

From time to time, another of the great canopies will go up, and for that people come running from everywhere to get it aloft. I’ve not a canopy rigger, but I have spent many Last Fridays Before Opening hauling on a rope by moonlight, watching as the Roof of the World rose into the dark air … it’s what you do, if your own work is finished. You go find someone else to help. Neighbors have spent long evenings sawing out mason-board shingles for me; I have stayed up until dawn carving pegs out of dowling for someone else. More than one dawn has found me clinging to the side of a roof in my shift and a tool belt, stapling burlap curtains over some offending piece of the 20th century.

A significant portion of my friends – even some of you, Dear Readers, who won’t read this love letter until Monday night – are out there now: building, setting up tents, finishing walls and prosceniums and costumes and hastily-bolted bags of cheap tacos. Some folks will cook something decent for dinner (Oh, blessings forever on you, Mrs. Jacobs!). Some will run all night on coffee. Kids will run amok, and help some, and lose drill chucks, and fall asleep in nests of quilts and hay bales. Somewhere about 2 AM, a group of people with fried eyeballs will find themselves standing in the spring darkness, watching the paint dry on Main Stage and passing round the life-saving elixirs of brownies and single malt scotch …

Tonight, the Village will rise with the Moon.

Kage Baker kept a big oak bookshelf by her desk. It didn’t hold her reference books. The ones she used most lived on the top of her desk; the others, for variable and different projects, stood in a mutable pile on the floor.

No, what filled the bookcase was her own works. It housed her brag shelf, and it went from part of the old bookcase that held our George McDonald Frasier and Patrick O’Brien collections, to a 5-shelf oaken monster filled with everything she wrote in her 12 years of publication. It was there, true, so she could gloat over it – especially the ever-increasing by-invitation anthologies, and the many foreign language editions. But it was also there so she could access the portion of her memory contained in the books.

These were her exo-memories, like the exo-planets that we lately are finding round other suns. They were her memories of her characters and her plots, and the memories (literal) of her characters themselves. And she had to be able to access them precisely to go ahead with new stories.

When did New World 1 close down? Where did the line “Two pairs and the Heirophant – I win!” come from? What cave did Joseph’s father paint? What’s visible from the northern side of Mt. Torquemada? How old did she make Latif? Or Victor? Or Nefer, and why the hell had she calculated Nef’s age in days?

All the characterization details, all the throw-away lines about interesting tech and peculiar historical tidbits and secret conspiracies: Kage wrote them down in the forge heat of creation, and then forgot about them. That’s why I write them down, she’d wail, frantically flipping through one volume or another. Now where did I put it?

This got worse as time went on, too. As more detail was added to the already enormous storyline, whatever had been finalized and recounted was shunted into storage. I think Kage really did have a tertiary memory, like she gave Joseph – but not even her Palace of Memory would hold every detail of a plot that ran from the division of Homo heidelbergensis to Duck Dodger in the 23 and a half century. So she kept all the books close to hand, and would seize up the appropriate one when she needed to verify something she’d already said.

Or, at least, what she hoped was the right volume. Sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it took quite some time to find the relevant passage, and in the meantime Kage would fall back into the story … and the pages would turn more and more slowly, and she’d spent 2 hours reading. (By the way, this is the biggest single time-waster in every household that depends in any way on books.) Sometimes she would be as tickled by her own prose as if she’d never seen it before – because she did forget bits in the fever of writing something else. And sometimes, she would moan and groan and castigate herself. What was I thinking?, she’d howl. This sucks dead moles!

Stop reading it, I would advise heartlessly. You started this in order to write something new.

Oh, screw you … and she’d read another 3 or 4 pages, then look up and ask, Hey, what dies first – your heart or your liver? And she’d be off on another idea.

I am presently missing that brag shelf a great deal. Oh, I know precisely where it is – in my storage unit, behind a wicker urn full of scraps of brocade, and a steamer trunk. The invaluable books it held are all packed safely in a nice box labelled “Kage’s Books – Personal! Important!” Which I think is under the kitchen box where I packed the Le Creuset ironware.

Yestreday, I realized I desperately needed some specific information from Sky Coyote, in order to make proper sense of the plot now developing in “Pareidolia”. And Sky Coyote is still not easy to find in tangible form: at one point, a bookstore owner friend told Kage that he could get an autographed copy of the Lord of the Rings, but not of Sky Coyote … it remains the book of which I have the fewest copies. And none of them were here in the house. And it was too late to go to the storage yard. And the public library was closed for Cesar Chavez Day.

But! I have my Kindle! (Cue the trumpets and tambors!)

Anyway, I downloaded it. And found my needed references, and wrote the dependent portions of the plot; and then wrote some more to keep up my quota and tie one edge to another edge, and then … then I sat down and read Sky Coyote from beginning to end. Never mind that I can recite portions of it by heart. Never mind that hearing once again Kage’s voice as Joseph has crushed my ego and left me boneless with admiration and self-doubt. Never mind that at the moment, I cannot imagine ever matching the Chumash Night Show; or Kenemekme paddling into the dawn with a canoe full of coriopsis and Hooker’s Evening Primrose. Or Joseph waking Humashup on That Day, and watching it fade into the past behind him like the tattered edge of a film strip … as the Chumash march  forward singing Bye Bye Blackbird.

How the hell can I hope to do this? Kage left me her memories. But not her mind.

What possessed me? Lord, I can only hope it’s Kage …

Kage Baker obsessed about things. She knew that, admitted it cheerfully and without guilt, and found many interesting ways to turn her obsessions into personal virtue. And she was faithful to her obsessions, just as much as she was to her morals and ethics.

She was a very complicated and evolved person. And I am discovering that obsession is a virtue, one to be cultivated with all energy by the hopeful writer. You just have to balance them a little. Today I need to switch several around …

I have been writing. But in 32 minutes, the new season of Dr. Who begins. The last Christmas special is now playing on BBC America, to urge those of us waiting for the new episode into higher and higher fits of hysteria. I am listening to it while I try to write, and as my family giggles and roars and gasps at the action in the living room …

I bet most of you are doing the same thing, Dear Readers. Which is good; you ought to be doing that. I like the image of so many of my friends all sitting down at the same time, following the Doctor into a new season of wonder. Me, I am about to gather up some indulgence or other (smoke, chocolate, knitting, beer – there are so many!) and repair to the living room myself. There I will wind up the new skein of yarn I just got, preparatory to making a phone case out of it.

It’s half wool, one quarter silk – and one quarter JADE. Yes, Dear Readers, someone has found a way to spin a fibre out of jade, and I am going to knit with it. Semi-precious stones are cool – I knit with jade now.

Life is an unending wonder. And that is coolest of all.

Kage Baker was acutely aware – or at least personally convinced – that the world saved itself up to interfere with her writing. Distractions, temptations, visitors, strange things floating by in the sky – they were all stockpiled by some personification of Chance and released as soon as she sat down to write.

It’s one of the main reasons she required quiet and isolation, why she insisted on few visitors; why, even when we had expected house guests (you get a lot, when you live at the beach …) Kage would sometimes take her laptop and go shut herself in her bedroom to write. She knew she was easily blown off course. She would tell visitors: So sorry, she just couldn’t write while people were talking. When an annoyed relative once asked did she also have trouble walking and chewing gum, Kage said Yes. And I know it. And if I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t ask it!

One of my jobs was keeping all these things from interfering with her concentration. There was no way I could prevent all incidences of noise and shiny objects; sometimes Kage just gave in to the urge to play Monkey Island all the way through, or watch The Wrong Box for the 3,749th time. Or one of our neighbors would drift by our second story windows in his glider, with a room-fan motor strapped to his back for motive power … some things would distract a saint with OCD.

Still, she knew what her weaknesses were and she tried to put up protective wards against them. More than that, no writer can do. As she got older, she was sometimes able to tolerate a surprising amount of noise and carrying on around her; but she always planned for the worst. Her goal was, always, to write.

I usually have, it must be humbly said, much better powers of concentration. I was the one who could memorize times tables and king lists and the mining products of Chile. I could do my homework with the Beatles playing at a Cavern-style level of noise. Nothing can break my concentration when I was reading. I don’t  look at my passengers when I drive. I don’t talk on the phone or (who is actually that stupid?) text. I have a will of iron, man, no cries of Squirrel! can send me panting and barking to the window.

All of which gets kicked right to the curb when it comes to writing. This is a new discovery, one found in the last 3 years – I seldom had trouble with essays and reports, and in fact can still (in an emergency only, mind you) come up with enough to kick-start my nephew’s college papers on short notice. But writing … holy moley, some part of my frontal lobes shuts down, and I can can be distracted by anything. I am usually not a video game player, but now … witness Mah Jong, where I am now on game 503 of the Archer and still haven’t won. I’ve been re-reading entire series of books, watching entire series on television – curse you, DVDs!

Of course, as of yestreday, there is no time to be wasted! I must average 1,000 words a day for the next 2 weeks. Which goal I did manage yestreday, even with spending a vital 3 or 4 hours doing research; some of which was actually needed for the story. But I found myself led astray down all sorts of blind alleys and fascinating garden paths; weird facts were multiplying before my eyes, undulating seductively across the computer screen …

There’s a new paper out, speculating on how the really large, really heavy, really spiky dinosaurs Did It: and, believe me, erotica in paleontology is not at all common. There’s a story about a pair of eyeballs left in a Kansas gas station – the mind boggles. Papua New Guinea has yielded a newly discovered area that may be the most eco-diverse few square miles in the world: new frogs and butterflies, blue-eyed possums, something that looks like a cat but isn’t and no one knows what it is, genuine ROUS! And the subject of “de-extinction” is heating up, so that it really looks like someone is going to try to resurrect a mammoth soon.

I actually did need to know the weather in Los Angeles during 1943, and was totally, completely blocked. Judging by what I could find, in L.A. in the year 1943 there was no weather. Except that on January 23rd the city got 2 feet of rain, and in July there was the first-ever smog alert. Other than that – nope, no weather. I spent 2 hours on this ridiculous data chase, and am now faking it. I feel safe in assuming the sun rose and set …

And in the meantime, there is a Doctor Who Marathon on BBC America, and Supernatural* is on television tonight, and I just found several deliciously insane books about Nephilim and absurd sources for the Sumerians, and – and – SQUIRREL!

Plus, it’s always so much more fun to sit and chat at all of you, Dear Readers, than to get my rear in gear and do something author-ish and disciplined.

However … I really must. Besides, Kimberly will be home from errands soon. And while she is probably coming back with a copy of Lincoln, she’ll also want to read what I’ve written today.

And so I’d better go write something. Last night, I left Lewis honking the horn of his green 1935 Ford Woodie frantically at the curb of Joseph’s house, and he has a desk stuffed in the front seat … and that’s no place to leave poor Lewis.

*Eeek! Kimberly has just kindly pointed out that it’s not Supernatural on tonight, it’s Grimm! See how distracted I am?

Kage Baker was known for being a California writer. She took that as a great compliment, being very proud of her native species status here.

As she said, she wrote a California product – boom or bust, feast or famine. It’s how the California economy has always regulated itself: just barely, and by the use of punctuated disequilibrium. Demands for Kage’s work came and went the same way, and so did her ideas. She’d work for 6 months on a book, unsure if there would be a market for it and hammering away in obsessive solitude. Then half a dozen editors would call wanting stories, and she’d find herself promising them all in the same 2-week period.

It wasn’t so peculiar that she got herself into these frantic situations. The true strangeness is that she delivered on all of it. She once wrote a novel in 6 weeks. Her record for a story under 10,000 words was one weekend; several shorter stories were written overnight. Presumably while sitting on the lap of her Muse.

I’ve been desultorily pecking away at the first half of a story for Tachyon, as all you Dear Readers know. Last week, I got it to a logical stopping place – about halfway through OR complete, depending on your viewpoint – and sent it off for approval or rejection. In the week since then, I have occupied myself gnawing off my fingernails and losing the fight to a huge cold. I’ve been drippy, congested and paranoid.

Plus, it’s spring break, and my entire education-oriented household is off  school/classes. Much sleeping in and watching movies has been enjoyed. Many books have been read so far. No writing has been accomplished at all.

And, I must admit, I have been playing with my new phone. (Thanks, Maggie – the Sky Map app is fantastic!)

But today, my publisher (the poor man has been down with death flu) and his lovely assistant, Jill, confirmed that “Pareidolia” is good. And they would actually like the second half as well. Victory dance with the parrot! Chips and beans for everyone!

But now I have a fortnight to complete it. I can do it – a thousand words a day, phhht! – as long as my brain works and my Muse behaves himself. The Goddess of Intermittent Bounty has smiled on my endeavours, just as She used to smile on Kage’s, and the frantic race is back on!

And since nothing inspires me like having something else I should actually be doing, blogs will resume with more frequency.

And now I must go compose a riot at a See’s Store …