Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker loved the works of Sir Terry Pratchett. She read them all, at least up to the point where she died. One of the things she regretted was missing out on whatever he had coming out in the future.

Her favourite of his story cycles was the Witches. And of the witches, her favourite was Granny Weatherwax (though she always wanted to hear more about the tragic career of Black Alice.) She was doing her best, all through her fifties, to grow up into Granny, too. She was aided in this by a certain severity of mien, a fair and highly-coloured complexion, a fondness for hatpins, and being tall and rather forbidding. Also by always going around with me.

I, too, wanted to grow up to be Granny Weatherwax. Who wouldn’t? She is the coolest of witches; the strongest, the best and the most autocratic. But of the pair of us, it was clearly Kage who had the chops for the role – because I practically have “Nanny Og analog” stamped on my forehead. I’m short, I’m fat, I hang around bars and I favour red boots. Inordinate numbers of people call me “Mum”.  I even smoke a pipe.

So, it was clearly Kage who won the palm in that contest. We were both pretty content with the aging bit, especially with such a pair of role models as Pratchett’s Witches … in fact, we were planning on dressing as them for our next Halloween. We figured Kage would be on her feet and a lot leaner by then – and indeed, she would have been perfect, had she lived. We were gonna have such fun … and we had a lot of fun just in the planning.

One of Granny’s talents that Kage most especially admired was Borrowing: assuming the mind of another entity and going out into the world to clandestinely observe things from that alien viewpoint. Kage loved the idea, and tried as hard as she could to cast her mind into other things’ thoughts when she wrote. She was always most comfortable as an observer, anyway; looking through the eyes of other creatures was almost an instinct for her.

When Granny Weatherwaxwent a-Borrowing, she appeared deeply asleep. Or dead. To prevent upsetting the neighbors (and being buried alive, which is always so awkward) Granny would hold a sign while she lay in her trance: I ate’nt dead. Kage went into her own trances while at her computer; she also put that sign up, as a way to let people know she was present but  really, really busy and they were not to disturb her. I usually ignored it. Harry bit holes in it. Writers, like witches and prophets, get insufficient honour in their own lands.

I have been deeply withdrawn of late, Dear Readers. I can apologize, but that’s about all – except to bestir myself now that I am more awake, and get back to work. I’ve been reading (the entire Dune series, and now I’m into Evo Devo); watching old television series, knitting, and sleeping. And Kimberly says I should let people know I didn’t die in mid stitch, or while following the trail of Hox genes through Drosophila melanogaster, or in my sleep.

And that does seem polite. So there you are. And here I am.

And I ate’nt dead.

Kage Baker always said one should never give up. If one falls, or fails – well, so what? Get up and start again. I don’t think she ever gave up on something she really wanted, or knew she had to do. She said she had to do her duty, because it balanced her determination to get what she wanted at any cost …

Mind you, what she really wanted was usually something like a rare book, an old film, a trip to a beach she had last seen when she was 4. It wasn’t as though she had galactic domination in mind. She simply wanted what she wanted, and nothing less would do.

We once hunted through San Francisco for an entire rainy weekend to find the street address where Daddy had lived in the 1940’s. Very exciting it was, too, since it was in the hills above Lombard, looking out down insane slopes into the Bay beyond. Have you ever seen the streets up there? Steep, narrow, and with a freaking stop sign at every intersection – a real E-ticket drive if one is driving a car with a manual transmission. And Kage hanging out the window, the rain running down her braid and turning her hair the improbable colour of garnets, pointing the way and yelling with glee …

I lack a certain essential adamantine quality Kage possessed. I get tired, I get discouraged, I get depressed. I set tasks aside. Since the first of the year, it’s been a real uphill slog to get writing done; the depths of the Bay are always at my back, a sucking void of ambition.

Sorry, Dear Readers. I keep catching colds while recuperating from depression, and then getting depressed again while I recover from the colds. And then I decided to re-read the entire Dune series. And the watch the entire Stargate canon. And I discovered the fascinating new evolutionary theories of evo-devo …

Anything rather than write, that’s what happened. Even Kage had fits like this, but when you watch someone go through this from the outside – well, what you see is the determination with which they rise above the impulse to sit on the couch and share peanut-butter pretzels with the parrot all day while you finally read the 14th volume of the Wheel of Time. I never saw what sudden escapement among the glittering wheels in her head suddenly unlocked Kage’s sense of purpose, and sent her into turbodrive.

And even if I had seen it, I don’t have it.

But I do have my own kind of stubbornness. I can walk until I get there. Where ever that turns out to be.  None of this “Excelsior” crap, I don’t have the time or energy to go charging about waving banners. Nope, for me it’s the measured pace, one foot in front of the other, and walk backwards for a while if the way gets too steep.That way, what’s in front of you becomes an interesting surprise, and you can draw strength from the familiar view behind you. Standing up and moving, that’s all that matters. So – onward.

I’m out of pretzels anyway.

Kage Baker didn’t have depression. Oh, she could get depressed – everyone can; everyone does. But she didn’t experience depression as a clinical pathology.

I do. It has made parts of my life extremely weird. Depression, as is well known to those who do end up exploring its shadowed vistas, is not just the grey murk intimated by all those commercials for anti-despressants – especially the ones where the victim’s depression is a sort of blue Schmoo that toddles around after them …  Abilify, that’s the crap they’re peddling in that one. Those commercial crack me up and enrage me, all at once.

Depression isn’t cute, and it’s not just a flat effect, either. It isn’t numbness. It isn’t sadness. It isn’t laziness. It isn’t anger. It isn’t pain. It includes all of those things, but hey – so does the rest of life. Depression, from the inside (at least, from inside mine) is all the dark feelings of life cranked up to the max and with the OFF switch disabled. You can function, but not well. And not for very long at a time.

Mine is caused mostly by a serotonin malfunction in my brain. Serotonin re-uptake inhibitors therefore work pretty well for me. But anti-depressants aren’t happy pills: not tranquilizers or euphoriacs. I can get depressed by ordinary things just like a normal person, as well as because my neurotranmitters are being eccentric. So, sometimes, I just can’t win …

My writing holiday in Pacific Grove was a delight and a triumph. Then I came home. I went through all the fun and excitement of the biopsy scare, and seasonal colds, and what might be a flu I wasn’t immunized against; and all the other petty annoyances to which flesh is not only heir, but a freaking collaborator. I’m tired and cranky, and I cannot write, and I miss Kage dreadfully right now. Missing her so badly comes and goes. Right now, it seems to have settled down with every intention of home-steading.

I’ve slipped off the coping of the Slough of Despond. I’m only writing this because Kimberly nobly nagged me to do it.

I’m hoping the act of crouching over my keyboard, fanning the tiny flame of creativity, will result in a nice warming conflagration. Sort of by habit, you know? At least, maybe I can manage to hack a few more sentences out of the yet-unsculpted clay of my inspiration. Such as it is.

Back to the slog.

Kage Baker always acknowledged the ritual divisions of the year. She was, in her intensely personal way, a very pious lady.

Mind you, for these observations she used the old European calendar, as filtered through the Celtic holidays still retained in it. And through her own tastes and preferences, too. She never claimed her calendrical observations were any sort of revealed truth, nor sought to impose them on anyone else: but they gave the year a shape and a pace that she liked. And they were yet more excuses every year for a festive dinner and a moment’s reflection.

So we celebrated the 4 Big Holidays of the Solstices and Equinoxes. Between them, we hit the Lesser Four, the Minor Arcana of rituals, the quarter days: Imbolc, Beltain, Lammas, Samhain. None of this diminished in any way Kage’s enthusiastic celebration of Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, Midsummer’s Day, 4th of July, the Day the Buzzards Return To Hinkley, Ohio … as she pointed out, older calendars than the sparse and denatured 20th century one used by the modern Western world were chock-ablock with holidays. Why not keep some of that tradition? It was fun.

In moments of whimsy, Kage came up with ritual observations for most of these. We used them when the fit took us – most of them revolved around special meals, which were always entertaining. Solves the problem of what to make for dinner lots more nights, too – Shrove Tuesday calls for pancakes, and there’s your supper menu right there! (It’s February 12th this year, FYI.) And you know what? IHOP has a take out menu …

Today is that multi-faceted holiday, that changeable opal of the almost-Spring: February Second. It’s Imbolc, Lady Day, Candlemas, the Purification of the Virgin Mary – there’s a definite trend toward goddess-worship there, which the early Catholic Church wisely absorbed and attached to Mary when they were re-organizing the spiritual life of Europe. Spring is coming, and it’s time to acknowledge the Maiden in all Her guises – light white candles in blue cups, bring fresh greens into the house, dine on new bread and fresh milk.

I don’t know what happened in America, that what we got instead was the shenanigans of a sub-Arctic marmot … but even the Groundhog has his enthusiastic devotees, and today the hairy little bugger had the good grace to actually predict an immediate Spring. So Happy Groundhog Day, too! Kage admitted she’d have paid more reverence to the Groundhog, if See’s made a chocolate one for the occasion …

It’s a good day for beginnings, if you’ve got any lying around unstarted.  Here in Los Angeles, it’s also been a good day for lying quietly about – soft clouds, mild weather, not much sunlight … I personally have paid extra attention to the groundhog this year, and spent a lot of the day asleep. I didn’t see my shadow, either.

I’m going to have a cream soup and fresh bread for supper. And start the next section of “Pareidolia”, which picks up in Los Angeles in 1943. Zoot Suit Riots, UFO’s, Japanese submarines attacking the coastal cactus, lines around the block at Hollywood and Wilcox for … See’s chocolate.

So, a happy Quarter Day to all of you, Dear Readers. Whether you are celebrating marmots or Brigid or the Virgin Mother, have a day and evening full of soft light. Spring is really coming.

Kage Baker hated reading her reviews.  She knew that if they were good, she’d get euphoric, but it would be temporary; an emotional sugar rush. And if they were bad, she’d be totally, dreadfully, suicidally depressed. She just couldn’t establish a moderate approach to them.

It was tremendous fun when she got an accolade or a prize – her exuberance was huge and contagious, especially when she was dancing around the living room with Harry the parrot screeching happily from the back of her chair – he loved it when someone danced; he’s just a riotous sort of guy. Then it was double chips and beans for everyone, as they say, and paper parasols in all the drinks.

When a review was bad, though, it destroyed her. Even when it was from a perfect stranger, or from someone whom she knew was a pointless noisemaker. And there are such in any genre, people who write scads of reviews (not always bad) just in order to get their own name some attention; authors dread them, since they write their reviews in such careless haste that they are not only not helpful, they can turn other readers off the work.

Mostly it was just that the effects of bad reviews lasted longer than the good ones, for Kage. And they sent her into such a Slough of Despond that for a while, she couldn’t write. Bad reviews were one of the few things that caused writer’s block, for Kage. “What’s the point?” she’d moan, slumped in her chair and tying knots in the end of her braid. “I’m a hack – a failure – a waste of time.”

“Oh nooooo,” Harry would wail.

“Stop reading the damned Amazon reviews!” I would tell her. And she’d promise, and be good for a while – until curiosity got the better of her and she sneaked a peak when she thought I wasn’t looking …

Usually, I read her reviews first, at her request. It was the system we finally hit on: I read them and gave her a translation if it was bad. Bad reviews can be very helpful to the writer, in that they can show one where one’s faults lie. They can also identify jerks out there in the blogosphere, so you know who to avoid … but for Kage, it was a case of being able to keep writing. So whenever possible, I was the last content filter.

Same thing with rejection letters – I read them first and passed on redacted translations. Kage was aware good observations could be gleaned from both critics and editors: she just needed them in a form she could survive reading. Some she never, ever did read – they were just too nasty. But their observations were useful nonetheless.

The problem with Amazon reviews was – and is – that they are like poisoned cocktail party snacks: they’re there in the open, they are bright and alluring, they are free and they just may make you very sick … writers risk depression, severe angst, late night  and early morning despair by reading the things. I know that. I reminded Kage of it  all the time. But, you know, that bowl of Spanish peanuts looks soooo tasty …

The reviews for Nell Gwynne II have thus far been decent. Some have been actually good! The decent ones are the most I realistically anticipated, so the glowing ones have been a tremendous boost to me. I’m not dancing yet, but it’s mostly because I’ve just never been the dancing sort … and, you know, it’s early times yet. And then this morning I went and looked at the Amazon reviews – sigh.

I shall not do that again. It’s pointless and painful. And Kage was correct – praise is wonderful but fragile in the memory: bad reviews carry much more weight and burrow right into the center of your soul. What really pissed me off was that the review didn’t mention me at all: while complaining that it didn’t read like Kage had actually written much of it, the critic also laid the blame for the story’s faults directly on her.  Which is unfair, and doubly so in that she can’t defend herself.

However, such are the perils of exposing one’s self in writing. A book is a delicate edifice. Anyone with a few bucks can write rude things on your walls, and the author is not allowed to hunt them down and shoot them with lots of small, non-fatal but very painful darts … not that I’ve been brooding over this. Nope, not me.

And anyway, in the meantime, I also got a nice email this morning. Mr. Stefan Raets, who has been interviewing me via the aether this last week or two, has posted that review on his site today. Here is the link he sent me: http://farbeyondreality.com/2013/01/31/author-interview-kathleen-bartholomew-sister-of-kage-baker/

Do take a look, Dear Readers. I had fun answering his questions. May his site get lots of traffic!

And now, I must go dance with a parrot …

Kage Baker was always intrigued by the phenomenon of suddenly finding references to a new object or topic everywhere.You know – or maybe you don’t. But it happened to Kage all the time.

She would find some new topic interesting, and want to learn more about it. And suddenly, there would be references to it everywhere, when it had never been noticeable to her before this. Someone would reference it in an email;  I’d find an article in a magazine; there would be a special on television about it. This happened over and over to Kage – something caught her fancy, and abruptly she was inundated in facts, photos, action figures, marshmallow shapes in cereal …

This happened for things as disparate as silent movies and favourite candies. EBay, when it rolled around, turned out to be a huge resource – an alternate universe where everything that had ever intrigued Kage was to be found. Walnuts dipped in grape juice? I scoffed, but Kage found them on EBay. Same with Glasswax, aluminum Christmas trees, and bone knitting needles.

While I am not as attuned to this invisible storage facility where everything you ever loved has gone to hide, I do get infrequent glimpses of it these days. Not so much the goodies I merely want, as the things that I probably need. Mostly , though, it’s just weird stuff that I saw once or twice and then abruptly began to find everywhere.

I was hilariously thrilled to find the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect. Then I was even more amused and amazed to find another news item about it – it’s apparently well on its way to become the poster bug for insects snatched from the edge of extinction. It’s not too surprising when you consider the high weirdness of its discover (which I am sure, Dear Readers, you all recall): these guys are just packed with interesting oddities. They’re huge, they’re shiny black, they disappeared from one weird island and then got found on an even weirder one … well, it you missed my previous expose of tree lobsters, do check out my previous blogs: Back to the Island (7/18/2012) and Son of Lord Howe Stick Insect (9/20/2012).

But now! Amazingly, someone has made a cartoon of their adventures, the plucky little bugs. Well, the plucky nerve-shatteringly huge bugs, I guess; but the point is, there is charming little animated film about them now:

http://scienceblogs.com/sciencepunk/2013/01/06/sticky-an-animation-about-the-unextinct-giant-insects-of-lord-hoe-island/

Feast your eyes, Dear Readers. (Or peak through your fingers.) When something gets a cartoon made of it, it’s going mainstream for sure. And the stick insects are a lot cuter (or at least a lot less horrific) as cartoon heroes. Take a look. Show your kids, especially small ones – little kids love bugs, especially cartoon ones that cannot show up unexpectedly under their beds. But the pattern persists for me! Once again, whatever eldritch current brought Kage news about re-discovered strains of teosinte and obscure Australian children’s books has brought me news of the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect.

Maybe I have a budding power … just in case, I’m gonna start concentrating on tigers. I’ve gotten two unexpected references to white tigers in my news feed this week – if I can find a third one, it might mean they are being considered for unanticipated survival by the Muse of the Unexpected. And tigers really need the help. Maybe 25,000 of them will suddenly show in a distant Asian valley, as all those mountain gorillas did several years ago.

Dostoyevsky said the the best way to think of something was to tell yourself not to do it – his example was a blue-eyed bear. So, Dear Readers, let’s try not to think about blue-eyed tigers. That practically guarantees they will surface in astonishing quantities. And that would be very fine.

PS: I begin on year 4 without Kage, Hard to believe … sleep well, kiddo.

KAGE BAKER  hated medical tests. Nonetheless, she endured with a grim determination whatever was needed. She always said that if you expected medical science to help you, you’d better let it cast the bones and read your urine.

Doctors tended to look nonplussed when she told them this. It appears that medicine no longer teaches its own history to its students. Kage was always willing to take up the slack and educate them herself.

I am doing my best to face another round of tests with aplomb and courtesy; I don’t mind passing on a little information myself while I do so. Today, I turned on the mammogram tech to the works of Frank Herbert, just by taking my Kindle with me to my breast biopsy. Apparently, people do not usually take their Kindles along to this test … or recite the Litany of Fear for the edification of the staff. But I think it ought to be framed and on the wall of every testing room.

My biopsy went quite well. It was nowhere near as uncomfortable as I was led to believe, thanks to a generous use of Lidocaine; in fact, I’m still numb. The acrobatics of getting in position for the biopsy proper are undignified to the point of absurdity – one must be face down on a table with a hole cut in the center, through which the pertinent part of one’s anatomy is encouraged to protrude. Giggling is frowned upon, too, as the doctor doesn’t like it when you move while she’s trying to insert a foot long aspiration needle into your tit …

But really, it’s ridiculous. I have been informed that the design of the table comes almost unaltered from a piece of surgical furniture designed to accommodate the  male        genitalia  … all I can say is that (unlike our brethren’s wedding tackle) we ladies do not carry all our exterior equipment on the center line of our bodies. The one big hole in the center of the table is not really suited to the design of the bosom. And if the size of said hole is unchanged from the design on the original – well, there certainly were giants on the earth in those days, and they must have men of renown.

But it was really not too uncomfortable; I’ve endured worse. The Lidocaine worked a treat, and they got all the samples they needed on the first pass.  I now boast a platinum bead imbedded in my left breast, adding to my collection of precious metal jewellery for interior organs. The worst side effect has been a stiff neck and shoulder from lying still and trying not to fall through the table through sheer Dynamic Tension for 45 minutes.

I don’t know anything yet, and won’t for a few days. But the biopsy is done and gone, and I can relax about that, at least. Now I’m going to indulge myself a little, and watch John Stewart Stephen Colbert before I return to “Pareidolia”. Time to pick up the twisted thread of Joseph’s career in WWII Hollywood!

And, Dear Readers, I thank all of you for your wishes of good fortune and health. Makes a huge difference in surviving these little domestic hysterics sane, when you have such nice folks pulling for you.

Kage Baker was a fiercely dedicated writer. She wrote almost all the time, even when she didn’t want to – because, she said, you might only get a few hundred words done, but those few hundred will move you that much closer to the place where you suddenly find you can write 2,000.

To which end, I’ve added a few thousand to “Pareidolia”. today. Completely rewrote the beginning, trying for less happy Joseph and more Show, Not Tell. I’m going to do some more tonight, before I fall asleep to the sound of the waves 100 feet away.

Despite being  a well-behaved writer, it’s been a lovely day. There were otters floating tranquilly in the deadly high tide this morning; there is a pigeon next outside my window, with sweetly courting rock doves in it. I have chocolate chip cookies for a late night snack. Neassa is wonderful company – we’ve been trading observations and writing conundrums as we work (Who took out the Sumerians? Do you remember?)

The moon rose, full and glorious, and its silvered road has been dancing on the waves all night. And the coast of Monterey is simply one of the most beautiful places to be at any time, for any reason. Its especially easy to enjoy it through a window when the window is the paned casement windows in the renovated  Victorian B & B where I happen to be staying …

My publisher called me on the road yestreday, to ask politely if any of my writing weekend was to be spent on his stuff. Ad yes it is, and I’d better get back to it. Jacob is a wonderfully nice man, and he did ask so hopefully and politely …

Back to Constantinople!

Kage Baker adored Robert Louis Stevenson. She adored his writing, both fiction and travelogues – he travelled a lot, especially for a guy with emphysema and bronciectasis; and he usually did it on the cheap, because he was chronically broke.

This was a guy who defied his nice upper-middle-class family of engineers and bridge builders, to become a travel writer and then a novelist. Quelle horreur! Plus, he married a divorced American lady who was older than he was, had children by her ex in tow, and was decidedly not a member of the Scottish Covenanter Kirk. His family did not respond to his shenanigans with an outpouring of money.

None of that stopped Stevenson. By foot, by rail, by boat and by cranky grey burro-back, he explored writers’ colonies and art communes all over Europe. Then he wrote books about them. He came to America to beg the older lady (whom he met in a French artists’ commune) to marry him; he took up writing travelogues in order to pay for housing and food while the lady (her name was Fanny) – who was somewhat taken aback by her gaunt, pale, hacking suitor – tried to figure out what to do with him.

Kage thought this was a gloriously romantic love story. All the better that it was real, and by the man who wrote one of the first real psycho killer stories AND the best pirate stories ever. And the entire last act of their courtship took place in California, and mostly in Monterey.

Stevenson loved Monterey. So did Kage. Her devotion led her to become a retro-stalker: she went over every inch of Monterey to find all the places where Stevenson did … stuff. Any stuff. She found where he lived, where he took his meager meals and did his best to live on brandy, where he bought salve for his horribly excematous hands, where he hung around his lady-love’s hotel and made calf’s eyes at her windows.

Further searches took her (well, actually I took her) back and forth through the Northern California wine country, where the Stevensons – once married – took their honeymoon in a deserted silver camp that can only be reached by a wooden  staircase and ladders up a hillside. However, first place in her heart was claimed by Monterey; because by the time she found it, it was had weathered all sorts of economic and political storms to become the beautiful, antique-rich city it is now.

Monterey has the largest number of extant adobe buildings in the United States. The hotel Stevenson lived in is one of them; I know most of its inches, and Kage knew them all.  Joaquin Murrieta lived there in his blameless youth. That idiot Fremont occupied the place in defiance of a treaty with Mexico. It has sidewalks made of ancient whale vertebrae. It has the oldest theatre in California.  Its cemataries are full of ghosts and geese (Run. From the geese,). And for a while, it was the capitol of California. Stevenson wrote about that, too.

I also love Monterey. Being here without Kage makes me feel like half my skull is filled with styrofoam peanuts instead of brain tissue, but hey – I only need enough to plot and type, right?

So I am here now, in this birthplace of pirates and arena of cockeyed lovers, pounding the keys of my Buke like a good girl. Of course, I am writing this for you Dear Readers, instead of a flashback/prequel scene for “Pareidola” ,,, but don’t worry. The back left quadrant of my mind is worrying away at it. I shall break out in a description of Egyptian bureaucracy at any moment: Joseph-as-Imhotep inventing the government-enforced ratio calculations for the statues and paintings of the gods that actually messed with the worshipers’ brains. And that later have been used to produce the Byzantine icon that makes mortals go mad or drop dead, and that makes Joseph’s brain itch …

The new opening came to me at dinner, via the invaluable Neassa. We were scarfing down Mexican food and watching the lights of Sand City across the Bay  contest with the moonlight on the waves. I  was whining about writing a flashback scene – ’cause I hates them, I hates them forever! – and Neassa said, So put it at the start instead of partway through. Then it’s not a flashback, it’s a current event. You ought to have some time travel somewhere in here.

It must have been  the steak burrito. She said it was amazing. That’s what I get for eating girly food like giant shrimp in green olive tapenade. Neassa now gets all the chocolate the turn-down service left us. She deserves it.

More tomorrow, Dear Readers, as I lock myself into my hotel room soI have to write. Excelsior!

Kage Baker adored the gracious old city of Monterey. I think if we could have stayed in the old Shipping Warehouse, or the new Maritime Museum, she’d have been ecstatic. I can imagine her camped out happily next to the Fresnel light upstairs in the Museum, blissfully sleeping in its revolving beam of light.

Since they don’t let people stay there, or even camp out in the Plaza, we usually sought out a hotel in the adjoining little town of Pacific Grove. It’s that southern end of town on the other side of the Aquarium, where all the houses are from the last two centuries and the narrow strip of park on Ocean View Boulevard twists along the edge of the sea. It’s an utterly exquisite place, and for us it was always a destination of its own – we could go to Pacific Grove just to be there, and need no further adventures or delights. Sometimes we went and stayed in the Butterfly Grove Motel, and went no farther from our suite amid the eucalyptus trees and swarming Monarch butterflies than to walk down and admire the Lighthouse.

Pacific Grove was even more a destination resort when we stayed in the Seven Gables Inn. This is one of the lovelier B&Bs that throng in Pacific Grove like the butterflies; an old family Victorian that has converted seven of its rooms into bed chambres of astonishing beauty and comfort. It also offers the living room and parlour and breakfast rooms intact and still serving their original purposes, and there are more modern (but almost as lovely) rooms in the stable wing … it’s enough just to stay there, you really don’t need any other entertainment.

Being on Ocean View Boulevard, it faces the Pacific Ocean across a single narrow street; you can walk out the front door, cross the road and walk straight down onto what passes as a beach there – which, at high tide, is nothing at all. Very exciting. Seals and sea otters bask on the rocks; sea birds float like pearls in the kelp beds.

Kage went there for writing weekends; working holidays in an atmosphere of peace and beauty. I just unashamedly cocooned, spending my happy time in knitting and reading, surfacing to justify my existence in the window seat by debating What Comes Next with Kage. Other than that, I was as useful as a potted plant …

But there am I bound tomorrow, and this time I will be aiming to produce several thousand words myself. I’ve got my Buke, and even had the sense to update my Verizon wi fi service: the Seven Gables does not boast such extraneaties as computer connections. Or televisions. Or phones. Or, for that matter, coherent radio stations – there’s a radio in every room, but all we’ve ever managed to pull in on it has been UFO sounds and rhythmic static. Maybe the nearby Army base has something to do with it – Kage could speculate on why it happened for an hour at a time – but I am now armed with a Pandora account, and so can provide a nice classical soundtrack on my Buke.

Since I think I would dissolve in tears like Naiobe if I tried to stay at the Seven Gables alone, Neassa is coming to support my wavering courage. This was one of Kage’s most special places, most fertile creative nodes: it’s going to be hard to be there. I must admit to an urge to cut and run, and spend the weekend in the Motel 6 out on Highway 1 with a bottle of Macallan whiskey and a box of tissues. But not only do I need to do this, I owe Neassa a massive treat.

Not only has Neassa stood in for me when various disasters have struck me down at the last three Dickens Fairs – which is a dreadful task, my beloveds are indeed all sweeties, but directing them is like herding cats on drugs and Southern Comfort. Also, Neassa was one of the two people who took turns coming and spending time with me after Kage died. She and Kimberly are the primary reasons I survived. At all. In any condition fit to continue a life, with all my faculties and clothes.

I’ve been trying to make it up to Kimberly by buying her household appliances – red dryers, painted iron fences, plum trees. For Neassa, a fellow writer, I am hoping this writing weekend at the Seven Gables will at least demonstrate the enormity of my gratitude. There’s no way to really make it up to her. But she saved my life.

The least I can do is make part of hers really cool for a weekend. Home-made muffins for breakfast, tea and cookies at bedtime, and 4,000 words on her Regency novel: writers are easy to get treats for, if you just think a little way outside the box.

And I shall report from the delightfully weird little town of Pacific Grove, Dear Readers. There’s more to it that B&Bs and golf, you know. Wait’ll I tell you about the graveyard …