Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker maintained that we – she and I – shared a brain. She was left-handed, I am right-handed; together, she reasoned, we were one fairly competent brain.

Our friends and family, I think, were willing to accept the idea that it took the pair of us to make up one brain. It was generally considered that, on our own, neither one of us could find useful portions of our anatomy with both hands and a Google map.

I believe various parental units were astonished when Kage actually left home – not only because it hadn’t been expected she would, as they say now, launch; but because she was the first one to do so. It was always a source of wonderment to some older relatives as the years rolled on and we appeared to be successful adults – Momma, I know for a fact, thought we were more like Laverne and Shirley (or Thelma and Louise) and was always on alert for the moment when we’d get tired of “playing house” and end up in jail or an asylum or a convent. When Momma died, she made each of us promise to take care of the other. We’d at least won her confidence to the point where she believed we could manage as a team.

If nowhere else, that symbiosis was used in Kage’s writing. When she needed extra brain power, she claimed, all she had to do was hook up her own brain in sequence with mine. The brain storming that underlay every one of her novels and stories was how we did it. Long hours tossing ideas back and forth, trying out story lines and characters; psycho-babbling and taking parts and arguing imaginary histories and fantastic technologies until something cohesive arose stood free of all the murk.

“Like the primordial island rising from the retreating ooze of chaos,” I opined once.

“Eeeuw,” replied Kage. “Less ooze, more ideas, please.”

She was right, of course. Sticky icky horror was never anything she wanted to write. Even when she did break down and write a Cthulu pastiche, Pismo Beach and chowder and beach-front buskers got mixed in.

Anyway, running our two brains in harness was how Kage processed the final stages of research into writing. I have all the notes she wrote down from those sessions; I have all the memories of having done it in my mind.

And this last week, I’ve been trying to explain this in an interview with the charming Stefan Raets, of  http://farbeyondreality.com/  . Stefan is a science fiction and fantasy reviewer, and has been interviewing me via email this week. He sends me well-thought-out questions, and has been very kind about accepting my verbose explanation of how Kage wrote. His focus has been largely on the “how and why”, and on Nell Gwynne and the Company series. It promises to be a very nice interview, and I’ll be happily blatting its publication date as soon as I know it.

It’s really made me think about how Kage did what she did, and how she included me. That matters an enormous lot to me, engaged now in trying to hack more of her stories out of the slowly-hardening wax of memory. (Hopefully with less purple prose than that last bit of description …) Consequently, Dear Readers, I am taking off this weekend and heading to Pacific Grove, where I shall immure myself in a Victorian B&B for a writing weekend.  It’s what Kage used to do when she really needed to work, and it’s where we used to go for her to do it. I’ve finally worked up the courage to try it myself …

It’ll be weird as hell to be there without her. I’m fetching knitting, too, in case my Muse deserts me totally for the local bars. And the heroic Neassa is meeting me there, so I don’t just cut and run when faced with trying to write where Kage found so much inspiration.

I’ll let you know how it’s going, Dear Readers, as it goes along. In the meantime – keep your eyes peeled for Mr. Raets’ upcoming interview, and light a candle for Neassa’s patience.

Kage Baker, believing as she firmly did that any good thing was worth over-doing, actually observed several New Years during a single calendar span.

There was the birthday year, of course. That diminished a little in importance with every annular marker past childhood. On the other hand, celebrations usually lasted a week, so as to get everything in. Kage liked to mark them with chara trips.

There was the deep-dyed-in-your-chromosomes seasonal New Year – usually noticed around April, when in Southern California Spring finally wins its battle with Winter; up until then, it might yet rain for a month and wash little towns away. It’s done it before.

Then there was the astronomical New Year, which she considered began at the Winter Solstice. The Longest Night, the Shortest Day – then it was off on the merry-go-round once more.

There was the classical New Year in January, of course. Kage was apt to comment, though, that this was only the recent, Justinian version; if one needed extra time, one could default to the old Gregorian calendar. She liked options.

Kage never got the school year out of her system, not after “12 years in the navy blue, aaaar”: as she put it. The neat thing about the school year is that it has two New Years. The first was in September, when one was compelled back into blue uniforms, 5-pound saddle shoes and stuffy classrooms. That one was only redeemed by new crayons, new books, and the immediate proximity of the winter holidays. The second New Year, of course, was in June – when all the horizons of the earth expanded to infinity in one deep, gold-rimmed breath, and Summer came.

There were fiscal years, only noted because the IRS got stinky about self-employment tax payments. There was the New Year of royalties, which is usually in March – except in lean years, when it begins and ends with some piddling amount in December. There was the New Year of beginning a new book; and that one could start anywhere, on no notice whatsoever, and then twist and telescope itself into weird, non-Euclidian geometry.

And there was Samhain, the Celtic New Year. That one fit neatly into the celebrations for Halloween; in our household it was a three-day festival, marked with feasts, honouring the dead, and running around in the dark with pockets full of chocolate. That last bit was imperative even as grownups. In fact, maybe more so – it was grownups, said Kage, who could really benefit by a nocturnal stroll by the sounding sea, eating Snickers bars by moonlight and the eldritch green algae-glow of the waves.

I still keep most of these observances. Even the school year, which has been recently reinforced by moving into Kimberly’s household, full of teachers, ex-teachers, and teachers yet-to-come. But for me, in these strange days – half epilogue, half new life – the year begins on January 31st. Each new year of my life will begin on that day.

This lets me off the hook, too, for falling into a slough of exhaustion post January 1st. Freezing cold, flue shot reactions and all the other detritus of last year have knocked me flat on my ass the last three weeks. My deepest apologies, Dear Readers. My newest New Year is now upon the horizon and I will return to Do-Bee industry.

This coming January 31st – first day of, as Hallmark cards so annoyingly insist, the rest of my life – I shall celebrate by recovering from a little out-patient surgery, and carrying the phone with me from room to room. I’ll be waiting for the results of the needle biopsy scheduled for January 30th, which is being done to determine the exact nature of the weird little spots in my left breast, that showed up on my recent mammogram. They showed up even better on the more detailed one done today; hence, the biopsy.

I intend to blog my way through this, Dear Readers, with the enthusiasm due the New Year. I shall once more be venturing into the aquarium-haunted environs of Cedar-Sinai, where who knows what adventures await? Odds are this whole current mess is a false alarm, and I shall emerge scatheless. But there are bound  to be some giggles and good stories along the way ….

And in the meantime: hey, whadda ya think of Nell Gwynne II?

Kage Baker. (That’s not a spanner; that’s my classic opening line).

Frost, wind storms, reactions to flu shots. Possible flu anyway. Power fluctuations due to the lines freezing and/or being blown down. Political dingbats yelling loudly in every medium, about everything. Conspiracy theories that are not amusing and are argued everywhere in public.

Weather disasters. Political disasters. Legislative disasters. Social disasters. Cooking disasters (Okay, that one’s personal. But it matters.) Fashion disasters – in that I don’t care what people wore to the Golden Globes, but am faced with interminable slideshows everywhere I look. And mermaid gowns are stupid.

Narcolepsy, ugly socks, brain worms, raccoon raids, drippy sinuses, arthritis in my thumbs.

These are some of the annoyances with which I am failing to deal. An actual blog will resume tomorrow.

Kage Baker intensely disliked cold weather – despite which, she spent half her life in Central and Northern California, where frost is common and snow is not unknown. The light, she said, was better – and one can always add layers of clothing to ward off the Ice Age. Which, to Kage, was anything below 70 degrees.

The real problem, though, (according to Kage) was not how far North or South one was in the long coastal ribbon that is California. It’s the fact that the place is a mosaic of micro climates. Most of them are fairly small; some are absurdly so, and have given rise to the insane variety of vegetables, herd beasts and cottage industries we’ve always boasted.

For instance, the Sunset Strip, between Doheny and Crescent Heights, runs along the base of the Hollywood Hills in a completely separate climactic zone from everything up hill and down. Its first use was as a field greens farm and a camel and goat ranch. A half mile in any direction, and none of those would have thriven. The teetotalers in new-born Hollywood would have had to get their lettuce somewhere else, and Greek George would have had to sell something else to the Camel Corps.

The divisions can be sharp and ferocious, too; you can literally drive over a given river or hill, and find yourself in a different world from the one you just left. When we lived in Pismo Beach, the boundaries for our climate were Avila Creek to the North and Pismo Creek to the South – rain stopped and started as if on the edge of a roofed patio; fog banks would form on one or the other side of the creeks, and just stay in place. They looked like the implacable faces of glaciers, and one drove into and out of them like special effects on some Disney Weather World ride.

I now live in an area of Los Angeles called Atwater Village. It used to be just plain Atwater, but some preppy promoter got hold of the name in the 1970’s and elevated it to a faux village. It has resolutely resisted upscaling, however, and one of the reasons is that it’s in a funny microclimate. It’s wedged up against the Hollywood Hills where they become Griffith Park, separated from both Glendale and downtown Los Angeles by more hills. The Los Angeles River – in one of its rare, natural state stretches – runs through it. All this makes it the home of ferocious fogs, high winds, and frosts unseen in most Los Angeles areas.

Among other things, that makes sidewalk cafes uncomfortable around Atwater. Since pretty much the same climate persisted in the Hollywood Hills, where I also lived, I don’t mind it in the least. But the folks with free-range cotton caftans and hairless little dogs wearing quilted silk coats tend to vanish when the wind begins to blow …

Our halcyon days ended yestreday afternoon. The wind began to blow hard. Continuously. And amazingly coldly. The wind chimes in the lemon tree sound like Quazimodo is jamming out there, and the frost lights in the mulberry tree are rising and falling and flailing like the Antarctic waves in the Roaring Forties. The temperature last night hit freezing, and today has reached a fine tropical high of 57 – from which it is rapidly falling. We’d have had frost if the wind hadn’t blown it straight off the grass and the windows – and if the wind drops tonight, we’ll see glittering lawns tomorrow.

It’s gorgeous, though. The eastern mountains look close enough to be marching West, probably hauling glaciers to roll right right over us. The front yard is paved with golden silk, like Lothlorien. Young ravens are flying upside down and backwards between the denuded camphor trees, and their cawing sounds like children laughing. I love this … Kage would have been wrapped in a blanket, indoors by the fire and cuddling the indignant parrot, but I love this.

People who dismiss California as having no weather don’t know what they’re talking about. Or what they’re missing. We’ve just gone from spring to winter – backwards, to boot – in 24 hours! From Italy to England! And there are still flood warnings and squids out at the coast.

Man, it’s just one big special effects festival around here. And people wondered where Kage got her ideas …

Kage Baker always said that one of the worst doldrum periods in the year was the first fortnight of January. She herself tried to hibernate through it. However, deadlines being what they were and increasing every year, she tended to spend January alternately  playing games on her computer, and writing like a madwoman on several projects at once.

January has such a weight and mass of its own! Its gravity hauls one in and spreads one like peanut butter across the internal landscape … Christmas is gone, but Winter is just getting its second wind (often literally). It’s freaking cold. It’s still more often dark than daylit. There are all the toys and festal foods to be used up before they go bad. Really, it’s hard to do anything in January.

And then, just as you decide to be responsible (said Kage) California unleashed its Secret Winter Weapon. The Halcyon Days arrived.

Classically, the Halcyon Days are a period of calm and warmth at midwinter, a false spring that gives a few days or weeks of mild, sweet, warm weather just after the Solstice. In the Greek myths, it was a reward for a loving couple who were inconveniently turned into birds: the Halcyon Days arrived just so they could build their nest floating on the calm seas, and raise their brood in peace.

Regardless of cursed bird lovers, California and Greece share similar climates. And California, especially the Southern part, gets its own Halcyon Days – a heat wave is almost normal around New Year’s, and January usually alternates between mild sunshine and Fimbulwinter. Kage and I grew up expecting to be able to run around barefoot at the end of Christmas break, and then be wrapped to our noses in scarves and coats by the time we went back to school.

Once we were adults, though … the Halcyon Days became a real hazard to adult responsibilities. Getting to work. Holding down a job. Writing 3k words a day … these were the times when we tended to blow off all our scheduled endeavours and spend the day under a budding tree. In lawn chairs on the beach, counting sand pipers and concocting stories. Chasing the sunlight down some road between newly-green fields and exclaiming over all the baby animals. Lambs! Foals! Calves! Or, as Kage would cry exultantly, “Oh, look at the little vitellini!”

During the Halcyon Days, we were major slackers.

This week, the Halcyon Days have been hesitantly showing their shining, misplaced faces around here. The Hollywood Hills and Griffith Park are green, green, green.  The spring king tides are flowing relentlessly on shore, and Humboldt squids are staging carnivorous raids into all the winter harbours. The weather is changeable and totally confused – this morning it rained, now we’re having 40 MPH wind gusts, the sun is shining brightly and tonight we’re scheduled to freeze! No end of hilarity. All in all, it’s just not a day when one feels fulfilled sitting indoors at a desk.

But I’ve a novel I’m doing Phase 1 cleanup on, and another that is still in its (staggering) infancy. I’ve a short story partway composed, and it’s not gonna get any longer on its own; I even went to the trouble of making an outline, for heaven’s sake! It would be wrong to waste it.

Still, the light is so beautiful outside … it leaps and bends, wanes and waxes on all the white walls, imitating flames and waves as the mulberry tree does a strip tease outside the window, exuberantly losing the last of its leaves to the wind. Soon the eastern mountains will begin to burn rose and orange and amber, crowned with snow and mirroring the sunset. What’s a poor girl to do?

I think I need a floating nest.  I need to go float on the tide a little, and nurture something.

PS: Dear Readers, I have checked with Subterranean Press and they inform me that they will begin shipping Nell Gwynne II tomorrow. That means not only the copies ordered by individual buyers, but the ones going to outlets like Amazon. The weather has been truly weird and bad back East, where they are. But your patience will be rewarded!

Kage Baker and I always observed the full 12 days of Christmas. Partly because it was an old custom, and Kage liked those; partly also to stretch out the season of Yule. After the buildup to Christmas Day, she found it a dreadful let-down to have the whole thing collapse into nothing on the very morning it finally arrived.

Classically, the 12 storied days begin on Christmas, not end there. And they go on until January 6th – variously known as 12th Night, Epiphany, Little Christmas, etc. It’s supposed to be the day that the Magi finally got to the stable – and, it is to be hoped, reinforced the angel’s warning to Joseph and Mary that it was time to clear out of Herod’s ‘hood if they wanted to keep their baby safe.

In modern times, here in the US, Christmas begins the day after Thanksiving and implodes on Christmas Eve. In really devout areas, it seems to begin the day after Halloween … by the time 12th Night rolls around, the stores are displaying Valentines and Easter eggs.  We scorned such claim-jumping. Not even  Peeps and Cadbury eggs could persuade Kage to abandon the Midwinter festivities before 12th Night.

Kimberly’s family feels much the same. The tree is still up, though it will come down tomorrow. The lights are still strung for the Christmas display, in multi-coloured glory; after tomorrow, we’ll clear off the polychrome and revert to icy white and blue for the duration of January. The seasonal evergreen light over the front door will be changed out for a blue one. Kim and I like to keep a string of lights on the front window year-round, and the colours are changed monthly to reflect the season. What comes after Christmas is frost.

Literally. Even here in Southern California, there are places where frost makes its appearance in the black heart of winter. I live in one of those micro-climates. January is the coldest month down here, and it’s in the last week that we’ve had to begin scraping frost off the cars in the mornings. The lawn recovered nicely from the summer heat, and now we have to worry about frost-kill … but it never lasts long down here.

The Christmas cactus is covered with scarlet flowers twice the length of  the hummingbirds that come to raid them; the oxalis is showing its first neon-yellow blooms, the rosemary is covered with pale-blue flowers. Various bulbs are displaying blunt anonymous buds rising through the mulch of dead leaves to surprise us. No, the frost won’t last; but while it’s here, we’ll honour it with the appropriate lights.

This is what Kage and I always did, and it’s a joy to me that Kimberly still does it, too. I like the domestic habit of helping the seasons along their path with ritual lights. It’s one of the great advantages of electricity! Though if I had to do it with candles or oil, I would. I have, not always having lived where current flows … and despite the fact that I have a fibre optic Christmas tree plugged into the UCB port of my computer even as I write this, it’s keeping company with coloured candle cups: just in case the power fails.

Gotta keep the lights lit. That’s something in which Kage’s determination never faltered, whether it was votive candles on top of her view screen or the lamps she lit in the windows for every Quarter Day’s changes. If we want the light to dwell with us, we have to make it sure knows where we live, right?

Right.

Kage Baker always maintained that one of the reasons she wrote books was an overwhelming case of  l’esprit de l’escalier – that formulation of the scathing retort only after you have left the party or argument or debate. The perfect response usually comes in the middle of the night, while you are gloomily going over the day’s happenings; it sits on the bedstead at your feet, and gibbers at you.

Or so Kage claimed. In order to lay these ghosts of still-born debate, she further claimed, she wrote books. In those, she was complete mistress of the conversation, and her heroes could always have the bon mot, the last retort, the game point. At least, if she decided the plot was properly advanced by it, they could. If not, she let them, too, stew in miserable second-guessing themselves in the middles of their nights.

That happened a lot to Mendoza. It was one of the reasons Kage also frequently said she hoped she never met Mendoza in a dark place, as she anticipated getting punched in the nose by her creation.

But in the meantime, the stories and novels gave Kage a bully pulpit. She could say those things that had only occurred to her long after quarrels at the family table, or over after-dinner drinks; the brilliant counter-arguments that were only ever addressed to the deaf ears of the evening news. She was far too shy to proffer her opinions in most social situations, although she argued freely with the television set (we both did and I still do); but in her books, Kage had all the time in the world and could craft her conversational sallies from safe ambush.

The little stupid people were born, in part, from that – the evidence of something like them, their cowardice and machinations and sneakiness, demanded they be given a face and then soundly refuted. Kage felt that the attitude they embodied had to be personalized and identified to be fought: so she wrote them into the world and then alerted everyone to their works and influence. And can any of you, Dear Readers, really deny that there is some prissy, fussy, cowardly evil in the world that – once outlined by Kage – obviously has their shape?

Her descriptions of the Beast Liberation Movement, the growing ABSO persecutions in England, the resurgence of Prohibitions, the discouragement of individualism and the demonization of the different: Kage’s books gave her the platform from which she could argue with these ugly trends safely. She couldn’t get run over in the conversation – which happened, in real life; she was always being talked over, and she hated it.

But in her books, she could take the time to come up with the perfect scathing retort in time to use it.

More importantly, as time went on, she found she could do more than just Dorothy Parker some moron from the safe ambuscade of her computer screen. She could sound the warnings. She could blow the copper’s whistle, sound the alarm, wind the alerting trumpet and the cautionary drum … Fire! Fear! Foes! Evil is vaulting the gates and burrowing under the walls – it may be petty now, but if we ignore it, it will grow to a black tide and sweep us all away.

Being Kage – and despising melodrama – she chose to most of all laugh at the new Puritanism she saw growing, at the tide of self-righteousness, and the rebirth of the No-Nothings. Ignorance has become, not Bliss, but Pride: Kage fought that. She took trends to such extreme lengths that they became ridiculous, and inspired giggles – but we remembered them, Dear Readers. We didn’t forget them. It maybe funny to postulate a scenario where Devon Cream is a Controlled substance, but the idea itself is so absurd that it sticks in the mind – and then when the Mayor of New York outlaws super-sized sodas, someone will eventually stand up, pointing and laughing, and declare how idiotic this all is!

That was Kage’s hope, anyway. Don’t outlaw pleasures, she would say, rolling her eyes – that only increases the demand for them! If you think they’re dangerous, then make them safe, and teach people to make good decisions. But banning everything the most timid members of a society fear and dislike doesn’t work.

If cheese is outlawed, she once said somberly at a Convention, only outlaws will keep cattle. The audience roared with laughter at the image. Kage waited it out with her wry little half-smile and then added, Keeping livestock was one of the things that launched civilization. Cheese and beer and bread and writing – all dangerous, you know. Cheese is beast exploitation, and beer is bad for you and bread makes you fat and writing – why, only elitist snobs need to write! Gonna throw them ALL out, kids?

They stopped laughing, then. Maybe they thought a little more about it the next time someone tried to outlaw something “for their own good”.  One hopes they did.

Kage hoped they did. And I look around at this new year, and I hope so, too. Oh, I hope and pray with all my heart, Dear Readers. And so, I hope, do you.

Kage Baker felt that the first weeks or so of every new January were not just for new starts – they were for planning. Contemplation. A quiet mustering of forces, preparatory to taking on the world yet again.

For one thing,  she was very, very tired by the time the New Year rolled over the world. Six weeks of Extreme Christmas; year-end deadlines for books; scheduled beginnings on new ones looming on the horizon – it all combined to make her retreat a bit as the new year began. It was a time to go over the old lists, and carry forward the unfinished items into a new list.

The fewer there were to carry forward, of course, the merrier a New Year it was. It was during one these matching up the edges of the old year with the new that she initially discovered she had totally missed the deadline for the novelization of Empress of Mars. The deadline tally on her calendar said “Due Jan. 15th” – but Kage had thought it said June. Hilarity, hysteria and warp speed writing ensued; she got her publisher to grant her 6 weeks leeway, and wrote 2/3 of a novel in that time.

Of course, once that was done, we re-vamped the calendar system. Mostly what we did was get a white board and assorted coloured markers, and I wrote up all her deadlines, con dates, interview dates and so on in multichromatic glory. Kage proved at once that it was just as easy for her to ignore the polychrome as the mere black and white, so I took to checking it every week and notifying her audibly that something had to be done. That worked. Mostly.

I  check my own deadlines myself – there aren’t that many of them yet. Kimberly is much better at it than I am, though, and if I just remember to tell her things, she’ll write them down and nag me … and there you have my basic problem: telling her. The purely secretarial part of my brain seems to have evaporated in the heat of creativity, leaving me wandering through the dimness of my own mind. I used to be armed with a nice shock-proof, water-proof flashlight big enough to stun chance-met cave bears – now I have a couple of torches and a box of sparklers, and am dodging rats, bats and giant spiders through a veil of smoke and sparks.

It’s interesting. But it’s not very efficient.

Luckily, I do have Kage’s old habits to fall back on in my extremity. It’s the first week of January – that means I can still hibernate for a few days, and get my bearings once again. Then it’s time to put away the props and costumes; take down the Christmas tree; finish off the holiday sweets and return to healthy eating; and make a bright clean new writing schedule. Time to take stock of obligations and resources, and see how the latter might be hammered  into shape so as to satisfy the former …

I need a new Company story – that one is well underway, firmly anchored in icons, tree rats and New Horizons In Advertising. I’m on the program for this year’s BayCon, and I need to something to read and tout and just generally promote, so as to look like a real writer. No problem;  that one can be covered by the new novel that came out yestreday. I owe Linn the Patient a look at something, anything, I did on my own – and I’ve managed to complete an ancient manuscript, so all I need to do now is check it for spelling and grammar and complete lapses of sanity or continuity and send it off. But it exists!

I have a bag of chocolate gold coins left, good for doling out as self-assigned rewards. I have a knitting project almost done (for itchy finger moments) and another selected. I have a nice backlog of the unread on my Kindle, for those moments late at night when I just can’t push my own voice any further up the hill and must fall panting to the side and drink of someone else’s.

I even have crossword puzzles.

And at the moment, I have a cold – a fierce, implacable, drippy, stubborn cold. Absolutely no decongestants can be safely mixed with my cardiac meds, so I am pretty efficiently chained to my bed and desk. That makes it so much the easier to plan all this other stuff.

Thag you, Fate. Thag you bery much.

Kage Baker usually spent New Year’s Eve sick.

This was because she tended to catch colds during Dickens Fair, which matured into stately bronchitis by the time the New Year rolled around. Luckily, we seldom went anywhere at New Year’s – our long-standing celebration was steaks and potato latkes at home, followed by a Twilight Zone marathon. Kage would soothe her cold with wine coolers or hot toddies, until it was the magic moment – then she’d risk her life and both lungs by standing on the front porch to pop the cork on our champagne, and listen to the neighbors shoot off armament …

With small arms fire and  the signal cannon from up the hill sounding around us, we’d toast one another and make our annual resolution: to survive.When the gunfire died down, we’d go down to the beach and Kage would wade into the winter waves and vow her life to the muses and the gods of writing. And then we’d go home and finish the champagne.

Why she never died of exposure, I have no idea. But that midnight bath in the cold salt sea actually seemed to shock her system into normalcy; and her colds vanished in a  day or two past the New Year.

Her very last year, Kage was in hospital for the New Year. I sneaked in real candles and real champagne, and at midnight we made our usual vow and toasted one another. She was recovering from brain surgery at that moment, but she truly meant her promise to survive … as she commented three weeks later, on her death bed, she had survived. She had just never specified how long it would last.

She issued dreadful threats to me if I should fail to make that resolution, or to keep it. So tonight I will pledge, for the third year post-Kage, to SURVIVE. And to do so to some profit, too – today Nell Gwynne: On Land and At Sea becomes theoretically available for order on line. Both our names are on the cover; there are some reviews already, and they are favourable. Possibly due to the holidays, Amazon is a little confused about whether or not it’s actually shippable – I suspect it won’t be until Wednesday the 3rd, in actuality.

Not even my author’s copies have arrived. But they will soon. And I will have survived,  and succeeded in the first task Kage left me.

In the meantime, I’ve been asleep most of the day, trying to subdue the cold I now have. Friday I went North for the final act of Dickens Fair – renting a truck on Saturday, and packing the furniture and props back to storage in the hospitable barn of one of my people’s mothers. All my dear stalwarts arrived to pack and carry; nephew Michael even drove up with me to do a manly job of work with the loading, and keep me awake on the road, as well.

The next generation – Mike and all the alarmingly tall Rettinkids – is slowly taking over the heavy lifting. And the generation after them, Sasha and Connor and the yet-unknown sleeping in one of our helper’s belly, is getting in practice by running around crazily every chance they get. It’s how the enormous, competent children who assisted us in the job Saturday first learned to do it …

I drove the truck. I’m not much use for carrying and toting, but by God! I can still drive a rental truck!

Then Michael and I drove home Saturday night. It was a glorious run through the dark of I-5, with mysterious lights twinkling in all the mutable and strange darkenesses … the moon rose golden in the East, and the stars were dangerously bright: nascent novae out there in the Galactic Empire. We could see moonlight glinting on the snow at the tops of the Tehachapis as we drove through the Grapevine; it was only the gusty winds that prevented the road from icing over, and we were damned grateful for it!

Tonight is leftover prime rib and Yorkshire pudding; tomorrow is baked ham and Hoppin’ John and collard greens, with many other tasty side dishes. The Rose Parade. Too much football. More cocooning and napping and wondering why the weather only gets this clear and lovely in the winter when 6 million people are watching the Rose Parade on the telly …

And I’ll write a bit, and read a bit. And survive. I pray that all of you do the same, Dear Readers, and that your coming years are full of joy and wonder. Mine is starting off better than in some time, so I have hopes that Hope itself will be returning to us all.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Kage Baker liked having a quiet Christmas Day. Maybe because we almost never did. We were the travelling Aunties, appearing at odd times from strange places, bearing unusual gifts and tales of wonder.

I blew back into Los Angeles yestreday on my annual trek from Dickens Fair; wrapped last minute presents, gloried in our Christmas tree lights, ate pizza (hey, every family has their own traditions), slept in the glow of all the Christmas lights. In Kimberly’s house, as in mine and Kage’s, the lights stay on all night Christmas Eve – including the many miniature strings festooning my desk. I am especially fond of the miniature nebula lights, draped around – what else? – Kage’s Nebula.

And I am enjoying that quiet Christmas she always hoped for (and seldom got). At least, as quiet as it can be when the brother-in-law is reading funny things off the Internet, and the nephew is assembling enormous model kits and lamenting the overcast skies because he wants to use his new sextant, and my sister is alternating putting bits of dinner in the oven with cuddling cats on the couch.

And me? I am napping, reading, nibbling, and realizing my unpacked luggage is now buried in bows and wrapping paper. But I neither mind nor care. It’s a soft grey day, it’s Christmas and everyone I love is somewhere safe and warm. (I checked wherever possible.) Festivities are happening everywhere.

I sincerely hope all of you are as well, Dear Readers, and I wish you all a Happy Christmas: from London, from the road, from the edge of Griffith park and the edge of reality and all the other edges where I dwell. There will be more stories in days to come, and ruminations on all the weird ideas that occur to me as I dash hither and yon.

But for today – it’s quiet time. Cuddle your loved ones close, Dear Readers, and give thanks that the winter has spun on its painted pole and we are once again falling into the light.