Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker said repeatedly that the world actually ends all the time. It’s just that no one really notices. So it spins on, and whatever is happening is what always happened, and no one is the wiser.

If the world ends tonight, who will notice? Only those who escape it and go on to whatever comes next; and it will only come next for them. For everyone else, what comes next will look enough like what came last that nothing will be remarked. Roses were always blue; narwhales always lived in Lake Michigan, and isn’t it convenient that cats have thumbs?

The winter solstice occurs here in Los Angeles at 3:12 AM on December 21st. I may yet be awake; I usually am. If you all vanish, I’ll try to bring it to your attention, Dear Readers. And if I vanish, I’ll try to leave something scrawled somewhere to let you know. CROATOAN WAS HERE. LOVE ONE ANOTHER. WHO SO PULLETH THIS SWORD FROM OUT THIS STONE WILL BE LIABLE FOR PROSECUTION.

Something, anyway.

But regardless, it will be the Light Reborn yet again from the depths of the darkness. Whether or not you or I sees it, the Light returns and the world will rejoice. If the world falls now, it will fall into ever-increasing light. And that’s a good way to go.

Good night, all.

Kage Baker would usually be flagging slightly by this time in the year. Not from Extreme Christmas – she was up for Dickens Fair no matter what. And that emphatically included usually doing the last weekend with a raging fever and the distinctive but unknown-to-science malady we all  simply call “Fair Crud.”

Glassy-eyed with Nyquil,  hacking up her lungs; to explain her red eyes and nose, she often regaled customers with how she was remembering her one true love who died in a freak naval accident –  usually involving giant octopodi. Sometimes she blamed bad gin, or assured people it was “just a touch of the cholera”.  It’s amazing how funny modern people find cholera, when it’s jolly Christmas time all around them and they no longer remember what the hell cholera is anyway …

I’ve managed to attend Dickens Fair mostly by long distance this year, trapped by duty and illness in Los Angeles. My faithful minions have kept me informed and modern technology has given me a tele-presence: I have been directing via cell phone. And it’s worked. But this coming weekend is Last Weekend, and I must be there. Not only to partake of the event myself, but because once the customers are out of sight, the  really hard part begins – striking the set.

Those performers and vendors who aren’t responsible for their personal venues can flit around like grieving fairies, gathering kisses and hugs and stirrup cups, and making many tearful goodbyes. And so they should – it’s always a highly emotional time, when the curtain comes down for the last time. But for them, the whole thing goes up and down like Brigadoon: between a sunset and a sunrise, appearing and vanishing like magic.

It’s not magic. Well, maybe it is – but it still takes effort by the magicians and genius locii. Someone has to box the glass and china and ornaments and linen and furniture; someone has to get all the glories back in their various nests, where they will rest out the ensuing year. My dear ones and I will spend some hours in exhausted hilarity, putting away our toys.

And then I’ll head home – either racing through Christmas Eve as soon as the dawn breaks, or seeing how far I can get on Sunday night itself. I’ve done that sometimes – driving until I was hallucinating parrots and pineapples by the side of the road, and then pulling into some motel for a hour’s sleep in the glow of a single string of Christmas lights … they always have just one string, those places. But they still shine out bravely over the dark expanses of the winter night.

It’s been a tough December, and I haven’t gotten as much done as I wanted to. But I’ve gotten some things finished, and more will be done soon, and new leaves are already beginning to open beneath the metaphorical snow. To get the to beginning, you have to reach the end first – that’s the whole point of that night-running, that wild untrammeled rush to where Sol Invictus is breaking new on the world …

And so I keep running.

Kage Baker was a big believer in the maxim: “Sufficient unto the day are the troubles thereof.”

She interpreted it as meaning that one shouldn’t stockpile problems, nor hoard them for quiet moments. If at all possible, examine them in brief and set them aside until one can do something about them. Make plans – one can then label the problems In Process and file them away for a more appropriate moment.

This is especially nice if the moment the problem chose is, like, 2:45 in the morning.

Kage wasn’t subject to insomnia, so something had to really bother her to keep her awake. Then she’d spend an hour or so planning and plotting – long conversations in the dark we had, something at which I am at least very good … and at some point the Worry-Meter would click over to empty, and she’d go to sleep.

It’s a good system. I use it when I can – though I’m not as good a plotter. So sometimes, I just make up a sketchy outline – just enough to confuse my neurotransmitters and force a nice cascade of endorphins. Then I get some cheese and a book and overwhelm myself with a little sensory overloads until my consciousness burns out. It’s not as useful as Kage’s way – no plans result, and I do entomb cheese crumbs in books – but all that really matters is that one is asleep at the end of it.

Half a hundred small problems are making this December a chore. There are one or two large ones as well, but they aren’t as much of a bother. There’s only so long one can actually, physically and mentally maintain high-level worry about rising sea levels, gun control and the coming world-wide shortage of neon.* It’s hard to keep a good paranoid focus, when one is being much more immediately assaulted by the local unavailability of King Arthur Self Rising Flour. My rear tires are shedding their skin like fat snakes. Is the noise at midnight in the pantry the cats practiscng Irish dance, or do we have mice? Why the hell has 1 sock out of each pair of my long stockings vanished?

Outside my room, the wind is abruptly rising and loose stuff has begun to fly sideways down the driveway; the lights in the mulberry tree are clearly at risk. In the lemon tree, the steel chimes sound like a jam session with Quasimodo and Keith Moon. Harry is meowing in the unique, parrot-style, I-don’t-need-to-breathe-to-make-this-keen-noice staccato that drives listeners insane. And we’re out of fudge.

But in the meantime, in the fertile plain of desire and delirium that is my desk, Joseph is closing in on the ikons he needs; soon he’ll be successful and safe. For a while, he he he … Lewis has no idea yet what is coming, but maybe I’ll write him a nice date with some lady from the Hollywood Canteen as recompense. (Kage always said, she felt so guilty when she wrote Lewis into trouble …)

I saw my oncologist today for the standard check-up and I am fine. She said she didn’t like the way my heart sounded, but then – neither do I. So I’m seeing my cardiologist just after the New Year, and she can find some new way to keep my fuel pump from failing. In the meantime, I can take a nap. And write some more. And hunt down the bag of York Peppermint Patties Kimberly hid somewhere.

Yeah. That sounds like a plan.

* I’m not kidding. Neon is obtained by mining.What is mined is air. neon being one of the residues after nitrogen, oxygen and other compounds are extracted. Neon, being a noble gas, does form compounds nor result from them. And therefore, when we’ve used it up, it’ll be gone from Earth.

Kage Baker had very distinct and personalized ways of looking at everyday things. She maintained that everyone did. It was simply that very few people talked about it, and so didn’t realize that their own vision of certain things – the gender of numbers, the literal shape of the year, what the shadows on the Moon show – were not what everyone else was seeing.

She cherished her own concepts, and was really not very interested in what other people saw anyway. Sometimes, when it become obvious that, no, she really did see what other people saw – then she’d express genuine surprise. More often, it was clear that whatever Kage was envisioning as the physical aspects of, say, information flow bore no relationship to anything anyone else thought. Which was pretty much what she expected. But most people, she believed, never compared notes.

Your grandma may tell you that there’s a Man in the Moon. You believe her for 5 or 6 years, and even afterwards, you sort of half-consciously “see” the features of a face on the lunar plains … but what do you see? The full-faced cheese guy, grimacing from the rocket in his eye and bleeding Brie? The Joker silhouette of the crescent? Diana or Isis head to toe, braced in the silver frame of the orb?

I suspect Kage saw the  George Melies Moon – she loved that film. Me … well, I saw a rabbit.

Cultural expectations don’t work the same on everyone. Which pretty much proved Kage’s point, that we all saw something unique and no one thought to compare notes.

How do you see the year, Dear Readers? The perception of time is on lots of people’s minds right now – not only because Christmas is imposing its onrushing deadline on about a third of the world, but because a lot of folks expect the whole damned thing to end next week.  The Mayans – who, incidentally, do not expect an apocalypse – are nonetheless in possession of one of the most accurate calendars ever devised by the mind of man. It can be used to calculate dates from before the entrance of Homo sapiens (enter stage left, mind the orchestra pit!  Ah, hell, someone haul him out of the bass drum, eh?) and well into the future when otters have evolved thumbs and are running the world. And they saw it as a circle, one that repeated itself with mild variations.

What do you see? I picture the enormous span of time as a long, long, straight road. It runs out of sight in both directions, and little bits of it are lit up here and there with recollections, the candles of myth and legend, bonfires of books and martyrs: the usual flammables. I’m not on it, though. I standing off to the East of the road (positing the future as North and the past as South), about even with 1964. I have no idea why, but that’s the little diorama in my mind when I picture the flow of time.

The calendar year, though, I do see as a circle, a sort of ring road. Each month is a distinct and separate landscape, in varying sizes – the summer months of July and August are much longer than January or February. I am standing, always, on the border of September and October – apples and barley to my left, stone and bare fields to my right – staring out across the void to where June is glowing on the edge of summer. The weird thing about this view is that I was born on the first day of July. I was conceived, however, in October. I evidently see Time as a function of where I was technically begun.

However, the weirdest thing of all about this view of the year is what Kage said when I described it to her, and asked her what she saw. She looked at me sort of slantways and said, “Well, I don’t know how to describe it.”

There was nothing Kage did not know how to describe. NOTHING. I’ve thought about that ever since, wondering what the hell she saw. Sometimes it makes me wistful. Sometimes it frightens me.

So, Dear Readers: what do you see? And what do you think you see? And what do you think Kage saw?

Rhetorical questions all, but cogent at this season. Time may be only a matter of point of view. Or, you know … it may not.

Kage Baker loved the winter holidays. Nonetheless, she was always on the lookout for good remedies for holiday depression. She herself didn’t suffer from it; the more festivities the better, as far as Kage was concerned. Extreme Christmas could never go too far for her.

She sometimes ranted about having to much to do during the winter season – when you’re self-employed that can happen pretty easily. Most folks think you’re free as a bird and can take time off whenever you like;  go fishing or sleep late or take a random ferry to Catalina Island. But the truth is, when you are your own boss, you can’t skive off nearly as easily; you’ll always catch yourself in those clever lies you used to get away with telling to strangers.

Besides, Kage was inhumanly disciplined.  Procrastination was something seldom indulged in; and even when it was, she was usually just substituting one determined task for another. Over the years, she learned to apply this principle to leisure as well as labor -a rare trick indeed. But she played as hard as she worked, and with just as much focus. That kept her from being bored, and it usually kept her from getting depressed.

No, the holiday depression she had to deal with was mine. I droop easily in the winter.

You must understand, Dear Readers: I love winter. The night of the year is my favourite time; the palettes of snow and fog and bare trees etched against a silver sky make my heart sing. The sound of rain, the smell of wet stone, the high tides on on the grey beaches … that’s how my soul rejuvenates. So when the loud, bright, frenetic, tap-dancing, choral singing, sweet-flinging holidays start to burn out my brain – that’s when I get depressed.

I want more time in silence. I want solitude. I want to sit in a quiet place and watch the stars come out like flowers on bare oak boughs. I want to see the sunset limned across the western horizon like red tinsel, and the moonlit shadows glow a deeper blue than a summer sky. I want cold water in a white bark cup; I want to practice asceticisms on stony heights.

And when I can’t do these things – which, for many perfectly good and practical reasons, I usually can’t – I get depressed. Kage always saw it as her duty to cure me. Sometimes this was damned annoying – there’s always a part of you that stays 14, you know? And that rather likes sulking about and being artistically limp on a pretty couch … but the people who have to live with the reality (which is you being a lumpen gargoyle in the most comfortable chair) would really rather you took a deep breath and did something useful with your time.

Kage would ask me to drive her out – nowhere in particular, but she always found a reason to head for back roads and empty places. A few hours driving between the grey winter sea and the grey winter pastures and I would perk right up. It was amazing.

Or she’d find me a book I loved and hadn’t read in years; she’d ask me to read something she supposedly wanted to research and had no time for herself – nothing comforted me like falling into a biiiig book and living in another world for awhile. Or she’d put on a movie I couldn’t resist, and she and Harry would sit there sharing popcorn incredibly loudly until I gave up and joined them.

Kage would tell me stories; stories only I ever heard. I don’t even know if she meant to write them, though she certainly reminded me of them frequently in her last months. I’ve begun to think she came up with them specifically to give me something to write when she was gone. It’s one of those stories, told to me on a candle-lit winter evening by the sea (while eating pizza, as I recall – romanticism will only take you so far) that I am writing now.

I miss her very much. But I am now so deep in the story, that I almost resent taking the time out to write this. Because Joseph needs to find out how an ikon really works and I’ve left him wandering through Constantinople with the truth under his cloak …

As Kage used to say: Things to meet, people to do. No time to be sad this year. Hark the herald angels, God rest ye merry, and a hotch-cha-cha.

Kage Baker resolutely refused to watch most television news.

For many people – writers emphatically among them – current events are a rich and never-ending source of inspiration. Absolutely  nothing is as weird as what people do; Kage believed firmly that truth was not just stranger than fiction, it was more entertaining. And she made full use of that in her writing. Many of the more peculiar habits of her future world in the 24th and 1/2 century were extrapolations of 20th century trends. And all too many of them were just the simple truth, no extrapolation needed.

But she got most of her research done via the printed word.  Newspapers were still in full flower up until about 5 years before her death; I went through two or three every day, hunting for references that might yield an idea. We were seldom disappointed. The last couple of years of her life, Kage discovered news aggregators on the Web – those were great, too. But it was all the printed word. She liked her news in text.

The main exceptions to this were disasters and car chases.  (Space launches were no longer carried on prime time channels in the burgeoning 21st century.) Footage of honest-to-God disasters fascinated her – how often does one get to see a forest fire, or a lava flow, or great floods? Kage stored up the imagery for future use. As for car chases … she admitted it was a great vice to watch the damned things, but they were like potato chips: once you got into them, it was so hard to stop! And since, in Los Angeles, even sports will get pre-empted for a car chase, there wasn’t much use looking for something else on the telly anyway.

Ultimately, though, she’d give up even on those and put on a movie, or write. When Kage was in a mood for passive visual entertainment, though, the void was often filled with chases, warehouse fires, broken water mains, and landslides. On a busy day in LA, she might get all of those on the late news …

Kage gave up watching car chases, though, after the 5-second delay on the news broadcast failed a couple of times. A man in Altadena was killed by panicked police in a stand-down; a man on a downtown bridge shot himself in the head. And it all went out live. She stopped watching them so much after then.

CNN – which is now so venerable an institution that it’s showing signs of senility – was born in the green fires of tracer bullets over Baghdad and Tehran. It was the beginning of the 24 hour news cycle, and we watched it avidly. After a few years, though, even that got to be too much for Kage – she stopped watching war on the telly; because, she said, “It’s fucking immoral.”

“You’re a wordsmith, all right,” I remember commenting at one point (from the depths of a book, probably).

“Oh, screw you,” Kage said. “There’s nothing else to call it. This crap is nothing but bread and circuses. We’re all doomed.”

And then she’d either put on The Wrong Box, or go to her desk and write a better world into being.

Kage utterly refused to watch footage of the ever-increasing school shootings; she wouldn’t even let me read to her from the paper after a while. Unless it was a story about a new breed of platypus or something useful like that.

I thought of that last March, watching live footage of the tidal wave engulf Japan – how Kage wouldn’t have been able to watch. Especially those parts where you could see the slow, deep wave devour roads and little cars like bright toys, little cars with little faces behind the windows and frantically waving little arms … I’ve been thinking of it again these last 24 hours, as the babble of horror, grief and – yes, admit it, folks – voyeuristic fascination goes over and over the massacre of Connecticut children.

So I’m going to turn it all off and write. Kimberly has turned on the lights on the Christmas tree, and the outside lights as well. The little black cat is asleep under the tree, her coat spangled with coloured reflections. Harry is napping on the couch beside the ruins of his latest toy – a Kleenex box – and even the vigilant Corgi is blinking. My family is safe  and Miracle on 34th St. is on, and Constantinople is calling me. Time to go feel the wind coming in off the Bosphorus and smell the spices of the Orient.

Because nothing matters. Except the work.

Kage Baker loved December.

She loved the whole holiday arc – Halloween to New Year’s – and really celebrated whatever holiday season it was, in our house. Deco was everywhere, from specially coloured candles to Glass Wax stencils on the windows. Did you know they were once available for every holiday in the calendar? Did you know they can be found on EBay?

Kage found out, and we had Glass Wax up with hearts, leprechauns, bunnies and fireworks – all in pale translucent pink. But it was Christmas where she really got crazy with them: angels, trees, reindeer, snowmen … I remember one year she tried adding fruit juice to give the Glass Wax a less ectoplasmic colour. You know what? Beet, blueberry and strawberry juice stain glass when mixed with whatever the hell is in Glass Wax. We had pale, coloured ghost figures on the front window for months.

Of course, peculiar mishaps like that are part of the fun. In other areas of the winter holidays, Kage kept an orderly time schedule. Halloween lights up on October 1st; changed to fall colours on November 1st; changed to Christmas on December 1st. Those Christmas lights then stayed up until 12th Night. House deco up on the firsts of months as well – tree up on December 15th, down on January 1st. It was all very regular and tidy, and my adherence to this admirable system has pretty much broken down totally … luckily, Kimberly has her own system.

I just sort of go with the flow these days, floating along like a semi-sentient fallen leaf on the bosom of the River of Time. It’s because I hate December.

I love winter nights, coloured lights, Christmas, frost, singing to the stars as you go house to house breathing out cold smoke in the silent darkness. I love ritual fires and feasts. I love giving gifts to those I love. And if it happened at any other time of year, I’d love it all just as much; although getting frost in August would be difficult …

It’s just that almost everyone I have every loved has died in December. And I hate tripping over the headstones day after day. I told Kage, that last December, that I would kill her if she died in December – she kindly did not point out the asininity in this statement, but took it to mean I would be even more peeved if she croaked it during that difficult time. And so she thoughtfully didn’t. She waited until the end of January, when nothing great has ever happened anyway.

This December has been very hard. The months leading up to it have been tough, too. I feel like I’ve suffered a relapse in the grieving process, which has made dealing with the latter half of this year especially painful. Dickens Fair has helped, but the physical strain of traveling up and down I-5 has – for the first time ever – eaten the marrow of my bones and left me staggering exhausted.

And now the writing has picked up. Oh, I have been a pretty good girl, pegging away at the old trunk novel and finishing it. Pegging away at Marswife and seeing the word count rise. Working on this blog. But now – a nice publisher wants to do a collection of Company stories, and he wants a new one in it. From Kage’s much-lauded notes, you know, that I talk about all the time …  in other words, Dear Readers, someone has called my bluff.

So I sat down, dug out the pertinent notes, made an outline (something I haven’t done since college, for St. Scholastica’s sake!) and in the last three days have produced a little over 2,500 words. It’s … growing. It may work.

It’s keeping my mind off the grimmer aspects of December, at least. And Kimberly has strung coloured glass beads about my desk, and Mike has put up the Christmas tree so its glory peeps over the top of my desk at me, and there are cookies and chocolate everywhere. We have light-decked mooses in the front yard, and Cthulu in a Santa hat on the television set.

So, you know, December is as good as it can get and I am writing. It’s really as cool as possible, at least as glorious as it is painful.  And I have discovered thereby that Kage (and Mendoza) were right. Nothing matters but the work. And the work can hold any heart break at bay.

Good to know. Merry Christmas to all of you, Dear Readers, and I hope the dark heart of winter is kinder to you. And, oh yeah – anybody want to do some beta reading?

Kage Baker held two equal and peculiar convictions about me in our life. They were the sort of convictions that only a sibling can hold and maintain in the face of ongoing life experiences.

The first was that I badly needed a keeper. I was an accident-magnet, and needed someone to protect me from myself. She had an utter faith in my bravery, self-confidence, and tendency to walk off the edges of cliffs while following a star or a rare bird. Those who know me well must admit there’s something to this theory.

On the other hand, Kage was convinced I could do most anything if I set my mind to it. She absolutely supported me in anything I tried; she was always sure I would find a way to get us out of any trouble that found us. I just had to be watched to make sure I didn’t cut my foot off by accident while wielding some heroic blade in defense of Truth and Justice.

Curiously, she had no such faith in herself. She thought of herself as incompetent and cowardly,and never realized the enormous lottery she had won single-handedly by becoming a published writer. Kage never saw that as an accomplishment, exactly: it was just what she had to do, what she wanted to do with all her heart: and Kage never, ever gave up on what she wanted.

I don’t think she ever realized the depth of her own talent, or what it meant to her fans. Not even when, in the last months of her life, I had a dozen letters every day to read aloud to her from worried fans. They told her how they loved her work, how it meant something special to them; how such and such a tale had helped them in a tight spot or gave them inspiration or even changed their lives …

“I write fairy tales, for God’s sake,” she said one evening.

I was reading her (no kidding) a single mother’s explanation of how the travails of Emma in The Hotel Under The Sand had thrilled her recently-fatherless daughters. The lady was writing to thank Kage for giving  Emma a happy ending without magically reversing her losses. Emma went on through her troubles to eventual joy in a new life. That hit her daughters with the ring of truth and reality, and did more to convince them that happy endings can happen than a platoon of faerie godmothers could have.

The family was on their second reading aloud of the book.

I was reading the letter through snuffly tears. Kage, as pale as her pillows, lay there with a ferocious scowl on her face, too weak to even turn over on her own. She had thirteen days to live that night, though neither of us knew it.

“Still – that lady got the point. And her little girls, too. They understand what the story’s about,” Kage said finally. And she grinned. “So I guess my life had a point after all.”

“Your life has about a thousand points, you jerk,” croaked I, the constant comforter.

“Yeah, but getting an idea through to three strangers on a printed page? That’s a good one,” she said. “You’ll find out, when I’m gone.”

“You are not going anywhere!’ I insisted. (I lettered in debate. You can tell, Dear Readers, can’t you? That piercing argument and all.)

“Oh, screw you,” said Kage. “I got the Sight and I tell you: you’ll pick  things up when I drop. Now read me another letter, please.”

That was her determined wish. It was her conviction – when (if) she died, I was to keep the stories going. And I would do well, because that was the way she wanted it. She wasn’t worried at all about how it would all happen – she just knew it would, believed I would accomplish what she had planned. Of course, selling books and stories is a little harder than building a Victorian Parlour in a cow barn …

But not to Kage.

So I’m stuck with what she planned, and was firmly convinced would happen. And, to my continuing amazement, we’re already on Phase Two of her Famous Plan and so far it’s working.  Nell Gwynne II will be released December 31st, and the publisher just emailed me that my copies – author’s copies! – are on the way to me. And I am even now embroiled in hacking out the plot of a new Company story, to enrich a new collection hopefully coming out next spring.

It’s about icons, Joseph and Lewis, Constantinople and Hollywood, See’s Chocolates and tree rats. I think it’s called “Pareidolia”. I think I can glimpse Kage nodding approvingly when I labor over the notes these past 3 or 4 days, so I guess it’ll happen.

She told me so.

Kage Baker always said that the writing business was a perfect example of feast or famine. Sometimes there is nothing to do, nothing to sell, and no one buying if there were anything to sell. The next week, there’s $6,000 on the dining room table, 3 manuscripts on the desk and the Muse is fidgeting like a man with a ferret down his trousers …

I finished the November NaNoWriMo contest and won! Though you are not competing with anything but your own laziness, getting 50,000 words down in 30 days is quite a task. And I did it. And those words happened to complete the first draft of a novel, so now I am on to the next phase of that project. I’m putting together a file for some beta readers, and the patient ladies (like Kimberly and Neassa) who check my always aberrant spelling.

I’m also collecting some of Kage’s stories, fitting them together in interesting ways depending on word count, subject matter and publication history, and testing them out on a very nice publisher who would like to reprint some of them. A project of which I approve whole-heartedly, but it does mean I have to play jigsaw puzzle with a dozen stories and Kage’s notes on them … and it’s rather as Budu says: One can write lies.

Or at least mistakes. Kage apparently didn’t always record where anything sold; except the first sale. This makes it interesting, trying to find where else any given story may have wandered over the years.

Aaaand … there are always the ongoing works, the fresh, new, accurate work I am trying to coax out of Kage’s outlines and cryptic messages on cocktail napkins. Publishers are willing to look at new stuff if I can get it completed – nay, they are eager! And I need 6 more arms.

Plus, my CPU is still in the computer hospital (I am tapping away on the teeny little Buke Kage so loved – how did she use this thing?) and keep finding files I didn’t transfer to a thumb drive or a disk. Or rather, not finding them, which is the hair-tearing point. Some story files are still in Office 12, which is one of the most horrible and irritating word processing programs EVER, and I have to translate them to the Open Office format I prefer before I can do anything to them – and I can’t find the right buttons to do even that!

My sister and brother-in-law are fighting off some sort of gastrointestinal malaise, the nephew is going through finals week in a state of concentrated hysteria, and I just discovered Harry the Parrot has chewed holes in my Hammler Schumaker catalog.

Man, I can hardly wait to bail out and run for Dickens Fair this Friday. Oh, Road of Weirdness, take me away!

But not before I find two more stories for Tachyon Books ….

Kage Baker always liked it when the winter rains finally came to California. Whether in Southern, Northern or Central California, those first cold rains sluice away the exhausted dust of our ferocious summers; our winter rain is rejuvenating, revitalizing.

It’s when our land turns green. All the imported plants in the gardens, or gone feral in the hills, drop their leaves and go nakedly to sleep. But the native plants – the sycamores and oaks,  the native sages and poppies and grasses all begin to sprout anew in the December wet season.

Even the hardier of the imports have adapted. California bunch grass now shares pride of place with the ubiquitous wild oats – the oats grow everywhere, and are now what makes most of the hills golden in the summer; they are the carpet for the oak savannah that rolls over so much of California’s empty lands.

And it’s the oats that are springing up now. They are a green haze on the hillsides, not tall enough to wave in the wind yet; but later in the year, they’ll bow and dance like the sea, long silver-green waves on every curving hill and bare lot. Under the sycamores and royal oaks all proudly naked; under the madrones and live oaks still flaunting their foliage like harem dancers – the same green carpet rolls under all of them.

Winter is our wet season, our green season. The hills reach their peak of verdant beauty somewhere around the solstice, which Kage always said was a sign of the sacredness of the land – that it put on its best for the return of the sun. Maybe she was right. Probably she was. All I know, in my own heart, is that winter is not a season of death here in California. It’s instead a season of a lover’s sleep, breathing softly and quietly in post-coital bliss.

It therefore pleases me no end, Dear Readers, that – in this season of quiet growth and life – Nell Gwynne: On Land and At Sea is due to be released on December 31, 2012. Finally! Officially! With both our names on it! And it has this gorgeous caramel and chocolate coloured cover:

If you haven’t seen it yet – isn’t it lovely? I think that may be Dora, the middle Devere sister, in the foreground. She’s my favourite of those three.

And to add to my glee and delight, a good friend (Cat Eldridge, Editor of the online review magazine Sleeping Hedgehog) forwarded to me the review below – which I am informed is being printed in Locus:

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“Nell Gwynne’s on Land and at Sea was left unfinished at the time of Kage’s death, and has been completed by Kathleen Bartholomew. No indication is given as to how much of the book was Kage’s, and how much Kate’s. I’m not sure to what degree this matters, either. In any case, the transition is seamless.

It’s a hard book to categorize. The ‘‘Nell Gwynne’s’’ of the title is a genteel whorehouse operating in 1848 London, named for the iconic Seventeenth Century orange-seller, actress, and courtesan. Two centuries later, as Victoria sits primly on her thrown, officially, English society keeps a stiff and puritanical attitude toward sexuality while all sorts of naughtiness goes on behind closed doors.

Mrs. Corvey, the proprietress of Nell Gwynn’s, had previously lost her eyes and had them replaced with fully functional, telescoping prosthetics. She habitually hides these devices behind smoked glasses while pretending to be blind. The young ladies whom she employs are an intriguing group, including the sexually ambiguous Herbert/Herbertina.

Ah, but this book is not merely a kind of latter-day Fanny Hill, although it swoops tantalizingly close to ultra-genteel pornography (or a parody thereof) on occasion.

Chief patrons of Nell Gwynn’s are the members of the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society, a kind of proto-Center for Advanced Studies, more a scientific think-tank with patriotic leanings than a purely academic association.

The Madame and her girls close up shop for a month’s holiday at the seaside resort of Torquay, where they encounter a half-mad American-born Anglophile who has invented a submarine steam-cannon and plans to use it to provoke a war between England and France. Our heroines communicate with their patriotic patrons via a wireless radio secretly invented decades ahead of its time, called the Aetheric Transmitter.

I won’t go on. There’s just so much fun here, not the least being the endless mouthwatering descriptions of Victorian feasts, and the presence of a marvelous little terrier called Domina. But then I’m a dog-lover anyway.

The story is madcap and further description might spoil the fun. It’s steampunk science fiction reduced (or should I say elevated?) to the level of opera buffa.The copy that I read is an ARC or advance reading copy, featuring a marvelous cover painting and interior illustrations by J. K. Potter. I hope the publisher retains these for the official publication of the book.

Kage Baker was a true ornament to our field. She is sorely missed, and all praise is due to her sister Kathleen Bartholomew for preserving and enhancing her heritage.”

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Imagine me leaping around the living room, Dear Readers – dancing with the Corgi and Harry, and scaring the cats into fits.

It’s a pretty good December 1st around here. A fitting beginning to the green, green winter when California comes back to life, when the hills turn emerald and the grass grows.

Looks like there will be a spring after all.