Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker always said, “Don’t plan anything important for the Monday after a Faire weekend.”

This is wisdom pure and undiluted, as one is always mostly dead on those Mondays. Even if one went in civvies, did nothing strenuous or useful, and even left before moonrise. Which, most unusually for me, I actually did. And I didn’t even have to drive home, being instead kindly ferried by a good friend.

Nonetheless, even with a quiet Sunday under my belt now, I am still half dead today. Getting the nephew to and from college was a real challenge; even apart from the weather, which is currently threatening most unseasonable rain. And this after Saturday being in the 90’s when I was in Irwindale! The seasons these days are like the ones in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but not with such nice illustrations.

In the meantime, there were laundry and dish loads to do; a malware scare to track down and innoculate the home network against; lots of e-correspondence of the “My God, what were you doing out there?!?”  variety. Also, I slept a lot.

Because Kage was right – you never get anything done the Monday after the Faire weekend before. If you are normally lucky, you get to unpack the car from the night journey just past, when you got home at 2 AM and were too tired to do more than unearth your deodorant and carry it indoors. If you are only slightly lucky, you got home today, wincing and shrinking in the daylight like a lost vampire. And if you are really unlucky, you woke up in a back seat or a cheap motel room in Buttonwillow, wondering where to get a fuel pump for your cherished mid-60’s VW squareback that became an expensive paperweight somewhere about midnight  on I-5 …

Real life, Dear Readers. The bane of all performers. More reminiscences tomorrow, when my brain comes back online.

Kage Baker would roll her eyes, shake her head and scold me. But in the end, she’d be proud of me.

I got a call Thursday from a dear old friend – Luisa, who was (in our mutual youth) one of the many APQ’s – the brave, tough and talented women who played the Queen at Renaissance Faires. I’ve been fortunate enough to be good friends with most of the APQs (Actress Playing the Queen), which led me into many strange and wonderful adventures when we were all young.

In these latter years, the APQ’s have inexplicably gotten younger and younger. The current APQ at the Irwindale Faire is only a couple of years older than my nephew Mike; and I can remember her birth and in fact her whole life – one of the many, many Faire brats running through Faire in a noisy pack, leaping off hay bales and cutting through back stage areas and living on the free lemonade I dispensed …

But most of the older ladies retired years ago to start their own families and live real lives. The gravitational pull of the Faire cannot be denied forever, though, and this weekend several reunions for the oldtimers were announced … so Luisa called me up and asked, “Hey, wanna go on an insane adventure?”

Well, no other argument would have worked as well. Appeals to my sense of nostalgia would have been useless – the Faire changed hands some years back, and I quite loathe and detest the current owners. This sentiment is cordially returned, too: I was a trouble maker until I walked out – and I have never, ever desired to see what they did to my Arcadia, my Wood Outside Athens.

But a call to an insane adventure with an old friend? One with whom, in point of fact, I have had many other insane adventures? Oh my yes, I was up for that!

So I spent Saturday at Pleasure Faire, knee deep in more fun, more joy and more horror than one would ever expect from an outdoor event selling something as mundane as Miller Beer. I’ve spent most of today asleep and recovering – my body held up through our excursion, and then just quit once I got home.

So tomorrow I will share my most unanticipated adventure with the redoubtable Luisa, and all the wonders we encountered ( and some we shamelessly dodged) as we tore through the Faire. Okay, as we tottered from hay bale to back stage to welcoming hooch, leaning on one another and giggling.

I’d forgotten how interesting sunscreen tastes on one’s lips in the morning …

Kage Baker, at moments of extreme joy or good fortune, was prone to cast her eyes heavenward and call out, “She’s ugly! Ugly!”

This was a joke from A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. At one point, the slave Pseudolus, played by the incomparable Zero Mostel, so advises the ever-listening gods about his young master’s light o’love: in order to discourage said gods from sending ill-fortune upon the too-lucky. It also just amused Kage, who figured anyone with half an education ought to understand the reference. Also, that anyone with any knowledge at all about movies should recognize a line from one of the funniest films ever made.

And she liked the looks on people’s faces when she yelled at the sky, too.

This is a habit I need to revive in my personal life, I think. Clearly, there has been too much gloating and rejoicing going on around here. Zeus is raining down lightning, the peevish old crock.

My beautiful new dryer has been delayed until May 1st. Despite all the care taken to check inventory, it won’t be available until then and so I have to wait. Wah! I’m still missing a 1099, though at least I have time to acquire the hard copy – the info got to the Feds on time, but I need that copy! And last night, the local vermin resumed their summertime Morris Ales on the roof …

I assume they’re drinking, anyway. Because they certainly make a lot of noise, run into the walls and fall off the roof. The raccoons, that is – the frat boys of the animal world. They evidently regard our house as the local shady liquor store, where beer for fake IDs can be reliably gotten … I think it’s the fermenting wintergreen berries up there.

In the next tree over, right over my bedroom, a territorial mocking bird has been singing of love all night, every night. That, I like. In avian terms, it may be the equivalent of a garage band, and that exquisite liquid sound translates to other birds as Stairway To Heaven picked out laboriously on an unplugged axe … but to me it sounds like the lullabies of Paradise.

However, the squirrels I could do without. By day, they are cute little acrobats foraging amid the mulberry fruit. By night, the raccoons stumble over their nests and the squirrels wake up cursing and screaming. Weird as hell and twice as noisy.

Last night, the Corgi apparently noticed that the local wildlife had returned, and decided he was derelict in his duty. Something was certainly prowling at ground level; you could track its progress all over the neighborhood by which dogs were having hysterics. Whenever it got close to our house, Dylan would charge outside baying and howling. It was much more than his usual response, and at one point he was doing his best Hound of the Baskervilles imitation right in front of the living room windows. So we assumed that whatever-it-was, it was on the porch smoking bidis or something.

After two hours of this, I had had enough. Kimberly was lying on the couch with a pillow and a cat over her head, moaning; I got up and went out on the front porch to stomp raccoons and have a talk with the dog. He was on point – which looks pretty funny on a low-slung dog like a Corgi – with his radar ears triangulating on the driveway.

Now. I was in just my nightie, not even my glasses on. And while I have good night vision, my actual eyesight sucks. That means I see well in the dark, but I don’t see much of whatever it is I see. So I did see that an animal was creeping up the driveway, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

Those of us who are vision-impaired but not actually blind tend to judge things by patterns of dark and light. I could tell it was a black and white animal … but it was only when I began to stamp my feet and hiss that I registered the fact that its black and white was not the basically horizontal deco of a raccoon – you know, the stripes on the tail, the ear to ear mask. Instead, there was an undeniable verticality to the white bits … and when I stamped at it a second time, it stamped back and rushed at me.

It was a skunk. Not just a skunk, but a mature, practiced skunk. One who knew how to give warning and wait to see just how stupid I was. A gunslinger skunk.

I levitated, turned in midair with an unexpected JATO capacity, and found myself back on the porch. The Corgi was already inside, under the pillows in his nest and pretending he’d never made a sound. Even the raccoons shut up. And everyone finally went back to sleep.

I’m calling him Hipshot Percussion. He’s clearly a message from the Fates. And he can patrol the yard as often as he likes. Yep. A skunk on Security is just fine with me.

Because, you know, Lady Luck and all – She’s ugly! Ugly!

Kage Baker said that apologies are not as much use as explanations. If you can explain, in a coherent manner, why you failed in some enterprise, your victim will be more inclined to cut you some slack than if you unload a weepy apology on them.

At the least, you may get credit for entertainment value.

I haven’t posted in days, mostly because I’ve been doing other things. Not more important things, just things that would not leave me alone. I had a writing deadline (which I made, to the apparent satisfaction of my patron), then it was tax time. My taxes are a little complicated – though easier than last year, thank all the mercantile dieties! – but I tried a new tax prep program and it turned out to have some … difficulties. Nothing that couldn’t be solved by reading the instructions carefully, but it took time. And of course I didn’t read the instructions carefully.

What took even more time was discovering I had never gotten one critical 1099, and then trying to scrape together the pertinent information: all I needed for the electronic submission was the gross amount paid to me, and the payor’s Federal ID Number. Easier said than done! hard as it may be to believe, very few people have their Employer Tax IDs memorized.  At one point, it looked like it would take several days to get the information – due to family disasters among the staff of the company that owed me the 1099, and their tax accountant getting run over by a dog … really. A dog.

And so I filed a request for an extension, to cover all bases and my derriere. The extension kept getting returned, with the IRS insisting my name and SS # didn’t match their records. Nonsense, cried I. And re-submitted it. Several times. I finally got around to actually looking at what I’d input and, lo! I’d entered my SS# wrong! After 40 years of entering that damn number a dozen times a year, I screwed it up! Rapidly correcting my idiocy, I got the extension in just at the deadline; and then I got it approved; and then I got the return in  just at the deadline and … finally got all my taxes done.

A hard few days, I had.

On the other hand, I did go out yestreday and purchase a new clothes dryer. Kimberly’s dryer has recently deceased; which happens with alarming frequency when I start using one. (As Kelly Rettinhouse knows!) It’s my habit, when I help kill a dryer, to replace it.  And this dryer is something Kage and I had wanted for years: a bright red one. Chinese lacquer red, glowing metallic gorgeous red!  Low energy usage, huge drum, tons of different cycles and the mere sight of it lowers my blood pressure and raises low blood sugar.

However, Sears was full of fractious, glassy-eyed children, all running amok compromising adults with weak immune systems. First I developed a FOO, probably from the stress of tearing around, doing taxes and shopping. And in the middle of last night, I woke up with a stomach ache and realized I had some sort of vile gastric upset.  I always feel, at times like that, as if I’m some kind of protozooan who has only just developed a gastro-intestinal tract and hasn’t worked out which end does what yet.

So I slept all day.

But today I am better! I have my 7-layer dip of an explanation for you all, and I hope it at least entertains. So thank you for your patience. Now, back to writing regularly, and waiting for the Sears guys to deliver my beautiful new red dryer …

Kage Baker always wanted us to get a portable generator.

This was because we lived most of our lives in places where the power supply was chancy – the Hollywood Hills, remote little beach towns, oak groves in the center of hay meadows … and she hated it when the power went out. She liked lighting candles for illumination (we were never without some) but when she couldn’t listen to records or use the computer, she went rapidly nuts.

Eventually she’d always settle down with a pad and a pen, but first there was much railing and storm quotes from Shakespeare. But if she had to transmit something electronically when it all went pear-shaped, there was no recourse. Just a lot more carrying on …

I never did get around to buying a generator, for all the sense it might have made. The things are noisy; and run on gasoline, which is dangerous to store; and take up room better used for books or props or costumes, or anything else we were more likely to use more than once a year. And we never seemed to have the money to hand right after a power failure had reminded us how sensible it would have been.

But today I rather wish I’d done it. In Los Angeles, it is raining like the end of the world. Thunder and lightning are so loud and frequent that car alarms are being set off. This is insane weather for this time of year – instead of a March Miracle solving our chronic drought problems, we are evidently getting an April Apocalypse.  The whole western edge of the city is flickering on and off, and our power keeps browning out here on the edge of Griffith Park. So I’m fretting.

My situation is worsened by the fact that I am helping a friend with a writing project – the deadline to which is, of course, today … I’ve been swotting away grimly, but clever time management is of no use if the power fails! The email keeps going wonky, too, and you know what? I have now become so dependent on the near-instantaneous communication afforded by the aether, that my brain short circuits when my email goes awry.

It’s a terrible thing. I must re-think this generator thing. And maybe look into how hard it can really be to set up a pigeon post … and in the meantime, Dear Readers, I’m going to take advantage of my system’s precarious vigour to work on my deadline before it goes dead. And if it does go dead, I’m crawling back into bed where the cats have taken refuge from the thunder.

And I advise you to do that, too.

Kage Baker believed firmly in unseen influences, omens, vibes and strangers among us. Not conspiracy theories, or Freemasons, or the centuries-old influence of Egyptian cults and modern financiers (though she claimed membership in the Bavarian Illuminati from time to time). She wove her stories out of the possibilities of Things That Are Not, because they were interesting; but she didn’t necessarily believe in them.

She figured most space aliens were wish-fulfillment, most Sasquatch were bears, and most ghosts were bad plumbing and badly-insulated wiring. She believed Atlantis was Thera was Santorini. She felt that copper bracelets did nothing for your health unless the green ring they left around your wrist was penicillin. No, Kage kept her belief for real eldritch things.

To be more precise, (and less daft-sounding) Kage felt that Shakespeare was right  – there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anyone’s philosophy. They tend to walk around where humanity conducts its own noisy, self-obsessed business, and are sometimes glimpsed while about their own peculiar concerns. We don’t know what they are or what they’re doing – and there is nothing that people like to talk about more than things they don’t understand. Kage suspected that a lot of organized religions rose out of the human urge to gossip; writ, as it were, large and on the side of a ziggurat.

When she was around 14, she heard or read some interview with Jim Morrison that heavily influenced how she viewed the unseen. Now, Morrison was very much a self-styled bad boy, the fore-runner of people like Marilyn Manson and a generation or so of Gothic rock stars: except that Morrison was … real. Real-ER, anyway. Maybe it was the novelty value of being among the first rockers to pose as a languid demon-lord; before Morrison, the epitome of rock ‘n roll decadence had been Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis. Maybe it because he really looked and acted the part.

Anyway, he gave this interview. And in it, in a rare moment of sounding as though he took the matter seriously, he said that there were actually real otherwordly people in the world. And you could tell who they were by the way they watched the rest of us – by an air, he said, of distance and fascination combined. By the way they looked too long at things humans didn’t like to contemplate, or averted their eyes from things human liked. By their elegance and beauty; even if they were acclaimed for elegance and beauty when – if looked at carefully from the corner of your eyes – they were actually brutish and horrible.

He advised his young listeners not to look for these wanderers, by the way. Not to draw their attention, not to emulate them or seek their favour. He never hinted whether or not he was one, and for some reason that struck adolescent Kage as the very soul of verisimilitude. Anyway, she maintained ever afterwards that Morrison was right and had revealed one of the secret underpinnings of the world.

At any rate, that long-ago description, thrown off casually by a man who was, at the time, also very young and fairly silly, slid down and was buried under the observations of Kage’s life. Ultimately it was part of the strata and bedrock of her imagination.  And from that stone, she carved loom-weights for weaving the various worlds of her mind.

Maybe it was like being in the Bavarian Illuminati; to which, now that I think of it, she started alluding at the same time. She thought Bavaria was a funny name. Or maybe she really believed it all those years. I don’t know. I only know you should be careful what you say where young minds can hear you – because some of them listen for strange things. And remember …

Kage Baker did not eat ducks. Ever. In fact, she preached against it.

She had a moral objection to eating ducks, having known one little white duck socially as a very small child. All her memories of Duck were good, and so she would never eat his kin afterwards. I think The Story About Ping, that tale of our childhood, had some influence there, too. She loved that story.

The fact that ducks are all dark meat had nothing to do with it, Kage always maintained. True, she didn’t eat the dark meat of chickens or turkeys; but she had consented to try goose – when we were adults, and I was on a 16th century cooking  binge – and admitted that dark meat, per se, was not objectionable. Besides, geese are wildly unpleasant people, as anyone who grew up anywhere near Griffith Park or its Zoo, Ferndale, Echo Lake or the L.A. River can testify. Years at the Renaissance Faire, which was often lousy with enormous bad-tempered grey geese, only reinforced the impression that a goose’s best moment was while steaming on a platter.

Kage’s fondness for the China Towns in both Los Angeles and San Francisco also contributed to her refusal to eat ducks, I think. All those windows and shop fronts with golden, dried, dead ducks swinging gently in the breeze – complete with heads and feet – were too much for Kage, culinarily. She admitted their cultural importance, and the ambiance they gave the streets – but she was wont to go off into dark speculations about whether they were actually dead and ready for the table, or … zombie ducks. ANGRY zombie ducks.

Anyway, she wouldn’t eat them. I, lacking Kage’s finer sentiments, got an occasional mouthful of pressed duck at other people’s Chinese food feasts, but mostly went without.

However. Kimberly has no such compunctions. She roasted a beautiful pair of ducks this week, which were hailed as a triumph by the gentlemen of the family (including Harry). Kim goes on the theory that the main attraction of a roasted duck is crispy, crackling, savoury skin, and these were perfect. However, there is actual meat on a duck; and so tonight the tidily trimmed remains of the ducks are simmering on the stove to produce a good broth.

Kimberly’s husband Ray is an alumnus of Fredonia University, you see. Yes, there really is a Fredonia University, in upstate New York, and that’s where Ray got his degree in physics. The place’s tenuous connection to reality may be why he’s a theoretical physicist; all I know is, he’s claimed for the last 30 years that that’s why he can’t use power tools … anyway, in his honour, we are making duck soup.

And if, Dear Readers, any of you don’t understand this reference – don’t tell me! Go Google it and educate yourself, if so. It would break an old woman’s heart to think anyone would not understand how Fredonia U. and duck soup go together.

Anyway – the ex-ducks are simmering into a lovely broth right now. We’ve added a generous amount of sage, and a soupcon of poultry seasoning; onions, celery and carrots have gone in, as will fresh leeks very soon. Wild rice will seethe in it all eventually. It will be rich with savoury dark meat, and I think will be a triumph.

Kimberly has the soup-making gene, thank all the gods. Our mother did not – while otherwise an inspired cook, her soups were like something out of the Necronomicon: not one of the incantatory recipes, one of the inhabitants. It stemmed from her inability to discern what sort and how much of any given noodle was appropriate in a soup … and I think, to her insistence on adding beans that looked like eyeballs. Anyway, not even the dog would eat that stuff.

This, though, is a clear golden broth with wholesome grain and veggies in it, and no trace of noodly evil. There is a time and place for noodles, and duck soup is not one of them.

I think even Kage might eat this. Maybe not. But she’d have to admit it’s an exemplary soup; especially on an evening when a late storm is bearing down on Los Angeles. Kage could always get on with art for art’s sake – even if she insisted on eating peanut butter toast to honor little Duck’s memory.

Kage Baker, as I may have previously mentioned, subscribed to the popular theory that our domestic machines have secret, hidden sensors in them. These sensors activate in the presence of unexpected cash. And what they do is make some vital piece of machinery DIE.

Tax returns, bonuses, advances, that feral twenty found in your jeans pocket – heck, I remember my skateboard developing arthritis of the axle joints upon my receipt of birthday money. As adults, it’s mainly our electronics that croak at the sight of sudden wealth – in the real jackpot of fail, the electronics that run our cars. Who among us, Dear Readers, has not had some portion of our computer-dependent automobiles short out because we were getting a 4 digit tax return?

Anyway. Today I got up, turned on my computer, turned away to put on my glasses – and turned back to a blank screen. Assuming (not unnaturally) that I had  somehow bollixed up the start button, I did it again – turned away to wrestle my T-shirt away from the little black cat, and turned back to … a blank screen. Again.

I pressed the button again, and this time I watched. For about 10 seconds, an error message appeared on the screen. It said: CPU FAN FAILURE. CPU WILL SHUT DOWN TO PREVENT DAMAGE TO CPU.

It’s because of that huge surprise payment from Disability. I just know it is. And I consider myself lucky that all four wheels did not fall off the car, instead.

Evidently the CPU only talks about itself in the third person … but setting aside its existential and grammatical eccentricities, it was for certain sure dead in the water. So my nephew kindly unplugged it from everything I have it plugged into, and I took it to Fry’s Electronics.

I love the Fry’s in Burbank. It has a giant flying saucer crashing into the front of its building, and inside is decorated with Varied Apocalyptic Visions – giant ants, death rays, several varieties of homicidal aliens, killer robots, signs warning of radiation and toxic waste. Also , it has a fantastic selection of candies on the way to the cash registers, such that it is nearly impossible to escape with your measly coaxial cable without three kinds of chocolate and a bag of gummy worms.

Perhaps more to the point, they are an authorized dealer for my CPU manufacturer. And, CPU fans not being enormously complicated pieces of machinery, it didn’t take long to fix it. Nor, to my amazement, did it cost a great deal. So, despite the activation of the secret sensor, I feel I got off pretty easy.

Of course, Kage had a second, contrasting theory to combat the secret sensor one. Or perhaps it constitutes a superstition – or, as Sir Terry Pratchett postulates, a substition: believing something to be true that hardly anyone else believes in. Kage’s particular ‘stition was that the sight of a blue heron meant money was due to arrive shortly. And I must admit, I’ve never known it to fail.

I saw a blue heron a few days before discovering the astounding automatic deposit in my bank account. And on my way back from retrieving my newly en-fanned CPU, I saw another. Which may mean that more money will be arriving to counter the computer’s secret sensor activation.

At the very least (as Kage also used to point out) it means I saw a blue heron today – and any day wherein you get to have your computer fixed, eat exotic candy and  see both giant ants and blue herons cannot be considered a waste of time.

So there am I happy.

Kage Baker tended, most of her life, to celebrate Easter on the run.

This was because, well into our 30’s, it generally fell on a rehearsal weekend for the Spring Renaissance Faire. We’d be out on site on Holy Saturday, building and teaching and rehearsing; we’d spend the Easter vigil watching the stars through the oak boughs, sleep in a tent, and wake up at dawn for our Easter solemnities.

I’d usually find chocolate eggs hidden in my shoes – except the year I left them outside the tent because they muddy. Raccoons ate my Easter candy that year …but various other actors (likewise waking up on Easter morn in their tents) took up a collection for me, and so I got to feast on donated eggs and jelly beans anyway.

Kage always swore she didn’t want candy: mostly, I think, because Easter fell just when she was trying to get into a costume she hadn’t worn in a year, so she was usually dieting furiously. At any rate, I usually gave her  toys – lambs, rabbits, duckies. A rubber chick one year, that you could squeeze and its little bloodshot eyes would pop out horribly – she loved that one. Her favourite, though, was a splendid wind up rabbit with red glass eyes, that she named General Woundwort. She made him little bandoliers and a swagger stick.

Anyway, we’d rise and strike our tent – drink the sweet white wine we’d stashed in the creek to be chilled for breakfast – cry joyous Eloi! Kyrie! to whatever risen deity was listening in the trees – and head home. We could have gone the night before, of course; we knew there’d be no work or rehearsals on Easter itself. But it was too delicious to leave, when the Faire site grew uncharacteristically silent and empty on a spring night; too glorious to wake up at dawn, alone but for the other demented die-hards under the budding trees. Faire site was a wonderful place to wake up in on Easter morning.

Most year, there was an egg hunt for the kids; I remember one year when, due to some weird confusion with Celtic customs in the Front Office, the administrators dyed all the eggs woad-blue … whatever colour the eggs were, we’d hear the children shrieking with excitement as they hunted them among the wild roses and the camomile down by the creek, or among the bright new hay bales around Main Stage. It was a joyous noise behind us as we trooped off to our car to head home.

Because no matter what else – whether it was hot or cold, clear or rainy (we spent more than one Easter morning under Main Stage, waiting for the rain to end) we knew we had to get to Momma’s for dinner. It was Expected, with a capitol letter; and a capital offense waiting for you if you didn’t show up. Not that we would have missed it – Momma’s Easter dinners were legendary, and enormous, and convivial, and free. We’d arrive tipsy from that sweet wine for breakfast, damp with rain, sometimes still in costume, and Kage would make up for her virtuous rejection of candy by eating anything Momma handed her.

In later years, when Momma was gone and there was no longer a Spring Faire … well, by then we were living in Pismo Beach, and so Easter continued glorious. Sometimes we went to brunch, where Kage discovered chocolate martinis – breakfast martinis, she insisted, while I rolled my eyes and gagged, and stuck to coffee. But she’d order her damned musical comedy cocktails, and her eyes would start to glow with the theobromos, and she’d weave mad stories over the eggs Benedict.

Sometimes we’d pack special breakfasts – the traditional May Wine, and some sweet loaf wrapped in a tea-towel, and strawberries. And a bag of Cadbury’s solid chocolate eggs, with lovely delicate candy shells – not those ghastly “creme” eggs, with the filling made from petroleum by-products. The solid eggs are tiny and pastel, and just the right size for a parrot’s claws. Because Harry always came with us – and he adored them, and knew he was entitled to one or two all to himself; he’d hold them in his foot and nibble away until he was reduced to licking melted chocolate off his toes, and we’d laugh and laugh …

Today, I’ve breakfasted on sacred Mullah coffee and hot cross buns; Kimberly and I have a truly noble ham slated for dinner, with asparagus and au gratin potatoes. It’s a warm, sweet day, a good day to salute the spring.

Kage used to cry: Χριστός ἀνέστη!. And I would reply: Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη! She probably meant the Christ, and I know I meant the Green God, but all that mattered was the Great Truth: He Is Risen! He Is Risen Indeed! Whoever He is, He is alive and walking in the world.

Kage Baker has a new book just coming out.

Yes, she does. It is The Best of Kage Baker – a compilation of her shorter works edited and selected by your humble correspondent. It’s from Subterranean Press, it has a kick-ass cover by J.K. Potter – Kage’s very favourite of her illustrators – and it will be available on April 30th.

Walpurgisnacht! And also May Eve, that enchanted night for which Kipling wrote:

Oh, do not tell the priest our plight,
For he would call it a sin:
But we have been out in the woods all Night
A’conjuring summer in!

And we bring you news by word of mouth,
Good news for cattle and corn –
For now is the Sun come up in the South
By Oak and Ash and Thorn!

And here is the cover:  

And the first review is out from io9 at http://io9.com/5899744/april-books-stephen-kings-dark-tower-neal-stephensons-weird-history-and-more?tag=bookshelf-injection

And it’s a good review, too,  from the lovely Charlie Jane Anders.

Whoo-hoo! There are a lot of old faves here, but also some lesser known goodies – things published only once or in obscure places. Two novellas. Interior illustrations. I tried to pick things I know Kage herself liked, and had wanted to share with people. It’s gonna be a nice volume, Dear Readers, and I am very excited to be able to say at last – it’s coming!

And my thanks to the inestimable Mr. Tom Westlake, the Lord of Misrule, who sent me this lovely news.

In other news – it’s been a lovely soft Friday and I’ve spent the day as chocolate money, frivolously and happily. Haven’t really done a thing, except this blog entry in Kage’s service. But I’ve got a Peach Jamba Juice and a bag of Gummy Berry Lifesavers, and I’m gonna go off now and spend an indolent evening watching telly.

And sneaking back to the computer every now and then to gloat over the new book …