Laurie R. King: Mutterings

1993 was a big year in my life.  A Grave Talent was published, and didn’t disappear entirely.  The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was prepared for publication, and I went to New York to meet that mysterious and all-powerful individual, an editor.  The publishers made it clear that they wanted more books, and would give me money for them: this writing hobby had a future.  And in the autumn of that year, I bought a cat.

My first advances, many of which were foreign, I spent in three ways: first I’d take my family out to dinner.  Then I would buy things we’d been putting off for the house (It seemed appropriate to use a check from Denmark to replace the Jotul wood stove with central heating—and God, it was nice not to have to cut, haul, stack, and fetch wood, then fuss with burning it, and then have to clear the ashes, just to keep the kids from turning blue.)  After that, the money would go into the family account, my first financial contribution in fifteen years of marriage.

Except for one sum.  When I got back from New York that fall, I decided to splurge on myself, to get myself something truly frivolous: unnecessary, expensive, and beautiful.

I spent $300 on a young Abyssinian cat, and bought myself a friend.

Haile has been my buddy for fifteen years.  All cats, but especially the desert breeds (Abyssinnia is the old name for Ethiopia and Haile Selassie was the king of said country—originality is not a requirement for naming cats.) are seekers of warmth, and Haile took early on to settling on my feet as I slept or while I was writing.  This habit of finding him on my lower extremities during the night eased a trying hospital visit, when my drugged mind interpreted the pressure cuffs on my legs as the reassuring familiarity of a shifting cat.

When he was young—once he had adjusted to the trauma of moving from a one-room artists’ flat into a farmhouse, which caused him to skulk under the furniture for days—he became an inveterate explorer, and the officer in charge of the estate.  Workmen would arrive and within two minutes, Haile would show up to investigate, which meant we’d have to make sure they checked their tool boxes before they drove away, left the crawl space of the house open, and were aware that he would be sitting at their feet as they sprayed sawdust all over with the Skil saw.

As he grew older, he grew less likely to face down the local bobcat or find a way onto the roof, which was something of a relief.  Still, he never went grey, never lost his boyish good looks or charm.

Haile died last weekend, of a rare neurological auto-immune disease called myasthenia gravis, which interfered with the use of his muscles and turned him into a liquid cat, needing to have his head held to eat, his body lifted to use the cat box.  And which eventually locked up the muscles in his throat and chest.  The veterinarian returned him to us in a neat cardboard coffin with—a touch both funny and unbearably poignant—a white daisy taped to the top.

I buried him in the garden last night, my friend of fifteen years.  I will buy a red-twigged Japanese maple and plant it over him, a reminder of his supple exoticism and beauty.

The simple nature of the relationship—warmth, tactile comfort, food, companionship—makes for a simple reaction to his death.  I am so very sad.

Here’s wishing us all a sturdy and cheerful 2009.

(From a 1939 British propaganda poster, sent me by the stupendous Tony Broadbent whose character Jethro the cat burglar is sure to encounter Mary Russell one of these days.)

Christmas can be a tough time of year, especially the first year or two after you’ve lost someone close to you.  After my father died, it took me some time before any of us could face producing the sorts of cookies he always baked for the season.  Eventually, my mother started making the individual fruitcakes he used to make, and occasionally one or two others, and the iced butter cookies that were her realm.

Then Mom died 18 months ago, and last year I didn’t make cookies.  But this year I found myself digging through the recipe box I made for her back in high school and coming up with the clump of ancient, butter-stained Christmas recipes both parents had used for so many years.

Dad specialized in the German style of cookie that is made and stored weeks in advance.  These are not cookies for immediate gratification, and as kids we were generally more interested in Mom’s sugary icing anyway.  But yesterday, following a 20 hour power outage, I piled up my baking ware and got to work—which I should have done 3 weeks ago, but I was working on a copyedit and better late than never.

So now I have multiple loaves of cranberry bread (the best recipe I know of is on the package of cranberries, gorgeous for toasting,) small ones for gifts and two large ones in the freezer for Christmas morning.  I have a large batch of orange candied pecans for giving and nibbling.  I have “Great Grandma’s Christmas Pudding” (more accurately, Great-Great Grandma) which is a typical English steamed dessert, dark and heavy and made of an unlikely mix of carrots, potatoes, brown sugar, and raisins, the chief glory of which is the flamed brandy one pours over it after Christmas dinner.  And no, sticking a silver coin in it to be found is not part of our family tradition, I think someone broke a tooth on it one year…

And Springerle.  This is a typical Dad affair, requiring a lot of fussy steps and endless waiting, and truth to tell, he was not a man for the details of technique, so his generally turned out rocklike and only edible when dipped in a hot drink.  Egg whites are whipped with sugar to make a meringue.  Egg yolks are similarly made thick and sticky.  Flour, lemon peel, and the elusive anise oil (hunting all over Santa Cruz county for anise oil, I found a source only to have it dry up when my daughter dutifully showed up to fetch it.  I ended up using anise extract, but next year I shall start earlier and find a source, probably online.)  Fold all the sticky bits together with the flour, and then wrap it up and store it in the fridge over night.  The next day (today, in fact) roll it out and then press it with a Springerle mold, which is either a flat piece of wood with shapes carved into it, or a rolling pin with those same shapes—I have the pin.  The cookies are then cut along the lines of the mold, laid onto a cookie sheet over anise seed, and stored again for hours and hours, to set the shape.  Eventually, they are cooked (slowly) and then—yes, stored again, with a hunk of apple, to soften and age.

So, what are your family recipes?

There’s a new Laurie King on the shelves—a new LRK short story, at any rate:

Long long ago, in a galaxy far away, I did an event we called “Writer’s Improv,” which meant I sat down one lovely May morning and wrote a story with the world looking over my shoulder, online.  That day I wrote what turned out to be about a third of the final story, which eventually I finished and gave to Dana Stabenow for a collection called Unusual Suspects.

And it’s a nice story, and all the others in the book are nice stories, but to my mind the most interesting part of “The House” is that my Writer’s Improv was intended as a demonstration of the writing process, from first idea to polished product.  And since it’s on the shelves now, all three thirds of it, I’ve posted a page on the web site that has the original text and a detailed commentary on the writing—and more to the point, the rewriting—process.

It’s here. But I warn you: for the end of the story, you’ll have to get the book.  (If you want a signed copy, drop a line to my local guy and I’ll sign them when I’m in.

Sorry for the silence here, my Mac was off playing with friends at the Apple store, and in the meantime the copyedit for The Language of Bees landed on my desk—oh, and isn’t today some kind of a holiday?  Because my house is awfully full of people all of a sudden…

But I just wanted to say that I am giving thanks today, not the least for you, devoted readers of fiction, who continue plunking down money or filling out library requests for titles by LRKing, and make it possible for me to do what I love, tell stories.

I answered the phone the other day and found myself talking to a pair survey taker, with a list of remarkably unconnected questions from sports to bladder infections.  One of her concerns was whether or not I would be shopping on the day after Thanksgiving, and so I thought I’d conduct a survey here: do you venture into stores that day?  And if so, why on earth do you risk life, limb, and mental equanimity?  Is it the bargains?

In addition to the question, I have a request, not entirely self-serving.  If this holiday season is anywhere near as cataclysmically bad as the media is suggesting, use what dollars you are laying down a your vote to what you want preserved on Main Street.  Bookstores can be the center of a town, an essential part of its life-blood, and owners across the country are shuddering with dread of what their bottom line is going to look like come January. 

Books make great presents.  Bookstore gift certificates make great presents.  The doo-dads bookstores have on their shelves make great presents.  And a latte from the bookshop’s coffee bar makes a great present for yourself.

If you want signed copies of LRK books for your Christmas list, you can write my local guy, Crossroads books (crbkswat@sbcglobal.net) or go to the Capitola BookCafe  web site.

In any form, please toss a few dollars at a bricks-and-mortar bookstore this season.  For us all.

My good buddy Dana Stabenow is a video star!

It’s a great example of how to make, and use, a video, with pizazz, personality, and humor.

This is how it came about, in her words:

1.  I saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company in London.
2.  I moved back to Kachemak Bay and joined the Homer Yacht Club.
3.  I crewed on the Joy under the command of Captain Mark Brinster.
4.  Mark’s day job just happens to be videographer.
5.  Eureka!  Shazam!  Syzygy!
6.  Mark and his grip came to my house with approximately two tons of equipment and we shot it in two hours.
7.  He went home and edited.  Being a gifted artist, he was going for beauty and quality and perfection.  I told him I wanted Looney Tunes and suggested sound effects.
8.  Voila!

Seriously?  I’ve never liked being in front of a camera, but this was fun.  Maybe it was because I got to write the script, maybe it was because I’ve crewed under Mark and I know he’s a good captain, maybe I watched so many videos good and bad during the past election that I thought “How hard could it be?”  I really got a bang out of hamming it up.  I’ll be doing this again.

We all hope so, Dana.  Personally, my reaction was, “Man, I’ve GOT to go read them all again.”  Which, really, is what a book video is all about.

Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries, Veteran’s Day here in the US.  Ninety years ago, November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent for the first time in more than four years.  In London, there was silence, and the bells rang, and people wept.

I was 13 when the first US combat troops landed in Vietnam.  That war played in the background throughout the rest of my school years.  I was a senior in high school one spring morning when my English teacher walked in and silently wrote four names on the board: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder.  The invasion of Cambodia had set off protests across the country; at Kent State the National Guard responded by marching on the young crowd—two of those victims were not even a part of the demonstration—with fixed bayonets and bullets.

I can remember reading Wilfred Owen’s most famous Great War poem in high school, and clearly remember its failure to engage me.  Why, I wonder?  You’d have thought a person who watched television broadcasts of men her age slogging through rice paddies and planes dumping chemicals on the landscape would respond to phrases like “Men marched, asleep.  Many had lost their boots…all went lame, all blind.”  One would think that the ending might have spoken to her adolescent angst:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory, 

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est 

Pro patria mori.

The belief that it was “sweet and right to die for your country” defined attitudes in the Great War, and infused that horrific slaughter with its peculiar bittersweet quality.

But by the time Vietnam grew up across the sea, we at home saw the soldier as being one with the commander: Johnson made his war, the man in the uniform fought it, all was of a piece.  When those boys came home, they were looked on with mistrust by civilians who had read about My Lai and daily atrocities.

We were angry, and had no energy left for pity, or even compassion.  That attitude, thankfully, no longer exists.  Even the most ardent anti-war voice will pause to speak a word of understanding for the actual soldier on the ground.  Which is odd, when you stop to think that in 1968, most of our soldiers had been drafted.

That shift in attitude may have been why I wrote about Vietnam (in Keeping Watch, which happens to be the current book under discussion at the forum.)  It was an incomplete and harsh understanding of that war, boiled down to a stark Them and Us, and the guilt of the self-righteous, stay-at-home civilian remained in my bones, growing like a cancer until I could bring it to light. 

Remembrance Day.  Spare a moment of silence for those who did not, those who will not, return. 

After the excesses of the past couple of weeks, when I wrote and deleted countless furious posts, I was for a time written out.  Now I feel slightly hung over.  However, regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly.

I just wanted to say that I really like you guys a whole lot.  Some blogs would have erupted into a vicious firestorm over the election, and my comments about it, but you all managed to suck it in and remain not only coherent, but well-mannered.  

Thank you.

Huge relief.  Great pride.  Dawning hope.

Yes.  We can.

I don’t talk about my two kids much here, because I’m a great believer in the family’s privacy, but you have to know how proud I am of them, right?  Well, yet another example of how the two of them just make my heart glad appears on the local paper’s web site–here, just take a look:

It just makes a mother’s heart jump around all warm in her chest.

It’s all about this contest, you see, in the local paper, and I was thinking that maybe if enough people voted for this picture, the two of them might stop looking at me that way…