All About Tad: And, We Receive Some Good News

Deborah Beale continues the diary of events around the Beale-Williams household and gives us a candid perspective of the man behind the magic

6.17.01

From the Shadowmarch message-board:

Subject: does Tad have a life

One wonders...

how does a person manage to

- write two books at the same time
- do research for that
- be a famous writer (giving interviews, traveling, etc)
- have a family, including kiddies
- visit this message board every day

and actually have time left to have a life? Or doesn't he?

(My mother thinks Tad isn't really Tad. Some figure — the message-board Tad — has been hired to entertain us. I can't convince Mom that she is wrong, although I'm sure she is. Creepy, isn't it?)

6.18.01

Here's what Tad did today.

He got up about 9.30 a.m. As usual this is after five hours' sleep. Six or even seven hours is a luxury, and mostly happens only when he's jet-lagged. (Sometimes he naps in the day, but this is often unsatisfactory semi-sleep.)

He had about an hour after getting up, of playing with the kids, drinking coffee, talking to our nanny, and — holy of holies — reading the sports section of the newspaper.

Then he went to work in our office. We both love our office — there's a great view of our hill out the window — the redwoods. At one and the same time they shelter us and, by their very size, define great sweeping spaces all around us. (It was in fact when I saw this room that I knew we would buy this house.)

Until lunchtime, he dealt with emergencies, phone calls, deadline stuff, some emails, some message-board postings. There is always, but always, too much work.

Lunch, Tad ate and read. It's almost always graphic novels or comics. Recent reading: Alan Moore's From Hell. Tad would like to read more fiction, but it's again a question of time. (He reads novels at night, or in the afternoon whilst taking a break from writing and letting his subconscious chew over a plot-logistics problem.) When we lived in London, he read between six and eight novels a week. Having kids has slowed him down, but he has a true reader's voraciousness. It's as if he inhales the print off the page.

(I, on the other hand, have damaged reading skills. It's all those years of reading for work, as a book publisher. You speed-read. You read just looking for the things to market about a book. A few weeks later, you can't remember much at all. And now, when I read for real, I'm pretty slow. This isn't true for all publishers — most of them read like Tad — but unfortunately it's true for me.)

Afternoon. Today was a good day: he wrote. He was not distracted by the latest emergency arising out of tech support. You work at home, you are your own tech support. Tad hates it, unsurprisingly — it's a wretched drain on his time.

I worry sometimes about how hard it is for him to find time to write. It is in fact a great problem for any writer, and it doesn't lessen if a writer is blessed enough that it becomes his or her full-time work. You really need solitude, and there is never enough solitude. Plus, the business of a career is considerable (although, in our house, that's one area of work that is largely mine.)

Evening, we had dinner and played with the kids. We're trying to break our habit of watching the news whilst we eat. We know it isn't good. It's just, often we don't otherwise get to see the news. It's one of those grown-up things you want to hold onto, but can't.

(We don't watch when the news is bad — is really bad. We don't expose the kids to that.)

Playing with the kids is either great fun or hours of hell. Tonight it was the former — a running-game called GO! GO!, which naturally involved much screaming.

Then we went through the uphill struggle of preparing for bed, after which Tad got our 1.75 year-old daughter (ten minutes of reading) and I got our 4.5 year-old son (one hour of reading). Tomorrow we will swap. Tonight, therefore, Tad was back in the office at 8.10.

It's now 10 p.m. as I write this. I'll collapse at 11 or so (I'm the early-morning child-care, which is fine because I do mornings not nights). Tad will write and think till 3 or so. Then he has an hour unwinding in front of independent movies, or Mystery Science Theatre 3000, which he loves.

The dark and the warm solitude allow his imagination to do its job. He has an astonishing capacity for plot-detail work, solely in his head.

I'm tired. I think I'll write about that later.

6.20.01

Bloody 56k modem. We spend the day taking turns to get on-line, and it's constantly one on, one off, one on, one off. We can't get DSL, living in the mountains. Oracle's flamboyant Larry Ellison (who was recently engaged to Tad's brother's fiancée's cousin, although we aren't sure if that's still so) has a place not far from our (rather more humble) abode, and every time we drive past, it's a family joke to wing a few comments from inside the car:

Whatcha doing for an uplink, Larry?

Any chance we can piggy-back on your optical network?

The second-richest man in the world has to have something figured out. Quite what it might be intrigues us.

Mid-afternoon, frustrated by the slowness and the sharing, Tad suddenly gets a look on his face.

I say, "Oh-oh," because I recognize that look.

"It's OK," he mutters.

Quite what he's planning remains to be seen. The look, however, is obsession.

6.21.01

Tad gives me a bar chart showing the numbers for the site — unique and repeat hits, plus message-board hits. There it is: climbing, climbing, climbing. I have a few moments of YEAH! WOW! before coming back to earth. We can't really tell much from these figures, and half an hour later, in another of our phone conferences, Josh Milligan points out that the obvious test is when we start selling subscriptions. It's like someone gently saying shush in a library.

Evening. Tad and I indulge in a rare pleasure. We have a dinner party. Generally this is the sort of thing that's very difficult to pull off, with two small kids. But another two small kids have come along — in the company of their parents, of course — and so all four together, plus judiciously timed Elmo tapes, is what allows the adults to drink good wine, eat well, and play. Benign neglect — crucial in any parent's armory.

The dinner table is very jolly. Tad's brother and his fiancée (the people so nearly but not quite! related to Larry Ellison), my best friend plus her nearly adolescent daughter, and a French couple, parents of the other two children, are there. We talk of many things. Principally I remember (this being a three or four or even five glasses-of-wine evening) the topic of where best locally to view Mars. The red planet is tonight, and for the next few days, closer to the Earth than it will be for a number of decades. Also, neutrinos. News broke last week of research that showed that neutrinos toggle back and forth between three different states, and so we talk of neutrinos and how this is one jigsaw piece in our growing understanding of the life and destiny of the universe.

I'm fascinated by current physics. I can't hold much of it in my head. But I read about it avidly — am passionate to know.

Christophe, the husband in the French couple, is a physicist at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He is part of an international team working on anti-matter research. He asks me if I saw the news about neutrinos — he laughs as he says this, a what-a-silly-question laugh. We fall to discussing many more things than I can understand (but one thing I do know, is this is a golden age for physics and for astronomy). Christophe also talks a touch scornfully about the search for the elusive Higgs boson particle. All I know about this is that the research, at CERN in Switzerland, was halted amidst considerable heated feeling — some of the scientists there felt they were on the point of a breakthrough. But CERN was being renovated and the date had long been set.

"Oh, the Higgs boson," says Christophe, in that very French manner of talking down the nose.

"You don't think it exists?" I ask. But there is some distraction and I don't get to the bottom of this.

Then Christophe tells me, with a little smile, that there may be an anouncement, a significant anouncement, very soon, about matter and antimatter.

Dessert and coffee and wonderful French dessert wines go by and Christophe and I finish talking. Whereupon I discover that Tad has not had dessert. Instead he has put the children to bed all by himself.

Later, when everyone is gone, I say to my best beloved husband, "I would have helped, you didn't have to do that."

"Oh," he says, "you so love a dinner party, and dinner-party talk. And you've been working so hard lately."

When I first met Tad, I was astonished by his kindness. Ten years later, no matter the clash of egos, the fights that sometimes go on for days, and just day-to-day pissing each other off like any married couple, still, that has not changed, not at all. It's a light he has inside.

6.22.01

Has anyone died yet from fear of email? I don't answer mine for a while then tentatively open it all up, and wham, big hyper-ventilate. And what I receive pales by the side of Tad's hundreds of fan emails every week. Thank God he's so sanguine.

I have been talking to Charon the Web Goddess, my friend in Scotland, about viral marketing.

From: "Charon"
To: "Deborah Beale"
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 16:17:53 +0100

Hello again... to enhance the viral marketing definition, it's about turning your advocate's friends into advocates and so on, because what you're doing is either a) cool or b) giving something great away or -- preferably -- both. Which means that everyone passes the virus on willingly. The best ones emerged organically -- the Budweiser 'wassup' ads from the US were circulating on the web in the UK before they got shown on UK TV, thereby creating a big 'we're cool and you're not' factor, which helped when they finally hit our screens. I doubt that was clever marketing on Bud's part, I reckon some US geek just emailed his mates here, and it did the rounds. Same goes for little desktop flash or java games. If they're good enough, they go round and round for months. There's no reason why you couldn't create something like... It's got to be cool though, but I doubt you'll have any bother with that! Amazing how much shite about 'nuiw meedja' I know these days! Cxx PS: did our wedding invite arrive by any chance?

I have been complaining to Matt Dusek, our web architect (but really he's a farmer) about our uplink problems

From: "Matthew Dusek"
To: Deborah
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 11:41:46 -0500

Deb,

I can't tell you how appalling I find it that high speed Internet access isn't available where you live. All the money that -created- the phenomenon is there, for the love of God!

Lack of DSL I can -almost- understand, since it's rather proximity sensitive (meaning you have to be fairly close to the transmission station; it's still shocking that they haven't dropped a station right in the middle of town). But to not even have high speed cable access?! Somewhere in Silicon Valley?!

Sorry for the rant, but what good does it do to live in a place where half the population is VCs and billionaire technowonks if you can't get access to all their nifty toys? My vision of the place has been besmirched.

By one of those curious synchronicities, just as I'm reading this Tad walks into the office with the phone and the yellow pages, and he's obviously at the end of a conversation. He tells me he's located a satellite service and a place to buy the equipment, and he's made an appointment for the equipment to be installed. Plus, we have to get a new PC to act as a server. But, he thinks, our uplink problems are, as they say in the UK, sorted.

That's what the obsession-look was about. He's excellent at grabbing hold of something and not letting go till it's been shaken into submission.

"One more problem," I sing to Tad and the room, "is down and out."

The last email I open today is from Josh Milligan. He and I have been talking about something that amused us four Hierarchs of the site, that is, the 666th person who signed up for the message board called him- or herself "The Beast".

From: Guthwulf
To: Deborah Beale
Subject: Re: Our newest member
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 19:24:26 -0700 (PDT)

By the way, 667 was "Dante".

What superior wits there are present on our site.

6.23.01

There is another car crash outside our house. I have just climbed into bed, with books, newspapers and research material for the next children's manuscript — it is ten or so at night — when there is an almighty reverberation, and a pressure change as if all the air over the house has been momentarily sucked away then forced back. I leap out of bed and check the kids: deep-sleeping like dirty little wombats (we tend to do day baths: evenings, the parents are mostly too exhausted). In the kitchen Tad is pulling on sneakers and reaching for the flashlights. I'm scared. I don't want him to go out there. But I don't say it.

We switch on all the lights outside and I watch Tad disappear through the gate. After a while there are rescue vehicles galore — a fire truck, a tow truck, paramedic van, police car. The varieties of flashing lights are dazzling. Our son, Connor, would love this: but he sleeps very deeply, and there is no likelihood I could wake him.

Then Tad comes back.

I say, "I was scared."

"Why?" he asks, depocketing the flashlights.

I shrug.

He says, "There's a guy out there with his girlfriend, says his tire blew."

"And did it?"

Tad's turn to shrug. "Nothing much left of one of 'em, whatever happened. They're OK, the people. No injuries."

"Good," I say, because besides not wanting anyone hurt, one of the things I feared was Tad having to see something pretty bad.

"He did this to me," says Tad, and he starts menacing me like a gorilla, pushing at me with his chest. "He didn't want me to call the police or anything. He was swinging his arms and walking at me. Kept saying he was just going to change the tire and go. I said, 'You don't understand. You can't go.' I meant the state of his car. He got even nastier. He was pretty ugly, too, I mean, physically. His girlfriend was as pretty as he was ugly." Another shrug. "She tried to appease me, like she was embarrassed, or worried I had something on them."

"So why was he doing this?"

"Because he's done about two thousand bucks' worth of damage to a neighbor's fence."

I'm sort of glad it was Tad out there, not me, just because I'm not very good around people who try to evade responsibility.

"It ended," says Tad, "because the neighbor who lives right at the top of the hill suddenly appeared, saying, 'I called 911!'"

"So the asshole backed off?"

Tad smiles. He's so much more sanguine than me.

The night goes back to normal, save for one loud WHUP-WHUP from the police car.

6.24.01

The past few days, I've found on the message board some really nice comments about the Backstage pieces I have written. They leave me pink-cheeked and smiling with pleasure.

All day there is the sound of buzz saws coming down the hill, through the trees. I found someone to clear the debris on top of the landslide up there. It's active. Fortunately it is not moving towards the house, but at a right angle away from us. It's still our liability: hence this work. Clearance first — a huge job since the last time the landslide moved (the El Nino winter of 1998) it took with it many trees. After clearance, grading and drainage. After that, replanting.

(I once heard someone remark that the most beautiful landscapes in the world were often notably unstable. Everyone here learns to accommodate, one way or another, the sheer aliveness of what's around us. Our neighbors, and many people we know, have their own share of things like this. The trick basically is to accept this: measured by the scale of a lifetime, you are not too likely to have anything truly catastrophic happen. You will however have a few pretty large and painful clear-up-the-mess bills.)

It's hard finding people to do work like this. There was a news item on TV a few days back saying janitors in San Francisco would have to earn seven times their annual wage before they could afford a down-payment on a studio apartment, or a one-bedroom apartment. And two contractors this year told me that they had deliberately downsized their businesses to mom-and-pop operations, because in the Bay Area, no matter how much work the recent boom brought them (and there's still a huge amount of building and contracting work going on), and no matter how much higher the wages are than anywhere else in the country, it still doesn't pay to live here. So the contractors who stay here are the ones with strong family ties to the area. Which makes for not many workers pro rata the work.

6.25.01

I'm watching Tad whilst he writes. On the surface there isn't much to see — just my best beloved husband only partly visible behind his computer monitor. On the wall behind is a shelf filled with Beatles toys — Yellow Submarine era, plus characters from that movie. Los boys gave them to Tad as we were evolving the Shadowmarch project. Above the shelf is a framed print of Michael Whelan's wondrous artwork for To Green Angel Tower.

Tad works like he does most things: steadily, constantly, with balance. Of course, the wonder about Tad, for everyone who enjoys his work, is how he creates those gripping stories — and how he writes so much, with such consistently high-caliber, fantastical, invention.

I can tell you the ingredients.

Firstly there is the imagination. If used frequently and actively, like an athlete uses her or his muscles, it strengthens and becomes ever more flexible, ever more lithe. Tad has now had decades of using his imagination as his number-one work tool.

Then there is knowing how to open up what is inside of you — imagination plus subconscious — in order to let the ideas out. This involves learning to trust that if they don't come immediately, they will come, you just need to wait and let them. This is a process part Zen, part magic, part healthy psychology.

Plus there is self-discipline. Tad works very, very hard. The epic, as almost everyone reading this will know, is his form. On most days he writes between five and ten pages, and if he's in the closing stages of a novel, it's between ten and twenty pages. He has been writing professionally for sixteen years, or maybe it's eighteen ... Whatever the length of time, the point is that after a while there comes a capacity to produce reliably a certain amount per day (in the writing stage of a book, which is different to the conception stage, say). I use the word "capacity" because few writers would actually call it ease.

(Why the epic? Because his ambitions are big. Because his ideas are prolific. Because he's full of words. Because his energy is considerable, even now that he's finally met his match in the stinky monkeys who allow us to live in the house with them, and occasionally remember we're their parents.)

There is something else in the mix, something that resides at the heart of his talent. He has an extraordinary understanding of story. He thinks in terms of story — he sees plot and structure in his mind. Or perhaps feels them in his bones. He is utterly rigorous in his employment of them.

Some of Tad's novels are edited more than others, most notably the last volume in any series, because his task in hand, tieing all those plot strands together, is so complex. But as a general rule, he produces close to finished copy. In fact, his first novel, Tailchaser's Song, was barely edited at all. This astonished me when I was Tad's UK publisher: the novel is so structurally complete.

Even though I live with all this, it never ceases to be a cause for wonder.

6.26.01

We've seen quite three or four praying mantids in the garden, zipping along the top of the fence or watching us from the rose bushes. As soon as one of us spots them, everyone piles out of the house to see. We hatched three egg cases in May, and it pleases all of us that a number of mantids have survived the birds in the garden and appear to be growing nicely. They remind us of our skinny little cat — whip-thin, with long bodies and triangular heads.

Evening. A neighbor from half-way up the hill, somewhat stressed, is at the door. He saw something amidst the partially cleared debris of our landslide — went to investigate — FIRE. He's stamped out what he could and called 911.

I go cold. The horrors of Californian wildfires claim all my thought for a few moments.

A fire truck arrives pretty quickly. Our son is THRILLED. Our daughter thinks it's pretty cool, too, fighting and smelly in my arms (all this happened just as she needed a diaper change, oh joy). Connor joyfully directs the fire truck as it uses our driveway to turn around and to back up, up the hill. The firemen pretty much ignore him, which causes me a moment of maternal heartache, until I realize they're probably very focused on getting things straightened out, quickly. Tad goes up there with the firemen as they investigate then foam everything. Pretty unusually for this time of the year, a light rain has begun to fall. I take it as a sign that the gods are on our side.

6.27.01

Our neighbor calls. He spoke to the fire department, and they tell him they believe that the guys working on the clearance started the fire — there was some evidence, apparently, that they tried to smoke out a bees nest. This seems to me so monumentally stupid that I wonder if it really could have occurred. Our neighbor then tells me that as he was leaving his house this morning, the guys working the clearance rolled a huge log down the hill (instead of heaving it into the disposal truck), and it caught up with his car and did considerable damage. The estimate for the body work — $1,000 — was presented this afternoon to the clearance guy in charge of all this (whom I like). He agreed to pay for the damage without a murumur.

6.28.01

Everybody on the Shadowmarch team is working very hard and barely moving forward.

Josh Milligan has been claimed by various exhausting, all-demanding projects at work, and is pretty frustrated because he has not been able to work on Shadowmarch quite as much as he would like.

Matt Dusek is overwhelmed with contract work, at the same time as he is wading through the complexities of getting the e-commerce solution plugged into the web site. It's proving complex and the single most difficult task we have faced to date. We all of us feel a bit helpless in the face of this thing.

Today, another Shadowmarch phone conference. At the start of things Jupiter the triangular-faced cat knocks the jack out of the wall by crashing into it during a kitten-game. Tad is bounced off the conference. Josh, the great catalyser of all things, gets Tad back again and we're off.

We're all concerned to keep the subscription process simple for those who use it. This may be something beyond our control.

We decide to hold off on an email blast till we can make the payment process work to the optimum; and discuss guerilla- and viral-marketing ideas.

Awesome, says Josh.

Tad's written a short story that we all love — a Tale From The Book Of Regrets. We consider using short fiction as virals.

Awesome, says Josh.

I work out price points on the subscription fee, figure out an angle for a new press release (Shadowmarch offers special low rate for early subscribers) and the conference begins to wind down — we're all tired, though you wouldn't guess it from the speed of the talk.

Awesome, says Josh, and signs off.

Late at night I fall back into my thoughts about our progress. The things we thought we would do in the first weeks, have turned out to require months. In part that's because we're a shoestring operation. In part it's because we're all so ambitious. Our model has become something steady and persistent.

6.29.01

From behind me I hear —

Biff crash —

(Frantic squirting of a water gun.)

Shite.

Rotten little cat.

IF I FIND THESE BLOODY ANIMALS IN THIS OFFICE ANY MORE I AM GOING TO TAKE THAT PIN BOARD AND EVERY PIN IN THE PLACE AND HOLD THEM DOWN AND ...

Jupiter's enjoying himself.

So's Tad. Nothing like a good excuse to imagine awful fates for the cats.

Late in the afternoon, the guy in charge of the clearance crew comes to the house for final payment, and tells us that for the first time in a couple of decades working in this area, he's found scorpions here — specifically, under the bark of a rotten log on our hillside. At first we don't know what he's saying, because he says part of this in Spanish and when we translate the word, we can't quite believe this is so. Then we're intrigued. Apparently they are little white things — I must see if I can track what they are. Little or no, I imagine they could still give you a nasty surprise, were they so inclined.

6.30.01

Friends arrive from New York: my dear friend Katya (who is an international marketing consultant with an all-consuming career — she and I love to swap notes about new economy companies and the evolution of the information age — her significant other, Terence (who works for the publishing company St. Martin's Press) and the journalist/psychiatrist-in-training Paul McEnery.

I'm so pleased to see them. They're all wonderful company, and we always get together when Katya's flown in for business in the Valley. (One of the many entertaining things about Katya is, I always have to ask where she's calling from — you just never know. Mostly it's Europe or Russia or just somewhere in the USA, but she's surprised me a goodly number of times now — Alaska, for instance, or Warzawa.)

Paul's an expatriate Brit like me. We all sit in the garden, watch the children play, and drink agua dente. I give myself over to having a good time, and snuggle Tad on our garden sofa.

7.2.01

About Tad as a person.

He whistles Fly Me To The Moon in the can.

He has a profound sense of what's right, and always sees a job through — always.

His wit and his sense of humor are, well, awesome.

He is very wise. Once I was comparing notes with him on pro parties at conventions, the big thrashes where agents and writers and publishers and artists get together. It can be hard when you are first on the scene to walk into a room like that. But Tad said, "Oh, I never had any problems, not after the first few minutes of the first one."

I said, "Why not?"

"I realized that everyone in the room was so concerned with how other people perceived them, that I didn't have to worry about anything at all."

His novels have reflected some of the broader concerns in his life at the time that he was writing them, but he is not an autobiographical writer.

Tad isn't a paragon, he's a human being. He's hard to live with sometimes, just like everyone is. I could write about this, perhaps, but I won't, because that passes over into what is known and shared only between him and me.

7.3.01

The satellite-uplink project is growing complex. We have the satellite and the PC bought for a server, and stuff else, I know not what it all is. But getting someone in to install it all is proving a headache. I'm beginning to wonder how this all will play out.

7.4.01

Joyously we are having two nights of fireworks celebrations for Independence Day. Last night, July 3, we went to a quad in Stanford where, we have been told, there is an annual display known only to locals, one rumored to be pretty special. And it is special, too. First of all, the atmosphere was lovely. The quad is surrounded by fragrant lavender bushes, and within them hundreds of people and children sat waiting. When the display came it was right over our heads. Our son, exceptionally excited, kept a narration during the entire display.

HERE COMES A BIG ONE!
OH! THAT'S JUST LIKE AN EXPLODING CAR.
HERE COMES A BIG ONE!
CRACKABOOM, CRACKABOOM!
NOW, THAT ONE'S JUST LIKE AN OCTOPUS.
HERE COMES A BIG ONE!
OH! THE COLORS ALL CAME FROM THE INSIDE TO THE OUT.
OH! IT'S A BANANA SKIN.
CRACKABOOM, CRACKABOOM!
Etc, etc.

It was our daughter's first fireworks display. She enjoyed it, and, waving her arms and crowing wildly, she took her cue from her big brother. But later, she had a bad night, and a nightmare, I think. (Since she is as intrepid, not to say driven, as Sir Francis Drake — which is in contrast also to her more cerebral brother — this was somewhat of a surprise.) So today I was tired. Tad kept saying, "I've got something to tell you," but it slipped away under the pressures of childcare and a general inability to focus.

Tonight we go out again as it is growing dark, and head down to meet Tad's brother Arthur and fiancée Pam, in a parking lot — specifically, the Wonder Bread parking lot, behind a factory or a depot. It's a good place, we're told, for seeing down to the Bay and the Redwood City fireworks. A handful of people gather there, including a man who strikes me as a bit of a wiseguy — he regales everyone with stories of fights at his wedding. I turn away and wait for the fireworks. When they come they are on a larger scale than last night's fireworks, but more distant. Connor enjoys them: Devon is bored. So I play with her, and we have fun.

On the way home the children, tired, fall quiet. Tad says, "I've been trying —"

"— To tell me something," I finish.

"Yeah. I had an email from Ulrike."

Ulrike Killer is Tad's German publisher at Klett Kotta (we have been very happy with their publishing of Otherland.)

"She says the radio series we heard might happen, is definite. Twenty-four episodes of Otherland, fifty-five minutes each. It's the biggest radio drama in German radio history."

CRACKABOOM, CRACKABOOM!