SHADOWMARCH | Dreamcatching

Backstage

Dreamcatching: only good dreams will stick ...

Deborah Beale concludes the first season's backstage journey through all the mundane joys and trials of catching a dream

8.10.01: It's high summer. Everything is quiet and hot and slow. My garden is beautiful. It's been a lot of work.

I was never the slightest bit interested in gardening until we moved to this house in the redwoods. Now I am a woman obsessed. When I garden I experience the peace that passeth understanding. Also, something like an expurgation. My mind babbles quietly — a bit like what you find happening when you're woken suddenly in the middle of the night — and after, it's like the unconscious has been scrubbed out. The satisfaction is huge, until later in the evening, when the frustration of not being able to do all that I want, for all the hours it takes, kicks in. I am an addict, I am actually a gardening addict.

My mother has reminded me that as a small child I would follow my grandfather, a skilled carpenter, around his garden and observe his work, making things or growing things. (He was very tall. He was kind and mostly silent. He had a stone owl with glass eyes, right at the end of the garden.) Funny how these things emerge, no matter how many decades they have to wait.

In the front garden, in the sun, I have roses all over the place because I have always been greedy for roses. I have hanging baskets along the walkway that leads to our front door, and also blue-and-white striped Chinese lanterns, twelve of 'em swaying gently. I have a lawn that is a perpetual source of grief. I have a hinky sprinkler system and I have the mantids we hatched in the spring.

Also there are heritage tomatoes. I'm growing them between the climbing roses — the ones behind which I found that fat black widow, atop her egg sac. I chose heritage tomatoes solely because they are very pretty, and I plant first and foremost for aesthetics. Fortunately they are also delicious. Tad's favorite — mine too — is a stripy green tomato, called something like Aunt Gertrude's German Green (this isn't quite the name, I think, and I can't find out what the right name is because of how the smallest monkey child loves to remove all garden markers and tags, and hoarde 'em for her trophies.) The tomato is big and besides being an extraordinary color, it has a fruity, almost melon-y, flavor.

The tomato vines have climbed all the way up the wall and now hang over the other side, like the roses. So it's a beautiful sight when you pull up in the car and see all the flowers and the fruit coming over the wall. Actually I worry that someone might come and steal my fat tomatoes, but that seems like a silly thought.

I have come to the conclusion that the tomato is a seriously sensuous plant. The smallest touch leaves a thick moisture on the skin that is so strongly perfumed, it's almost skunk-like. I heard a few years ago of how a perfume house had produced a tomato scent. At the time I thought, What...? Now I get it. The smell is the smell of summer gardens — garden dirt under my nails, my children with Popsicle smears on their cheeks playing with their big nylon toy plane and the green tunnel from an adventure tent, and Tad and I sitting at day's end, watching them as we drink iced sparkling water with a little apricot juice.
8.11.01: Now that the payment solution for the site is in place, each morning I am activating Shadowmarch accounts as the subscriptions comes in. It's monotonous and takes hours but I do it with pleasure. Also done with pleasure: the support email. At least, I answer what I can and, if it gets too technical, forward things on to Josh Milligan or Matt Dusek. It all gives me more of that "I made this on the kitchen table" feeling — my labors, handcrafted with purpose and care.

Also, a slow-as-golden-syrup mood is upon me.

August is turning out to be so much nicer a time than July. There are work frustrations, naturally, not the least of which is our difficulty with that payment solution. We're hunting for a second solution we can offer additionally on the site, one which will make payment an easier process, especially for our non-USA subscribers. The search is not as easy as one might think — I am finding that I cannot just go to a company's website and find something that suits our needs. Emails have to be sent, phone calls made, many questions asked, many answers decoded. Sometimes I feel smothered in information, and it's leading me nowhere, it isn't knowledge.

But we are planning a holiday for early September, and the children are so much fun, and building out Shadowmarch is a rich experience. Therefore, right now, there is barely a complaint in my bod.
8.14.01: Tad is installing new systems in our computers. It has punctured my golden mood, since the installation is, unsurprisingly, a fraught process. Also Tad just hates this stuff, it takes him away from writing, but he is, being who he is, compulsive about getting things right, seeing them through. Sometimes of course it's all beyond his control, at least until he can get down to the electronics store again. Then he's on edge, and when things crash (which is frequent), he's miserable. He really shouts and swears, and he's just wound tight. Tad can be very easy-going, so this sort of mood really stands out. I plow on with my work, trying to offer the right amount of support but not absorb too much of his frustration. I don't want to write another Shadowmarch diary shot through with what I call techno-whinge.
8.15.01: I've been working on a Macintosh PowerBook G3 for quite a few years now. It was originally bought for Tad to use on the road, and we would swap off computers when he went away. But it all got complicated when Tad had a few tours in a short space of time where he was wretchedly ill and unable to work in between promotional events (walking pneumonia when he was, literally, half a world away from home — things like that.) And author tours are so grueling anyway that expecting to work whilst on them, even just picking up email, was perhaps always over-ambitious.

(An ex-landlady of mine, in London, used to piss me off by referring to author tours as "holidays." I mean, a typical day touring for Tad is like this: 6 a.m. start. 7 a.m. plane. Land in another time zone. Picked up by sales rep or escort. Whisked to stock-signing session or lunchtime signing/appearance at bookstore. Be interested in, and have real conversation with, absolutely everybody you meet. Afternoon, some media [local newspaper or radio most frequently.] Late afternoon, check into hotel. Fifteen minutes to change, hang clothes, shower, call home, grab something to eat. Evening signing. Be interested in, and have real conversation with, absolutely everybody you meet. Out to dinner with bookstore people and fans. Be interested in, and have real conversation with, absolutely everybody at dinner. Crawl back to hotel at midnight. Next morning's plane is 5 a.m ...

(Touring with your author is something like that for a publisher too, only the pressure to perform is a little less. Still, you've got other worries. Did the press packs make it? Did the warehouse get off its butt and ship the books out in time — unlike what happened on last month's tour? What the hell will we do if bad weather closes the airport/the trains go on strike/the bookstore buyer has done nothing to promote the signing/the escort doesn't show? What if no one turns up to your author's signing session? Etc. etc.)

Anyway, one way or another, the PowerBook settled into being mine. But it's too short on memory for my needs now, and Tad wishes to claim it back. So today I'm transferring everything over to another computer.

Interesting how tough it is to clean out a few files. This is quite strange. I have always been a person who travels light. I throw things away rather too easily, and never regret it, either. So why is it so hard now to junk dead files on a computer?

Business correspondence, letters to friends with whom I've now lost touch, boring bank stuff, old budgets ... How often do I even refer to last week's email, never mind all this? Yet somehow it's difficult to let it go. These words, my voice from years ago, suddenly seem a part of me, more so than mere possessions.

In the end, even though I know it really is pretty unlikely I'll look through any of this again, everything gets backed up on a zip disk, and I move on.

I've discovered that Tad has scattered software manuals throughout the house (read: bathrooms.) So he's obviously educating himself afresh about a number of applications. I look up from spring cleaning my hard drive and tell him I finally feel like we're getting somewhere with this grand overhaul of all the systems.

Tad laughs hollowly and says he feels like he's riding a bike underwater.
8.17.01: OK, I'm sorry, I just have to techno-whinge.

Yesterday was a "Nothing Works" day. Everything to do with installing our new home system proved arcane and complex and unfathomable and all in all we had a day of getting absolutely bloody nowhere.

Plus in the afternoon the satellite guys came and hoisted the satellite for our internet uplink, up on the pole that took us so long to get in place: and the uplink just wouldn't work. We were told in the end that there were problems with the actual satellite that day, and nothing could be done for a while. Then the satellite guys made a date to come back several days hence and went away. It was all murky and strange. We were also told — was this on a separate visit? I am beginning to lose track of all these comings-and-goings-with-no-results-achieved — that there are still tree branches blocking the signal, and so Tad is up the hill right now, sitting in a tree and sawing away at branches that were specifically pointed out to us as the problem. It's hot. He shouted down to me a few minutes ago, hoarse and tired and fed-up.

And then in the evening — well, these things always come in threes, right? We got the kids to bed in good time for once then decided after our horrid day of frustration we deserved an evening with no work and — this is so rare in our household — a movie. A Pay-Per-View movie.

Except the goddamn Pay-Per-View wouldn't work.

I had to tell myself that sometimes there are small comforts to be had. In this case, the small comfort was a real customer representative at the end of the phone tree, and at 9 p.m. at night he did his best. But our Pay-Per-View just refused to come out and play, and that was that.

Tad suspects that when we had the house re-roofed early in the year, some jack or switch was interfered with, or got bumped, or something like that. Whatever happened, it's service interruptus, and right now we're just too dazed by everything else to figure out how we will be able to get it back.

As I write this I'm also conscious of how the contractor I hired at the end of July for the latest round of work on the landslide on our property, still returns no phone calls and is now nearly three weeks past the date he was due to start work.
8.18.01: After the awful day yesterday, I begin this day by spending a little time in the garden, just breathing. There's a corner here that's shadier, a place defined by stands of redwoods that are the biggest trees on the property, true giants. I stand underneath them in the hush and the giant space and I listen to the birds high up there.

Trees so big have a presence unlike anything else — almost as if there's a silent intelligence there. I understand how someone like Julia Butterfly, an environmentalist who lived in a redwood for two years in her fight to prevent it being cut down, can come to regard a tree as a person. That's not me — I am in general not in search of revelation or spirituality, nor am I of a mindset or a lifestyle to have it burst upon me. I am at ease with this rotten ole existential world. But I do understand now how landscapes such as these in the American West can alter your sense of reality, or simply be a different reality.

To work. Josh Milligan's banner ads, featuring Matt Rhodes' artwork, are up on Sluggy and they've had some splendid click-thru results and the numbers on the site have taken a big leap. Matt Dusek is flying in from Chicago, and in a few days we'll be getting together with him, Josh, and Josh's younger brother, Alex, for a big Shadowmarch pow-wow, which is an excuse for a dinner party with good wine. I love dinner parties, they're simply one of the best things in life.

The techno-frustrations go on and on, but I'm feeling better. I just wish Tad was too. There are times in our lives when he really carries a lot of pressure.
8.19.01: More Shadowmarch support email. I'm plugging away at it. Today whilst working a memory crawls from a cobwebby corner of my mind. A bazillion years ago (well, in the mid-eighties) I was flying to Greece with a friend. Going through customs, I observed a very young man, really a customs officer in training, loudly deriding some poor unfortunate who had made a number of mistakes. "They never learn," this young man sneered. None of his colleagues took much notice of him because it was one of those intense-security times and everyone was hyper.

I didn't let it pass — I was very rude to the young man in question, I think over the heads of all the people in between us I loudly derided him right back, and I do remember that he wouldn't look me in the eye. (I was in a line at another table, but my friend wasn't, and his luggage was subsequently searched right down to taking apart the bits of his camera equipment. It was harassment. I was however forgiven by my friend, because the young customs officer really was horrid and deserved a tongue-lashing.)

What I learnt from that incident was — you cannot expect a large body of people to act as anything other than individuals, and they will ask the same questions and make the same mistakes. So — be kind.

And I am trying to be kind. I hate to say something gooey, but really, it's its own reward, people are eager to fix things for themselves if you just help 'em figure out what they got wrong, and lots of 'em say thank you, too. Out of a hundred emails, I've only had two that have been unpleasant in any way.

The Shadowmarch fridge magnets are in the process of being manufactured now. When we all saw the proof, Tad and Josh were happier than I was with the color balance of the design. I think they need more zing, but I let the matter go, especially as we have so little time to get them finished and off to the World SF Convention in Baltimore.

Tad and I also have most of our holiday planned — the short one we are taking in early September. Disneyland for the kids and L.A. for the grown-ups. Since we're doing things post the Labor Day holiday, reservations have been a cinch. Ooh, I like it when things are straightforward.
8.20.01: Our son Connor calls me, with great excitement. I run to the living room. Thrilled, he is pointing outside — a family of deer on the hill. They're very pretty, but I find myself (this is a bit de trop, really) looking at their strong haunches and thinking, mm, venison. When Connor goes out with his sister and nanny Dena, five minutes later, I burst outside yelling and whooping and I chase 'em off.

Tad teases me. He makes jokes about the cruel mommy. The situation has a particular piquancy because of How We Found This House. We were coming over the hill, from the coastal side of the Santa Cruz mountains, in a pouring rainy-season storm. I was eight and a half months pregnant with Connor. A stag leapt out in front of the car. We were going so slowly we felt it likely the animal was OK, even though it was lying there, a bit stunned. But given those hooves, the storm and the dark, and my condition, we weren't going back to check. So we pulled into the nearest house to ask to call the humane society. Which was, this house.

Three years later, when I was eight and a half months pregnant with our daughter, I was driving past and saw a realtor's board, and I thought, Oh: the Deer House is for sale ... And when I told Tad he said, Why don't you go check it out?

Actually, for the sake of simplicity, I'm omitting some details that are spookily karmic. But one way or another we bought the Deer/Dear House, and now here we are, with Tad laughing at me as I come in from scaring the wildlife, and telling me, Cruel Mommy, repaying good karma with bad. They'll have their revenge, you know.

I reply that I am not so karmically inclined that I'll let deer rampage about my lawn.
8.21.01: Tad's got a poison oak burn on his wrist. I take this PERSONALLY. He thinks he might have got it when he was up on the hill trimming the branches that interfere with the signal to our satellite dish.

I go up there. The poison oak that was there before, is really truly sincerely dead. I struggle even to find vines, and in fact fail. Maybe he just got very unlucky and found the last little bit. Or maybe it happened somewhere else. The thing is, we can't think of anywhere else he's actually been. All Tad's been doing day after day is the bloody systems, and writing Shadowmarch and the new novel that's currently called The War Of The Flowers.

The burn looks just like the white stripe left by your watch strap in the summer, only in reverse. That's bad enough — it's been driving him mad, the itching, the past few nights. But now other little patches of "burn" are appearing on his body. Perhaps the poison-oak oils got onto his clothes too, then transferred themselves elsewhere on his skin. It's a bit puzzling, given this odd time delay. It's spiteful stuff, poison oak. When I see Tad itchy and miserable I fantasize about how, if I see poison oak on the hill next spring, I will be even more vicious in my response.

In the evening we have our big Shadowmarch meeting/dinner — Matt Dusek, in from Chicago with his friend Neil, and Josh and Alex Milligan, a.k.a. Jiriki. Here's some of what's covered at the meeting: marketing the site; e-commerce solutions; content issues; Shadowmarch on PDA files; Shadowmarch in libraries; the links page; automatic account activation. I minute things. Tad says that some people on the message board took that recent worm attack personally, and were pretty upset. It pleases us all that we've built a site where such a community has developed. Tad talks about how proud he is of everything we've done. On the subject of the site itself, Matt quotes a friend who looked at Shadowmarch and exclaimed, Such reckless creativity!

Matt and Neil have brought some excellent wine, and when the meeting breaks up the three of us loiter at the table. Matt and I discuss what it is to have children — Matt talks about how philosophy leads him to the idea that he does not want to have children. I'm the opposite: the intellectual matter of life has always led me to the idea that having children is an important thing for me to do. Matt's viewpoint has nothing to do with disliking children or not — in fact he clearly likes their company and I suspect he's a lot of fun in the uncle department. But I can't quite get to the bottom of why he thinks the way he thinks, which probably has something to do, on my part, with that excellent wine.

Before the meeting began, Matt and Neil helped Tad move a very large and heavy crate from our dining room. They took it across the back lawn and dumped it at the side of the house. Devon, my daughter, followed them, thrilled to be part of the big-guy action. And following her, I experienced what I was seeing, intensely: very little girl, doing her bonkey (monkey) dance, behind big men with big crate, beneath all those towering trees. It is a dizzying and delicious moment of perspective.
8.22.01: Matt and Neil are just too cheerful in the morning. I wish I had their metabolism. They stayed in our guest room, and Matt tells me he slept on the floor as an experiment. In ascetics? I enquire, but there are small children shrieking in the kitchen, and after a few seconds I grab for coffee then slope off to get my email.

From: support@shadowmarch.com
Subject: Private Message Notification : An Illustration for Shadowmarch : Maurizio Manzieri

Dear Tad and Deborah,

It's only for your eyes ! Here's my first Official illustration for the Shadowmarch Universe, and I'm really excited about it !!!

It's a personal interpretation of the Briony character...a photorealistic snapshot, underscoring the 'drama' of the first chapters, taken an evening that I was visiting your wonderful literary adventure. Briony looks like a sad bride and her uneasiness has been symbolically frozen in the action of cutting a rose with a carved dagger. I surprised her in a tower of the Shadowmarch Castle. In the background it's possible to see the menacing Shadowline sliding upon the sea like a clawing thunderstorm.

Could I consider myself officially enlisted in the Shadowmarch Arts Council?

With enthusiasm and love

Maurizio

I gasp when I see the picture Maurizio Manzieri has sent us. I just think it's so beautiful. Maurizio is a professional with an illustrious record and tons of enthusiasm. I think we've found our next Shadowmarch artist.
8.24.01: We've sorted out the new-payment-solution business. We've chosen WorldPay because they can handle the foreign transactions with ease. I'm sorry, however, not to have gone with a company called merchantbankcard.com, because their customer service was very good.

Josh Miligan sends me an email about Maurizio Manzieri that is characteristically to the point.

To: Deborah Beale
From: Guthwulf
Subject: Re: art -- please read 1

Awesome. Let's sign him up. :)
8.28.01: To: deborah@shadowmarch.com
From: Tad
Subject: The "why I love you" thread

These people are nuts! But they're crazy about our website. Just thought you might like a quick browse of this.

I check out the URL Tad's sent. Dragondawn has begun a thread where everyone gets to say what they love in other people on the board. It's crazy, it's sweet, it's really funny. She's right about how there can be too little of this in everyday life.

Lots of bitty work to finish before we go away. I'm basically hustling for Shadowmarch on all fronts, and in the past few days, once or twice, I have felt myself drowning in detail. However, some of the nicest detail comes from Maurizio Manzieri. His emails charm me and make me laugh. He's very sincere, and he says things like —

I'll try to realize artworks with all the beauty present in my heart
And also:

Today my body seems retouched with Photoshop ! My team keeps saying that I'm surrounded by a golden halo...:-)
— which I think means he's pretty happy with his upcoming Oct/Nov cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Maurizio should post on the "Why I Love You", and maybe I should be posting there about his big-puppy enthusiam, ha.

I'm still experiencing frustrations with everything to do with the geotech work above our hill. The Village Gossip continues to return not one phone call. He's just disappeared. What makes it particularly irksome is (a) not knowing where we stand with him at all — I mean, does he intend actually to do the work? (b) we're involved with another crucial bit of work now — a water-pipes replacement project that affects six houses, it's a big job of work about to start and if the Village Gossip really does intend to do the work for which he was hired, it's crucial to coordinate both.

As ever this summer, I take comfort in my garden. A few days back one of my friends told me she was very envious of my huge crop of roma tomatoes. And I have the most beautiful roses coming on. There are more rosebuds than I count — they're just everywhere.
8.29.01: I finish the first draft of our new children's manuscript. It's all about dragons, and it's been great fun to work on. Just recently we got close, twice, to selling one of our children's-fiction projects — a manuscript was raised for acquisition in editorial meetings, but twice got shot down. Given my years as a publisher, I know what it's like to fight in-house to acquire something you really want to take on, so I'm both sympathetic to the editors concerned, and then not, since they didn't win the fight and that's the bloody point.
8.30.01: Some big moments with the children. Devon counts to ten and has begun recognizing a few letters (she's one year and ten months.) Nothing amazing about this, since she's obviously been absorbing Sesame Street shows and Elmo videos (she's OBSESSED with Elmo. Fortunately we have developed fairly successful parental thick skin. You have to, the music to things like this, heard for the nth time, would seriously destabilize you otherwise.)

And we've just watched The Wizard of Oz with Connor. It was a big moment for us all. Previously he had been too scared of the witch. Now he's absolutely thrilled with the whole film, and Tad and I have a chance to appraise it again.

We're having a tough time with Verio, our web host, over something that ought to be inconsequential. They have wrongly charged us a fee for support that was previously cancelled. Every month for three months we have pointed this out, when the bill comes in. We've emailed and written and Matt Dusek has spoken twice to various people about the matter. Nothing's been resolved, and now they've sent us a letter threatening to suspend our service. Read: take Shadowmarch down.

This has gone way beyond anything reasonable, and since actually being reasonable has gotten us nowhere, I have now become highly unreasonable. I aggressively complain to several people at several levels inside the company. I do this every day for several days. I aim to be the first thing they see each time they open their mail boxes. I am aggressive, pushy and I WON'T GO AWAY.

Actually one of the best business tactics in the world is what I call "The Charm Attack." I would be, in my previous incarnation, exceptionally nice to people who were in my way. The whole point was to get from them what I needed. Also, I would sometimes "Charm Attack" enemies just because it would confuse 'em, and it's good to keep your enemies off-balance.

However, at this stage of things with Verio, since this is highly corporate with minimal personal contact, there's nothing for it but to make such a nuisance of myself that they'll do anything to make me go away.
8.31.01: Last-minute work in the garden, before we go away. Whilst tieing up the new tomatoes growth, a Stellar's jay dive-bombs the air above my head, making me jump. These birds are wild and a bit scary. They are quite lovely: big, iridescently blue, and they have a sooty crest of feathers on their heads. And they are also very clever. But their omnivorous, alien smarts make me think of the Hitchcock film, The Birds — not the best recommendation for the species, ha.

Last year there was an incident involving one of these jays. One morning I heard a cacophony of bird shrieks. I looked out of a window and saw a blackbird, obviously distressed, some yards away from an enraged and threatening Stellar's jay. The jay was protecting what it had taken from the blackbird: one of its babies.

I ran outside: the big birds leaped into the air; I gathered up the naked, quivering baby. It was alive. I looked up at the jay again. It was watching me from a nearby branch. As I made eye contact, it screamed at me and shat profusely into the air.

I called the Humane Society. Just as they finished giving me directions, so I could take the chick in and maybe they could raise it, it began to die. It was obvious. I watched. I thought, This must be what they call the death struggle. It took a minute or two. Finally it was over. A stillness followed. Then a clear fluid slowly pooled out from its beak.

Unsurprisingly, I then found myself dreadfully upset. I had been unable to save the chick. Had I made matters worse by denying the jay its meal? Had I blundered in like a clueless human and rendered the entire thing pointless, when it in fact had meaning?

One thing being a grown-up means, is you think a whole lot more about death.

This morning, the jay's watching me again. I emphatically turn back to my tomatoes. My dreamy garden, filled with life, spotted with death.
9.1.01: Tad has taped a wine rack to the top of his G4 cube to stop that wretched cat, Jupiter, switching Tad's computer on and off all the time. It looks like the cube has sprouted a set of strangely formed antlers. Still, it works. There's nothing like a low-tech solution to actually fix things, if you ask me.
9.3.01: My friend Teresa calls and says, "I know this way cool place, you'll love it, I know you'll totally get it. Grab the kids and let's go for a walk."

Teresa and I are very close. It's sisterly, we both need each other. Our friendship has produced a few moments of chagrin in poor Tad on account of, Teresa was his friend, from way back, and when we moved back to California after our years in London, I nabbed his friend. Not that they aren't dear buddies yet, it's just, the balance is different.

I've told Teresa that if she should die before me, I'm going to get up and give an address at her memorial service unlike any she can imagine. I will stand up in front of all those people and say: "This is a woman so skilled at life she actually taught me to hawk phlegm. That's right: before Teresa came into my life I was entirely unable to do this. But then I had pneumonia and was horribly sick. And my lungs rattled and I couldn't breathe and Teresa came to see me and said, Girlfriend, you are just doing yourself no favors. Now go like this. And miracle of miracles, once she explained, and showed how, I actually managed it. Now I can gob up with the best of 'em!"

Teresa and I find the idea of this hugely funny.

Anyway, one thing we do is go walk in the Baylands. There's a preserve there which includes a number of trails through the marshy wilds, a nature center which my kids love, a duck pond which Connor especially loves, and on the edge of things, the Palo Alto airport, where all the Silicon Valley execs park the toys that they take out for a spin on the weekends. It's so beautiful down there. The sky is filled with birds. The estuaries are filled with birds and light. We try to identify the different kinds of waders pick-picking their way through the mud. I tell Teresa that I consider this one of the most beautiful places in the world. I always add, "And I should know because I've been to a lot of the world." Which is a touch arrogant perhaps, although I have done a fair bit of traveling.

Anyway. The really cool place is a salt pond Teresa's discovered there. I leave Tad working at the house (he needs to have the quiet alone time, but he's unhappy not to be with us — it's always a conflict for him.) We meet up, I unload the kids, we all set off. The weather is perfect. We walk into parts of the Baylands that I don't know, and the children play as they go. Devon as usual gets filthy fast. She's wearing her "Devonator" shades, which turn her into something like a Schwarzenegger mini-me with curls, and perfectly express a certain side of her personality. (Tad always finds a little kid wearing shades and a pacifier, unspeakably funny.) The colors of the Baylands dazzle me — sage, umbre, ochre, rust red. Connor plucks at the salty hard-scrabble plants along the path. In the distance are the huge hangers of Moffet Field, an airbase. The hangers give this place the look of a sci fi artwork. There is a march of electrical pylons too, which adds eerily to the place, even as they spoil the view. Here, we're at the bottom of the San Francisco bay, and the East Bay mountains rise up to meet the sky.

I see black-necked stilt. Great egret. American white pelican. It's a long walk for the children — a mile, maybe more. When we reach the salt pond, it's like a crater in the ground. We work our way down cautiously. I've put Devon in her stroller and she doesn't like it. Connor stays at the top and begins shouting at me. He says, I don't like it here, Mom, I want to go, I don't like it here.

Everything's so quiet. We're a long way from anywhere. The water of the salt pond is red. It's like looking into ruby glass. Ruby-red poison. It's freaky beautiful and the only words that spring to my mind are:

Eco death.

The water has shriveled back, and the shore of the pond is like a sugar shell. It's the palest brown. In the salt crust on the shore I see hexagonals, barnacle shapes, mineral flowers. Connor is still yelling at me. Devon is really wailing loudly now. I turn to her, I fuss her. Furious fat tears well in her eyes. I try to give her some Infant Tylenol, thinking it's teething pain. She shrieks and wrenches her face away, and red Tylenol runs down her cheek.

Behind me, Teresa screams. I whip round. Teresa yells OMIGOD! and laughs out loud. Then she really screams.

She's up to her ass in thick black Bayland ooze. The crust gave way beneath her.

I'm suddenly scared that the ooze is the sucking kind. I don't know anything about quicksand. I am in front of her, testing the ground with my heels. I reach and take her under her arms. I brace myself.

Into my head from far away floats a memory, a voice read or heard, someone who once went out on a boat with Marilyn Monroe, and she slipped into the sea for a swim and got into trouble. The voice describes the struggle to get Marilyn back in the boat. She was not, the voice carefully says, Nor was she ever, a small girl ...

Teresa is not a small girl. How much does she weigh? Can I do this?

Suddenly Teresa gives a great heave and pulls herself out. We shriek with laughter and relief. I make the mistake of stepping forward to look at the place she fell into.

I go in up to my calf, left leg.

We grab Devon's stroller and run from the place. Connor is angry with us — really angry. He's telling us what we did was dangerous. He's shouting at Mommy and Teresa because what they did was stupid and besides he hates this place.

We make our way back. Connor is talking about The Lion King and the Pridelands and how that place is like the Pridelands after the hyenas came. When we're closer to the car he adds, "It was a place where aliens live. I thought there had to be aliens in the pond." Devon falls asleep. It's really hot now. Teresa and I are high all the way back. We laugh and laugh. Connor gets angry all over again when he hears us laugh. Passers-by see the black mud all the way up Teresa's legs — hell, they probably smell us coming. Some roll their eyes, some laugh. Teresa calls out to them, "Hey, don't go to the salt pond."

I say to Teresa, "I have the best times with you."

"You stink like a duck," she replies.

"You stink like a duck," I reply. "No — a ducks's ass. You stink like the buttholes of every duck in this place."

On the way home (Teresa has peeled off her pants and and is sitting on newspaper) we stop for a jolt of big coffee and I buy Connor chocolate cherries. He's happy with that and pleased to have proved he knows more than the grown-ups. Later he tells me he didn't like the long walk, that was all.

"Honey," I say, "we had cell phones. We were OK."

He looks at me and his wise child's eyes say, Maybe.
9.4.01: Our neighbor calls to complain about our internet uplink satellite dish. Hey says, "This is a rural area, you know. We don't like the fact we have to see it from our driveway and I want you to take it down."

It still isn't working, of course.
9.5.01: Today we leave for our trip to L.A., and Disneyland. I spray a bottle of wildlife repellant over the garden, to protect things when we're gone. The repellant is basically big cat or big animal piss. The raccoons and deer will mistake it for the presence of a coyote or a bobcat. I've been using it all summer. Our local gardening center swears by.

"Pooooh!" says Connor, coming out of the house. "Stinks like a skunk!"

I find the mantis again whilst I'm spraying, and hooray! She's absolutely huge, and a mature jade green now. Everyone blows kisses at the big bug, then we leave.

It's me, Tad, nanny Dena and the kids, in a hired mini-van. As we're driving down to the Pacheco Pass, I begin to get very anxious. My precious birdies, our beloved family nanny and my dearest husband all in one van — the fear of an accident seizes me (I don't have too many waking nightmares about myself, but I'm certainly in the grip of one about my beloveds) and there comes a point where I have to breathe deeply for fifteen minutes or so. I comfort myself by thinking how driving has improved in the Valley. A year or two back, the arrogance was pervasive. I've got 100k stock options, out of my ****ing way. You could encounter examples of really blatant aggression pretty much every day.

But it's gone. One small good to come out of the economic crash is that it's humbled people on the roads. Now I have much less reason to worry about idiot drivers.

Suddenly Dena calls out —

"Hey! Did you see that woman in the lane to our right?"

"No," I say.

"Driving an SUV," says Dena. "And reading a book."
9.7.01: We're having a great time. The kids are vibrating with excitement. At dinner for two nights I had cocktails like a grown-up. In the morning there is actually time to dress and put on make-up. I even spent half an hour in a bookshop today.

The first day is sheer delight. I will never forget my children's faces as they watch the 7 p.m. Parade of Disney Stars, down Main Street.

We go on more rides than I can count — there are so few lines. Everyone is thrilled by the Pirates of the Caribbean. Connor, scared of all things supernatural, declares the Haunted House to be his favorite.

A bit tired, late in the afternoon, I find myself on a ride, in the "Fantasyland" section of the park, called Storybookland. It's a narrated boat ride through fairy-tale settings, all of which are rinky-dink miniatures. You begin by going through the mouth of a miniature Monstro the whale (from Pinnochio). The landscaping is of the bonsai variety. The little boats sit quite low in the water, and sway a bit too. We're on a looping little river, slowing as bit as we pass each miniaturized world. The young woman narrating our journey does so with her voice pitched very high: every so often, for emphasis, her tones swoop all over the place. Everything is screamingly kitsch, including the content of the narration, which strikes me as something Liberace might write for this ride. I wonder if this is one of the older parts of Disneyland. Then:

"Oh!" I say, and jump so much the boat sways again. Dena the nanny, and Connor, and the young woman narrating the journey, all stare at me.

"It's nothing," I mutter, but when I get off I'm scanning the crowds for Tad. He and Devon are somewhere in the Dumbo ride. Given all that we want to do, and the kids' needs, I don't in fact get to ask Tad what I have to ask him, until later. But the conversation is as follows:

"What was it you told me," I say, "about the origin of Otherland?"

"Oh," Tad replies, "I only realized this a little while ago. It's Storybookland — that ride on the river — going past all those little worlds."

"Otherland comes from that?" I say, hugely amused.

"I was really little at the time," he replies.

He doesn't understand what I'm getting at. I'm impressed at how small and sweet the origins of Otherland are — and yes, I'm amused at the touch of cheesiness here — but the thing is, how fascinating it is, that these things come back to us from our earliest years — shape us like this. It's the same for me with an East German children's show called The Singing, Ringing Tree. When I finally obtained a copy of this, sometime last year and after years and years of being haunted by it, I was astonished to see that the tale had foreshadowed a lot in my life.

"It made a big impression on me," Tad is saying.

"I understand. I love Storybookland," I tell him. "Next time we go to Disneyland, it's the first place I want to go."
9.8.01: We've been hanging out with some friends of ours — Josh Stallings and his family. We made an independent film in the 90s with Josh, called "Kind Of Cute For A White Boy." He and Tad wrote it, and Josh directed. It did the rounds of independent film festivals and picked up a few awards. It was a great experience, a real time-of-one's-life experience. Now, when we go see Josh — he's a film editor — we pick up on the gossip relating to various people we know working and living in L.A., and chew over potential future projects.

We've also seen some friends of ours — Erin Augenstine and her family — in Pasadena, and have been discussing ideas for other projects plus also the progress of a children's manuscript that she and Tad have been developing for a while (the title is "Diary Of A Dragon.") So the business side of the trip is dealt with.
9.9.01: We drive home. It's a long drive. I'd rather fly but Tad hates — HATES — to fly. The children are mostly very well-behaved, bless 'em. We buy a dream-catcher for Connor at a gas station in the Pacheco Pass. He emerges from the place beaming, the dream catcher clutched to his little-boy chest. Tad walks behind, smiling broadly. Connor has wanted a dream-catcher for a while. Now all bad dreams in Connor's room, says Connor, will be let go. Only good dreams will stick.

"No more bad dreams," we say, climbing into the van. "No more bad dreams coming our way."

Driving the 5 up from L.A. is tedious and wearying, but the Pacheco Pass is gorgeous — big California landscapes. I grow dreamy and hypnotized. Finally we get onto the 101 and I feel the Peninsula beginning to close around me, and sense the Valley up ahead. Another 45 minutes or so and we're home.

"What are all those branches?" says Dena, as she's lifting Devon from the van. I leave Connor to Tad, and walk to the side of our driveway. There are tomatoes all over the place — split, squashed, ruined. The vines have been torn up too. With a growing ache in my heart I open the gate. On the other side, the roma tomatoes plant has been three-quarters destroyed. Tomatoes are ripped off and strewn everywhere. When I turn to my roses I see they have all been eaten. Not a flower, not a bud left. Everywhere I turn I see destruction. The grass is churned up. The lawn is painfully gouged. I bend down and see hoof marks.

Whilst we've been away, the deer have paid us a little visit.