SHADOWMARCH | Shadowmarching On

Backstage

Shadowmarching On: Doing the 5-7-5 Step

Deborah Beale continues to share all those moments that make Shadowmarch and our therapy bills what they are today. Hey, look, there's my name. Look Mom, I'm on the web!

7.7.01: The Shadowmarch team is experiencing a number of frustrations. Right now the specific difficulty is that Matt Dusek has too much work. I think of Matt as our site wizard, because he makes all that techno-magic happen — he's our architect and our programmer. But he's got so much on his plate that all our work is bottle-necked.

With Shadowmarch, everyone's roles overlap. For example, we drew heavily on Josh Milligan's corporate experience when devising the site's structure, so he's largely responsible for the conceptual architecture. And Matt wants to work more on content and marketing, though Lord knows when he'll get a chance to do so.

Even though Matt is our primary programmer, Josh could still take some of the more technical end of the workload. However, Josh himself is enduring the shove 'n' pull, inside the company he works for, that comes with a big wave of layoffs. Josh is still standing, but his workload is hell.

I have a dull feeling that this month might be tough for all of us.
7.8.01: Tad is working hard to piece together everything needed for us to have a satellite Internet uplink. Naturally it's proving more complex than we thought. Here in the mountains, satellite is our only hope. But when the guy from the satellite company comes to install the dish and whatall else equipment Tad had to buy, he takes about thirty seconds to tell Tad that it isn't going to work.

I'm at my desk and dimly aware of a flurry of goings-out and comings-in. When I look up, the screen door is open and through the trees, at the top of the hill, Tad and the guy are just visible. The discussion looks fairly intense.

The satellite-company guy comes back down, bids me a cheery goodbye, and leaves.

I say, "What's going on?"

"If we put the dish on the roof," says Tad, coming in through the screen door, "we won't get a signal. It's because of all these giant trees. But I refused to accept this. I took the guy up the hill and asked him, 'What about putting it here, then? Or here?' And he agreed that one spot might work."

"So why's he gone away again?"

"Because," says Tad, "we have to get a steel pole erected up there first, one that's sturdy and secure enough to bear the dish. Don't worry — I took all the measurements off him that I could think of."

"My worry," I say, "is finding someone to do it."

Tad smiles. "I bet it'll only take us a few weeks before this whole business is finished. You wait and see."

"I love your optimism," I say, because I do.
7.9.01: Today I climb the hill to check out where this satellite pole is to go. It's the first time I've been up there since the clearance work was done, and I discover that some of the heavy fallen branches that were supposed to be hauled off our landslide, thrown into the (expensively hired) dump truck, and disposed of, have instead been rolled onto the top of our hill, and left there. I feel stupid. Why didn't I think to check this before I paid the guy I hired?

I am beginning to understand how gritty it can be, working with the land here. You think if you approach things with a good will and an open mind, they will be straightforward. Looking at the mess, this notion suddenly seems foolish and naive. I try to soothe myself by thinking how this is all just a learning curve—

Standing in the forest light, a memory comes to me. Tad and I have a friend who is a classical musician — specifically, a cellist. Her name is Eleanor. Eleanor rides horses — she took me riding earlier this year (something I did a lot as a child), and separately she also took another friend riding, a man who is a superstar in the world of classical music, although exactly what for now escapes me. Anyway, Eleanor told me how he bumped around on his horse like an ill-stuffed scarecrow; then said to her, through clenched teeth, "I hate being bad at something."

Looking at the mess, I laugh. "I hate being bad at something," I repeat. "I hate being bad at something. I hate—"

There's no poison oak.

It hits me in a rush. All that poison oak I sprayed like a vengeful harpy, late in the spring when we were setting up Shadowmarch? It's gone. Just a few brown tatters remain where once there were profuse leaves and vines.

So that makes me feel better. She who shall be named Death-To-Poison-Oak climbs back down the hill, pretty jaunty.
7.11.01: Christophe the physicist told me at our dinner party last month that there would be some big announcements soon from the frontiers of contemporary physics. And now they're here.

In the San Jose Mercury News there is this: NEW ANALYSIS CASTING DOUBT ON ELUSIVE PARTICLE. What seemed to be a breakthrough last year at CERN in Switzerland, that the Higgs Boson was close to being discovered ("a particle believed to be the source of mass and weight in the universe") may now turn out to be a "statistical mirage ... The mathematical equivalent of seeing mythical beasts in a grainy photograph."

(Ooh, I love the science writing in both our local paper, and the New York Times, which has syndicated this piece. It's frequently just very good writing — what a pleasure. I settle down to the article with glee.)

I read how researchers at CERN thought they might have found traces of the Higgs Boson, just as their equipment was to be demolished (to make way for a new installation that will take a few years to complete). Under fire, the director general had decided the evidence was not convincing enough to justify a delay. Now a new analysis of the data has shown that what was spotted, might just be "random superpositions of ordinary particles."

Random superpositions! This stuff is fab!

And oh, the power struggle behind this. Maiani, the director general, has been very gracious — he's said that the chances the particle had been seen have not disappeared — the data is "still tantalizing." Mind you, Chris Tully, "a physics professor at Princeton," has come into the fray with this comment: "For the laboratory, Maiani made the best decision."

It's just like a Greg Bear novel.

Anyway, at our dinner party a few weeks ago, Christophe the physicist applied a touch of insider's scorn to the idea of the Higgs Boson particle, and now I know why.

Christophe worked at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator, as part of an international team (he's finished there, however, and has just gone back to France.) I should say that SLAC isn't far from where we live. When I drive down into the valley, there it is, a sort of off-white rectangular snake running through the Stanford hills. I find it quietly thrilling that we are close to a particle accelerator. Soon my son will be old enough for me to tell him a few basics about this. He's already in love with Stanford's big radio telescope, which is involved with the SETI project — the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence — and is another prominently visible structure on the Stanford hills.

What Christophe was most excited about was a forthcoming announcement from his own sphere of things — matter, anti-matter — and now that's here, too.

"Tiny Discovery May Answer Question About Big Bang," says the New York Times. According to the piece, the team at SLAC have found new evidence of a crucial lopsidedness in the universe.

If the Big Bang had created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, then each side would have "annihilated each other and left nothing but light." Therefore the thinking is, matter predominates over anti-matter (basically because we're here and we're matter). Evidence for this was found once before, in the 60s, but since then, nothing, despite repeated research efforts.

The team that Christophe was working for have been observing particles called B-mesons, and their anti-matter counterparts which are called, unsurprisingly enough, anti-B mesons. And what they have discovered and recorded is that the two decay at different rates. It is therefore evidence for there being more of one type — matter — than the other type — anti-matter.

The feature tantalizingly concludes with the notion that these results, whilst being very satisfying in themselves, and long sought, are nevertheless not enough to explain all the matter that is seen in the universe. But it's a start.

I put down the newspaper. I hear everywhere how this is a golden age for cosmology, and as a humble amateur observer I can only concur. Science-fiction nerd that I am, this stuff makes me glad to be alive.
7.12.01: I am beginning to have quite some trouble finding someone to erect on our hill that steel pole that's needed to bear our little satellite dish. Nobody calls us back about the job. I sort of believe, given general economic conditions, that there has to be slow-down in work coming for carpenters and builders and all manner of contractors. But it isn't happening right now, just when I need it, dammit! (Petulant, moi?)

The Shadowmarch team is finishing the detail work needed on our payment solution. It's tough going — we can't seem to get to the bottom, quite, of all we need to know about how this actually works. The mechanisms of the web, it seems to me, can be curiously opaque ... We're left looking at each other, saying things like, Are we just know-nothings? Is this stressing us because the whole damn thing's a learning curve? Or is there something more going on here, and are we in for some nasty surprises?

I guess there comes a point where you just have to get up and do it. God, I sound like an advertising slogan.

In the evening there is an accident. I hear a crash from the hallway, then Tad, distressed, begins calling to our little cat, who appears to have crawled off under a table. A few moments later, Tad comes into the bedroom — I'm sitting up in bed, reading a chunk of his new novel, War of the Flowers — with Jupiter, the still-a-kitten cat, in his arms.

"Stupid animal," says Tad, but he's pretty upset. He lays Jupiter on my stomach. I say, "What happened?" and begin gently running my hands over Jupiter's body.

"He was doing that galloping-around business," says Tad. (Jupiter often makes me think of a Stevie Smith poem, about a cat who was forever "galloping around doing good".)

"In the dark," Tad continues. "And he just bowled into my shins with such force that he knocked me backwards. I think I may have trodden on him as my foot came back down."

"Leave him with me," I say. "Seriously — go back to work."

"I think he's OK," says Tad anxiously. Tad is so loving towards all the little creatures in the house — I know he's already done what I'm doing now, that is, run hands all over the little creature.

I look into Jupiter's face. He's in shock — his pupils are dilated.

"There's no swelling," I say, "or heat, so there are unlikely to be any broken bones." Then I do persuade Tad to go back to work; and I settle back to observe Jupiter as I do the mother thing (it's magic).

After twenty minutes he comes out of cat shock and into a state of instinctual wildness. He wants to get off the bed: his tail thrashes; his fur rises as my fingers stroke. Then, one way or another, he tells me that he's angry and that his front right leg hurts.

I cuddle him to sleep and keep him close all night.
7.13.01: Jupiter is hopping around on three legs — he won't put any weight at all on the fourth, that front-right leg. It's heartbreaking to see. He's miserable and depressed, too.

Once more unto the vet. Expensively, of course. Jupiter is x-rayed and checked for this and that. Good news: there is indeed no fracture. (Our vet also points out that it's good news because a fracture may have meant very expensive surgery.) He does however have a considerable soft-tissue injury and it could be weeks before he's using all four legs again.

Back home to tell Tad the news. We watching Jupiter trying to jump and romp around the bedroom. Pathetically he flops onto the carpet, then crawls under the bed.

Over dinner our son, Connor, makes an announcement. He says: "Boa constrictors are very nice snakes. They like to cuddle you."

Tad snorts his nachos. Connor looks at him like a kid suffering a seriously weird dad.

Of late Connor has — beyond his four-year-old observations of the world, which are surrealistic to say the least — been wrestling with the idea of jokes, and what actually makes a joke. He doesn't understand how a joke works at all. Samples of all of the above, observations plus jokes, from the past week alone, include the following:
"Oh, I think today is my hiccup day." (Announced from the back of the car, on the way to his favorite restaurant. No, he didn't have hiccups.)

"I get it. Two cup cakes and a hot dog makes ‘divided by'." (On looking at math symbols.)

"I have a problem with my breath. It starts in my head and goes to my airplanes, then down to my toes. But it isn't working well today. See. My airplanes aren't well." (Actually an elaborate ploy to get out of staying overnight at his grandparents' house.)

Then, yesterday:

"Knock knock. How do you climb a mountain with one leg?"

I was driving him and his younger sister out to a playdate with friends. "Knock knock," I reply (sometimes he gets a touch obsessive-compulsive if things don't follow exactly the form he decrees.) "I don't know. How do you climb a mountain with one leg?"

"A building," he cries, "with no tower!" Then he cracks up.

I'm eyeing him and his little sister in the rear-view mirror. Devon looks at her big brother with round-eyed adoration. It occurs to me, given 1) the toddler's drive to imitate, 2) the recent upswing in Devon's language acquisition, that we may soon enough have two of 'em in the house — pre-K maniacs, I mean.
7.14.01: My dear friend Melanie Rawn — the writer, her books are big fat gorgeous fantasy sagas, and she is my kids' "Auntie Melanie" — has sent me some web haiku.

From: Melanie Rawn
Date: Fri, 6 July 2001 03:26:51 EDT
Subject: Fwd: Haiku
To: Deborah Beale

In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft "error messages" with Haiku poetry messages. Haiku poetry has strict construction rules.... Haiku are used to communicate a timeless message often achieving a wistful yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity.
I'm not the best person for Internet-circulated jokes and the like — I am ashamed to confess that sometimes my sense of humor fails me when I am working hard. However, these haiku really amuse me. I find myself especially fond of this:
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
Also, this is cute:
Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
It occurs to me that I'm identifying too much with these haiku. One way or another, I'm finding this a really frustrating time. I don't seem to be moving ahead with anything very much. I can't quite figure out why I should feel like this.

But there's something I can't put my finger on. I sort of look inside and understand that this feeling isn't about Shadowmarch, much as I enjoy whinging about the hurdles we have to leap. It's to do with all the land-management stuff.

There is something I need to figure out.
7.16.01: On with the nitty-gritty of the site. There's an email to Josh Milligan, Matt Dusek and myself, from Tad, thrashing out things like how crucial it is to us that people give us their email addresses as part of the subscription process. It's next to impossible to make a subscription process available for people, without needing them to leave email addresses. Tad says
I'm trying to respect people's privacy, but since we're not going to sell this information, we can't stress privacy to the point of making it really difficult on ourselves.
It intrigues me how this business — creating a commercial web site — involves us with all these big issues of the information age, howsoever we think ourselves a little mom-n-pop business.
On another subject, and this is mostly for Matt, I'm beginning to suspect that our "hits" data is being further skewed by a lot of people having some kind of cookie-rejecting routine on their work or school computers. (I don't know much about this stuff, so I'm arguing more from layman's logic than any knowledge about the subject.) One reason I think this is because just after the new episode's gone up, we've actually had a bigger jump in the following 36 hours on the "unique" hits numbers than on the "return" hits.
It's tough to make much sense, actually, of the numbers we get. They're cheeringly high — but what do they mean? I notice, for example, in some of the trade journalism I read from the publishing industry, that people count all their page hits as individual readers. Or they add everything together — unique and repeat hits, say — then call that final figure, the number of readers on their site. I wonder if the only way to compare things is to scramble all our numbers together too, then see how they look.

Very unscientific, however. Mind you, this is ever the way of the publishing industry. And marketing and publicity in general — the spin's the thing.

Today the life of the enterprise, and the household, chugs on. Matt Dusek is working his butt off, coding for the integration of the payment solution. Jupiter the cat is almost back to his old self. Although determinedly making use of only three legs — the injured one is held out in front of him, like something precious to which he wishes to draw your attention — he can still get into fearsome trouble. In the middle of the night — of course — he forces open some drawers in the kitchen, jumps into one and shreds 'n' spreads the paper bags he finds there, works his way to the back of the same drawer to force it out even further, then gets jammed good and solid. Wailing with masterful atonality about his misfortune, he naturally wakes up our light-sleeping daughter. Three a.m. It's another hour before Tad has everything calmed down again. (I dig myself under the duvet, ignoring everything.)

Then Tad comes to bed. Actually, this is his normal hour, although he doesn't usually lose quite so much time to vandal cats and upset toddlers. It has to be admitted that unconventional hours are one of the perks of a writer's life. I kiss him my best beloved. He looks exhausted. I feel guilty. But Tad's thoughts are elsewhere. He says, "Deb, I've just remembered something."

"What?"

"It's a month to the World Science Fiction convention, isn't it?"

I begin to reply, then understand his train of thought.

He says, "We have to market Shadowmarch there."

"Fridge magnets?" I say.

"You took the words out of my mouth," is his reply.
7.17.01: I think I should actually say, here in this diary, that even though we work very hard, Tad and I don't spend all of our time talking about things like, how to market Shadowmarch. It's just that round here, business is closely woven into the threads of everyday life.

Josh Milligan is all over the fridge magnets. Specifically, he's figuring out who can manufacture them for us, and at what cost, and he's coordinating the whole thing so that we have them in our hands very quickly. They will then be shipped to the World Science Fiction convention in Baltimore, the better, we hope, to promote Shadowmarch.

Jay Sheckley and Jack Rems, who own that dream bookstore, Dark Carnival, in Berkeley, used to produce fridge magnets to promote signing sessions at the store. We loved the magnets they made for the various Otherland volumes. Also we were pretty impressed by how quickly they were begged, borrowed, or stolen from our fridge. Obviously this experience told us that people really love fridge magnets (duh). But beyond that — what a cheap and cheerful marketing tool. And what hangs round longer than a fridge magnet? Some of the magnets in our own collection are currently adorning their third fridge, having been with us since we lived in London in the early-mid 90s.

We're going to use the Iain McCaig artwork for the Shadowmarch castle. Plus, we'll order more magnets than only for use at WorldCon, because there is lots more we can do with them besides.
7.18.01: Much excitement in the house as Tad and Connor return from picking up dinner. A big khaki-green-ish mantis has flown in through the door behind them, and is now showing off, high up on a wall. Our kids look up at it, thrilled. Devon's clapping her chubby little hands and doing her monkey dance. Connor's yelling, "Look, Mommy, look, Mommy!" and dragging on my shirt, even as I'm tripping on the cats, who naturally seize the moment to investigate possible escape (Jupiter), or theft of incoming food (Pandora, our fat Abyssinian).

The mantis is very welcome. What a splendid creature it is, examining us from on high. We speculate how many might have survived out there in our garden (we hung a number of egg cases in the rose bushes this spring, and two out of three hatched). Then we open the door and gently waft the mantis out — Pandora, beneath it, has begun that death-to-all-birds-squirrels-and-bugs kitty chatter.

"Bye, bye, bug," says Devon, opening and closing her fingers. She's too desperately cute for words.
7.19.01: Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.
The Code Red worm has attacked our site.
Welcome to http://www.worm.com!
Hacked by Chinese!
That's what it says. I ask Tad, "Is this a political act?"

He shrugs. "Does it make any difference?"

I say, "Not much, I suppose, when it happens to you. Whatever the cause I'd still like to wring their—"

"Not in front of the cats," says Tad.

"O site, thou art sick," I say, "The invisible worm, That flies in the night, In the howling storm—"

Matt Dusek is having a terrible day. He left work to go home and patch the hole in the software, and get the site up again. But when he got there, for obscure but wonderfully ill-timed maintenance reasons, the telephone lines were dead. So he turned round and went back to work again. On the way, he called Tad from his cell phone and as he did so his car broke down.

The site therefore has gone down for quite some time. I'm worried about the stress on Matt D. For years I had nightmares, always inventively different, about chains of events just like the one Matt has experienced today in real life. In the nightmares I was desperate to get somewhere, and everything in the universe was stopping me. If I were Matt, right now, I'd be unraveling big-time.

Tad had some big problems yesterday with the installation of a new application, problems which took all of yesterday. And now there's this. Yet even as I watch he becomes weirdly cheerful. It's the joviality of the condemned. I allow myself to be infected with it.
7.21.01: Mime-Version: 1.0
To: Josh Milligan
From: Tad Williams
Subject: Fwd: Possible advertising for Shadowmarch on Sluggy Freelance
Cc: deborah, matt

Josh, could you get this guy something? We really should take advantage of this kind offer.

Mucho thanks,

Tad

To: tad@shadowmarch.com
From: Tom Ricket
Subject: Possible advertising for Shadowmarch on Sluggy Freelance

Hiya, Tad (or, if you've pawned the task of reading this account off on someone else, Hiya, Tad's Flunky!) ;-)

Just thought I'd write with a quick note to see if you'd like us (Sluggy Freelance) to give you any banner ad space..

Okay, that was probably too abrupt and not too informative .. so, some background:

I work for the online comic strip Sluggy Freelance (http://sluggy.com). We're fairly large (about 6 million page views per month). Sluggy readers vary, but tend to be people interested in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, as well as interested in computer- or online-related items .. hopefully your target audience! :)

Anyway, we've accumulated some free space in terms of showing ads -- of the six million or so impressions, we sometimes have a few slots free.

So -- I was just reading through Shadowmarch message boards recently when I though, "Hey, why don't I use my powers at Sluggy for evil, and see if Tad would like any free advertising?"

I figured it couldn't hurt the Shadowmarch cause :)
Wow — this is pretty cheering. Free ads. Josh Milligan is immediately on it — he's talking to my new hero Tom Rickets, and creating some banner ads for us to view in the next few days. Wonder what this will do to the numbers...? Interesting to find out.

I'm emailing back and forth with one of the organizers of the upcoming World Science Fiction Convention, about how best to use our fridge magnets. He's good and fast in answering my queries, which is cheering. So that's rolling along nicely.
7.23.01: Josh has emailed some initial banner ads to us, and they're beautiful. Damn, but Matt Rhodes' artwork is amazing! Very satisfying it is, too, how something commissioned for one area of things, translates impactfully to another.

We have, however, been experiencing frustrations with getting a pole erected at the top of the hill, to bear the small satellite that will hopefully provide our internet uplink. Tad has been trying to book someone for the job, who insists on coming very early in the morning, which is hard on Tad because of how he habitually works into the small hours. We persuaded the guy that eight a.m. was the earliest time we could handle, given Tad's hours and the demands of two small children. Anyway, the first time he was due to show, he didn't. The second time was today. He left a phone message complaining that he had already been out to us and had to go back home on account of the address Tad gave him didn't appear to exist. This phone message came in at 6.45. a.m., which means that (a) if he hadn't got lost he would have arrived at our place at 6 a.m., (b) we didn't pick it up because we were asleep, (c) we did however receive the full benefit of this message because we were not asleep afterwards, and especially, our children were not asleep.

This man left another two messages in the day, but we've decided not to follow up.

In the afternoon, frustrated by this and by the failure of anybody I call about the land-management work I'm trying to get done, to call me back, I pick up the yellow pages and stay at it until I get an actual contractor on the other end of the line. His ad in the yellow pages makes a feature of his expertise with landslides. He's nice on the phone and comes round to see me immediately. He goes up the hill with me to survey the work needed, makes a proposal for the drainage system we need, and says he can do the job, no problem.

After that, we sit at our dining room table and I try to get fuller details on the job of work he's proposing. Instead, for an hour and a half, he gossips about people whom he sees as the great and the good, or with many sideways glances and knowing laughs, not so good, of our area. (All this translates to people with money and how badly they have managed their land. And all of the tales come back to how people with influence think highly of him.) It doesn't occur to him at all that either myself, or Tad when he appears from the office, might have work to do. He also has pretty bad breath.

I begin to think of him as the Village Gossip. And I'm finding it really pretty difficult to lever a word into these long-winded monologues. However, when he does finally cough up more detail about the job in hand — which is more or less when Tad appears — it seems that he understands what's needed. And he is the only person in goddamn weeks who has actually estimated the work for me. Other than landscape clearance, none of the contacts provided by our neighbor who is a builder came through, and one, when I persisted, told me with some heat pretty much to go away.

I'm desperate.

The Village Gossip says he'll have a written proposal ready in a day or two.

I say yes, please, and we'll take it from there.
7.25.01: Wow — we're hitting 'em out of the park today.

Someone I called came by quickly and cemented-in the satellite. Not too expensive, and a job ticked off the list. Now we've got to call the satellite-installation people again and get 'em to come out again and put the thing up.

Plus, the Village Gossip got his written proposal to me today, like he promised. It's short and to the point, but he says he'll write a fuller description of the job next week. He can start in five days. Tad and I, relieved, sign the proposal, which effectively makes it a contract.

All of this makes up for two fairly rotten days. Two days ago was another childcare disaster day, with the nanny out with a migraine. This had all sorts of repercussions for our household, because it came at a time when our assistant is going through some stresses in her own life, and has been in to work only erratically. So there was a backwash of stress.

(Plus, on a day when we really needed the VCR to subdue our children and PLEASE! PLEASE! give us just a little time for the totally urgent stuff, the machine died, and did so with inarguable finality. Still, we had fun, all four of us, going to Target and hunting down a new one. I was a touch alarmed to see that they seem to be on their way out. There's been a sudden market surge towards DVDs.)

Then, yesterday, Tad was sick — upset stomach — he looked pretty gray by mid-morning, and went back to bed, which is very unusual. He forced himself up in the afternoon, however, and wrote eleven pages because, as he put it, he'd better get something done before he gets really goddamn sick.

That's mah man!
7.26.01: Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
This week, chez Williams & Beale, it's been like jumping stones across a fast-moving stream. Leap — land — we made it! Leap — land — oh-oh, pond slime ...

The Sluggy ads have gone up, and there's been a big jump in site numbers.

(We made it!)

The phone lines into our office are dead. Plus there's some problem at our ISP anyway, and the upshot is, we observe the numbers then cannot get back on line to check anything out.

(On your ass in six inches of water, woman.)

Then comes the following.

Since he can't get online, Tad installs an e-sketch pad and its software — he's planning to create some of the site's art (he was a commercial artist for quite a few years in the eighties). One way or another this causes a major meltdown, which results in Tad spending the rest of the day taking his hard disk in for rescue service, plus reinstalling an old computer so he can work for the next week or so.

He blames himself. He says he overloaded things. (Actually this, in microcosm, probably says a lot about the Williams & Beale lifestyle.) He says, Thank God I did that extra work yesterday, since I lost all of today.

But he also says something that intrigues me, and sticks with me. Which is:

In 1915, when cars were new, you could at least get under the hood of the motor vehicle and figure something out. But with computers, no way can the average man or woman who has access to them, get under the hood and figure something out.

I have been thinking for a while about how, when I was a kid in the 70s and you heard about the brave new computer era that was coming, the idea was that work would become obsolete. (In the UK the labor unions equated this with, workers would become obsolete, and unsurprisingly liked this not at all.)

Whether you saw this as utopian or no, the grand thing was, computers would make our lives simple.

How absolutely ridiculous that has turned out to be. I am overwhelmed at every turn by the complexity of things. The sheer work of staying on top of all of this is, well, just really unattractive. Another bloody app to learn? Do I have to? Do I really have to?

I am not alone in this — feelings like this are commonplace with my pals.

And then I have another thought. When you consider how the information revolution really works, it seems clear to me that access to the new technologies is an elite thing — a matter of privilege. The utopian promise of the web is just not going to be realized until it becomes both cheap and — simple.

I laugh at myself. People make a living thinking and writing about things like this. With this realization I'm probably years behind the pros. The thing is, I'm just coming upon this now, through experience, and viscerally.
7.27.01: Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

From: "Matt Bialer"
To: "'Deborah Beale'"
Subject: RE: hello there
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 15:24:01 -0400
MIME-Version: 1.0

Sorry to hear about the technical problems but I guess it with a big techpioneering effort like this there is a certain degree of rolling with the punches, right? And you still have fun doing it....regardless....Sorry to hear Tad is sick....why the Staff catastrophe too?
An email from our agent. I'm whinging too much.
7.28.01: Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
The web is like that.
Our payment solution has been up for a few days, and the message board is full of tales of woe. PayPal's lengthy period for verifying the credit-worthiness of overseas subscribers has taken us all by surprise. Plus, PayPal's systems are hyper-sensitive when it comes to the possibility of fraud. Any irregularity in the financial details means your card or bank account can be rejected forevermore. I discover this personally when our bank makes an error in talking to PayPal about the Shadowmarch account. Result: I have to drag my sorry ass down to the bank and open a new account (and yes, this account being Shadowmarch business rather than a plain checking or savings account, it involves rather more than just filling out forms).

Since the way PayPal operates would effectively mean that overseas subscribers will not benefit from the month-long low-rate subscription offer (because many of them cannot pay in time), we take the instant decision to extend the low-rate subscription offer indefinitely whilst we research other payment solutions.

The experience of all this, up close and personal, leaves the Shadowmarch team defensive — we're doing our best, goddammit! — and a bit dispirited. Tad is particularly upset, which is unusual because he's normally so sanguine. We end up having a fight about something unrelated, and after an hour or so I figure out that it was really about letting off PayPal steam.

To add to all this, there is a big leap in what PayPal is taking as its cut of the Shadowmarch subscriptions. It's an entirely different sum of money to what was stated on their site when we signed up, and it's a nasty surprise. I email PayPal to ask them quite what's going on.
7.29.01: Something positive: Josh Milligan has secured some decent costings for the Shadowmarch fridge magnets, then secured some more that take the price down further. The upshot is that their manufacture is underway, and we should have them in time for the World Science Fiction Convention.

(Leap! We made it!)
8.2.01: There's been a local murder trial running for a few weeks, and it's caused a big stir around here. A man called Kenneth Fitzhugh bludgeoned his wife to death in their kitchen, dragged her body to the bottom of the basement stairs, then persuaded friends to accompany him into the house and "discover" the body. He did this because for many many years his wife, Kristin, had had an affair with the family's best friend, which resulted in the birth of the first son in the Fitzhugh family; and she was about to tell that first son (now graduating from college, and engaged to be married) who his true father is. Kenneth Fitzhugh has just been found guilty of second-degree murder.

It's a horrid drama, and one might almost say, just from the point of view of notoriety, that it's Palo Alto's O J Simpson trial, except that nobody thinks Kenneth Fitzhugh is innocent. (His attorney, after the verdict was handed down, stood on the court steps and said to reporters, "I actually believe Kenneth Fitzhugh is innocent." It was a comic moment, to me. The "actually" was quite de trop.)

The defense argued that this was an exemplary marriage, with two people treating each other with civility and kindness, and that somebody working on the house, a contractor of some kind, had to have done it, and the jury had to put this one down to a mystery.

The DNA evidence was overwhelming, as was evidence like phone records of where Fitzhugh was at the time of the murder, and a pair of Fitzhugh's shoes, the soles covered in his wife's blood, being found in his car. The holes in the defense you could run through the Swiss Alps and call 'em train tunnels to Italy.

The thing is, I'm irritated by how this all got under my skin. I personally found Kenneth Fitzhugh and his amateur acting repellant and scary. But did I look away? And it brought out some unpleasantly small-town behavior in the reactions of the people in Palo Alto, a place, I would like to say, that is dear to my heart. But then I remind myself that you'd get that sort of behavior anywhere, and it would take on its own brand of small-town character (places like London and New York can be just as provincial as anywhere else).

I'm glad it's over. The sun is warm, not too hot, my tomatoes are ripe and heavy, my garden is beautiful, my children play there in the evening, chasing each other, laughing, squabbling over toys. That poor Fitzhugh family — what a tragedy.
8.3.01: From: Deborah Beale
Subject: PayPal correspondence

Dear PayPal

I sent you the following query:

"When I opened my Shadowmarch account in June, I did so on a fee quotation on your site of 30 cents a transaction for transactions less than $15. I now find that I am paying 2.9% plus 30 cents -- you have increased the fees and on your site I have found nothing about this other than 'Please note that all fees are subject to change.'

"I would like to know --

"Is this permanent?

"Have you done this to all your accounts?

"What regulations -- what laws governing businesses such as yours -- allow you to do this?

"What offer can you make me to take the fees I pay you back to, or closer to, what your site quoted when I originally chose you for our e-commerce solution?"

The answer you sent back fails to answer this entirely:

I would be grateful if you would now answer my questions.

Sincerely

Deborah Beale
The email I received from PayPal — I have omitted it from the above solely because it's boring — was a standard piece of flannel explaining the differences between PayPal rates. It had nothing to do with the sudden addition of a percentage for transactions under $15, and was a bit like being addressed by a parrot.

Since the above email, the parrot is silent.
8.4.01: We got to the Obon festival at our local Buddhist temple in Palo Alto. It's a family tradition: we go every year. Obon is the festival of the dead, and arises from the Japanese Buddhist belief that the dead revisit the Earth. At our local temple we crowd into a tent with hundreds of other people with kids, the better to eat sushi, burgers, and corn. I take Connor off and we spend ten minutes hunting for Japanese tchatkas and another ten minutes in the festival's flower shop (today we will bring home some big chrysanthemums — they are white and gloriously shaggy). Then we rejoin Tad and Devon for the festival's climax. This, I believe, is Bon-Odori, which is the Dance of Rejoicing. Traditionally Bon-Odori means folk dances by the light of paper lanterns. The dances comfort the souls of the dead. Our Palo Alto Bon-Odori is a fabulous jazz band, slap in the middle of the central courtyard. A few dozen neigborhood kids, watched by a few dozen more parents, dance round and round the bandstand. Tad and I get down and funky with our pair. Connor devises a dance where he and I circle in opposite directions, and when we meet we FLING our arms in the air, and I have to throw my (long) hair around too. Then we're off again, running. Devon loves to dance, and does so for a long stretch, then mars her relative good behavior by a calculated assault upon the bandstand. A couple of mikestands are sent flying but nobody is hurt. There's a big yellow moon and a breeze to set the lanterns swinging. Tad and I are all out of breath and we meet up, laughing. Then Connor crashes into me and he and I are off again.

Last year Devon was too small to dance, but now she's doing it and she gets it totally. Ooh, we love Obon Festival.
8.7.01: I'm looking for another payment solution for the site. There are a number out there, but there are, of course, no standard ways of doing things, and all in all it's no simple task. I was talking to a sales guy at one company and when I put down the phone I realized I didn't have the answers to any of my questions, despite his being thoughtful and open. So I called him back, apologized, asked him to discuss the most crucial point with me again, then listened closely. He answered my original query in the affirmative, but in super-techno detail — he told me the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of how something worked. I saw how I had come away from this thinking, 1) Yes, 2) What?

The days are evaporating in high levels of work. It isn't just Shadowmarch, of course, it's everything else — I have a few projects besides, and so of course does Tad, and that is always the way of things chez Williams & Beale. But after putting the kids down for the night, I'm working till 11, 12 at night. Hmm.
8.8.01: There's another worm out there, the SirCam worm, and it has sent something to Tad via his Penguin Putnam email address. The attachment, chosen at random from the victim's hard disk, is entitled

Instructions For Collecting Stool Samples
We laugh mightily at that one, and then, naturally, we junk it.
8.9.01: The people from the satellite company were due here today to place the dish on its steel pole. They didn't come and they haven't called. Also, the Village Gossip has not only not turned up, as scheduled, to do the drainage work on our hillside, he is additionally not returning my messages. I've left two now, and I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt: I mean, I'd feel awful if he had fallen prey to some dire health problem. But I'm also aware that this isn't that likely.

It's the end of the working day — Dena the nanny goes home in five minutes. Tad catches me sighing as I put the phone down. He says, "Talk to me about L.A."

"I have to go release Dena," I say. "I can hear Devon screaming, too." We want to go to L.A. to see one of our best beloveds, Josh Stallings, and his family. In 1995, we worked with Josh on his indie movie Kinda Cute For A White Boy — Josh and Tad co-scripted the film. But more than that, Josh is Tad's dearest and oldest friend, and you try not to go too long without seeing your dearest and oldest friends.

"It's OK," said Tad, "I'll be quick. Let's go see Josh then take the kids to Disneyland."

"Can I get good cocktails there?"

"I reckon," says my non-drinking husband. "In fact I'll bet they're pretty good."

"A holiday?" I say.

"A holiday," says Tad.

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

"Enough with the poetry," he says. "Let's go out for dinner get you a cocktail right now."