Armies of Daylight
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The first theme-party is going to be a post-Thanksgiving brunch: menus and advice about what happens if you want to invite more people than you have dishes?
I remember back in my Riverside days, inviting friends to dinner and asking not only that they bring their own dishes, but their own CHAIRS.
And on the subject of my Riverside days:
THE ARMIES OF DAYLIGHT
I was still living in Riverside, still training with the West Coast Karate Association (Sensei Dalke’s organization, which is now the AJKA, I believe); going to karate camps in the mountains near Idylwild and partying with the karate group, an instructive experience in group dynamics as well as in breaking boards with one’s bare hands. Every year we’d have “Spirit Week,” a sort of boot-camp-at-home during which they’d have really hard basic classes at 6 in the morning, and then you’d go on with the rest of your day in a fog. More about that when I get to The Ladies of Mandrigyn, but I do remember helping to build Sensei Dalke’s downtown dojo – laying the training-floor, painting bathrooms. Since I’m an artist as well as a writer, they’d get me to paint the front windows with poster-paint at Christmas time.
During this era also I started Regency Dancing, and attending science fiction conventions. I never attended conventions as a fan – had never even heard of them until I was a pro. The Los Angeles fan group also included some serious Jane Austen fans, so they’d do dancing in the style of the English Regency at the conventions: still do. And, they had an all-day Regency event, to which I went dressed in the awfullest tinkered-together Georgian gown (I’ve always much preferred the Georgian style to the Regency, which makes me look like a fire-plug), and an honest-to-God powdered wig – as in, a wig I’d done up with talcum powder. I met Larry Niven there for the first time and didn’t dare say a word to him. What could I have said? Gee, Mr. Niven, I love your writing and someday I’d like to be a writer, too?
An awkward start to what has turned into a long-standing friendship.
When I finished Armies of Daylight – which has a spectacular fight-scene between Gil and the villainous Alwir in the snow – I packed up the manuscript, and went off for the weekend with my friends to a cabin in Big Bear, where it actually WAS snowing. A lot. After a weekend of slipping, tripping, falling, and exhaustion (it is REALLY tiring to flounder around in deep snow) I came meekly home, unwrapped the manuscript, and re-wrote that scene… and every other scene in it that involved snow.
I’m a Southern California girl. I’ve never lived in deep snow. My friend Laurie – who grew up in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho in an actual cabin due to a back-to-the-wild dream of her father’s – sneers at me when I complain of the cold down here. (And her advice is very useful for things like cooking on a wood-stove, and how difficult is it to skin a deer?)
When I finished Armies, I was hit for the first time by something that has been with me ever since: that awful sense of grief at finishing a story. I’d been with Gil, Ingold, Rudy, and Minalde for two and a half years by that time – longer than a lot of marriages. (Longer than mine, anyway…) Leaving them filled me with sadness.
Around that time I did try to put together a lightweight science fiction tale called Karate Masters Versus the Invaders from Outer Space, but it never really went anywhere. This was just as well.
