My friend girliejones is hosting a ‘Women in Music’ appreciation month.  There are a lot of artists, songs and albums I would recommend: Suzanne Vega’s debut, Rickie Lee Jones’ debut, Norah Jones’ debut, Missy Higgins’ debut, the Indigo Girls early compilation 4.5, Heart’s Dreamboat Annie, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and either of the first two Pretenders albums, but instead I thought I might mention something that I’ve been listening to a lot these past few months. Shelby Lynne’s Just a Little Lovin‘ is a beautiful tribute to the music of the late Dusty Springfield.  A successful country and western singer herself, she takes songs from Dusty in Memphis and elsewhere and slows them down a tad, sings them a whisker lower, and delivers a slow, sensual sound the caresses careworn sensibilities.  It almost doesn’t matter what she’s singing, because it’s the sound of her voice that gently picks you up and carries you away, not the words she’s saying.  In truth some of the lyrics are best left unparsed, but the sound is for late nights and perfect Sunday mornings.

Well, this weekend is going to be about three things. Finishing Eclipse and Subterranean, and planning my schedule for the US trip. I’m terribly, terribly behind on the latter. I know where the planes are going to leave me, but not much else, which is crazy. I’ve not got a final program from Anticipation, but I have a few programmed things. Nothing planned for California, the sightseeing day in Montreal, or for the convention. Must fix!

The family are out of the house right now. I’m playing The Weepies. It’s been a hard couple days, made a lot harder by some things I just need to filter out of my world for a while. I need to make things a bit simpler, rather than more complicated.

In the meantime, I’m going to spend the time before dinner reading Fritz Leiber stories. Charles and I had decided on a core short list for our ‘best of Leiber’ volume, but hadn’t finalised it. Now it’s something left to me, which is incredibly sad. Charles and Fritz were such good friends, and Charles loved his work so much that it seems wrong to make the final decisions without him. Nonetheless, the important thing is to complete the book and make sure it would be one that he’d be proud of.

I’ve been thinking about how I’d like to remember CHARLES.  I knew him for sixteen years, and during that time he both didn’t change at all and changed a lot.  Somewhere about 2005 he began to get older: he got tireder, more likely to fall asleep, and started needing scooters to get around conventions.  He found that the late nights took more out of him, and so the late nights on the back deck at Locus became shorter affairs.

Today I looked for photos of him, ones that fit the CHARLES I knew the most.  I stumbled across this one. It was taken in June of 2002, I think. It was a few months after we’d agreed I was to become reviews editor and not that long before I headed over for Con Jose.  Shortly, Marianne, a toddler named Jessica, and a baby named Sophie would pile in for a few days, inhabiting his downstairs and consuming his home for a while, all of which he graciously absorbed like the patriarch he was.

So this is the image of him I’ll keep: alert, full of life, completely himself, and with some of the best years of our friendship in front of us. I think of him every day.

Today has been all about Charles.  He died yesterday and yet, because he lived so far away and because I only saw him once a year (though I’m gladder than I can say that I saw him twice last year) it seems impossible to believe that he is gone.  He has been an enormous presence in my life for more than fifteen years: friend, mentor, colleague, and so much more. I have spent so long talking about Charles that my voice is almost gone.  There’s so much I want to say, so much that should be said, but I can’t seem to find the words right now.  So, let me say this about my friend.  He was the most honest and trust worthy person I have met. He was fierce and loyal and kind and generous. The things that he loved, he loved totally: art, music, food, science fiction, people. His life was an inspiration and his death is a challenge.

Do I have stories about Charles? I don’t know. We mugged and took silly photos in a Boston art gallery. We finished the last of Heinlein’s scotch together.  We ‘bigged’ up on airplane so we could scare taking the middle seat on the plane.  And he wanted to teach. Teach me how to cook turkey, how to drink scotch, how to read a book, how to … everything.  He loved life and a lot of it loved him back.

When I’ve had the chance to think I will try to say something about him and SF. He loved it, and deeply. More importantly, he believed in it and its intrinsic importance. He also did everything he could to influence it, to make it what he thought it should be. He published Locus to influence the field. He ran the Locus Awards to influence (by example) the Hugos. He edited more novels than anyone will ever know, either before they ever got to a publisher or once they had been accepted.  And in some of those places he loved best – the restaurant dinners, the bars, the deep and secret places – he talked about science fiction, he influenced decision makers with the force of his vision about the field, and sometimes he changed what they did (and sometimes he didn’t).  Whatever else may be true, Charles entered the field in the 1950s and left it yesterday, a changed place better for him having been a part of it.