All kinds of strands of Kage Baker’s personal history came together for the first time in Mendoza in Hollywood. She had a sudden new confidence, born of having sold Iden and Sky Coyote—she felt she could do anything. “I can do anything,” she exulted, twirling in her chair at the vast oak desk she had bought with the proceeds from Iden. “I have all of history at my command!”
What Kage wanted to write was Grand Hotel. She wanted lots of different Operatives, and a look into their lives—both as Company employees, and as the people they had once been. She wanted a dazzling background, a rich panorama, a wealth of history and legend and the human condition. And since that kind of accommodation was not to be found in Los Angeles in the 1860s, she set the whole thing in a Company-operated stage depot in the Cahuenga Pass.
Kage loved old Hollywood, old movies, and the history of any place she lived—the stranger the better. Mendoza in Hollywood was the first book she wrote in its entirety in Pismo Beach. She loved Pismo, but she missed the Hollywood Hills—so naturally, her homesickness permeates this book. It was also the first book she wrote after we got successfully attached to the internet and cable television, so it’s rife with old maps, old photos, and old, old movies.
