March 1989 
March 1989 An alphabet board spells its first word, “CAT,” and begins its second, “XAN….” Some letters arrive addressed to an elf named Jenny c/o the Monster Under the Bed in A Cute Care Section of a Cumbersome Hospital. Eleven cats vie for a maiden’s favor. And a little girl laughs again for the first time.
Marsh 10, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Remember me? I’m the author of the Xanth novels. I wrote to you in FeBlueberry, the day I received your mother’s letter. I said I was going to put a Jenny in my next Xanth novel, Isle of View. You don’t remember? I thought maybe I’d make her an ogre girl, and—oh, you do remember! You were just teasing me. And you say you want her to be an elf girl. Okay, elf she is. It’s been a long time since there’s been a lady elf as a character in Xanth, about 400 years, when Bluebell Elf had something to do with Jordan the Barbarian. Never mind what; the Adult Conspiracy forbids me from discussing anything like that with you. Today Rapunzel is their distant descendent. So it’s about time that a full elf made the scene again. I will be starting to work on that novel about the time this letter reaches you, but it will be the end of Mayhem by the time it is finished, because even with magic these things take time. Then it will be late 1990 before it is published, because there isn’t much magic in Mundania, and things take much longer there.
Your mother says that Fracto, the evil cloud, tried to stop her from bringing my letter to you at the hospital; he blew up a real blizzard and spread ice on the roads. Yes, he does that. But she finally did get through. She says when you heard the letter, you smiled, for the first time in the three centuries since you had the accident. Well, maybe it wasn’t quite that long, but it seemed like it, didn’t it? Thank you; I’m glad you were listening. She says you managed to wiggle a toe and squeeze her fingers and move your eyes around, and that you could indicate Yes or No. Just now, while typing this letter, I called the hospital and asked the nurse at the Acute Care Section how you were doing, and she said you are improving. That’s the way! I guess it’s no secret that you have a long way to go. It’s like falling into a deep pit, and having to climb your way out inch by inch, and it’s hard, and your folks are sort of peeking over the edge, far above, and calling to you, but they can’t climb for you. You have to do it yourself, and maybe you get very tired, and maybe you slide back down sometimes, and that’s very frustrating. But you’re in a good place, the Acute section; you should see the ones at the A-ugly section! The point is to make a bit of progress when you can, no matter how slow it seems. Remember what I said: things take time, in Mundania, because there is hardly any magic there.
The nurse said you hadn’t regained consciousness yet. That’s all she knows! She must think that if you don’t sit up and scream, you’re not awake. Actually, your mind is going at a mile a minute, but your body is stuck in slowsand and doesn’t respond. Nerves take a long time to heal; you just have to be maddeningly patient. Maybe that’s why they call the folk in hospitals “patients.” They’re really “impatients” because they want to get out of there fast.
Well, you’re stuck there for a while. At least they can’t stop you from dreaming. You can dream about being in Xanth. I haven’t figured out yet what Jenny is doing in Xanth; I think she’s lost, at first. So is Che, the winged centaur foal. I think she has one of her cats with her, which is odd, because there aren’t many elf-cats in Xanth. Well, we’ll see.
Remember, don’t let any night mares in. Only Mare Imbri, the day mare, with her sweet dreams. And smile for your mother; it makes her so happy. She wrote me a four page letter, when you smiled.
Marsh 18, 1989
Dear Jenny,
I think you had a better day than I did, today! This is Saturday, and I was trying to edit and print out a piece I wrote for a writer’s magazine. I mention you in that piece, though I don’t give your name; I just said that even funny fantasy can relate to serious life, and told how a twelve year old girl perked up when I wrote to her, after being pretty much out of it for months. You see, some folk think that fantasy is stupid and that writers should stick to serious things, like international politics, instead of wasting their time with puns and goblins and all. I get annoyed by that attitude, for some reason, and when I get annoyed I can become most expressive. So I wrote that article, and I suspect it will be published eventually. Anyway, everything went wrong. Do you know about computers? Not yet? Well, here is all you need to know: when you sit down at a computer, it is out to get you. It will pretend to behave, but the moment you aren’t watching, it will do something to you. You have to be paranoid to stay ahead of a computer. So when I went to print out my article, I thought things were fine. I have a nice laser printer whose print looks just like this: [tell the one who is reading this letter to you to hold it up for you]. See? Usually for letters I use the dot-matrix printer, while I save this one for my novels. So the first copy I printed had the wrong heading on it: it said ISLE OF VIEW, which is the title of the novel Jenny Elf will be in, any day now when I catch up with a pile of letters. All right, my fault; I forgot to tell it this was a separate article. So I typed in Anthony instead, and printed those 8 pages again. This time it didn’t have any page numbers. Somehow they had gotten erased when I changed the heading. So I remade it to get it right, and ran off a third copy, and this one had the “Anthony” and the page number—but it had changed it to justify on the right margin. That is, it made the words line up evenly on the right side, just as they do on the left side. Growl! I didn’t want that! So I remade the heading once more, and ran off the fourth copy, and it finally was right. My afternoon was gone, too. So you see, you were doing better than I was, because you smiled and laughed today. I wasn’t laughing, I was saying #$%&*!! [no, don’t translate that!] because of all the time and paper I wasted today. Just to top it off, I shoveled some horse manure for my wife’s bulbs she’s planting—yes, our horse Blue is the model for Mare Imbri the Night Mare, and she’s a wonderful horse, though she is 31 years old now, which is pretty old for a person, let alone a horse, as your mother will tell you—and it was full of ants and a red ant bit me. Now I don’t like to hurt other creatures, but when that red ant bit me I squished it, and I feel sort of bad about the whole thing.
So I decided to do something nice with what remained of my day, and write to you. Your mother called me last Monday, and said your father read my second letter to you, and that you really liked it. She was very pleased. Apparently you had had nothing better to do than watch the hypnogourd—oh, in Mundania that’s called the TV set—and that my letter snapped you out of that. I’m glad to know you enjoyed the letter. So as I set up to type this letter, I phoned the Cumbersome Hospital and asked about you. But when the aide found out who I was, she freaked out and refused to tell me anything. So I called your mother, and if you think my day was bad, you should hear about hers! That ear ache, you know. She said she was in the perfect mood for a good fight. She’s another person who can get most expressive when annoyed. I guess you know that. At any rate, she called the hospital and got it straightened out. We figured out what happened: the aide thought I was someone else. But I did learn about your good day, and that’s what counted.
So I’m sorry about boring you with all this business— oh, you’re not bored yet? Or maybe you’re just too polite to say so. Okay, stop me when you do get bored. You know, I hate to waste time. I mean I have things to do, like writing Isle of View, so I can’t afford to waste time in mundane things. But last month one of my readers asked me to come see a play his group was doing. So I went, and I happened to be in a bad place in the auditorium, and all the sound was garbled, so for two hours I was stuck not being able to hear the play. I talked with the man afterward, and he said they had a catalog, and I could order a video tape of that play. So I did that, and also ordered some music from that catalog. You know about music? I love it. Actually, I love all the arts, but I was able to get good in only one of them, writing. I had thought of being an artist, but though I did have talent, it wasn’t enough. I took a semester of piano in college, and the teacher said I could become a decent pianist if I worked at it, but I’m not a piano man. I like the recorder. You know, that’s like a wooden flute. I have a nice tenor recorder, but twenty years ago when I picked it up to play, a roach fell out of the mouthpiece and I lost my interest in playing for a decade or two. Anyway, I was never much good at it, and I don’t read music, so mostly I just listen to it. When you get older and start reading my Adept and Incarnations series you’ll see how I build music in to those novels. The right music just does something to you that can’t quite be described—yes, I see you do understand. When I was your age I used to sing folk songs to myself; I memorized about fifty of them, which was something, because I hate to memorize. But I wouldn’t sing when anybody else was around, because they didn’t understand. When I got to college I sang folk songs with other students, and took a semester of chorus. Some of those songs are really great when you have all the harmonies. But mostly music has just been my secret. Anyway, when the order arrived I looked at the cover on a record called “Heartdance,” and that picture fascinates me. I have it propped up where I can see it while I work. It shows huge old stone musical instruments—a violin, a special kind of guitar, and something called a hammered dulcimer—I mean, these things are about fifty feet tall, and cracking apart, and the grass is starting to grow over them. But at the top a young woman in a red dress is dancing, and in the background there are stone walls, and green pastures, and on a mountain way in back what may be a castle. I haven’t even listened to the record yet—I have to take time to get my record player set up—but I just keep looking at it, with the girl dancing to hidden music, and who knows what fantasy in the background. So I did what comes naturally: I’ll make that scene part of a future novel. No, not a Xanth novel; this really isn’t that kind of picture. This will be one titled Fractal Mode. By the time I write it, and you read it, you’ll be fifteen or sixteen, just about like that girl in the picture, and then you can dance to the hidden music too.
Are you bored yet? No? Then why are you snoring? Oh—it’s the Bed Monster snoring. Yes, he does that. He’s not interested in music or pictures, just ankles. Okay, I’m running out of time, so I’ll tell you about one more thing. It’s a secret, so don’t tell your folks, because they might get the wrong idea about Xanth. Or, worse, the right idea! One of the things in Heaven Cent is when Prince Dolph watches a mer-woman change her fishtail into legs. They can do that, you know; they make legs when they need to walk on land. Dolph is worried, because his mother Irene was very strict about boys not being allowed to see girls' panties. I mean, wouldn’t you die of embarrassment if you were walking along, and a gust of wind blew up your skirt, and some stupid boy saw your panties? But then Dolph relaxes, because he realizes he isn’t seeing any panties—because the mer-woman isn’t wearing any. He won’t be in trouble after all! That’s the part you mustn’t let your folks know about, because they might not think it is funny. But Dolph is incorrigible; he keeps trying to see someone’s panties, and he does get in trouble for it, as boys do. We tackle this issue head-on in Xanth #15, which is to be titled The Color of Her Panties. That’s the mer-woman’s panties, of course. You see in #14, Question Quest, the Good Magician Humfrey searches for the one question he can’t answer, and that question turns out to be “What is the color of the mer-woman’s panties?” He can’t answer because she doesn’t wear any. It’s a real problem. But remember, don’t tell anyone about all this; I don’t want to get in trouble. Anyway, I still have to write #13 and figure out what Jenny Elf is doing there.
Keep getting better, Jenny; you’re making everyone very happy. Except maybe King Fracto Cumulo Nimbus, the evil cloud, who hates to see anyone being happy.
Marsh 26, 1989
Dear Jenny,
I have a whole lot of news this time, so you won’t have to sleep through this letter. I wrote you a three page letter a week ago, and it probably bored you, but this one will be more interesting.
You see, I have just finished writing the first draft of the first chapter of Isle of View, and have just introduced Jenny Elf—and the second chapter will be all about her. But before I tell you about that, I have to tell you some other things. Yes, I know I promised this wouldn’t be boring, but such a promise is almost impossible for an adult to keep. I was delayed for several days because I had to proofread the galleys for another one of my novels, And Eternity, which will be published early next year. If I don’t read the galleys carefully—they are an early printout of the novel—and catch the errors, it will be published all wrong. But at least I had figured out the chapters for View. They are all alliterative—that is, the first letters match—and they sort of hint at what’s going on. Here, I have printed out a copy for you. The first chapter is “Chex’s Challenge.” Do you remember Chex from Vale of the Vole? The winged centaur filly? She got married in the next novel, and now she has a foal, Che, and someone has kidnapped him. So her challenge is to find him before anything bad happens to him. She’s pretty desperate, the way mothers are. At the end of the chapter she encounters an elf girl with a cat.
I paused here to phone the Cumbersome Hospital and inquire how you were doing. (I had to wait until my daughter Cheryl got off the phone; she’s home from college, and she’s my Elfquest expert. Yes, I know I have written a story for Elfquest—it’s in Blood of Ten Chiefs—but my daughter is the elf freak in this family.) The lady took a while to answer, because she was with you. I didn’t mean to interrupt that! She said you had a good day and were smiling a lot, and that you sat in the sunshine for a while. That’s nice. I told her to tell you I’d called. You do remember who I am? Don’t give me that perplexed look! I see that smirk hiding. You’re trying to pretend you don’t remember, and it won’t work. Not this time. I think.
Where was I? Oh, yes—the elf girl and her cat. That’s Jenny Elf, and her cat can find anything—except home. So she has to chase after him (maybe it’s a her—your mother described your eleven cats and one rabbit to me, but didn’t say which one of them finds things, so I don’t have a name or description yet. When you hear this letter, you can let me know exactly which cat it is) so she can bring him back home when he gets lost. This time he was looking for a centaur feather, and he found it, but by the time he did, he was lost and so was Jenny Elf. Really lost. Because, you see, she’s not from Xanth. Xanth elves are associated with Elf Elms, and the farther from the elms they get, the weaker they are. Jenny is from the World of Two Moons, and she doesn’t know anything about elms or centaurs. That’s right—she’s an Elfquest elf, and oh, boy is she lost! She was so busy chasing after the cat, just trying to keep him in sight, that she paid no attention to the route they took, and made a journey no one else ever made before, from Elfquest to Xanth. The second chapter will be all about her. See, it’s titled “Jenny’s Journey.” Now I’ll have to bore you with some technical stuff again. You see, I can’t just take an Elfquest elf without asking. But as it happens, I know Richard Pini, who publishes Elfquest; his wife Wendy draws the pictures. So I’ll make sure it’s okay with him. I’m sure it will be. Some day they may make Xanth into one of their comics, so we have to get along. When we met, Cheryl just about freaked out, meeting someone that famous. She was trying to drink a milkshake, as I recall, and each time she took a mouthful he would say something funny so that she had to laugh. We have a picture of her trying not to laugh in the middle of a mouthful; her cheeks are bulging and she looks desperate. I’m the only other one I know who is mean enough to do that to a fan. Anyway, it should be all right, and this will be something unique: Elfquest in Xanth. If folk hate it, it’s all your fault.
Okay, you can wake up now, the boring part is over. Chex mentions that she’s looking for Che, and Jenny’s cat takes off, and Jenny runs after him because she knows she’ll never find him if she doesn’t keep him in sight. He’s not running away from her, understand; he just gets so excited with the chase after something that he forgets. He really does want to come home, once he finds what he’s after. Chex tries to follow, but they disappear into the thick jungle where she can’t follow and are lost. That’s why the second chapter is from Jenny’s view. The cat finds Che—but the goblins have him. That’s bad, and Jenny knows she has to do something to get him away. She does, but then the goblins chase her too. She finds a raft and takes Che on it on the With-a-Cookee river where they can’t go. (Oddest coincidence: near here we have the Withlacoochee River that flows the same way.)
Well, there’s a whole lot of adventure I won’t bore you with, because I haven’t figured it out yet. But near the end they learn why the goblins grabbed Che: the grand-daughter of their chief is a very nice girl—goblin men are all ugly and mean, but their girls are pretty and nice—but she’s lame and just can’t get around very well. So they wanted to get a good steed for her, so she can ride places. Of course Che is too young to ride, let alone fly, but the goblins didn’t know that. The goblin girl is Gwendolyn, Gwenny for short, and Jenny likes her a lot. It’s really too bad she can’t have a centaur to ride. No need to spoil the ending for you—what? But—well, if you feel that way, okay, I’ll spoil it. They finally take Gwenny to live with the centaurs, and Jenny stays with them too, because no one knows how to get back to the World of Two Moons. Not in this novel, anyway.
There’s more to the novel, about Dolph and which of his two betrothees he chooses, but you have the idea about Jenny Elf. She wraps up in Chapter 14, and then we go to Dolph and the girls for what turns out to be a really difficult decision. I wonder if the Elfquest folk will want to take Jenny back to their world and have her in a comic? You never can tell what will happen. Anyway, you now know more about it than anyone else does, and I hope you’re satisfied. You aren’t? You what? Oh, yes, Jenny Elf does look a bit like you, in her elfin way. I thought you understood about that.
Odds & ends: remember when you smiled for the first time, and your mother was so excited she wrote me a four page letter? Well, then you laughed, and she wrote six pages. You had better slow down, because you don’t want her to write even more! I managed to make her laugh, when I told her on the phone about the key I have on my computer; when I touch it, it flashes DON’T TOUCH THIS KEY AGAIN!. Another says HELP! I’M BEING HELD CAPTIVE IN THIS COMPUTER. It’s a strange thing: your mother started smiling and laughing again just about the time you did. Isn’t that a coincidence? Or maybe it was magic.
I meant to explain about something that happened way back at the beginning of time, when you listened to my first letter. (When folk are my age, it can be easier to remember the distant past than what happened five minutes ago.) Your mother asked you whether you’d like to have a Jenny Elf or a Jenny Ogress in the novel, and you indicated that you wanted the elf. She asked you again, and you indicated the elf again. She asked you the same question yet again, and you began to get a bit impatient, because you’d already answered it twice, and wondered why she wasn’t paying attention. Then she asked still another time, and you got sort of frustrated. WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET YOUR ATTENTION—HIT YOU OVER THE HEAD WITH A TANGLE TREE?! I SAID ELF! At which point she began to get overexcited, and had to leave for a while. Well, I wanted to explain her side of it. At first she could hardly believe that you had answered, because the truth is, you hadn’t answered many questions before. So she asked you again. Then she was afraid it was just chance; maybe your eyes were moving around randomly and she was just seeing what she so much wanted to see. So she asked again, and you answered again. Then she thought, suppose she tells the nurses, and they say impossible, that child’s in a coma, you imagined it, so she might bring them in to see for themselves—and you’d be in a coma, not answering anything. So she asked again; she didn’t mean to upset you. It can be very difficult to function smoothly when someone you love is in trouble, and it’s very exciting when things start to get better. I guess you figured that out, because when she got hold of herself and brought a nurse in, you showed them that yes, you did know what you were doing, and the one who maybe thought it was impossible had to eat her thought. Now you know the whole story. Don’t tell your mother I told.
Each time, I learn something new. In your mother’s last letter she mentioned that you and she are vegetarians, because you love animals too much to hurt them by eating them. Would you believe, I am a vegetarian for the same reason. Well, there were other reasons too, but once I left high school back in 1952 I sorted things out in my mind and decided not to eat any more meat. So for 37 years it’s been that way. My wife is a vegetarian because I am, and my daughters are too, though I told them they should make up their own minds about a thing as important as that. None of us like to hurt animals. My older daughter Penny has pet mice, because someone at college got a white mouse to feed to his snake, and when the snake wasn’t hungry he let the mouse go outside his door in the hall. Penny was appalled; she knew that a tame white mouse couldn’t survive in the wild, let alone the college dormitory hall. So she took it in and got another mouse as a companion for it, because mice don’t like to be alone any more than people do. The oddest thing was that the mouse she saved wasn’t grateful; it tried to bite her finger every time she fed it. We helped her buy a three story mouse cage for them. Penny has parakeets, too, adopted from folk who didn’t want them. One was for sale at a flea market, and the poor thing was so downtrodden that it just hunched on the floor of the cage. But once it had company of its own kind, and decent care, it perked up and used the perches. We like to have a cage big enough so the birds can fly, you see. I think she has about five birds now, and they all look happy.
Are you asleep yet? Not quite yet? Okay, a little more. We have little spiders around our house, because we don’t like to hurt them either, and they mostly mind their own business. We figure that if they can find enough bugs to eat, they must be doing us a favor. Sometimes one will come across my keyboard when I’m typing, and I wait and watch it till it’s clear. Meanwhile we’ve had a minor adventure with a cow. Our neighbors have cows they raise for—well, we don’t like to think about that. This is a brown cow who somehow got out of their pasture and into our forest, this past week. Last night she even found her way from our drive into our pasture, but she must have left again, because I spent twenty minutes looking for her this morning but all I found was some footprints, cowflops, and the white skull of a goat. Hm. Well, if that cow comes back, she’s welcome to some of our hay, and the company of our horses. I wouldn’t mind if the owner never got around to fetching her back. I’m calling her Elsie, the Bored Cow.
Keep getting better, Jenny; you’re doing great.