img May 1989 img

A right big toe uses a right useful computer to right difficult communications. 24-X = 12+X. One person gives a story to another, who may or may not have missed something. A realization of hair loss incurs a moment of sadness. And a happy reunion takes place.

 

Mayhem 5, 1989

Dear Jenny,

 

I figured out what happened to the last letter: this word processor puts a “ruler” at the top of the file, setting the margins and things. When I set up a new file, for the Jenny letter, it put on its default ruler (yes, your mother will explain that in more detail than you care to hear; just ask her. She’s eager to start in, if you just give her the teensiest bit of encouragement) at the top. Then I used my “letter” macro to put my letter format on, forgetting the default format, which was now off the screen. So when I printed, it took the first ruler, which was the wrong one, and ignored the second. Then when I reset the paper, I put it in wrong. Growl!

I have things to tell you from the fun to the awful, and not enough time to tell it all, because I’m in a Jenny chapter of Isle of View now, with Jenny Elf and Che Centaur and Sammy Cat captives in the bottommost bowels of Goblin Mountain, and I want to get back and find out how they fare. Jenny is about to meet Gwendolyn Goblin—Um, I’d better check with you on this. She’s lame; I always knew that. That’s why the goblins wanted a horselike steed for her, so she could ride around instead of walking, and be princessly, or more properly chieftainessly because goblins have chiefs not kings, despite her handicap. But why foalnap a centaur foal, instead of a mere regular horse or something? Because, I now realize, there is more than lameness wrong with Gwenny. She doesn’t see well. If she rode a centaur, the centaur could see things and tell her, so that she would always know with whom she was dealing and what was going on, and never make embarrassing mistakes. But you see, this notion stems from your story about the blind princess, so it’s not wholly mine. Your mother told me she would ask you if it’s okay to tell that story here, and if you agree, Jenny Elf will tell it. But to have Gwenny Goblin with poor sight too—well, that fits so well that I think I’ll do it, unless you scream blankety murder or blow the whistle on me. No, no, don’t blow that whistle! The last time you did that—well, never mind.

Back to business: suppose I cut out the nice parts and cover the nasty parts instead, and—what? The other way around? Brother, you’re fussy today! No, leave that whistle alone; I’ll start with the nice.

Remember last time when I told you about the wrens in the bicycle bag? How they didn’t come back? That was Thursday I found the nest being started. Well, Sunday morning when I returned with the bike, using a new bike bag, a wren flew out of the other one. So I went inside and opened the bathroom window right next to it, quietly, and watched. Sure enough, Carroll and Lina Wren (down here we have Carolina wrens, with reddish undersides) flew in immediately, perched on the bike and looked all around to make sure I was gone. They had returned to the nest! My daughter Penny happened to drive up from St. Pete that day—the nice thing about daughters is that they visit even after they grow up and move away—and I told her about it, and she said I hadn’t looked closely enough. Her beady daughter eyes had spied an egg in that nest! A couple of days later there were two eggs there, and now there are three. So we have a family started here, and how glad I am that I took the trouble to set up that bike bag, though I thought they weren’t using it. I’ll report on developments as they occur. As I have said, wrens are good to have around the house; they are bold little birds who clean out the bugs that are trying to sneak into the house.

Now an ugly item. Ask your mother whether she should read it, as I happen to know she’s already sneaked a peek at it. She’ll skip it if you ask her to. This is from the news, and you may have picked it up already. A group of teenage boys in New York City went “wilding”—that’s a new term—and ran through Central Park at night beating up anyone they could find. They found nine or ten people. One of them was a lady jogger. They hit her in the face with a brick and raped her and hurt her so badly that they left her for dead. Several hours later when help came she had lost three quarters of her blood. They put her right into Cute Care and managed to save her life. That was last month. Now she has come out of her coma and is able to squeeze someone’s hand on command and move her eyes, and she evidently understands what is said to her, but they don’t know yet whether she will ever recover completely. Her life will never be the same, regardless, I thought of you when I read about this, because though the circumstances of your injury were different, your situation is similar. I think you can understand how that woman is feeling. She is recovering faster than you, because (I think) she was hurt more in the body than the head, while you got bashed worse in the head. But none of it is any fun. I don’t expect you to feel any better because someone else got hurt, but if you are the kind who prays, you might pray for her. You know what she needs.

Back to a nice item. Your mother sent me two of your pictures—no, don’t glare at her, she means well, honest she does, you just have to make allowance for mothers—of princesses—no, not the originals, she made copies, you don’t think she’d risk the originals, do you? So stifle that glare—uh, where were we? Somewhere in that sentence I got lost! Also your story about the blind princess. So now you get my critique. Stop that! Come back from under that sheet! You’re disturbing the Bed Monster! I told you this was a nice item, I think. Your spelling is like mine, which means you are a creative person. The only one in my family who could match my bad spelling was my dyslexic daughter Penny. Oh, I can spell now, of course; I learned it when I was an English teacher, and had to abandon my creativity. Sigh. I don’t know whether I’ll ever recover. But your pictures—what do you mean, what makes me think I’m an art critic? I took art classes for six years and once thought to be an artist, so there! Why didn’t I become an artist? Let’s change the subject. What? Look, we really don’t need to go into that. Oh, all right: I realized that I was not good enough to make it as a commercial artist. Now are you satisfied? I feel your pictures are marvelously mature, considering your age, and expressive. Maybe you’ll be able to do what I could not, and be an artist. But it’s something else that brought me to this paragraph. One of your pictures is of a woman with her baby, and she is crying. I’m not sure what the story is there, but I don’t think that’s the blind princess, unless maybe there’s a chapter I missed. But what I notice is her hair. It flows out and forms a kind of cape behind her, framing her upper body, I love that. I remember when—but no need to go into that.

Oops, you say you want to go into that? Sigh. All right. When I was eleven years old, I knew a girl who was twelve. No, I’m not making this up. She was everything desirable in a woman, as I saw her, I loved her. No, no one took it seriously, and certainly she didn’t; what would this fine young woman want with a boy of eleven? But my mental picture of her remains to this day, and I think I still love her, over forty years later, in my way. I know it by the hair. Her hair was the length of that of the woman in your picture, and though it did not flare out like that—she wore it in two long braids, mostly—I like to think that maybe it could have, had she wanted it to. To this day the first thing I notice about a woman is her hair. Have you seen pictures of the singer Crystal Gayle? Right—she’s my favorite singer. Because of that hair. Oh, she sings well, very well, but I really didn’t notice her singing until I saw her hair. So when I see your picture, and that hair, oh Jenny, it touches me. Perhaps by no special coincidence, I have a lady goblin in Isle of View named Godiva, who has hair like that. And of course in a prior Xanth novel I had Rapunzel. Nada Naga, in Heaven Cent, has hair like that too, and younger Prince Dolph loves her. Now you know why.

And an in-between item. I understand they have to give you nerve blocks, because you get pain, I have half a notion how that is. Some years back, when I was doing more strenuous exercises than I do now, my right arm started hurting, especially when I moved it, and it got to the point where it was getting hard for me even to type on the computer keyboard. So I saw the doctor, and it turned out to be tenonitis, or inflammation of the nerve. Not a life—threatening ailment, and it doesn’t sound like much, but if I moved my arm suddenly I could just about faint from the surge of pain. It was a job sleeping at night, because when I rolled over, the pain jerked me awake. Medicine didn’t help. Finally the doctor gave me a shot of Novocain in the nerve. That wasn’t a nerve block, and it didn’t make the pain go away, but it did reverse its course, so that in the following months I was able, slowly, to reach farther before the pain started. About the time my right arm got better, it started in the left arm. This time medicine helped, but it still reversed grudgingly. All told, it was about two and a half years from start to finish, and it wiped out all my arm exercises. I had done as many as fifty chins on my study beam, and a lot of Japanese pushups, and I had muscles on my arms. All gone now. Running is the only exercise I maintained. But in the course of this, I learned that pain was not necessarily bad. I found that when I knew exactly what caused it, and how to avoid it, and could control it by reaching only as far as I cared to tolerate the level of pain, I could get along with it. I get the feeling that you suffer pain, and you don’t want to make a scene about it and get everyone all up in a heaval, so you just tolerate it. Sometimes the pain is better than the shot in the nerve. Okay.

Your mother got tired of waiting for me to forward the “Curtis” comic strip, so had them run it in your local paper. Okay, I’ll just enclose the ones I had already cut out, plus a cartoon about the unpleasantness of having a shot in a nerve or wherever. Tell her that Adept #6, Unicorn Point, is already out, in hardcover; if she makes the library ignore the bad reviews and stock it, she can read it. And I didn’t mean to make trouble for you with that Mary and Ann problem; I can give you the formula to solve it, if—you say not to bother? Well, it’s no trouble, really. Uh, okay, I’ll drop it.

Mayhem 12, 1989

Dear Jenny,

Remember when I said I didn’t think your picture illustrated the flower story? Ouch! Five lashes with a wet noodle. When I got into it to adapt it I saw my mistake: I was thinking of Lily, not her mother, and the picture was of her mother. Anyway, I did the scene, and have printed it out for you. But don’t go straight to it; let me explain the background first.

Che Centaur, the winged foal, is. captive in Goblin Mountain. Jenny and Sammy go with him, voluntarily, because Jenny feels the foal needs company. They meet Gwendolyn Goblin, the daughter of Godiva Goblin, who turns out to be a rather nice twelve year old girl. The reason Godiva wanted a centaur companion for her was to help her get about and to see things, because she is a bit lame and so nearsighted that everything farther than a foot or two away is a blur. Jenny’s problem was solved by her spectacles, but Gwenny’s problem can’t be solved that way, so she really does need help. She has a chance to be the first female chief of the goblins—a chiefess—who can make the goblins behave much better, but if any of them learn about her sight problem, they will kill her and put in a male instead, and things will be as brutish as they have always been with goblins. So Godiva really does have good reason for what she has done: only a centaur can work so well with Gwenny that the goblins will be fooled, and she can rule. That’s part of the larger problem in this novel: Jenny and Che have agreed not to tell, because if they do, Gwenny will die, and she really doesn’t deserve that. But can Che agree to be prisoner of the goblins for the rest of his life? So he hasn’t made up his mind.

Jenny and Che and Gwenny get into a Tsoda fight, squirting bottles of the water of Lake Tsoda Popka at each other (we happen to live on Lake Tsala Apopka, here in Florida: another of those odd coincidences) and get drenched; it’s great fun. Godiva doesn’t quite approve of this, for some reason, but of course mothers don’t have to have reasons for their objection to fun. So the kids clean up (Che has to face away and close his eyes so as not to see any Panties) and Jenny tells a story instead. She has to adapt it to Xanth terms, which is tricky, and it doesn’t work perfectly, but the essence comes through. That’s the excerpt I printed out for you. At the end, their shared dream is shaken apart when the mountain trembles: Cheiron Centaur is commencing the siege, by having rocs drop stones. The battle has begun. Okay, now at last you can go to that scene. This is my first draft, so maybe there are typos, and I may change things later. If you see something that is fouled up, let me know and I’ll fix it before sending the novel to the publisher. I’ll also show a copy to the Elfquest folk.

Um, it occurs to me that you may feel that Gwenny is a name too close to Jenny. Well, I pondered this, but it just does seem the best way to simplify Gwendolyn. One letter of a word can make a big difference; I don’t confuse you with my daughter Penny, for example. Penny is 21 now, in college, with a job, but she’s still my little girl. So I think the name’s all right.

On to other business. I’m enclosing a Sunday Curtis comic you may have missed, and a cartoon about the space shuttle launch; if you look at it twice you’ll see what’s funny. And two clippings about girls you may like: one saved her friend’s mother’s life, and the other sued her boyfriend when he stood her up for a prom. These are your type of girl, right? Plus an envelope with Polish stamps— oh, these’ll never fit in the little envelope I typed! Well too bad, I’ll type a bigger one. What do you care about Polish stamps? Well, they have pretty pictures of horses, penguins and dragonflies. The letter was sent to my old address, but managed to reach me anyway.

I understand you are using a computer now, to help communicate. I’m glad of that. Maybe they’ll set you up with a paintbrush program, so you can paint pictures on the screen. We have Microsoft Paintbrush, which uses a mouse; you can paint good pictures with it, if you have the patience, and save them or print them out. If they haven’t gotten something like that for you yet, blink your eyes and wiggle your toe until they do; I suspect you could have a lot of fun with the screen and that mouse control, and maybe turn out some great pictures.

I also understand you are back in Elven Armor again, and casts on your arms. You put a good face on it, but I know that isn’t much fun. I’d tell you to look on the positive side, but I know it’s a pain, so might as well say so. One of the periodic debates I get into with those who believe in God is why God allows awful things to happen to folk who don’t deserve it. Don’t tell me you were a bad girl so you were punished by being almost killed. But of course I explain it all in my Incarnations series: Satan is doing it. Early next year the final novel, And Eternity, will tackle the matter of God and resolve it. You’ll probably like that one, when you get old enough to sneak it past the Adult Conspiracy censors. Anyway, I understand also that you are getting a blazing fast red wheelchair, and that the nurses in the halls will be set spinning when you zoom by too fast to see. “What was that?” one will ask, “A bird? A plane?” and another will reply: “No, that’s Spinning Jenny!” You know I joke about the doctors and nurses, and how they can get piled up ten deep, but I’ve actually had some experience with the real work that they do. I collaborated with a doctor on a book about kidney disease, dialysis and kidney transplants, and I interviewed doctors, nurses, and patients and learned a lot. The doctor changed his mind after I found a publisher for the book, and I had to drop the project, which I think was too bad; it was a good book. But by that avenue I got to know pretty well folk who were being saved from dying by the doctors and nurses, and what it took to keep them alive. If you want to know a lot about kidney dialysis, I can tell you, but not in this paragraph. I have also had some absolutely infuriating encounters with callous or incompetent doctors and nurses. So I have seen both sides. Just so you know that when I tease a person or a profession, that does not necessarily reflect my underlying opinion. Each profession seems to have its good examples and its bad ones, and this is true for writers as well as doctors and nurses.

Oh, I almost forgot: yes, the wrens are doing nicely.

The eggs are still there, and all seems well. Our magnolia trees continue to bloom. I see them when I ride the bicycle out to fetch the paper in the morning—it’s a mile and a half round trip—and the bunnies along the drive. Also when I do my exercise run, which covers most of our tree farm. We have pretty big blue passion flowers now, too. And yes, I saw a dragonfly exactly like the one in the corner of the envelope, green and blue; it was probably the one who posed for that picture.

So have a harpy day, Jenny, and don’t forget to ask about that paintbrush program. You don’t have to wait to get all the way better, to draw again; you can do it now, if they have the setup.

Mayhem 19, 1989

Dear Jenny,

Yesterday I finished the novel proper, and this morning I finished the Author’s Note for Isle of View, I’m sending a printout, which your mother may or may not read to you, as she sees fit. No, don’t blink your eyes angrily at her; she has reason. Let me explain.

You may not remember much between when you were hit by that car, and the time my first letter helped bring you out of your long sleep. (I feel like a prince!) It was a bad time. The Author’s Note describes it in fair detail. You walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and your family felt the terrible chill of it. That part of the experience is not fun reading. You may not care to listen to it now.

I have sent this because I want your folks to go over it and tell me where it is wrong and what parts should not be left in. I have named you only Jenny here, because I am afraid that folk could discover who you really are if I gave your full name, and there are some folk who shouldn’t. But I can change that if you wish. I will modify it as required, and ship the novel, Note and all, to the publisher. Along about OctOgre 1990 it will be published. By then I hope you are long out of the hospital and maybe out of your wheelchair, Jenny, and getting on with your life. I doubt you’ll ever be a star Olympic athlete, but you can be a lot else, regardless. I hope you like the novel, when. There’s a lot more than just Jenny Elf in it, of course, but Jenny is a major character.

I have tried to avoid subjects that I fear will bring you disquiet, but I seem to have been blundering into them anyway. I assumed that your mother’s description of your present hair style was the way it’s always been, and that you liked it that way. Now I learn that you had waist-length hair, before the accident. I’m sorry if I hurt you by my comments; it was the last thing I wanted to do. Let me tell you a bit more about hair, in my family. I wouldn’t let my wife cut her hair, for the first ten years or so of our marriage, so she wore it waist length. But she complained that it was hot, especially here in Florida, and finally I realized that I did not have the right to make her uncomfortable. So she cut it, and has worn it short since. But our daughters—that’s another story. The first one I claimed as mine; Penny was my little girl, and she never has cut her hair. She was hyperactive as well as dyslexic, and I told everyone that she had so much energy because her hair had never been cut. In the Bible Samson was the strongest of men while his hair was long, you see; when it was cut he became weak. Cheryl was our second daughter, and her mother claimed her. Penny’s hair color matched mine, though I am dark and she is blond—you think that’s crazy? No it isn’t. When we checked we discovered that Penny’s hair is the same shade as mine at the same length. If I wore mine waist length, it would bleach out blond. Anyway, Cheryl’s hair was dark like her mother’s, and she was good in school like her mother, while Penny’s grades were like mine. Once Penny brought home a report card, and I lectured her: “Penny, I don’t understand. This is not like you. I don’t expect this sort of thing from you.” It was all A’s and B’s, you see, instead of C’s and D’s. I suspect your dad would do the same with you, if you brought home an A math grade. Some folk don’t understand the humor in a family where love is more important than success; too bad for those folk. Cheryl I teased the other way: that if she ever saw a grade below A + she would be baffled, having never seen a B, and someone would have to explain what it was. Or even an A -. Cheryl was the one who made the highest SAT score in the history of her school. There weren’t SAT tests in my day, but if there had been, no one knows what I would have done with it, but height would be the least likely course. Depth, maybe. No, I’m not stupid; the test makers are. They don’t know the best answers to their questions. In fact they don’t know the best questions. Anyway, Cheryl’s hair was in the charge of her mother, who cut it short, until I remarked passingly how Cheryl looked like a little boy. About that time Cheryl, no dummy, began to take control of her life, and I don’t think she has let her hair be cut since, and now her hair is well down her back. The two daughters together are a marvel, one blonde, the other brunette, a complementary set. My wife doesn’t speak of the matter. So I’m glad to hear that you have the right attitude about hair; I understand you won’t let your mother cut hers either. I guess we know who has the willpower in your family! I’m sure your mother looks much better with her hair long. There’s a verse in a folk song that reminds me of: “Laura was a pretty girl, o-my-o!” Surely because she wore her hair long. Don’t get me wrong: my wife is a fine woman. Just not perfect. She doesn’t understand about hair. Anyway, go ahead and grow your hair long again, Jenny, and feel your strength returning with it.

There were other things I learned too late, such as about your getting beaten up by that bully of a boy last year. I might not have mentioned that business of the woman getting attacked if I’d realized. And you being dyslexic too. The first day in first grade, the teacher was yelling at my daughter, because of her handwriting and such. Um, you know what a pressure-cooker is? No? Ask your mother. Then picture the pressure rising toward the explosion point. That’s me when someone starts yelling at my daughter. I was once a teacher myself, and I don’t take any guff from teachers, many of whom are illiterate compared to me. But in Florida we were locked in, because of the system to prevent segregation. That is, if folk could choose their own schools, they’d be all black or all white, no mixing. We approve of integration, but this meant that we couldn’t move our daughter out because they would think we were trying to get out of an integrated school. So we forced the issue on the basis of Penny’s dyslexia: that school had no learning-disabled program, so we required that she be transferred to a school that did. That got her out of that class with the yelling teacher, and after that she did well in school, and learned to read, and has been reading at a great rate ever since. Her dyslexia doesn’t affect input, just output. There were other battles to fight, and I fought them; I have been militant on behalf of my daughters throughout, right up into college. When Penny had trouble in college because of her vegetarianism, and they insisted she pay for the full schedule of college meals though she couldn’t eat them, I showed her how to teach a college a lesson. I wrote to the college president approximately thus: “I will regard this meals charge as an involuntary contribution to the college. You may be sure I shall not make a voluntary one.” That crossed in the mail with the college’s appeal for contributions. What do you know: suddenly the unbendable rule was bent, and my daughter was free of college meals. So anyway, I hope that my references to things didn’t disturb you too much. Just so you know I mean well.

Your mother says she’s dyslexic too, and wonders whether it ties in with ambidexterity. That is, using either hand. I wonder too. As far as I know, I am not dyslexic, but it did take me three years to get out of first grade. The things I was taught to do, I do right handed; the things I taught myself, I do left handed. Some things I did both ways, just as a challenge. Today I write right handed (but I have written left-handed in the past; I quit because it’s harder pushing the pencil into the paper than pulling it across) and eat left handed. My father thinks my absolute idiocy with respect to foreign languages derives from that; I mastered only one language, English, but I got pretty good at that, eventually. So I keep wondering about right and left handedness, and problems in learning, and male and female. You see, the brains of women may be wired differently from those of men; they have a larger corpus col—oh, I can’t remember the term, but it’s the cable that connects the halves of the brain, like the cable between the computer and the printer. A bigger cable makes for a better connection, and women often can see more sides to a situation than men can. But I’m strange; in ways I think like a woman, and I think it helps my writing. Left-handers may have a bigger cable too, to compensate. So I think I have more access to the parts of my brain than does the average man, and I can relate well to women, though I feel like a man. But you know, it’s supposed to be mostly boys who are hyperactive and dyslexic, also they tend to be blond and blue-eyed. That’s Penny. So maybe she’s a girl who is wired in her brain like a boy. These crossovers are fascinating, but we really don’t know anything for sure. Still, when something threatens you, how does your mother react: man-fashion or woman-fashion? Man-fashion is to bash that threat into oblivion; woman-fashion is to be understanding. Yes, I know: she reacts both ways. In short, ambidextrously.

And your mother says she copies all my letters, so they can’t get lost. Now that’s flattering! But if one ever is lost, and you want it back, let me know; I keep copies of all my letters, and I can print one out again if necessary. Twelve letters—I’ve been writing to you pretty often, haven’t I! I hope you aren’t getting bored.

You know, I had some notes for this letter, and here I am over 1500 words into it, and I have used none of those notes. Sigh. Well, if you want to know what I would have said, had I stayed on track, tell me, and I’ll say it next time. What? No I don’t have room for it all this time; I’m already three pages along. STOP BLINKING AT ME! Okay, one item: back when you had the accident, I was working on Total Recall, a special project. A novelization. That is, they had the script for what will be a major science fiction adventure movie next year, and I turned it into a novel. So that novel will be published this SapTimber as a hardcover under my name, and then in paperback when the movie is released, starring muscle man Arnold Schwarzenegger. So if you like science fiction violence, you can watch it, and think of me, though I really had nothing to do with the movie. I just wondered what I was doing when the horror that was going to have the single nice effect of bringing you into my life occurred, and that was it.

And one other item, from those notes: I don’t know whether you have gotten anyone to read Heaven Cent to you, but if you have the interest, I think you would like it. I had to check in it, because two major characters in Isle of View were introduced in that novel, and I saw things that I think would appeal to you and make you think. For one thing, twelve year old, freckled Electra. Now she’s an old woman of eighteen, but then she was a girl of your generation, who slept long.

Well, this has been a sort of a serious letter. It happens. Maybe I’ll get back to normal next time. Harpy thymes, Jenny!

PS (the morning after): I’m adding a clipping about a British vegetarian girl who entered Oxford University at age 11 and is a math whiz. Both my parents graduated from Oxford, my mother the top in her class, my father almost, except his marriage to my mother distracted him. Everyone in my family was smart, except me.

Mayhem 26, 1989

Dear Jenny,

Your mother didn’t write, and didn’t write, and I knew what had happened: the doctor had finally caught her out of bed once too often and locked her in the hospital, where she was fretting about everything and sundry. There she was stuck, until her ulcers went down and her blood count went up. I thought of calling, to make sure, but I knew that if I did, she would turn out to be at home and would tell me in 9.35 pages exactly what a sad sod I was to ever believe that any thumping quack of a doctor could ever catch her out. So I took the cowardly way, and waited. Finally she got tired of that game, and got her computer in gear again, and I got letters today and yesterday, not necessarily in that order. She had lost a day’s work by not saving her material, and naturally the computer had struck at the worst moment. Your mother is an idiot: tell her to get one of those programs that saves automatically every few seconds, so that her material can never again be lost. Every bloke but a Computer Systems Analyst knows that.

Just to get even, she says that you stuck your tongue out at me, because of that picture business. Oh you did, did you? Well, how would you like a pot of nitrogen on it? That’ll teach you to keep a civil tongue in your head. A smelly one, maybe, but civil.

Let’s see, where were we before we got into this quarrel? Your mother’s browned off letters. She says you approved the Jenny Elf story, and that she has no keyboard with the pound symbol. Horrors; I’ll lend her some of mine: £ £ £ £ £. It’s just a matter of pounding them out. She says you’re working on a letter to me. But I already have one from you, with your picture in Elven Armor, and about how your daddy fell out of his chair. And your signature, JNY. She also mentions your occupational therapy, where I gather you have arms and legs but not much middle. I wonder: would they ever let you try swimming? So the water would support you. It might be more comfortable exercise.

As of her last letter, you had not seen the Author’s Note. I’ve made the corrections she gave, but you will have to say about some things, such as whether to call you just Jenny. Tell her that when I went over that Note, this morning, I also added in a reference to Andrea Alton, who suggested putting Jenny (Elf) in, and her novel. And I told other fans not to deluge me with requests for their names as characters. “If you aren’t in a coma,” I said, “don’t ask.”

She also sent pictures of your reunion with Sammy, and your cat sweater. I’m glad you two could get together again; it’s been a long time. I see you have elven ears on, there, except that they aren’t pointed. Ah, well, the Elfquest folk will no doubt survive.

Okay, I’ll enclose some items for you. Gunk the vegetarian is back in the Curtis comic; he’s an animal rights activist, of course. In that connection, there’s a clipping about how they treat laboratory rats here in Florida: it’s horrible. What they want to find out is how to stop the muscles of folk like you from wasting away while you’re trying to get your head together, but the way they do it is sickening. However, we also have decent folk here, as the clipping about the veterinarian who takes in animals shows. I know you’d like him. I was raised on a goat farm, and little goats—those are the true kids—are the most wonderful pets. Little deer are a lot like that. We have families of deer living on our tree farm here; every blue moon or so we see them. Also possum, box turtles, snakes and whatnot; we value them all. The only thing we don’t like is hunters, so we keep them off. I’m also enclosing a picture in an ad. It’s not original with the ad; I first saw it over twenty years ago. Which face do you see: the young Jenny-girl, or your tired old mum? They are both there. No, keep looking; eventually you’ll see them both. It took me forever to see the old one, way back when.

Meanwhile, what’s new here? Well, remember that wren nest in my bicycle bag? The eggs hatched maybe a day after my last letter; I can see one of the chicks in there, though I don’t dare look too closely, because Lina Wren has an attitude like that of your mother: Leave My Baby Alone. But little Wrenny is in there, and maybe two more.

Yesterday two significant things happened. I finally heard from your mother, and I had a letter from a video producer who would like to turn Xanth into a series of videos, using live actors mixed with computer animation. He sent some sample video cassettes of what he had done, and it looked pretty good. Of course there’s a lot to check, yet; not everyone who wants to make a movie or video is capable of doing it right. But my agent is checking it out, and who knows: maybe some day there’ll be a series of Xanth movies, including Isle of View, with Jenny Elf and Sammy Cat.

So I guess that wraps it up, and—what? You say I still have most of a page left over. Well, sure, but that doesn’t mean I have to fill it. No, don’t you dare stick your tongue out at me again! I’ll blow a stink horn at you. That’s the kind that makes a foul-smelling noise. So there. But okay, I’ll fill in with a note or so.

One’s about my Rapunzel doll. Yes, I do have one. STOP SNICKERING! Franklin Mint wanted to do some Xanth figurines, which they’ll be promoting any year now; I even used their mountain setting in Man From Mundania, and you can only get onto that mountain by passing the Frankinmint plant. Then they pondered doing some Xanth dolls, and I said oh, you mean like Rapunzel? So they sent me their Rapunzel doll. She’s about twenty inches tall, in a beautiful purple gown and robe, and her hair, oh, my, it reaches down below her feet. She’s an expensive doll, about two hundred dollars, I think, but they sent her free. That’s the advantage of being a successful writer. I have her standing on a file cabinet where I can see her as I type my novels. She reminds me of my daughter Penny; her face is similar.

Okay, now may I end this letter? I ran out of time last night (this is now the next morning), because I had an hourlong phone call from my agent in New York about a complicated contract. I could get a lot of things done, if it wasn’t for the phone! You say one more note? All right, but this is the last one.

I may have mentioned that I answer over a hundred letters a month. Most of them I route through a secretary. I write my answers in pencil on the back of the envelopes as I read the letters, and once a week my wife takes the package of 20 or 25 letters to the secretary, who’s about 10 miles away, and picks up the prior week’s bunch. Some letters I do directly, like the ones to you. I have correspondents who are suicidal, or women who find me fascinating (stifle that snigger!), prisoners, bereaved families—I finished the novel of a young man who was killed by a car a year before you were hit—collaborators, and so on. After this letter I have to write to a murderer on Death Row, who brutally killed his girlfriend and their unborn baby. The funny thing is that in other respects he is ordinary and sensitive; when he learned I was writing to you he inquired, because he doesn’t like crimes like that. He says “I know she/her family wouldn’t appreciate me writing, but tell her I’m thinking of her and hope she has a full recovery.”

Author’s Note:

WHEN I REFERRED TO JENNY BEING INJURED MAINLY IN THE HEAD, I WAS MISTAKEN. JENNY WAS BASHED BADLY IN THE BODY TOO; I JUST DIDN’T KNOW THE FULL EXTENT OF IT. I UNDERSTAND THEY USE MAKEUP TO COVER HER FACIAL SCARS, SO THAT EVEN WHEN I MET HER, LATER, I DIDN’T REALIZE THE EXTENT OF HER INJURIES.

FOR THOSE WHO LIKE ANSWERS TO THEIR MATH PROBLEMS: THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS TO FATHOM THIS RIDDLE, BUT PERHAPS THE SIMPLEST IS BY USING ONE UNKNOWN AND SOLVING IT ALGEBRAICALLY. LET X = THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEIR AGES. MARY IS 24. SO MARY IS TWICE AS OLD AS ANN WAS, WHICH MUST HAVE BEEN 12, WHEN MARY WAS AS OLD AS ANN IS NOW. MARY’S AGE MINUS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM HAS TO BE ANN’S AGE, AND ANN’S AGE PLUS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM HAS TO BE MARY’S AGE. SO 24 - X IS ANN’S AGE NOW, AND THAT’S THE SAME AS MARY’S AGE THEN, 12 + X. SO THE FORMULA IS 24 - X = 12 + X. SIMPLIFY THAT BY MOVING 12 TO THE OTHER SIDE, AND - X TO THE OTHER SIDE, CHANGING THE SIGNS AS YOU DO. THUS 24-12 = X + X. THEN 12 = 2X. DIVIDE BY TWO, AND X = 6. SO IF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEIR AGES IS 6, ANN MUST BE 18. HOWEVER, WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THIS PROBLEM, I JUST PLAYED WITH IT IN MY HEAD, AND FIGURED THAT THE ANSWER WAS PROBABLY SOMEWHERE AROUND HALFWAY BETWEEN 24 AND 12, AND THAT WORKED. THEN I PROVED IT WITH THE ALGEBRA. FOR ME, THE SOLUTION ALWAYS WAS SIMPLER THAN THE MATH. JENNY DID FIGURE OUT ANN’S AGE, PROBABLY THE SAME WAY I DID: BY JUDGMENT RATHER THAN MATH. YOU MIGHT SAY THAT MATH IS A TOOL FOR THOSE WHO LACK JUDGMENT.

THE REFERENCE TO A BULLY COMES FROM AN INCIDENT THAT JENNY’S MOTHER TOLD ME. THE YEAR BEFORE, JENNY, AGE ELEVEN, HAD MADE A COMPLAINT ABOUT A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD BULLY, JUST STANDING HER GROUND. THEREAFTER HE AMBUSHED HER, BEAT HER UP, CRUSHED HER GLASSES (SHE WAS ALMOST BLIND WITHOUT THEM, HAVING SEVERE VISION PROBLEMS), AND WAS STOPPED ONLY BY THE INTERCESSION OF A NEIGHBOR. ALL BECAUSE SHE HAD TRIED TO RESIST HIS BULLYING. THIS IS A PROBLEM FOR WOMEN WORLDWIDE, IN THEIR DEALINGS WITH MEN. APPARENTLY THIS SORT OF THING WILL NOT BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AS LONG AS MEN GOVERN THE WORLD.