June 1989 
June 1989 Abdominal muscles see their first use in months; will the elven armor be retired? A new chair is ordered. A new companion is gained. Some old stories are retold. An anniversary occurs. And a birthday occurs, maybe.
Jejune 2, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Well, it’s a new month. I just finished last month, with a total of exactly 600 letters for the year to date—and this is the fourth letter this month. I—what? The last letter before this one? Oh, you wouldn’t care about that; it was just to some dull old publisher. So let’s—what do you mean, what publisher? Morrow, if you must know. Now let’s get on to—will you stop interrupting me?! Morrow’s a hardcover publisher, a major one. Now, as I was saying—good grief, girl, you’re as bad as your mother! Once you latch on to something irrelevant, you never let go! All right, it was this: last month the editor at Morrow phoned me and asked whether I would start a story for a New York Book Fair story contest later this year, and be the judge of the winning entry. That is, I would write maybe the first thousand words, and then the contestants who picked that up at the Morrow booth at the fair would finish the story, and I’d decide who did the best job. Well, I was in the middle of writing Isle of View then, but I said I’d do it when I finished the novel. So now the novel is done, awaiting only your word on how your name should be in the Author’s Note, so I wrote the story. It’s titled “Baby,” and it’s about this newspaper reporter who does a feature on black-market baby adoptions, and discovers that no matter what race or sex the babies are, they are all the same age, weight and length, and look like twins. What could account for this? That’s it—the contestants will finish the story, and I dare say some will have it turn out that the babies are really BEMs in disguise, waiting to take over the world. Oh, you don’t know what a BEM is? It’s a Bug-Eyed Monster, a standard item in cheap science fiction. BEMs are always chasing after femmes, which are—oh, you already know that. So my letter was to go with the story. Now aren’t you sorry you were so curious? You should have taken my word that it was dull.
I’m enclosing a few things: last Sunday’s Curtis comic, an item on saving a baby whale—you know, I just decided to join an organization called Greenpeace, that works to preserve aquatic creatures from extinction. Man does horrendous damage to the water folk, as he does to the air folk and the land folk, and if it doesn’t stop soon, there’ll be nothing much left on earth but man, and then man will set about exterminating himself too. I am disgusted. But I try to help save creatures in various ways, and this is one of them. I’m also joining an organization that fights censorship, because that’s something I hate. But I’m wandering from the subject. I’m also enclosing a picture I don’t like, which made me think of you—stop that, I didn’t say I don’t like you. It’s a picture of about six girls seeing the body of a friend appear in the water, their horror manifest. I thought of your friends when that car hit you, and I think that’s the way they looked. In this case, it was a drunken boat driver who ran over another boat and killed five young folk. Yes, they caught him. Our drunk drivers are just as bad as yours, more’s the pity. There’s also another letter enclosed for someone else; if your mother reads “Dear Andrea,” tell her she’s in the wrong letter, and to get on to this one. While you’re telling her things, tell her to do what I do about saving computer files: to program one key for an instant save, and hit that key compulsively every time she pauses. I do that in addition to having an automatic save feature. I’m ornery about problems; I don’t let the same one happen to me twice.
Your mother tells me about your days, which strike me as not much fun. I suspect you are a lot better patient than I would be. Are you able to read, if the book is in front of your face? I mean, I know you can’t just pick it up and hold it there, or move your head around much, but if it were right, could you read, or do your eyes not focus well enough for the small print? I go crazy when I don’t have my glasses on and then I have to read something; all I can see is the general shape of the words, like blocks lined up in rows. But if I wear the glasses, then I get seasick when I look beyond eighteen inches. So I’m forever putting them on and off, unless I’m wearing my half-glasses that I can peer over. A funny thing happened when the writer Jody Lynn Nye was here. I call Jody the Nymph, because she looks just like a nymph, only she wears clothes. She writes the Xanth Gamebooks, such as Ghost of a Chance; I don’t know if you’ve read those. They are where all the puns of Xanth have gone. She and I collaborated on the Visual Guide to Xanth, which is to be published this NoRemember. So she was here, last OctOgre, along with her husband and the artist, and we were talking. Every time I looked at her and put my glasses on, she took hers off. When I took mine off, she put hers on. Hers were just like mine, too. It was weird. Finally I figured it out: she needs her glasses for distance, while I need mine for close work. So I put mine on to focus on her at close range, and she took hers off; then when we looked elsewhere, long range, we switched. I guess you keep yours on all the time, so that doesn’t happen. Anyway, I was in the process of inquiring whether you can read, if the book is right. No, I realize that no one is going to stand there and hold the book in front of your face, and turn the pages when you blink; it would be hard to read, because the book would wobble and be at the wrong slant and all. They’d rather just read it aloud to you. But suppose the print were on a computer screen, and you could in effect turn the pages yourself, by pressing a button under your finger on the armrest? So you could sit there or lie there, with the screen just right, and read at your own pace or snooze in the middle without losing your place. Would you be able to read then, without getting a horrible headache? Because if you could, and would like to, they might be able to set it up that way. And if they could set up with an IBM AT-compatible system, which is what I use now, after four years on the DEC Rainbow, then I could send you a disk with Isle of View on it, and you could read the whole story of Jenny Elf in context. Because of course she’s only part of the story, and there’s a whole lot else going on, but she is intertwined with it throughout. This novel won’t be published until OctOgre 1990, and I wouldn’t want that disk to get into the wrong hands, but if this enabled you to read the novel yourself, even if it took you six months to get through it—well, first you have to decide whether you’re interested, and then your mother has to find out whether it’s possible.
Meanwhile, since your day isn’t all that nice—by my definition, your day won’t be nice enough until you are running through your yard and meeting the ducks who moved in during your absence—let me tell you about mine. I run through my yard—but my yard is an 87 acre tree farm. So my running route is 2.9 miles, from the house down along the forest path, beside the lake, through all the oak and magnolia and hickory trees, to the pump, where I prime it and pump the old bathtub full for the horses, then start my stopwatch again and run on through the slash pines, the dragonflies racing playfully with me and the blackflies trying to bite me, up to the gate at the north. Then back down through pines and oaks, taking a shortcut I carved for the horses, to the other side of our house, by which time I’m close to half way through my run. Then up the paved drive to the little magnolia tree, where, you know, nitrogen—STOP LAUGHING! THE NURSES ARE STARING AT YOU—and on up to the main entrance, which is about the three-quarter mark of my run. Then around and back down that drive to the house. Today I ran that run in twenty-three minutes and forty-one seconds, which is okay for me. It’s one sweat of a workout, I assure you, especially since the temperature was 90° F. But that’s how I keep healthy. I’m in my fifties, you know. If my first child had lived, I could have had a grandchild your age by now. Have you ever noticed how the old and the young understand each other better than the folk in between do? I saw a cartoon once, showing three people emerging from a movie. The posters said “Great fun for young and old!” The old man and the boy were laughing their heads off, while the ordinary man in the middle was looking blank. So then I came in and took my shower and washed my hair, which is dull business, so I sing in the shower, trusting no one can hear. Those old folk songs I memorized when I was your age. “Nicodemus” and “Danny Boy” and funny sea-songs and love songs and such; I like everything if it’s folk. I don’t know if you know most of the songs I know. If we ever meet, and no one else is around, I’ll sing some for you, but you’ll have to promise no one else can overhear; you know how it is. One of the funny ones goes like this: “My sweetheart’s the mule in the mine; I drive her without any lime; on the bumper I sit, and I chew and I spit, all over my sweetheart’s behind.” One of the serious ones is “The Ohio,” pronounced O-hi-O, about a man who drowns his girlfriend because she refuses to be his bride. A song can be ugly but beautiful, as I guess you know. Then lunch and here to this letter. After this I’ll have to proofread 27 fan letter answers the secretary typed and pack them off. Then, tomorrow, I can return to work on the story I have to do for someone else’s anthology, and finally get to work on my real project, Tatham Mound, about the American Indians who encountered Hernando de Soto. No it’s not fantasy, it’s historical and archaeological. If you promise not to tell, I’ll tell you a secret about that. Do you promise? No, I won’t accept a stuck-out tongue as an answer; I demand a firm blink. Okay, the secret is this: I got interested in archaeology because my daughter Cheryl was getting into it, and the local folk discovered an untouched Indian burial mound right here in Citrus County, Florida. That’s a rare thing; there are few if any left, and the culture of these Indians is unknown, because they all disappeared. What happened to them? Maybe this mound had the answer. What was needed was to excavate that mound scientifically, studying the placement of every bone and arrowhead and piece of crockery. But that would cost money, and there wasn’t money. So I gave the University of Florida the money to do it, and my daughter Cheryl worked on it, and now we know much more about those Indians than before, and I will write a novel to bring them to life and show how they perished. It’s a tragedy, all right; they were wiped out by plagues brought by the Spaniards. The evidence was in that mound. I expect this to be the most significant novel of my career, and tomorrow I get to work on it. But I don’t want folk knowing about the money yet, because then everybody would be asking me for money, and I just wanted that mound to get done. Uh, no, it couldn’t be left untouched, once discovered, because poachers would come and destroy it, as has been the case with most of the other mounds of Florida; that’s why so little is known about the local Indians. So it was excavated with respect, and my novel will really make the case for those Indians. I know what their land was like, because I live in it, and I know how the white man treated them. Forget about cowboys and Indians; this is a serious novel.
Sigh; I have rambled on for three pages. Well, you’re a good listener. Let me check your mother’s last letter, which just arrived today. She says you haven’t had a chance to answer about how you want your name in the Author’s Note. Well, let me know, so I can do it right and ship the novel off to New York. There is one more thing you maybe should know: I’ll be dedicating the novel to you, just to “Jenny,” however it is in the Author’s Note. Then folk can wonder who you are, until they find out at the end.
Your mother says they are setting up to rework your house, so that you can buzz around it in your blazing red wheelchair. She says she’s trying to figure out how to fit twice as much computer into half the space, and asks “ten pounds of dung in a five pound bag?” Another term for that description is—oops, there’s the Adult Conspiracy again. Well, I’ll sneak it in in brackets, so no one knows about my violation of the Conspiracy. The term is [blivet]. Don’t throw it around carelessly. Speaking of dirty things: she says that Ray’s car is now called the “Nitrogen Pot.” That must be some car! She also says she doesn’t drive much now. But after your accident—well, I had a car accident, back in the first year I was married. I was looking for an address, and took my eye off the road at the wrong moment, as I hit a reverse-banked turn. I lost control and sailed off a six foot bank at 40 miles per hour. I didn’t know whether I would wake after hitting ground. I remember the car going over and over. But I survived with only a bashed shoulder. I found my head in the back seat; this was before seat belts existed, and you bet I use them always now, as does every member of my family. The car was back on its feet and facing back the way it had corae. So it was a complete rollover and turnabout. I never recovered my confidence in driving, and I do little driving today. I taught both my daughters to drive, as I have a better temperament for that than my wife does, and now I’m satisfied to ride with them or my wife. Once a person has been truly touched by the disaster that an automobile accident can be, he or she does not forget. That may have figured into my attitude when I completed the novel of the young man who was killed by a careless driver, and with you. It’s one reason I don’t like to travel. My daughter Penny had an accident in thick smoke, and now she’s shy of foggy conditions.
Look, I have to stop; those fan letters are looming over me. Tell your mother I’ll send her another copy of the Note once we have it straight, and we’ll see how my family does on the “Choosing Sides” test she sent. My daughter Cheryl is home from college for the summer; she’ll be working at the local newspaper, driving (ugh!) in each day.
Oh, I almost forgot: the wrens grew up and departed the nest, and I didn’t get to see Wrenny go. Sigh; if you’re not there right at the right time, they sneak out. So have as good a day as you can, Jenny, and no, you don’t have to go over again the parts of this letter you slept through. I’ll keep the next one shorter, I hope.
Jejune 9, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Ha—I finally heard from your mother, who says you suggest putting Jenny G. for your name. So G. it is. I’ll set that up and run it off this weekend, so the publisher can finally see what it’s paying for. Oops—revise this paragraph! I heard from your mother again, and she said no, you preferred Jenny Gildwarg. Okay, I’ll do that, and if you change your mind later, the reference can be changed before publication.
Meanwhile, how are things here? Well, we have more magnolias blooming; all our trees above a certain size seem to intend to put out at least one flower this season, and there is one just off our property that has one tiny branch reaching across the fence onto our land—and that’s the branch that does the blooming. I think those trees like us. We also have passion flowers and fruit all over the place. The flowers are lovely purple circles, and the fruit looks like limes, but we don’t know whether it’s edible. If it is, we could call it a passion fruit farm, because it grows every-where, including our fences, and it tries to tie our gate shut. The wrens, having left the nest, don’t visit or call, ungrateful birds. I found a pretty scarlet snake near our mailbox—that’s a name, not a description. It looks like an imitation king snake, and the king snake looks like an imitation coral snake, and yes, we do have coral snakes here, and we like them. The poison is deadly, but they are harmless, because they’re small and don’t look for trouble. Spiders build webs across our drive and my running path, which is a problem. I don’t like to mess up a spider web, but when I come running full speed around a corner, wham, I may be into it before I can stop.
Remember the prisoner on Death Row? I don’t think you want to correspond with him, and I haven’t given him your identity any more than I’ve given you his. But he has a message for you: “Atari was developing an eye-controlled joystick/games. Perhaps she could use it for communication. The address is Atari Corp. 1196 Borregas Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086, Tel: (408) 745-2367. I don’t know if they still make it, or who they should talk to, but it would be worth the effort. Computer companies like to help (great PR), so if the situation was explained … And, given Atari’s price—even if they had to pay $40 for a 2600 or $130 for a 130XE computer would be nothing compared to what she will get. (Incidentally, my computers were: Jenny, Jenny Jr., Son of Jenny. Yes they were!) I only wish I could present it myself. Give them my address. I’d like to write to her—if they don’t mind. And, I don’t like ‘crimes like that'; I despise ALL crimes (DWI, robbery, white collar, political crime, discrimination/reverse discrimination.) To me crime is violence/violence is crime.”
Okay, I have relayed his message, but not his address, because I don’t think I would be doing you a favor. This person is seriously disturbed, and at present is asking me not to write to him again because he feels I’m too decent. He’s not used to decent treatment, and has trouble relating to it. I can give his address if you want it, and you could write to him as you do to me, if your mother does not throw a fit, but I don’t recommend it.
I understand that they are making you exercise to try to build up your middle muscles, so you can sit up better. That’s probably a pain, but still worthwhile, because you need to be able to put it all together if you want to get walking sooner rather than later. I also understand that they want to change your red racer wheelchair to one with a seat/shoulder harness. That’s probably so that you won’t go flying out if you put on the brakes too quickly.
Stray thought, speaking of speed: did you notice how you moved to Warp 7, and then you heard from WaRP, the Elfquest folk? Cause and effect; what else? I’m going to ask them if they would like to do the cover for the novel, if the publisher agrees. I feel they could do Jenny Elf best. The picture probably wouldn’t look too much like you, but that might be best, because you wouldn’t want to pass people on the street and have them keep stopping and staring and saying “Hey! Aren’t you that elf who helped the centaur foal?”
Meanwhile, having completed the Xanth novel, I’m into my next, Tatham Mound. This chapter is a tale adapted from the Popol Vuh, the sacred text of the Quiche Maya. My Indians are here in Florida, but there’s a girl whose mother was a fugitive from the civilized Maya region (they wanted her to marry an Aztec chief, and the Aztecs were really into ritual human sacrifices), and so she brought her heritage with her. You say that’s too farfetched; you can’t imagine anyone’s mother doing that? You can’t fool me; I know you know of a case yourself. So we learn the tale, and it’s a phenomenal one. There’s this girl, Xquic, which I think is pronounced Shkeek, who goes to a tree where there is skull-like fruit and one real skull, and she talks with the skull, and it drips a drool of saliva into her hand, and she becomes pregnant with twins, who will go to avenge their father’s death. No, that’s not the way it’s normally done, but the Mayas didn’t use storks. It’s a fascinating tale. When her father sees her pregnant he gets upset; in fact he orders her heart to be cut out and burned. Discipline was firmer in those days, you see. But she talks the men who are to sacrifice her into taking the blood-red sap of a tree and forming a heart-shape out of that, and they take that back and it fools the others. But her problems aren’t over. So you can see that this is no dry treatise on Indian lore; I mean to do right by those Indians.
Tell your mother I took the brain-sides test she sent, and my score was Left = 76, R = 129 and I = 95, which makes me a right-brained person. The description fits—but so do the descriptions for left-brains and mixed-brains and integrated-brains, so it means nothing much. It reminds me of the Kuder Preference Test I took in college, that concluded I should be a writer of math textbooks. I could hardly think of anything I less wanted to do! I mean, would you like to write math textbooks? The problem with these tests is that they force unrealistic, nitpicking choices. You want to know what it’s like? Okay, try this: Question One: would you like to eat a bug, or a worm, or either? If you try to say “Yuck! I wouldn’t do any of those!” you are an uncooperative client, and maybe you should be put in reform school. If you say you would rather eat the bug, then the analysis will show that you have a morbid attraction for hairy-legged things. If the worm, then you like squiggling cold things. So you could wind up being a taster for a roach motel. This is one reason I don’t do well on standardized tests; I always have too many objections that the test makers don’t appreciate.
But some readers are pretty perceptive. Today I received a fat envelope from the National Institute of Dyslexia. The woman writing works there, and says she’s noticed dyslexic aspects of my writing, and inquires whether I or any member of my family is dyslexic. Now that’s interesting, because she doesn’t mention my Incarnations Notes or Bio of an Ogre; apparently she picked it up from my Adept series and my would-be horror novel Shade of the Tree, wherein I have a hyperkinetic dyslexic boy. I don’t think I’m dyslexic, but I did take three years to get out of first grade. Certainly my mind is different—oh, you had noticed?—but it’s my wife who says “Go left!” while pointing right. A friend came to a screeching stop midway between the forks of a super-highway split once, when she did that. Still, we do have a dyslexic daughter. No I can’t just dismiss the letter; she wants to nominate me for a dyslexic achievement award. I’ll try to discourage her, because I think I’m ornery but not dyslexic.
We had a lot of rain this past week. We have a pool, and the water was up to 82°F, and I figured one more scorching hot day would bring it up to swimmable temperature—I freeze below bathwater level—and then the rains and clouds came and cooled it four degrees. Sigh. Those storms always sneak up on us, when my wife has laundry out drying. You hear plink, plink, and you think it’s the eaves dripping. Then WHOOSH!! and it’s a drenchpour. We dashed out anyway and scrambled in the laundry from the line. I’m sure your mother knows exactly how that’s done. It reminds me of an old alarm clock I had when your age. It would go dink, dinkdink, dink, dink-dink gently for thirty seconds. If by that time you hadn’t gotten up and turned it off, it would abruptly go BBBBRRRRIIINGGGG!! and send you up to clutch at the ceiling.
Are you asleep yet? I figure your folks use these letters to lull you to sleep. No? Oh. Well, it’s Enclosure time. One I won’t enclose: a solicitation from the National Gardening Association for money, saying “Kids like Jenny are counting on you!” I didn’t know you were working for them, but it does seem to make sense. They also say: “And from her wheelchair, young Jenny makes one of the most joyful discoveries of all: that gardening is really a nine-letter word for ‘freedom.’ “ Well, I don’t know; if four-letter words are bad, what about nine-letter words? I am enclosing a clipping telling of a man who is marrying a woman, and his son is dating her mother. You see what goes on in the outside world while you’re in the hospital? And a picture and article about a miniature deer, and Curtis, and a couple I thought you might relate to: man unable to move well, and woman pushing a boulder up a hill. This business of getting your body back, bit by bit—I figure at times it feels like that.”
Jejune 10—Now for my morning-after paragraph. I had done this letter, then last night your mother called me, telling me that it was Jenny Gildwarg rather than Jenny G. As long as I’m here again, let me fill in what I forgot yesterday. Despite the jokes and things, I don’t take your situation lightly. When I walk in the forest—it’s really more like a jungle—you are in my mind, and when I see interesting things I think “Jenny would like that,” and I picture you trying to bump along across the forest floor in your wheelchair and I realize it’s a foolish thought; you’d have to stick to the road, which fortunately goes by most of the magnolias and up Ogre Drive and past the bunny section and the heron section and the lines of pines. I think of you a lot, Jenny, and it lends meaning to what I see, whether it’s a squirrel or a pretty flower others might call a weed. I understand how your mother feels, with the flowers, thinking of you. The truth is, it may seem dull and lonely in that hospital, but the thoughts of many of us are with you, if only this were the Elfquest world and you could receive those thoughts directly. When I mention you to correspondents, without details, they express concern and sympathy. Jenny, if you went to a fantasy convention with a name-tag saying Jenny Elf, you would discover how many friends you have, and how they care for you. I think one day that will happen.
Jejune 16, 1989
Dear Jenny,
I hope your day is good because mine is. What, because it’s Jenny-letter day? Well, that too. But mainly it means that things have been falling into place for me, intellectually and physically. For example, this morning I was reading in a dull book about Florida history, because I need information on the Calusa Indians who lived in South Florida, and I wasn’t finding much, but I plowed on—and then suddenly I encountered phenomenal stuff about their marriage and death customs. No, don’t start scowling; this is neither dirty nor grim.
But first an interruption, because at this point my wife came home from a shopping spree with two recliner chairs, so naturally I had to dash out to unload and carry them into the house, and that was a job because I no longer have the muscle I used to before the tenonitis wiped out my arm exercises, but we struggled and heaved and shoved and managed to get them in before the storm that was trying to catch us in the act broke. They’re nice chairs; they’re soft and comfortable, and they swivel and rock, and they lean back to two levels, so you can relax for watching TV or go all the way back and snooze. If you think we’re crazy to huff and puff to haul these into our family room, just wait till you see what your mother’s hauling into your house: an elevator. Can you imagine your mother carrying an elevator? No wonder she gets tired!
I was about to tell you about the Calusa Indians. No, don’t look like that; your mother gets all up in a heavel when you make that face, and she’s already dis-heaveled from carrying that elevator. The Indians are interesting. You challenge me to prove it? All right, I will, but you have to listen. Nuh-uh—you have to keep your tongue in your mouth, too. (You thought I wouldn’t see? Ha!)
First, it turns out that the Chief likes to keep things in the family, so he might marry his sister. When he got tired of her, he’d kick her out and take a younger, prettier wife. In one case he had his son marry her, after he was tired of her. Right; that was a mother and son marriage, and they had several children. I mean, just how close can a family get? But now the death customs: they believed that each person had three souls, one in the pupil of the eye, one in the shadow, and one in the reflection. When the person got sick, it was because he’d lost a soul, and they had to herd it back in the way you’d herd a wild animal, cornering it and forcing it back, until it reluctantly returned to the person, and he got well. When the person died, he lost two of his souls. But the one in the eye remained. That meant that if a living person went to the place of burial, he could talk with that third soul. The Spaniards who conquered Florida in the 16th century remarked that there must be something to it, because an Indian who had gone to talk with a dead relative came to know things he could not otherwise have known. Right—because the dead can see more than we can. I think this makes a lot of sense, and it explains some things that have perplexed me before. But it relates beautifully to my story in Tatham Mound, because there my protagonist (main character) has a bad experience, and spends a night by a burial mound, and communes with the chief spirit of that mound, Dead Eagle, who tells him that he must find the Ulunsuti, which is the terrible colorless diamond crystal, the most powerful talisman known; one look at it even in a person’s sleep can bring death not to him but to his family. Think about that for a moment: that’s one deadly stone! If he doesn’t find it, his whole tribe will be wiped out. So he sets out to find it, and on the way he meets the nine year old girl whose mother was a Maya, and she tells him the story of “Little Blood” I told you about last week. But mainly he’s checking in with all the burial mounds, to inquire of their spirits where to find the Ulunsuti, and of course some of those spirits refuse to tell him. Now he’s passing through Calusa territory. So now I know how it is that he can speak with those spirits: because one of their three souls remains. Now admit it: wasn’t that interesting? Oh—you already knew? Sigh.
So that was my morning research; soon I’ll be writing that chapter, and it should be a good one. This isn’t Xanth, but by the time it is written and published you’ll be older, and you may even enjoy reading it. Who knows, you might get interested in the American Indians and become a world famous scholar.
But I was telling you about my day. It’s a running day, and I needed a haircut, so my wife cut my hair just before I ran, and naturally in the middle of that a man came delivering 110 reams of computer paper. His little girl was with him, maybe five years old; we showed her the wren nest, and I told her how we once had little girls, but then they grew up and went to college. That’s what they do, you know; you’ll be doing it too, in due course. Don’t shake your head at me; I tell you I know, because I’ve seen it before. You’ll grow up and get educated and get married and move to Hawaii or somewhere and send your mother a postcard each Christmas, for which she will be duly grateful. Anyway, we got the paper in, then finished the haircut, and I trimmed my beard. Then I ran—and sure enough, with all the weight off my head, it was my fastest run of the year and the second fastest ever, on this track. (I used to run much faster, but I was younger then, still in my 40’s). When I run I time it, and I sort of run a race with myself, against all my other runs. At the first quarter I was tied for fastest, but at the half I had dropped back to sixth place. But then I began overhauling those other selves, and by the three quarter mark I had passed three of them and was third. By the time I finished, I passed another, and so was second overall. But the thing is, those other fast runs were made in winter, when the temperature was about 70°F; today it was 90°. So I’m very pleased with this run.
The other nice thing that happened a few days ago was word from a man who had happened to be in a book store, waiting for his wife, and he saw people buying my novel But What of Earth?. That’s a novel I wrote about fourteen years ago, but the copy-editors rewrote it and in my judgment destroyed it. So now I have had it republished, by a different publisher, with every word restored to the original version—plus 25,000 words of comment about what I thought of the editing. Your mother will have fiendish delight reading that one; it’s a case where the worm turned and just about destroyed the wrongdoer. So I hope that that store was typical, and that all over the country people are buying it, and that they enjoy it when they read it.
Meanwhile, what else is new here? Well, our horses are doing fine; some day I’ll tell you all about them, because they can be very nice when you get to know them. Last week I mowed the lawn, which was nervous business, because before I hadn’t seen one of my wife’s sets of plants in time and mowed it flat. Ouch! But several were day-lily bulbs and they put out new leaves without trouble, and the last one was the kind of plant you can grow from a single leaf, and now it has put out half a dozen new leaves from its decapitated stem, so it survived too. Phew! When I mowed, I encountered a big box turtle in the front, and another in back; I think they come to eat our grass, which is fine. There isn’t much grass in the forest; in fact, we have about all of it. I also saw a toad, and mowed carefully to avoid it. Later I saw another turtle, just two inches long.
And a new color of dragonfly: deep black-blue, verging on purple, handsome creatures. I do like those dragonflies, because they’re so pretty, being all shades of green, blue, brown and yellow, and because they eat the flies that would otherwise be chomping us and our horses. On my last run, not today’s, I stopped at the magnolia tree—never mind why—and a deerfly sat on my leg to bite me, and a green dragonfly swooped in and grabbed it. You can’t ask for better service than that! Then one evening we were watching TV, a James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, which it turned out we hadn’t seen before—I thought we had seen them all—and my wife went out to check something near the pool, and there was a four foot long rat snake. It had come in because the screen door hadn’t quite closed. We know that rat snake; it circles the house in its quest for rats or whatever. But we were afraid it would fall in the pool and drown, so we had to get it out. Probably I just should have picked it up, as it’s harmless. But four feet long? I was wary. So we just sort of herded it around and toward the open screen door, and finally it went out. Next morning there was an item in the newspaper about a harmless four foot snake loose on a jetliner. So that’s where that snake went! You doubt? Okay, I’m enclosing the clipping. So you see, it’s been an interesting week.
As usual, I have an envelope full of clippings for you. Is it true that you make your mother make copies of all of them? They really aren’t that important, just things I think you’ll like in passing. The Marmaduke comic on back of the Curtis is funny too. There’s a Ziggy cartoon you may appreciate. There’s a girl and horse picture that’s so pretty I just had to share it with you. There’s a Doonesbury comic, splatted with ink; all week long they had trouble with the careless cartoonist, and got pretty fed up about it. And there’s a picture of a house in pine trees: I can take or leave the house, but oh, those pines! You’ll have to let me know if you don’t like getting deluged with these things; when I see something interesting, I say “Jenny would like that,” and I save it for you. I’m also enclosing a more recent printout of the Author’s Note in Isle of View for your mother. Once I knew how you wanted your name given, I went over it and naturally made four times as many changes as I expected—your mother’s friend Andrea Alton can tell you how that is—and printed it out and shipped the novel off to my agent. I think it’s a good novel, and not just because of Jenny Elf. I’m showing it also to Richard and Wendy Pini, so they can correct any errors I may have made in describing an Elfquest elf.
So let me know how you’re doing. I write about myself mostly because there’s not a lot to write about you. I mean, what’s the point in inquiring about all the things you did, when I guess it’s pretty routine therapy? But it’s important even if it’s dull. I hope you are still making progress out of that pit, inch by inch, and please do let me know when you break through to something new.
Know something? It’s now 5:30 P.M., time to feed the horses, and it’s raining. Hard. How do I get out to feed them? Pretty soon Blue will neigh to remind me, and I hate to get neighed at, because it makes me feel guilty. Those horses expect to be fed on time. Sigh.
Jejune 23, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Growr! Remember when I told you that the computer is out to get you? Well, it still is. Let me go back to a lot of dull relevant detail to clarify this. No, don’t tune out. This is my letter and you have to listen to it, or you get magic itch-dust down your back. And on your tongue, if you stick it out. Ha, I thought that would make you behave! The secret in getting along with folk is knowing the right threat to make them do what you want.
You see, this week I got a program called QDos that enables me to do mass file handling better. Your mother will tell you all about that sort of thing, if you give her a quarter of a chance. I like the program very well; in fact I discovered when I used it that my chapter about “Little Blood” was way too small, and I looked at it and found that only the first paragraph was there. I had the whole 15,000 word thing on my backup disk, so I could restore it, but that gave me a scare. If I had erased that backup disk, thinking I had it on the hard disk, I could have been in a week’s worth of trouble, after calling your mother an idiot for doing similar. She would have done a dance of fiendish glee. So I’m glad to have QDos, that tells me the size of the files it lists, so I can see if anything is wrong. I installed it on my upstairs system, with the color monitor, and lo, it addresses color, and I had all manner of pretty colors of print and lines and such. Then I was showing someone how I could change the color in my word processor, Sprint, too, all except the actual page of print, when lo, I hit a different button and the page changed color. I can change that too! So I wasted an hour or more, foolishly, changing colors, finding out exactly what I liked best. Now I have yellow print on a red background, and bold shows up in bright white, and underline in dull black, and highlighting in white with a blue background, and so on. If you have a chance to get a color monitor, do it; you’ll have endless fun playing with the colors, even without a paintbrush program. You could type a fiery red letter when something upsets you, for example.
Well. Now I’m downstairs on the backup system, no colors (sigh), but because QDos makes things so easy, I made a JENNY directory with 20 letters: 14 Jennys, 4 Mothers, and 2 Altons. This is the 21th letter for it. I used QD to move into it—with that program I can call up a “Tree” and travel along that tree by moving the cursor, and when I touch < return > I’m in the directory the cursor is on. It’s like climbing a real tree, only easier, and fun. I can copy or move files the same way. So there I was in the JENNY Directory, with all the Jenny letters piled up around me. I set up for this one, and hit my “letter” glossary entry to get my address and the date and all in one swell foop—and it balked. It said there was no such entry. So I used QD to check the glossary file, and that entry was there. So I tried it again, and it still said it wasn’t, and furthermore my “jenny” glossary entry wasn’t either. I hauled in my wife and showed her. Apparently it couldn’t read those entries from the subdirectory. So I went back to the parent directory, which is LETTERS, and tried again. Still no go. Growr! Finally I reset, and tried it, and all was working. I went back to the JENNY directory, and now everything works. Apparently the computer just decided to get me, for no reason. That’s the way computers are, as I told you. Did your mother tell you how my disk-reading technique saved her hash, for no sensible reason? When you’re dealing with nonsense, sometimes you can handle it by inputting nonsense.
Otherwise, how are things? Well, it’s our anniversary today; my wife and I have been married 33 years. And I’ve been having good runs. Remember how my run last week was the fastest for this year? Well, the next run was faster yet, and broke my record on this track. The one after that was breaking that record through two miles, then pooped out and came in second. Today was slower again; these things don’t last. It was a good series, anyway. So what’s the moral? Oh, you thought you could get away without one? No such luck! Here I am, still knocking seconds off my runs for no good reason except that I do them, and I try as hard on the slow runs as I do on the fast ones. My body varies in performance, is all. I’ll never come close to the seven minute miles I was running before I turned 50—soon I’ll be turning 55, and I’ll tell you my birthday if you’ll tell me yours—but I still do the best I can. Okay, so there you are, in your boards and straps and things, and somehow it seems that you’ll never get back to where you were before. But there’s no certainty of that. You could stop where you are now, or you could keep on improving until it’s as if you never were in any trouble. We don’t know how it will turn out. But you can make a big difference. So just as I hope I am promoting my health by running, I hope you’re promoting yours by doing those dull exercises. Even sessions that seem to be making no progress, or to be worse than before, may be improving you in ways that don’t show, so that somewhere down the line you will improve a lot. Keep it in mind.
I’ve been meaning to tell you of some of the other songs I sing when I’m taking my shower after my run. Today I sang a couple I think you would like. I like forests, you see, and romance, and animals, and happiness, and music—am I boring you? Oh, you mean you like these things too. Sorry, I guess I misread the signal. So I like songs about these things, and I always did, because I memorized these songs back when I was your age, which was some time ago. One of them is titled “The Happy Plowman,” and it goes: “Near a house near the wood, with a horse very good, a poor young farmer smiled as he stood. Looking down at his plow, in his heart was a glow, and he sang as he plowed the row: High-ho, my little Buttercup, we’ll dance until the sun comes up! Thus he sang as he plowed, and he smiled as he sang, while the woods and the welkin rang.” The second verse is about his helpmate in the house, who is lovely and good, and she echoes his song while the pots and the kettles ring. You know, I always thought Buttercup was the horse, but suddenly I realize that he may be thinking of his wife in the house. The other little song about the forest I like even better: “To the Woodland.” It goes: “To the woodland longs my heart, longs my heart forever; there my heart will always be, this no man can sever; in the woodland far away there lives my darling loved one.” Then the second verse: “Though the path is dark and long, rocky steep and narrow, though the wood is cold and dark, this brings me no sorrow; cares will vanish when I go to see her on the morrow.” Now isn’t that romantic? Well, you’d agree if you could hear it; it’s a pretty melody, with a lot of feeling. Love in the woods—what could be better than that? We shall have to get together sometime and sing some songs.
So what else is new? Well, today I received a plaque for the Phoenix Award, which I won in 1980. Only nine years late. It was awarded at DeepSouthCon, and I never received the plaque. So finally I have it, and it’s nice. I halfway agreed to go to a convention in Atlanta next Mayhem, so maybe they are encouraging me.
Meanwhile, I’m doing research for my novel Tatham Mound. You say you don’t care about that, just Xanth? Sigh, okay. Yesterday I had a call from the editor at Avon; he had received Isle of View but hadn’t read it yet. He was calling about a chapter of For Love of Evil that they will include in Man From Mundania, a teaser to encourage folk to buy the other novel and maybe increase my sales. But while I had him on the line, I asked whether Avon would be interested in having an Elfquest cover—that is, one done by Richard and Wendy Pini. I’m thinking of Jenny Elf with Che Centaur. I think it would be a cute cover. We’re also pondering whether to do a limited hardcover edition of that one, for which the special cover might be nice. Avon will think about it. But I don’t know yet whether the Elfquest folk would want to do such a cover. So this may come to nothing. But if it should work out, you just might wind up on the cover of the novel. Or did I say that before, too? Sigh again. Why didn’t you stop me before I repeated myself?
Now may I talk about Mound? Okay, if I keep it short? Sigh. You know the girl is only nine years old at this point—oh, you’re interested after all? You see, the main character is a fifteen year old Indian male who gets wounded by an arrow and is being pursued by the enemy. He hides and drags himself to an old burial mound, a sacred place, where he passes out. He has a vision, wherein he talks with Dead Eagle, the spirit of the mound, and the spirit tells him he must find the Ulunsuti, the—what? Oh, I told you about that last week? Sigh; I get so forgetful in my dotage. Everything I try to tell you, I’ve told you before! Anyway, the spirit also takes away his fear, and he heads off, looking for that magic crystal so he can save his people. On that trip he meets the little girl, called Wren because she’s so small, but actually her name is Tzec and her mother was Mayan. A scene I thought I wrote two years ago, and evidently didn’t, I put in today: they find a rattlesnake in the canoe, and he takes it in his good hand and helps it out, so it can slither off into the bushes on land. The Indians were more afraid of rattlers than we are, because they don’t dare kill them, because the snakes' spirits would return to destroy them. So everyone is staring, and then he realizes that the spirit really did take away his fear. What he doesn’t know is that he’s going to marry that girl—in fifteen years, when they meet again. So it’s a romance, but they don’t know that at this point. The spirit of the mound knew, though. Now admit it: wasn’t that interesting? There’s more to life than Xanth, you know. Maybe not a lot more, but some more.
Would you believe: I received a letter from the National Institute of Dyslexia. Someone there had read some of my novels, and concluded that they had a dyslexic flavor about them. They want to nominate me for an award for doing well in life despite dyslexia. As it happens, I do have a dyslexic daughter, and I did take three years to get through first grade, and even my friends admit there is something strange about the way my mind works—but I don’t think it’s dyslexia. So I told them that I probably wasn’t eligible. But it seems that dyslexics do succeed in life. Keep that in mind, in case you had any doubt.
Your mother’s letter of the 12th reached me Saturday the 17th, after I had mailed my last letter. So I’ll comment on it now. She enclosed two pictures, of you and your cat sweater. You do look like a clown, or like a butterfly, pinned to your board. When you get closer to walking—I realize you aren’t there yet—I wonder whether they have those walkers the old folk use, that are like chairs that sort of plant themselves down, and you hold on to the top part and can’t fall over? If your arms were strong enough, you could walk with one of those even if the rest of your body were made out of cooked noodles. She also enclosed a satiric column on hunting with semiautomatic weapons. In one of my Incarnations novels I arrange for magic so that the deer could shoot back; I have nothing but disgust and loathing for folk who like to gun down harmless creatures for the “sport” of it. Oh—and tell your mother I had a letter from Andrea Alton, and have answered it. She thought I had misunderstood parts of her novel, but I hadn’t.
Some enclosures, some of which are for your mother. The ones for you are Curtis, and one about girls who broke into a home and wrote praises to God on paper there. The police probably won’t put them in jail: they are ages four and six. Another is about a test—no, don’t turn off your mind yet!—that a newspaper published. It was a statewide high school achievement test, and copies of the answer key had been stolen, and students were buying them. Now you know what that means: the cheaters would make high scores, and the honest ones would not do as well. That sort of bothers me. So the newspaper bought one of those stolen copies, then published it on its front page, so everybody would have the same advantage and the test would be fair. So what did the school authorities do? They canceled the test, and threatened to sue the newspaper. They weren’t bothered by the cheaters, just the newspaper that stopped the cheating. Don’t go to a school system like that! Which reminds me: I’m reading myself to sleep on a book about Scientology. If you haven’t heard of that cult, you’re lucky. Scientology was started by a science fiction writer, which goes to show that even science fiction writers can’t always be trusted. Reading this book is like turning over rocks and watching the bugs underneath. So don’t join any cults, either. Not even ones that promise to save the world.
Now I have to handle a couple of business letters and get back to the chore of checking and signing contracts. You never saw anything as complicated and messy as those contracts! It took so long to get them straightened out that I wrote the whole first novel meanwhile: that was Isle of View. So it’s a pile of contracts for four books, four copies each, about eight pages each. What a mess. Of course there’s a whole lot of money involved. Still, I’d rather just be writing. Maybe you better not grow up to be a novelist. You can be an artist instead, or a mathematician—not funny? Sorry. I’ve put my foot in it so many times in this letter that maybe one more doesn’t matter.
Tomorrow your mother’s next letter will arrive, as the Post Orifice takes four days to deliver it. The PO is nearly as bad as a computer when it comes to messing up connections. Meanwhile, have a halfway decent day, Jenny, and a better one if you can manage it.
Jejune 30, 1989
Dear Jenny,
I just finished a four page Family letter—I do one each month, and this time Family Letter Day and Jenny Letter day came together. No, you can’t have four pages; I’m pooped out. No, that’s not a bad word, so stop sniggering.
I understand you have a new roommate, called Cathy. Hi, Cathy! Just don’t stay awake all night giggling, you two. I remember when a neighbor had two daughters whom my daughter Penny liked, called June and Cathy. One day I went by and called “Hi, Juney! Hi, Cath!” Just wait till the nurses get confused and call you two Jenthy and Cathny. Don’t tell her about the nitrogen—you say you already did? Ouch!
Okay, to business: sure enough, your mother’s letter arrived just after I sent my last. Her next one arrived yesterday, but it didn’t tell me what I wanted to know: when’s your birthday? Somewhere recently she mentioned about doing something when you were 113 and she was 134; from that I suspect that if you haven’t just turned 13, you are thinking of doing it pretty soon. I could probably even figure out your mother’s age, if higher math weren’t so difficult. Here, at any rate, is a birthday present from my wife. She has been slowly working on a cushion for you, with your name and a Xanth motif, and last month she completed the stitching, and this month she got it blocked out and assembled. Her initials are on it, XXX (we’re in Mundania, remember; when she’s with me at a convention, folks call her Mrs. Anthony, but there is no such person in Mundania), so you know who made it. Harpy Birthday, Jenny!
Something not really related: yesterday I got a half hour video tape called Nothing But Zooms, which is an animation of the Mandelbrot Set. Remember, I told you about it some time back? Your mother went crazy trying to find an illustration of it, but I don’t think she succeeded. Well, this starts with the glowing original “Bug” (I don’t know what they call it, but it looks like a tick to me) and slowly zooms in on its edge, so that you see finer and finer detail. It starts again, from another angle, and shows another aspect. It just keeps doing this, taking you through a wonderland of weird and lovely forms. Jenny, you don’t need to do any math for this; all you have to do is appreciate beauty when you see it. Are you able to watch a video tape? Surely they can connect one to your TV set. I want to get another copy of this video and send it to you so you can watch it. If it bores you, then you don’t have to watch it again, but I suspect you’ll find it as fascinating as I do, and will want to watch it over and over. Then, when you’re done with that, maybe your daddy will sneak in a video of Indiana Jones or something, and you and Cathy can watch it in secret, once you have the video cassette player in your room. Let’s face it: you don’t get a whole lot of fun, this year, and you might as well get what you can while you’re recovering.
Tell your mother that that essay I wrote for THE WRITER, that mentions you, is now in print in the AWGhost issue. But they typoed Elfquest, so now it reads Elquist. I see I had typoed it myself, leaving out the “f” but they worsened it. What will Richard and Wendy Pini say? Oh, dread.
Meanwhile, things have been interesting here. After we mailed my last letter to you, the power failed, and it was 21 hours before they got it restored so it stayed. It seems that lightning struck at the edge of our line, and blew out all the breakers so that the neighborhood for miles around was dark. The repairmen said they’d never seen such a blast before. Our most-of-a-mile-long underground line blew out in three places; they had to trace it down and use a giant backhoe to dig it out and repair it. We used oil lamps and candles. It was the day after our 33rd anniversary, so we went out to RAX to eat and called it a celebration of the occasion. Do they have RAX in your area? It’s ideal for vegetarians, because they have everything in the salad bar, including wonderful cream of broccoli soup and bean stuff so you can make your own burritos, as well as all the vegetables. I always pig out on three kinds of pudding: chocolate, butterscotch and vanilla. Yes, I realize you can’t go there just yet, and that you’re not eating that way yet, but you’re going to, right? Once you get back to regular eating, and you get to go home, then you can go out to a place like that and pig out on pudding. Anyway, such was our weekend, while we waited interminably for our power to return.
Yesterday someone called into a rock radio station and told them he was me. Growr! I don’t even listen to rock music! A friend of my daughter’s heard it, and inquired, and my daughter asked me. We tried to call in to tell them it wasn’t so, but their line was continuously busy and we couldn’t get through. Stop snickering. How would you like it if someone called in and told them it was you? It may happen, after Isle of View is published.
Remember how I changed the colors on my computer? I finally settled for yellow print on a brown background: vanilla and chocolate.
I was going to tell you about our horses. First let me tell you about the turtle: one of our big gopher tortoises was in the dog yard, banging the fence to get out. We don’t want it to tunnel under the fence, because then the dogs might say “You can do that? We’ll do it too!” So I picked it up and carried it out, its four legs scrambling. When I put it down, it headed off in the direction it was going without a word. They’re like that. Today it or another walked by the front of our house, eating the grass. I went out to see where it was going, and a bunny bounded away. Do you think the tortoise and the hare … ?
Okay, now the horses. When Penny got old enough to know what’s what, at about age six, she wanted a horse. “We can’t have a horse here in town!” we protested. Then we moved to the country. “Well?” Penny demanded. Sigh. So we got into horses. Now I was required to ride horses in first grade at boarding school, and those monstrous animals went where they wanted, and it was a terrifying experience. For the next thirty years or so I stayed away from horses. But when we got one for Penny, I discovered I liked horses after all. We wanted the perfect horse: one who could teach Penny what she needed to know. So we got Sky Blue, who had been a harness racer in her youth, but was now an old hackney mare of twenty. She’s a small horse, fourteen hands tall; below that they are classed as ponies. Blue had raised her former owner from age ten to age fifteen, and now was taking on Penny at age ten. Blue was an ideal horse, perfectly trained and gentle. She’s registered, with papers, and is black, with white socks on her hind legs. She’s thirty one years old now, having raised Penny up to college level, and her socks are falling down around her hooves, but she’s still spry. She’s a talking horse: she calls out to me “Fee-ee-ee-ee-eed!” and I’d better get to it. She served as the model for Mare Imbri the night mare, and also for Neysa the Unicorn in my Adept series.
Um, letter is ending. Blue just neighed at me, and I know what that means. To Be Continued.
*AUTHOR’S NOTE:
OOPS, THE INTENDED DEDICATION GOT LOST IN THE SHUFFLE. SIGH.