December 1989 
December 1989 A holiday passes. Progress is made. A stay is extended. Three new words are spoken. And one new word is defined.
Dismember 8, 1989
Dear Jenny,
Well, while I was struggling through a letter to a British publisher, your mother was talking with my wife on the phone. So my report is secondhand, but I gather that they are extending your stay at Cumbersome, because you are improving. Isn’t it odd, when the better you do, the longer you have to stay, instead of the other way around! Maybe it’s because you went to the convention, and saw how many folk care about you, so it’s just natural to respond. So—what? The British publisher? No, you wouldn’t be interested in that. Oops, every time I tell you you aren’t interested, you say you are! Just to be ornery. Okay, then, briefly: this publisher was demanding four hardcover copies of my novels, to tear up and use for typesetting and promotion and such. Such as four hardcover copies of With a Tangled Skein to destroy. Poor Niobe, getting ripped apart and laid out in pieces! So I finally told them no, make your own copies from the original one. They agreed, but then in the next contract demanded six copies to destroy. So I said—well, never mind; just poke a finger in the air and you’ll have a notion. I don’t need that publisher. Well, now they have a new editor, who came there hoping to edit my books, and he discovered I wasn’t there any more. So he wrote to ask what the problem was. Okay, I’m telling him. Picture your mother receiving a letter from that doctor, saying: “I understand you are the one who sent that submarine to run over me. What seems to be the problem?” So she would respond: “The problem was that I couldn’t get my hands on a tank, you CENSORED BY ORDER OF THE ADULT CONSPIRACY!!” Then she would reconsider, and instead write him an oh-so-polite but nevertheless extremely-cutting missive telling him exactly how his blank would be blanked if he did it again. And if he had the sense God gave an idiot gnat, he would apologize and guarantee it wouldn’t happen again. So that’s the sort of polite but cutting missive I was writing, while your mother was telling my daughters' mother how you could now speak three (3) whole new words and were graduating from pudding to solider food like casseroles and overcooked green beans. Um, don’t overdo it on those beans, because—well, never mind.
So meanwhile, back here at the tree farm, we—what? How did I actually politely cut up that British publisher? That’s really pretty dull, out of context. So let’s—sigh, you want to know anyway? Have I told you in the last five minutes how difficult you are when your beady little mind locks on to something irrelevant? I have? Sigh. Really, it’s just highfalutin' language you wouldn’t—oh, all right, here’s a quote: “It was obvious that [this publisher] placed no great value on my novels. My response is similarly obvious: I must go where my work is valued.” That translates to that finger I mentioned above. So as I said, it’s dull material for you. The editor will no doubt express dismay that such a misunderstanding could have arisen, and will see to it that things improve, and I’ll sell him some novels, as a favor. You see, there’s this series of collaborative fantasy novels that hasn’t yet found a British publisher, and this editor is even interested in Pornucopia, which gives a hint just how far he will go. I can do business with a publisher, once it is established just who is the master. Your mother understands perfectly; she gets along with people the same way. Too bad her dentist hasn’t caught on yet; he thinks she’s just another patient.
Now may I get back to my regular letter? I may? Oh, thank you Jenny! We had one more loose cow turn up; a neighbor told us (who happened to be the girl who delivers flowers; we invited her in so she could see how well the four poinsettias she delivered last Christmas—a gift from Putnam Books—were doing; we transplanted them outside and now they are big bushes. No, we didn’t tell her about my secret nitrogen fertilizer), and we called the sheriff, and he came out, spied the cow, and the cow saw him and took off for the forest and he couldn’t catch her. I think her name is Delia, as in the song “Delia’s Gone.” And we had a cold front come through. Yes, I know, it’s not supposed to happen in Florida, but sometimes things slip up. So there it was, just under 30°F, with five beautiful red flowers on our azalea (remember, the one that didn’t get the word that it was supposed to limit its blooming to spring); those flowers survived nicely, but we suffered frost damage to our poinsettias. They are just turning their top leaves bright red, too, having taken it on good faith that freezing wouldn’t happen here.
Do they keep you up properly with the comics? I have this nagging suspicion that they get careless on some of these important details. For instance, in “Curtis,” Gunk, the vegetarian and token white in a black comic strip, has a chameleon from Flyspeck Island; it adapts to any background and becomes completely invisible. Now it has escaped, and they are having a terrible time finding it. It just gulped down Curtis' sandwich, invisibly.
Meanwhile, here’s a news item that should make you squirm. You have an affinity for the Navy, right? And you’re an environmentalist, right? Well Greenpeace is a militant environmentalist organization; I belong to it, along with a number of other environmental groups. It focuses mainly on the sea, and sends folk out to interfere with whaling ships and such so they can’t kill the whales. This time the Navy was running a submarine missile-launch test, and Greenpeace doesn’t like nuclear weapons in the sea, so got in the way, and a Navy ship stove a hole in the Greenpeace ship and shoved it out of the way so the test could be run. So here is the $64 question: which side are you on? Isn’t that mean of me, to get you into an argument with your daddy!
On public radio they had another fund-raising week. We sent in our money, but they keep going until they make their target, and it’s dull as anything, listening to their constant guilt-inducing appeals for money. But in the middle of it this time they had something clever: young, bright, idealistic woman applies for work, because she really believes in what public radio is doing. Then this vampire-voice says “You are young and beautiful; you will make an excellent Fund Raiser!” Which is the one thing she can’t stand. So there she is, reading in a dull monotone “We know you will want to help this effort and contribute generously” etc., obviously hating it, while the vampire watches her throat as she talks. I think I’ve asked before: do you listen to the radio? There are some good programs there, such as All Things Considered, and you can get songs to your taste. I listen all day. My taste runs to the softer songs of the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. There’s this one I heard in 1957, “Dark Moon” and never since, and they never play it now, but maybe some day they will. So if you have a radio, you can practice coordination on the dial or digital buttons.
This week I’m proofreading my novel Phaze Doubt, and I discovered a typo that may amuse you: I have a reference to a mythological character Hermia. It came out Hernia. Now that intrigues me: a girl named Hernia. That suggests all kinds of Adult Conspiracy notions. This week I also got into revamping my computer setup. You see, we bought these hard plastic keyboard covers, and the cover flips up and becomes a paper holder, so I can type from a vertical sheet. I was doing just that, but had trouble finding my place, with no marker. So I tackled the problem head-on, as is my wont, and my wife got into it, and we finally fashioned a foam-plastic cutout in the shape of a fat L: vertically it reaches four fifths up, and horizontally three fifths, and the two inside sides of the L reach to two fifths and one fifth. So I can mark my place to within five lines of text, simply by turning over my L. It works perfectly; I wonder if I can patent the notion and make a fortune? We also added some macros on particular keys, such as my three dot ellipsis with hard spaces. That looks like this: … It’s on Alt-Period, and the thing about it is that those hard spaces prevent it from being broken up. I don’t like it when I have two dots at the end of the line, and the third at the beginning of the next line. But it takes me some coordinated fingerwork to do it with hard spaces, which is a nuisance, so now I can do it readily. Want another ellipsis? … There—see how it refused to split across lines?
So what else is happening here? Fun in court, would you believe it. There’s a judge here in Citrus County (Citrus County is a lot like Flyspeck Island, I think) who objects to strong language. When he overheard a lawyer say “B*lls**t!” he fined him and I think put him in jail. Now someone has written a song: “The Ballad of Gary Graham,” all about the silly things this judge is doing, and it’s being played on the local radio station and is very popular.
Your mother says—no, horrors, it can’t be!—that you lost your Magic Crystal. How could you? For shame! For sh—oh, you found it again? Well, okay this time, but don’t let it happen again. That magic is supposed to be helping you to get better. You know, you’ll get to speak one word per facet, and then you can start over.
So have a nice week, Jenny, and say “Hi” to Jenny for me.
Dismember 15, 1989
Dear Jenny,
The big news is that three days ago, Tuesday, I saw a two foot long coral snake. Do you know about them? They are just about the prettiest snakes, and they have the most deadly poison. But they aren’t dangerous. A coral snake’s teeth are small, and it can’t really bite a person unless he sticks his finger in its mouth. The snake is mild tempered and just wants to avoid trouble. So I called to Cam (my wife—remember the Xanth cushion?) and she brought out her camera and took pictures. Of course the snake just wanted to hide. It was right along the side of the swimming pool enclosure. She got a picture, we think. No, we didn’t hurt it; we just went back inside, and it must have wandered back into the forest. I’m glad to have it around.
Other news? Well today as I was typing letters—I did 13 before getting to this one. “What do you mean, why? Because you’re 13, why else? Oh, why before yours? Because I always wait until afternoon, in case your mother calls to tell me that you’re tired of my letters, and not to write another. Where was I, before getting into this interminable dash? Oh, yes, I was typing letters—I looked out the window and saw a phoebe. What do you mean, how did I know? If I tell you it was a phoebe, believe it. Because it’s a flycatcher that wags its tail; that distinguishes it instantly. No, I don’t know why they do, but they definitely do. I even named a character Phoebe, in the Adept series; she was a harpy with a sore tail, so she kept twitching it about.
What else? Nothing as significant, I’m afraid. Tomorrow I start writing Virtual Mode, which novel I conceived on OctOgre 14, 1987—yes, I have my computer printout notes with that date, and in 1988 I signed a contract to write it for PUTNAM/BERKLEY Books—and I have a problem. That wouldn’t interest you. What? You say you’ll decide what interests you? Sigh. Must we go through this every single letter? I have all these heavy significant things to say, and here you are demanding to hear about—oh, all right, all right!
I have this vision of the very beginning of the novel. Fourteen year old Colene is coming home from school—will you stop interrupting, girl?! What do you mean, that’s misspelled? I just changed the spelling, is all. I looked it up to see whether it had two L’s or one, and discovered that either will do, but that there’s a third variant with “ene,” so I decided I liked that better. So it’s correct because I’m writing this novel and what I say goes. That’s just the way it is. And don’t bring up that business about my calling you Kathy again; I’ve been trying to forget that for a month. You’re acting just the way Cheryl does when I call her Penny. You girls are all alike. Any little inconsequential thing, and you—no, don’t you dare start calling me by the wrong name! Anyway, Colene is coming home from school with her armful of books, and she’s an absolutely typical ninth grade girl, sort of cute and popular and happy with many friends and an active imagination. Then something happens to change her life forever. No, there’s no reckless driver. Only in real life does it get that bad. She sees something, and investigates, and it’s a man in a ditch. He’s face down, in funny clothing, and just sort of groaning. Now she knows she should go on home and call the police or something; her house is the next one down. He’s probably a drunk. But instead she does something almost suicidally crazy: she puts down her books and hauls the man into her sort of dollhouse cabin in the back yard. You know, her place, where she can shut the world out and listen to records or read fantasy novels or whatever. It’s all she can do to get him there, because she weighs something like a hundred pounds, and the man is at least 150 pounds. But she drags him in and shuts the door, so he’s hidden. Then she gets water and some food and takes care of him.
So why did she do this? Is she really crazy or suicidal? Yes she is. The truth is, her happy normalcy is but a front; underneath she is a deeply unhappy girl, and when alone her favorite pursuit is to slice open her wrists. She would have committed suicide before this, but her nerve always fails when she sees the blood flowing. Both her wrists are bound in cloth; others think this is just an innocent style she affects, but it’s really to cover the scars. So it is entirely in character for her to haul this dangerous man in here. He may recover and rape her or kill her; she knows she is flirting with this. The edge of such danger fascinates her. She’s not like you. What? Did I say that? Where? Back at the foot of page one? Oops, I see it now: “You girls are all alike.” So how can she be not like you, if—okay, okay, I apologize. You girls are not all alike! Now are you satisfied? (Brother!)
Actually, this is no drunken bum. He is Darius, Cyng of Hlahtar, from a far different realm where magic works and science doesn’t. No, this is not the Adept series; you haven’t read that, have you? This is a different setup. Anyway, he got separated from his native land, and here in this realm where magic doesn’t work he is pretty much helpless, because science is not something he understands. He normally conjures food, for example; the idea of buying it in a store for money is beyond his grasp. So he is starving. Colene fetches him food, and blankets to sleep under, and yes, she warms him by embracing him, because this place doesn’t have heat and he has the chills. She is taking a phenomenal risk. But look, I can’t do the whole novel here; that’s for tomorrow. I’ll just say that Colene nurses him back to health, and begins to learn his alien language, and he begins to learn hers, so they start to communicate. He is a good and decent man, just different. He tells her of his world, where he is the—loosely translated—King of Laughter, and though she hardly believes about the magic, he is good at making her laugh. He appreciates her help; she did after all save his life. She helps hira figure out how to get home. She’s smart with things like computers, and it is a computer analogy that accounts for the title. So in the course of maybe a couple of weeks, not only is he well enough to travel, but he knows how to get home.
Now here is the problem: From the time Colene meets Darius, she never slashes her wrists. He absorbs her whole attention. In fact, she falls in love with him; it’s very fast, but she was sort of in love with death already, and this is a much better alternative. By day she’s in school, unchanged to external appearances, but now her private moments are spent thinking of him rather than in slicing her wrists. But you see, I wanted to show her slicing her wrists. I wanted that stark contrast: happy girl, suicidal girl. How can I show that if she never slashes her wrists? Well, I could go back a few hours, before she finds Darius. But then I couldn’t begin with this typical ninth-grader (or so she seems) discovering the body in the ditch. It seems I can’t have it both ways. D*mn! I want it both ways! So how do I begin this novel, Jenny? Don’t answer that; by the time you get this letter, I’ll have begun the novel; in fact I’ll have begun it by the time this letter gets mailed out. I guess I’ll just have to go back those few hours, growr.
So now on to the main letter. What? You want more of the novel? Look, I can’t tell you the whole thing! I haven’t even figured it out yet! Okay, I’ll tell you just about this section. Darius gets interested in Colene, then realizes how young she is. No, this isn’t “Tappy”; Darius immediately backs off, being an honorable man. Colene is heartbroken, but helps him complete his return to his fantasy frame. He goes, and she remains behind, though she would have given anything to go with him. Her thoughts of suicide return with doubled force.
Once home, Darius thinks things over, and realizes that he has made a mistake. He owes his life to Colene, and now realizes that he loves her. She’s not too young by his realm’s standards. But he doesn’t know how to find her.
Travel between realms is extremely tricky; he can’t just go back. What is he to do? Meanwhile Colene realizes that her choice is between Darius and death; she will either find him and be with him, or she will kill herself. She can suppress the almost overpowering urge to commit suicide only by fashioning a desperate plan to follow Darius to his home. And—the rest of the novel concerns this effort on the part of the two of them to get back together. There’s a telepathic horse named Seqiro, and an alien super-science conqueror, and a woman who remembers the future instead of the past, and—but why bore you with all that? On with this letter.
Hm—I have notes for all manner of significant things, but here you kept me talking about the novel for two pages, and I can’t afford to do a six page letter. You’d just fall asleep. Okay, I’d better postpone the book reports until next time. No, don’t you dare sigh with relief! I have some books about trees and nature and the reclassification of the Burgess Shale, and if you think that’s dull, you’ll have to listen anyway. I’m worried about your education; I’m afraid they aren’t covering things of importance, such as the Burgess Shale and the daily comics. So here are a couple of Hagar the Horrible and Bent Offerings, and an item about a person being charged $35 for not eating any food at the hospital—you say you’re on that diet too?—and a dingus to help folk like you walk, and Curtis and Alligator Express with a fantasy princess story, I tried to copy a couple of atheist folk songs, but it was black on red and I guess God wouldn’t let it be copied. They are part of an atheist Christmas card a correspondent sent me, with songs like “O Come Ye unfaithful” and “Bad King Wenceslas.” I’m agnostic, which means I don’t choose to make an issue of my lack of belief in the supernatural, but the truth is my private belief is essentially atheistic. Well, here, I’ll quote some: “Bad King Wenceslas looked out/ On the Christmas season/ Where the peasants lay about / Hungry, poor and freezin'.” I like both the original song and this bitter parody. I also like the old Pogo parody: “Good King Sauerkraut looked out/ On his feets uneven/ Where the snow lay round about/ Gee, his feets was freezin'!”
Through the Ice has now been published, and I am receiving letters of appreciation from the friends and family of Robert Kornwise. What does this have to do with you? Robert Kornwise was killed just about a year before you were hit, by another reckless driver. I completed his unfinished novel, that his memory might live to that extent. You and he are linked in my mind. He died, you survived, and I became involved. I think you would have liked each other. Your mother will read you the novel, when you get home, if you ask her. More next week, Jenny—
Dismember 22, 1989
Dear Jenny,
The big news this week is Penny’s cat. Penny, my elder daughter, adopts stray animals. Do you know anyone like that? Yes, I thought you did. Well, there was this stray cat in her neighborhood a couple months ago, and then it disappeared, and then in the past month it reappeared and she adopted it, took it to the vet for shots, and brought it into her apartment. Now he is named O Neku Sama, which is Japanese for Honorable Mister Cat. He is nine months old, brown/orange with tiger stripes, and fairly lively. Yes I know: up until that last, you thought I was describing a relative of Sammy’s. Well, maybe a distant relative.
So Penny drove up two days ago, and Neku has been exploring our premises. We can’t let him out, because he might get lost in the forest and perish, but he’s had a ball exploring the house. The first evening Cam and Penny went off to a cocktail party put on by the local bank—we do a lot of business with the bank, so we’re on their list, but I don’t have a lot of use for either cocktails or parties, while Penny, now 22, can drink if she chooses, and maybe she just wanted to demonstrate she could do it, though I don’t think she has much taste for it either—and Neku remained here with me. He disappeared. I looked all over the house, fearing what my daughter would say if her cat had vanished forever when in my charge. I mean, what would you say to your daddy if—yes, that’s why daddies are careful. When Penny returned, Neku reappeared. Where had he been? That bugged me. So I kept an eye out thereafter, and I believe I know, because he’s there now: in the living room there’s a TV set in the corner, and there’s some space behind it, right in the corner, and that space is in shadow. But if you look carefully, you can see that some of the shadow has tiger stripes. Neku sleeps when Penny is away, so as to have plenty of energy for her return. Yes, I see you nodding your head; you knew it all the time.
Yesterday I was typing Chapter 3 of Virtual Mode and Neku was up with me in the study when they left. Women are always off shopping, especially at this time of year. What interests a man is the sight of a beautiful young woman without much clothing; what interests a woman is the sight of a big department store without much limit on the credit card. If department stores had nude young women as clerks, men would get more interested in shopping. But cats aren’t much interested in shopping. So Neku explored the study. He came to sit on the desk beside the computer monitor, neat your Rose, and then went down behind to play with the wiring, I was a little worried about that, but I did manage to have a good day, typing 4,000 words. Colene, the heroine, is trying to recover the key to alternate realities, that muggers took from Darius. If she can get it back, he can return, and maybe take her with him. But getting anything back from gang-type punks is tricky, especially when you’re a fourteen year old girl without much money. But Neku wasn’t much interested in this, and wandered away. I think he finds me sort of boring. What, you do too? Oh, you want to know exactly how Colene gets that signal back? I don’t know; the Adult Conspiracy—how old did you say you were? If your mother found out I told you—Okay, you promise not to tell her? Remember, Colene is a gutsy girl, and suicidal. So she makes a deal: she’ll play the punk who has the key a game, and if she wins, she gets the key, and if he wins, he gets her. No, of course this isn’t a legal deal, but she’s desperate, and he’s a tough fence—that is, someone who makes illegal deals for cash, or whatever. He likes the idea of whatever, with a young, clean, non-addicted girl. So he agrees to play the game, provided that his friends are the judge of who wins. And her game turns out to be a contest to see who can bleed the most before fainting. She starts, slicing open her arm with a big knife. She’s suicidal, remember. Now he realizes that he has more blood than she does, and can probably outbleed her, but he’s about to faint even, before cutting himself, and he decides to forfeit, and she wins. Never get into a bleeding contest with a suicidal girl! His tough friends think it’s a great ploy; they admire her for it, and honor the deal. So that’s the scene I’m. in upstairs. But today, downstairs, I’ve got to type letters to confounded fans—oops, no, I didn’t mean you! Why do you have to jump to conclusions? Then who did I mean? Well, there was this girl who hasn’t read any of my books, but she wrote me an angry letter, calling me ignorant and sarcastic, because one of her friends had asked me how I felt about fan letters, and I said I’d rather be typing my novel. So I—no, I didn’t burn her letter. I wrote her a thoughtful missive asking her to consider how she would feel if she was required to answer 100–160 letters a month, squeezing out all her free time and some of her working time, and someone asked her how she felt about it, and she said she’d rather have more time for herself, so then she was accused of being ignorant and sarcastic? In short, I wrote her a pretty nice, sensible letter, that will make her feel like last months' uncleaned litter-box. Moral: don’t take off on a writer unless you are awful sure of your point. So anyway, this morning Neku wanted something to eat, so I poured him some milk, and he wouldn’t touch it. Only he and I were up at 6:15 A.M., you see. Sigh. Now he’s back behind the TV set, and I’m typing this letter.
Meanwhile, what else is new? Well, the fanzine I write to published an edited-down version of my Convention Report, cutting out some of the detail about traveling and such, which makes sense. So now those readers know what it’s like to meet you. Unfortunately, it may be the last thing I send them, because I just can’t abide this business of censorship. I told them how I felt, and others have too—another writer even called me last month to tell me how emphatically he agreed with me, and that he was writing a strong letter to them—but no such letter has been published, and in the latest issue they published a snide remark by someone they favor—the one I implied was a sociopath, for taking pride in squishing spiders—about my being “testy” and taking my marbles home because of not having my way. In short, someone who will practice censorship is not about to admit that it’s wrong. So I will indeed take my marbles home, and I may not be the only one. They can ponder that at leisure. I don’t know whether you consider it an honor to be featured in my last report to a magazine, but I assure you that many of their more decent readers will be glad to know about you. I may write up the matter in the Author’s Note for Virtual Mode, as it is my custom to comment on what happens to me while I’m writing particular novels. Meanwhile, with a certain irony, the one who set this off, the prisoner on death row, feels very guilty about causing such mischief. He didn’t cause it; I caused it, by having him participate in what was supposedly a forum open to all. He asked what I thought of what he did to get sentenced to death, and I have written to tell him in unmincing words: he had no more business killing that girl than the fanzine had censoring him. I don’t like what he did any better than I like what that reckless driver did to you. But what I like and what I do may be different things, because what I do relates to principle, not pleasure.
All of which is pretty heavy discussion to hit you with, at this season. And I still haven’t tackled those heavy subjects that got squeezed out last week. Well let’s tackle one of them: the reclassification of the Burgess Shale. I know, I know, you couldn’t think of a more boring topic if you concentrated for a week, and your daddy’s rolling his eyes as he reads this letter to you, wondering if maybe I didn’t just take my marbles home, I lost them entirely. Well, shut up and listen, girl, and if you’re still bored at the end, okay, you win. You see, a scientist recently said that the two most significant things to happen in the past decade or so in paleontology—that’s the science of the earth’s history, which includes dinosaurs—were the discovery of the periodicity of extinctions and the reclassification of the Burgess Shale. The extinctions of dinosaurs and other creatures turns out to follow a pattern of about twenty six million years; every time that period passes, boom! more extinctions. Because, it seems, severe meteor showers hit the earth, blasting things to smithereens. That’s how come the dinosaurs departed, so we mammals could take over the world; you owe your existence to a meteorite from space. So okay, you understand about that, but what’s this business about stupid shale? Well, the Burgess Shale was a fossil-bearing section in Canada about a city block in size and ten feet thick. It’s in the Canadian Rockies, 8,000 feet up. But the fossils are of sea creatures, so you know something strange must have happened. The fact is, back about 530 million years ago that region was under the sea; since then the mountains have formed and lifted it up. Remember in “Tappy” the bit about how history lives in the decline of the mountains? Well, it lives in their uplifting, too. Our earth is dynamic, and if you could watch fastmotion pictures of it, one frame every hundred thousand years or so, you would see how it wrinkles and the continents slide about. But that’s not the point.
You see, there’s a lot of life in our world, and much of it is in the ocean. But there is a greater diversification of life forms in that one little sample of the Burgess Shale than in all today’s oceans. And it’s different. There are creatures there never seen before or since. And this makes no sense, according to the conventional theory of evolution. It’s supposed to be that simple forms evolve into more complicated forms, and split off into new species, so that the more time passes, the more species there are. But here at the beginning there were more species than there are now. What happened? Can evolution be wrong? Well, not exactly; we aren’t about to return to the Biblical version, saying that God created everything in one week. But it does suggest that everything existed a lot sooner than we thought, in that “Cambrian explosion,” and that the pattern since has not been one of increasing diversity of species, but of the elimination of most of the original species. Maybe by those meteor blasts every twenty six million years. We’re just lucky that it was our branch of life that survived; had one of those meteors hit a bit to the side, it might have abolished our ancestor and spared something else, and today’s life would be quite different. Instead of you in Cumbersome Hospital, it would be an invertebrate with a squintillion legs. You don’t find that interesting? Well, I do, and I think maybe I’ll use such a world as the setting for Mode #3, Chaos Mode, and we’ll just see what Colene, my suicidal protagonist, thinks of it. She’s into that sort of thing—extinctions. Forty years ago, when the Shale was discovered, they tried to classify it conventionally, and it just didn’t work; now they have done the job over, and scientists' jaws have been dropping. So admit it, Jenny—don’t you find the reclassification of the Burgess Shale a bit interesting after all?
Okay, I hope you have been having a harpy Christmas. This letter should arrive about two days after Christmas, when you’re sinking into Post-Holiday Depression, and really weight you down. Don’t be mad at me for making you think when you wanted to laugh; you were the one who made me tell you all about Colene in Virtual Mode last week, so that I had to postpone the Shale. Christmas doesn’t mean a lot to me; I just keep plowing on with my work and my thoughts. Christmas day my family will drag me away for a couple of hours for opening presents and having a big dinner and such, but I think I’d be about as happy celebrating with the Grinch. Do you ever find holidays depressing? Some folk do, I just find them sort of neutral.
Speaking of depressing: I had to exercise on the cycle today with it raining (it’s on the pool enclosure, outside but under cover) and the temperature mucking about between 39° and 41°. I wore a shirt and warm body vest and got through okay, cycling just over ten miles in half an hour, but I’d rather have it warmer. Tonight it’s supposed to get colder, and tomorrow colder yet. We worry about our plants, that may suffer freeze damage, and our dogs, who are not young any more. It’s not supposed to get this cold in Florida!
Well, have a good holiday, Jenny. I’m sorry I didn’t have things to make you laugh this time, but maybe you can enjoy thinking instead.
Dismember 29, 1989
Dear Jenny,
So I started out doing eleven fan letters, bringing my total for the month to 145, with about 15 more in my “unrush” pile. Then came the mail: 18 more. No, I won’t have to answer them all; several can be done with just Ogre Cards. But I’m just barely holding even. Well, I’ll catch up on some more on Sunday, after I write to my family; that Family letter now goes out to ten members of the wider family, and some of those ten recirculate their copies to others. Your mother knows exactly how it is done. Today, ironically, my parents, both of whom have one or more PhD’s, are known less for their credits than for mine. “Oh, you’re related to him?!” You will have some of that experience, Jenny, when Isle of View is published next year and your relatives start being known through you. “You’re related to that Jenny? I don’t believe it!” Some will recognize you from the graphic edition the Elfquest folk will publish. “That’s Jenny Elf!” So brace yourself; you have some interesting times coming, in due course.
No, I didn’t send you any gift for Christmas. My mind works in obscure ways. Neither Christmas nor gifts mean a lot to me; what counts is personal contact and understanding. I have been receiving gifts from fans, and it’s awkward, because I don’t send any in return. I want to discourage it. For one thing, they tend to be from female admirers, which makes it awkward at the outset. Three more arrived today. One from a female admirer, another from her husband. I think he caught on that (A) I was giving her a polite no time of day, and (B) I’m a useful contact for a hopeful writer. And he’s a hopeful writer. Now I have to explain to him how I do superior dialogue, when the truth is, I’m not sure how I do it. Critics think my dialogue is bad. Sigh.
So how did you say you were doing? Eating more pudding? Speaking more words? Somewhere in the pile is a letter from Sue Berres, who gives an unpronounceable term for how you have to learn to speak again. No wonder you have trouble! Think how much easier it would be, if they had an easy term for it. Well, keep plugging away at it.
So how am I doing? I’ve got a nuisance cold. Oh, you could tell? By my attitude? Usually I stave off colds with vitamin C, and I don’t care how many doctors say it doesn’t work; I am right and they are wrong. No, I don’t think vitamin C will make you recover faster, though I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. But this cold snuck up on me while I was on a long phone call with my agent, getting ready to market Tatham Mound. I went into the sneezes, and thought it was an allergy to something in the air. Hours later I realized it was a cold, but by then it was late. You have to use vitamin C right away, or it can’t do much. So I’m feeling generally about the way your mother feels after the dentist has entertained himself fishing for another elusive bone fragment (wouldn’t be sporting to catch them all at once!) and blowing out my sore nose every ten or fifteen minutes. No, the commercial pills don’t seem to work on me; my daughter got me a couple of kinds, and my nose laughed at them. Well, “laugh” isn’t quite the proper term; “snot” is. Finally yesterday I tore up tissue and stuffed it into my nose so it couldn’t drip on the keyboard; that gave me an hour to work in peace.
Oh, we had a decent Christmas, and I trust you did. My daughters came home from all over; one had been visiting in Michigan, and our roads got frozen over and closed, so we weren’t sure we could get her back. She was visiting the family of a Jewish friend. But she made it back, bringing her friend, so he had the privilege of participating in our Christmas. I think he paid more attention to it than I did. But I did receive a Sony Walkman “Outback” radio/cassette player, so that I can listen to music in stereo while exercising. It looks like a little waffle iron when opened for the cassette. A daughter dragged me out to shop the day before Christmas, and among other things I got my wife a box of chocolates. In 33 years of marriage I have learned something, after all. But overall I’m exactly as klutzy about such things as the average man. That’s why God made women, after all.
We had a cold wave. Oh, you had it too? But we aren’t used to such things in Florida. We’re on a kind of wooded peninsula in Lake Tsoda Popka, and our temperature doesn’t go to the extremes it does elsewhere; even so it hit 16°F and all our decorative poinsettias and such were wiped out. We had snow flurries, the first I’ve seen in thirty years in Florida. Cheryl went to Michigan to see snow—and during her absence it snowed on her car, here. We had hundreds of icicles on the eaves. When it warmed, they fell one by one, crashing; it was several hours before I figured out where the crashes were coming from. I hate cold weather!
Toni-Kay Dye sent cookies in many shapes; a number are dinosaurs, including a Xanthasauras. You remember her; she painted “Cats in a Window” for you. I sent her a copy of my Sci-Con report. And no, you can’t have one of those cookies; wait till you can chew better.
What’s that? You say you’re getting tired of this depressive letter? Sigh. Sometimes it’s as hard for me to be bright and cheery as it is for you to goose someone left-handed. It’s not that you don’t want to, just that—well, never mind. Let me tell you about one of the newspaper clippings I’m enclosing: here in Florida they raised the taxes and the tolls on a bridge, and drivers got mad. So they “shot toll machines, hurled plums at toll collectors and filled toll baskets with cherry bombs, razor blades, liquid soap, guns, bras, panties, shrimp and chicken dinner leftovers.” Ha! You laughed! I heard you. You know it isn’t funny; that’s what makes it so funny. So admit it: depressive humor can be fun too.
Meanwhile I have now written 28,500 words of the 30,000 I hoped to do this month on Virtual Mode, and will write the rest tomorrow. After Colene won the key by freaking out the thug who had it—you know, that bleeding contest—she gave it to Darius, who is from the fantasy realm. But two things happened: she just couldn’t believe him, and thought he was deluded, and he learned that she was suicidal. He needed a woman full of joy to be with him, because where he lives emotions can be transferred directly from one to the other. A woman full of depression would wipe them both out. So he used the key and disappeared—at which point she realized that he wasn’t crazy and she had just missed out on what could have been the best thing of her life. And he, too late, realized that his effort to save them both was in vain; she would die anyway, alone. He should have taken her with him and loved her even if he couldn’t marry her. Thus is set the stage for the main adventure of this novel: how they get together again. Soon she will be meeting a friend along the way: Seqiro, the telepathic horse. Stay tuned.
Naturally other things piled in to take my time from my writing. I had to judge the winner of the story contest Morrow/Avon had at a New York book fair. I wrote the beginning, about an ambitious female reporter who wants an important assignment but is put on an adoption story instead. Then she discovers that all the babies though of different races and sexes, are practically carbon copies of each other. What can account for this? The contestants, ages 15–17, had to finish the story. I got to see the four finalists. One was unfinished, another was full of blood and guts and alien monsters, one was close but not quite, and one was in proper proportion, and I declared that the winner. Yes, it was by a girl; they seem to have better taste in this area. So she’ll win the $50 prize. Yes, of course I used up more than $50 worth of my time judging the entries; that’s not the point. Yes, you can enter such a contest some year, if you get to handle the computer well enough to write. Or maybe an art contest.
I finally talked with the publisher about whether I should write two Xanth novels in one year so they could do a hardcover edition. We conclude that since I already have two hardcovers a year, this would just be crowding the field and maybe taking sales away from my other hardcovers, so it’s better to leave it alone. So I’ll just write one Xanth novel next year. Yes, I know; you already decided that; you told me. Maybe I’ll use the time to work out a Xanth computer game. My notion is to have the Player start by selecting a Companion: a character who knows his or her way around Xanth and the rules of the game. Then the Player won’t have to fumble around figuring out how to play it; he can get good advice from his Companion. The problem is, suppose a virile male Player chooses a sweet innocent nymph for Companion, and starts to get fresh? Maybe she’ll call her friend the ogre, who will stuff the Player through a knothole in the nearest beerbarrel tree. End of game. But maybe if he approached her with more respect, she would be more receptive. So this game could have aspects other than just winning through to the golden castle or whatever. Maybe the Player has to learn some courtesy along the way. You can see that this would be quite a job to program; your mother is already shaking her head. She likes the idea, but says it would be easier to program a balky printer to sing “Joy to the world.” But with the potential of the 386 computer …
I have to wrap this up. I had other books to comment on: The End of Nature and A Forest Journey, just as I commented on the one about the Burgess Shale last time, but they’ll have to wait another week. STOP SMIRKING! It won’t hurt you to get a bit of education along the way, you know. Not very much, anyway. Anyway, admit it: you got interested in the Burgess Shale despite yourself last time, didn’t you?
Yesterday I heard on the Paul Harvey News that the Rush Limbaugh (No, I’m just guessing about the spelling) radio show had been dropped because of bad words. Then Rush came on, talking about why women should not be farding while driving. Women were calling in and saying, “Well, I fard while driving, and it’s okay.” I finally looked up the word: FARD, meaning to apply makeup. Oh. That guy’s a conceited conservative, but it’s hard not to like him, sometimes. So remember, Jenny: no farding during therapy.