January 1990 
January 1990 A mother comes to visit. And a daughter goes home.
Jamboree 5, 1990
Dear Jenny,
Yet once again I’m starting this letter late. I had nine other letters to buzz out, and those kept being interrupted by phone calls from my agent and a conference call with Morrow Books. They have read Tatham Mound and wanted to make a pre-emptive offer so we wouldn’t send copies of the novel out to half a dozen other publishers. You know what pre-emptive means? You do? Okay. So they told me how important I was to them, and how they would be making my work into a major hardcover bestseller. Then they made a lowball offer. No, get that finger down! We shall be more polite than that. We shall simply show the novel elsewhere. If we get a better bid, Morrow will have the chance to match it. We’re calling their bluff. It isn’t that I am greedy, but that publishers show how much they value an author, and how committed they are to a novel, by how much they pay for it. So, with reluctance, I have entered the big-advance arena. It’s like a story Colene will tell in Virtual Mode: there are two horses in a pasture. One is Maresy Doats, to whom Colene writes private letters in her Journal; Maresy is the only one who knows Colene is suicidal. Colene always wanted a horse, but lives in the suburbs. So Maresy is imaginary. But a good and sensible friend. But this particular problem is Maresy’s: she sees that they are grazing their pasture at such a rate that it will be exhausted before spring, and it is all they have. So she talks to the other horse, saying “We had better slow down, so our pasture will last, and we won’t starve in the winter.” But the other horse goes right on grazing at top speed. What should Maresy do? If she eats less, to conserve the pasture, she will grow lean and the other horse will get more, and the grass will still run out. Then Maresy will be in a worse position to survive than the other horse, who has eaten better. But if she eats more, the pasture will be exhausted even faster. It’s a real problem. If Maresy sacrifices herself, only the greedy and insensitive horse will survive. So in the end Maresy has to eat fast too, giving herself the best chance though she knows it is not a good way. Well, that’s how it is with me and the marketing of my books. If I settle for low advances, publishers, who are like the insensitive horse, will give my novels indifferent treatment, and I will be bypassed by other writers who go for big advances. It has been happening. So I have to compete, though I don’t need the money. I don’t want to lose the race to the greedy and/or insensitive writers.
Meanwhile, back at Isle of View: The copy-edited manuscript arrived here yesterday. I had not received your mother’s corrections, so I phoned her—did she tell you about that? No?—and got them directly. She also said you had sent me a bushel of peanuts. A bushel?!! They have not arrived either. Maybe God diverted them to Squeedunk, because I didn’t send you anything. Sigh; life does get complicated. Anyway, I have marked in her corrections, and added a three page Jenny-Con supplement to the Author’s note. Yes, you can have a copy; here it is. And don’t complain about the streaks down the margin; my laser printer is doing it, and won’t stop. I think it’s leaking toner. We’ll use up this batch of toner, and then if it continues with the next one, we’ll have to call in the repair man. One problem I anticipate is that readers will want to write to you, and some may even want to send some money to help with your treatment. I got two addresses from your mother, one for letters and one for money. I pondered, considered, cogitated, and thought about it, and the more I did that, the more it seemed to me that the address I should give is the one for letters. If someone wants to send money, and puts it in with a letter, your mother can forward that to the money account. But I think most will be girls about your age who send letters of sympathy and hope.
The novel itself looks good. I haven’t told you a lot about it, because that would take 124,000 words or so, but Jenny Elf acquits herself well enough. Someone will surely read you the Jenny Elf sections when it is published. Maybe also about the way the Demoness Metria, whom you met in Vole, comes to tease young Prince Dolph. She even offers to assume the form of his fiancée Nada Naga, wearing only panties. He’s been trying to see Nada’s panties for years, without success. He has no shame. In the end, it is not Nada’s panties he sees, but Electra’s, which are not nearly as exciting for some reason, and—but I see I am boring you, so I’d better move on.
What? Well, of course Jenny Elf wears panties, and no, no one sees them. You have a suspicious mind!
And I was going to do that Book Report on A Forest Journey. No, I haven’t read it yet. I haven’t read the one about the Burgess Shale either; I’ve been too busy to read. I hate that; I want more time to read. Anyway, this one is about the role of wood in civilization. Stop getting bored—I tell you this is interesting, or else! It tells how wood is vital to civilization. For example, in 2000 BC the isle of Crete in the Mediterranean was a forested wilderness. Then it was colonized, and soon was a center of civilization, with a great fleet of ships made from that excellent wood. Then it exhausted the trees, and declined. I’m not sure whether this book mentions a small matter of a volcano named Thera which blew up and blasted the Cretan civilization to smithereens. But it’s probably right about the wood. I know from my research for Tatham Mound that some American Indians did similar—no, not setting off volcanoes, dummy!—using up all the wood and collapsing. Wood is important! When England used up its trees it shifted to coal, and that started pollution. So now you know why I’m into tree farms. Trees are wonderful things, and much better alive than dead. If you don’t like trees, you’re—oh, you do like trees? Well, I knew that.
I have to talk with someone about a Xanth computer game I may try to devise, with Companions the Player can choose to help him. I told you about that last time. You want to know whether Jenny Elf can be a Companion? Hm; I hadn’t thought of that. Does she know enough about Xanth yet?
Have a harpy week, Jenny! I understand the time is drawing nigh for you to come home. Then you can see that your mother gets some rest, instead of rushing madly after old monias and catching a new monia.
Jamboree 12, 1990
Dear Jenny,
Sigh. Our poinsettias and hibiscus are dead on their stems. We knew the cold snap at Christmas killed them, but it took a while for it to show so clearly. They were getting so pretty, and—you say you don’t want to hear about it? Well, there’s also the local news. A man was starting out on a bicycle ride for the homeless, to publicize their plight, and he got mugged and his bicycle stolen before he had hardly gotten underway. A young woman was dragged into a nine foot deep pit, held captive for several hours, then taken out and, um, the Adult Conspiracy warning light is beeping at me. Let’s just say that something she didn’t like happened to her. Another woman was squished by the dump truck she drove. They renamed a Tampa street the Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and the new signs keep getting vandalized, sprayed over, ripped out. Racism is rampant here. What do you mean, you don’t like that news any better than the business about the plants? I’m just telling you what life is like in sunny Florida. How come you’re so hard to satisfy?
What’s that finger-signing you’re making? I think it translates to BIRD. I don’t understand. Well, I do have some news about a bird. There’s this correspondent I call the Bird Maiden, because she used to rescue injured raptors—that is, birds of prey—and nurse them back to health and set them free again. When I got my novel Hasan republished, I mentioned the Bird Maiden in the Author’s Note. That novel is an adaptation of an Arabian Nights tale, “Hasan and the Bird Maiden.” You’d probably like it. The Bird Maiden in the story is one who could put on a bird suit and fly away. Sure enough, the mundane Bird Maiden took off for Germany after that, found a man there, and now she’s married and with an 18 month old daughter named Alessandra. That’s close enough to the story. Good things happen to my readers.
What? You mean that wasn’t what you were asking about? Let me see that finger again. Oh—that kind of bird! Very well, I’ll tell you the story about that. You see, about three months ago one of the also-ran FM radio stations decided to change its program and its image and go all-out for glory. It became the “Power Pig.” Its manager painted his car shocking pink with splotches and announced that the proper signal of respect was one middle finger thrust into the air. He called it “Flipping the Pig.” Now he drives around town and everybody gives him that signal of affinity. Meanwhile the radio station quadrupled its market share and became #1 in the area, overall. That Pig is really flying!
So now let’s get on to—what, you aren’t through with the Power Pig? Okay. The leading station had been Q-105. Power Pig said the Q stood for “queers.” No, I won’t tell you what that means. Then the local gay group got on the case, and the Pig had to apologize. Then the Pig put out T-shirts with the Q-105 logo, with a screw superimposed on it. That means—no, I’d better not explain about that. Q didn’t find that very funny. In fact, Q is now suing for trademark infringement.
Okay, enough of that, before you get bored. Oh? Not yet? Sometimes I’m not sure about your mind, Jenny. Well, all right, a bit more. The Pig urged women to send in nude pictures of themselves in another promotion. No, you can’t join that one! The Pig also said on the air that the only safe way to listen to it was “with a condom over your head.” No, I won’t tell you what that means; I’m already in trouble as it is. And the Pig went to the St. Petersburg high school and issued fake hall passes during a student protest.
So now you know what local FM radio is like. You should listen to the radio, Jenny; it can be a lot of fun. If they can get you one of the ones with “Seek” buttons, so you just turn it on and touch the button and it finds the next good station. The radio can be good company when everyone else is too busy to bother with you. Oh, no one would ever say that, but you know there are times. I listen to it all the time while I’m working, FM and AM.
I had to refill the can with a 40 pound bag of bran for the horses. I just managed to make it all fit—then remembered that the cup I use to serve the bran was in the bottom. Yes, I know: your mother does that all the time. Fortunately I was able to reach down through it with my bare arm and hook the cup out; bran is light stuff.
This week would have been Elvis Presley’s 55th birthday, except that he died over a decade ago. He was five months younger than I. What do you mean, who is Elvis? Brother, do times change!
This summer they will have a solar car race starting in Florida. It will pass near here. Each car is worth half a million dollars. When they get the price down, we’ll be interested. I’d love to see the world get off fossil fuels, because—oh, that’s right, you know why.
Elsie the Bored Cow showed up again. At least it may be her; all we saw was her manure in our road. The sheriff never caught the one cow left over. So we called him, and today heard sirens all over, and a helicopter circled overhead. No, I suppose it’s possible it wasn’t searching for the cow, now that you mention it.
So how has life been with you, Jenny? That ordinary? Well, maybe it will perk up when you go home. Then you can snooze, buried in cats.
I’m enclosing more comics. As I said, I have this nagging suspicion that they aren’t taking proper care of you, so that you miss some of these comics, so I’m enclosing the best ones. There was a block of four good ones associated with Curtis, Sunday, so I’m sending the block. Plus some daily ones. Marvin’s mother is named Jenny; I figure she represents what your life could be like when you grow up, etc. Cartoon of a writer’s life; they could have based it on mine. Picture of girl with horse, sort of like Colene and Seqiro, the telepathic horse in Virtual Mode. And a golden one hundred dollar bill I pasted together from an investment ad, with pictures of sailing ships on it; I thought maybe you’d like this kind of money.
Now, about that next book report I was going to do— what do you mean, there’s no room left for that? I might almost get the impression you weren’t interested, and I know that’s not true. Is it? Uh, Jenny, did you hear the question? Sigh. Well, then, maybe next week.
Say hello to the other Jenny for me, if she’s still there.
Jamboree 19, 1990
Dear Jenny,
Hey, it’s Friday again (Wednesday for you; you run half a week behind me), and time for the JenLet. I hope things have been less hectic for you than they have been for us. I’ve been writing Virtual Mode, the novel featuring the suicidal fourteen year old girl. All I get are twenty working days a month; the rest goes to correspondence and such. So I try to write 3000 words of text a day in whatever novel I’m in, and in the first month of Mode, Dismember 16—Jamboree 15, I succeeded, completing over 60,000 words. Then things started going wrong. Yesterday I only got 800 words done; the rest of the day went to accounting, business letters and I can’t remember what else, just that it wasn’t my novel. Oh, now I remember: my laser printer went on the blink on Monday. It flashed the smug message 27 OPC-1 and refused to print. Aggravating time with the manual, whose perfectly clear instructions nevertheless manage to be perfectly unclear, indicated that the something-or-other magazine needed replacement. No, it didn’t want ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE replaced with PEOPLE; this was a complicated dingus deep in the works. So we ordered one and replaced it—and the error message was unchanged. We called in the guy who handles the computers, and it mooned him with the same message. So we called the repair service. That’s in Tampa. It turns out that a repair man costs $115 an hour whether he’s driving here or working on the printer, and it’s a four hour round trip drive in addition to the time he’s here. Plus 31 a mile, and parts. So it will be a $600 repair bill for a balky printer, and the amount of paying work I haven’t gotten done in this period is a good deal more expensive than that. In short, it isn’t only your mother who gets aggravated about things. Especially about balky printers. Growr!
Remember last week I told you how we reported some cow manure on our driveway, and next day a helicopter was circling our tree farm? Well, it was the sheriff! He drove by a few days later to let us know, with his horse in a van behind. No, he didn’t find that cow. Man is supposed to be a smart species, but he’s not as smart as a cow in the wilderness.
Meanwhile my wife asked me whether I’d refilled the pasture water. Ouch! I’d forgotten it for over a month. That’s not the only water the horses have; I fill the tub at the barn every day, and they can drink from the lake if they want. But I like to keep the pasture water full too, to encourage them to be out there. I went out, and sure enough, that old bathtub was down to about one inch deep. So I dumped it out, because the bottom was solid with leaves and sludge, rinsed it, and then pumped it up again. Took 450 strokes with the red handpump. Ever thus, with mundane life. But if we ever have a weeklong power failure, we’ll still be able to pump water with that handpump, so it’s worth maintaining.
Plans proceed with Richard Pini and the graphic edition of Isle of View. The three parts of the adaptation are to be titled Return to Centaur or “What Kind of Foal Am I?” and Nada Worry in the World or “A Serpent Teen Exposition” and Morning Becalms Electra or “All the Snooze Befits the Prince.” You see, Che is the lost five year old winged centaur foal at the beginning, and in the middle we have the problem with Nada Naga, the princess who can become a serpent, betrothed to Prince Dolph, and at the end we have the problem with Electra, who must marry Dolph before she turns eighteen or she will die. But Dolph is smitten with Nada, not Electra, and the judgment of a teenage boy is— well, would you trust that? Anyway, publication of the first part is scheduled for JeJune, which means it won’t be all that long before you get to see Jenny Elf in person, as it were.
Which reminds me: you will be getting fan mail, Jenny. A reader has already asked for your address, so I gave him the box number your mother gave me, c/o Jenny Elf. By this time maybe he has written to you, and you’ve heard the letter. There will be more when the novel is published in OctOgre. Just don’t get a helled swead about it.
60 Minutes on TV had a feature about a girl with muscular dystrophy, the wasting away of her muscles. She’s your age, and uses a powered wheelchair to get around. I thought of you when I saw that. There was also an item on the news: they have discovered something that encourages nerve regrowth. Tell your mother to run that down, if she hasn’t already, because the only thing between you and the use of your body, Jenny, is some nerves that could use some regrowth. It could make a significant difference.
Meanwhile I received an envelope from Sierra. Well, I’m an environmentalist, so that wasn’t surprising. But this turned out to be Sierra Games, a different outfit. There was a letter thanking me for my suggestions, but saying they wouldn’t be using them. Interesting for two reasons: First, I never wrote to them; I didn’t even know they existed. Second, I had just heard about a computer game called Hero’s Quest, with good graphics. I’m considering making a Xanth computer game with some special features, and have been pondering whether to allocate time to it. So I want to look at that Sierra game, and several others they have, to see how they are; then I’ll make a better one. What was that sound? Were you sniggering? You doubt that I, with no prior experience, can improve what others have spent a lifetime doing? Oh, you don’t doubt? Okay. So this was a very timely arrival. Who sent in my name I don’t know, but—hey! I heard it again! You definitely made a sound! I caught you this time. Oh—you want to know whether Jenny Elf will be in my game. Well, do you want her to be?
Okay, I can put her in. And you want to know what’s different and superior about my game? Well, as I see it, most role-playing games get all complicated with things like hit points and closely defined levels of proficiency on a number of levels and they lack any genuine human interaction. Computer role playing games seem to share such problems, as well as requiring endless lists of supplies and things, and if you forget one, boom, you’re dead. This is not appealing to any but a game freak. I want to pull in ordinary folk like you, who don’t want to have to memorize a manual to play, but also don’t want something stupidly simplistic. So I plan on having Companions, and—what’s that? You mean I’ve already told you about that? More than once? Why didn’t you stop me, then?! Anyway, I have now discussed this with the experts—that is, my daughters and their friends—and I conclude that what I want to do is technically feasible. Whether I will do it I don’t know; probably I’ll get some of those games and see how they are, and then decide. Once you get home, Jenny, you should be able to start playing computer games, maybe some of the high-graphic action ones, and if they’re as interesting as they are supposed to be, you’ll have a lot of entertainment there. Tell your folks that it’s good digital therapy.
Meanwhile I have been exploring FM radio stations. The newspaper lists some, but some of the best it doesn’t list, which annoys me, so I finally wasted some time charting them myself. There are about fifty I can get well, and some seem promising. For example there’s one that plays nothing but mellow vocal oldies. Once I know where all the stations are, I’ll be able to listen to what I want continuously while I work, changing stations whenever commercials hit. I heard an ad for a dance on one, and at the end it said “Improper dress required.” Hm.
Meanwhile I still ride my bicycle out each morning to fetch the newspapers, and it’s always interesting in its fashion. The architecture of dawn moves me. The clouds form such spectacular and always different formations, with orange or red as the sun arrives, and the low clouds form thin sheets about ten feet above the ground. The bunnies run off the road. No, they don’t seem to hop much. The men are working on our front gate again; it’s been out of commission ever since the bad lightning strike some months back. Now they have set up two tall towers to transmit signals between house and gate, so maybe we can open and close the gate from the house, as was always intended. I want to be able to shut out those hordes of fans, in case I ever get famous. They got the signal working from the house, but not from the gate. But it’s getting close. Maybe.
I suffered a minor revelation this morning: accounts are like sex. Don’t laugh; I mean it. You see, I added up my earnings for last year, using my account book, and my wife added them up using her accounts. They didn’t match. That’s par for the course. She had more money than I did. So I gave her my calculator tape, and she found half a dozen errors. So I corrected those—and now I had more money than she did. So she corrected hers, and now we agree to within two dollars, which is pretty good. So how does this relate to sex? No, we didn’t decide that sex was more fun than accounting, and quit accounting. It is more fun, but that’s another story. But I realized that though each of our lists of figures had errors, those errors didn’t match, so we were able to cancel out all the errors by cross-matching. Well, that’s what sex does. If living creatures reproduced parthenogenically (that is, without sex), any errors in the genetic blueprint would continue. But with sex, there are two blueprints, and the errors in them cancel out. So it’s a good system. If those who hate sex were able to abolish it, they would soon enough breed themselves into extinction, because there would be no good way to correct for deleterious mutations. Serves them right.
And tomorrow we must get up at 5 A.M., so we can drive to Ocala and meet my mother on the train. Then two days later we’ll take her back to the same train, same hour. I don’t see my parents often, because they live in Pennsylvania.
Okay, I still have a book report in mind—what, you say we’re out of time? Just what do you have against book reports? Oh, well, maybe next week. Just let me know when you get home. Actually I may know it anyway, when you stop answering my letters.
Jamboree 26, 1990
Dear Jenny,
All right. Your mother phoned Sunday and said you had been home almost a week! I hope your dad didn’t take my last letter out to the hospital on Wednesday, only to discover that you weren’t there.
So let’s discuss important things, like comics. I’ve been enclosing some because I’ve had a suspicion that you weren’t getting to see enough of them. But now you’re home, so you probably see them all. So maybe I’d better cut down on those, except for the Sunday Curtis, which your mother forgot to make the local newspaper run. So I’ll enclose what I have this time, and then cut down. This week’s Curtis features Gunk, and the only problem is that Gunk wouldn’t have picked up a sausage pizza; he’s a vegetarian. As it was, he was right to step on it.
I’m also enclosing a big fake $20 bill which you can use to pay off your mother next time she reads you the comics, and a clipping of a poem about a cow.
Now about last Sunday. Did your mother tell you about that? My mother was visiting us, for the first time since 1988; she was here for two days. We picked her up at the train station at 6:30 Saturday morning in Ocala, which is about an hour’s drive from here, and put her back on it Monday morning. So I put my mother on the phone with your mother so they could analyze their children. It seemed to work out okay.
One thing I learned in the course of this visit. My mother had hair so long she could sit on it—but she cut it short when she was twelve years old. She says there is a picture of her mother in tears, with all this beautiful hair from her daughter on the floor. It seems my mother looked just like the picture of Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea party or whatever—they drink tea in England, you know—but she didn’t like it. There seems to be something about age twelve that’s bad for long hair. Do you think some evil creature put a curse on long-haired twelve year old girls? Then again, my daughter Penny never cut her hair; I was there to protect her from that, and it’s still beautiful today, now that she’s 22. Well, keep growing yours back, Jenny; you know what a difference hair makes. I may have details slightly garbled, but it seems to me that you lost all your strength about the time they cut your hair, and are gaining it back only at the rate your hair grows back. Remember Samson in the Bible.
I hope your mother is able to get help for you and her. Maybe the folk at Cumbersome Hospital figured she could take over and do everything that the 24 hour shifts of assorted personnel did, in addition to earning her living. I may be wrong, but I’m not quite sure that’s the case. If the right person could come in and help, it could be very good. I remember how good the Nanny was in England, when I was young; if I had had a choice, I would have stayed with her and not bothered with my family. Of course they don’t have such folk in America; closest we come here is the movie with Mary Poppins. Ah, well.
Meanwhile I had a letter from the Bird Maiden. Did I tell you about her? Yes, my Computer Find says I did, a couple of letters ago. Well, she sent a whole package of Christmas cards and letters to her mother in America, for remailing at local rates—25¢ instead of 90¢ overseas from Germany—and they ran it through one of their Patented Post Orifice Cruncher machines and burst it apart and most of the letters were lost. But I got mine, with 90¢ postage-due from Germany, and then another letter from her explaining what had happened, thinking her letter had not arrived. Mundane mails are like that; they have no respect even for bird maidens. (Come to think of it, the way you use that finger, I should call you the Bird Maiden!) Anyway, she told me how her cute 18 month old daughter Alessandra did a Cute Thing: locking her mother outside the glass door on the upper-story balcony in Dismember while she was washing it. It was an automatic latching door, sort of. So there was mother outside in temperature in the 30° range in her housecoat, and there was cute daughter inside alone, with the apartment locked. The neighbors below had to toss up an overcoat and shoes, and Bird Maiden had to keep Daughter entertained and occupied for an hour so she wouldn’t do something like turning on the oven and climbing in for a snooze. So they played pantomime games through the glass, while the locksmiths came and drilled out the lock and opened the door so they could rescue Bird Maiden before she froze. And you thought that only your mother had adventures like that!
And how is my dull life doing, you inquire? Well, after a year and a half they finally got our gate buzzer done. Sort of. Had to build a tower to get the radio signal over the trees, and at this point it has cost us over $3,500—just to be able to open our front gate from the house. Yes, yes, I know—your mother encounters such problems on an hourly basis. But she’s used to it. So we tested it, and it worked. And next day it didn’t. So my wife and I took the gate buzzer and she drove out to the gate—it’s three quarters of a mile by the road, remember—and signaled me to buzz it open, and I tried it in all different parts of the house.
The buzzer buzzes the radio unit in the attic, which in turn buzzes the gate to open. But the hand buzzer turned out to work only in the parts of the house closest to the attic unit. Sigh. So we finally mounted buzzers on the walls, upstairs and downstairs, where we know they work, and we run to buzz them when someone pushes the button at the gate. It worked when the lady editors from Putnam and Berkley came to see me yesterday, anyway.
Oh, what were they here for? Just visiting. They were at a sales meeting in Orlando, and they’re reading Tatham Mound, and Unicorn Point is on the New York Times best-seller list, so they came over. We went to eat at a restaurant where they have a fine what-do-you-call-it, where you take plates and serve yourself to whatever you want in the way of anything, all you can eat. There was even an ice cream vending machine, which the ladies delighted in using, then pouring on chocolate syrup and nuts and all. I stuffed myself with onions and mashed potato and three kinds of pudding. You’d have loved it. No, you would not have to take onions! I still feel stuffed, a day later.
So keep struggling through, Jenny. People do care about you. You should already be receiving fan mail; two readers asked for your address. So if you get letters “care of Jenny Elf” you’ll know.