Letters to Jenny (13 page)

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?