Letters to Jenny (26 page)

…………………

Sigh. Well, let me tell you about Tuesday. No, wipe that look of disgust off your face; I don’t mean the whole day. Just the afternoon. My wife wanted to go see the movie
When Harry Met Sally
so I reluctantly dragged myself away from the computer and went with her. No, of course I don’t like relaxing; I’m a workaholic. So we went—and naturally that’s when all the phone calls came in: your mother, Franklin Mint, and Morrow the publisher. Somehow they knew when I would be out. What’s that? What did Franklin Mint want? Well, they hadn’t heard of
Man From Mundania
and were confused when I mentioned it. I got a bit disgusted, but by the time they called back again they had read the novel and appreciated the “Frankinmint” pun in it. That’s a plant which gives access to the Magic Mountain the Franklin Mint folk made for their Xanth figures, to be put on the market soon. “You must have thought me a perfect idiot,” the woman said, and I did not demur too strenuously. Oh, you weren’t asking about that, but about Morrow? They wanted to know whether I would autograph books at a Waldenbooks store near a convention I’m going to. Yeah, I guess I will, grumble. But the movie was fun. No, I’m not sure it’s suitable for you; you’ll have to ask your mother about that. She said you listened to
With A Tangled Skein
on the talking books tape; did you survive that? You did? Okay, then maybe the movie is okay for you; it has less violence. It’s about a young man and young woman who drive together from Chicago to New York, sharing costs and taking turns driving, and they really don’t get along all that well. He eats grapes and spits the seeds out the window, only the window isn’t open. Splat! But ten or more years later they become friends, and finally fall in love; it just took time to develop.

Speaking of movies: someone sent me a copy of the Dr. Who episode that was never broadcast or finished, because of a strike in England when they were making it. My daughter Cheryl is a Dr. Who freak, so I saved it until she was home so we could watch it together—and it turned out to be a copy of a copy, visually and sonically garbled so we really couldn’t follow it. Ah, well. Next night we watched one my wife bought, because the price had come way down cheap:
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Now there’s a movie I can recommend to you (so you can let your mother read this part of this letter). It’s a mixture of live actors and cartoons, which sounds pretty hokey, but it does come together, and I know you’ll like it. The bouncer at a bar really is a monstrous gorilla, and there are other jokes, and Roger’s cartoon wife is impossibly sexy, but you do get to care about Roger Rabbit and what the mean folk are trying to do to him. Yes, the meanest is a sociopath.

So I’d better wrap this up. Sorry if I bored you.

…………………

Jenny, you’re supposed to protest sincerely that oh, no, you weren’t bored at all! You’re not supposed to make a silent agreement. That’s called social awareness. It’s one of the forms of lying which society approves. Everyone knows that. Ask Kathy. See? Shall we try it again?

Sorry if I bored you … Oh, thank you so much for saying that!

OctOgre 27, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Sigh. Remember when I was way late starting my letter to you last Friday? This time it’s later. The time is 7:24:06 P.M.—that’s right from my time button on the computer—and supper is at 8:00. Well, I’ll continue tomorrow morning. So what happened? Well, I have stopped with the secretary—what do you mean, stopped
what?
Stopped using her. Will you stop tittering?! For my mail. What did you think? The letters were running as high as ten errors per page, and it excruciated me to send them out with all those corrections. So now I’m doing it myself again, on the computer; that’s why I set up with these letter macros. So I started in on three days' accumulated mail, and then more came in today, so I’ve done twenty letters today, and that’s why I’m so late. But I’m almost caught up, except for one to your mother and the other Jenny’s mother. I’ll keep plowing through and try to get everything in tomorrow’s mail.

What’s that? No, I
wasn’t
frittering away my time! That pile of 20 letters contained things like a contract on the reprint of a story, and one to my collaborator Robert E. Margroff about the fourth novel in our fantasy series,
Orc’s Opal
, which I’m about to start revising, and one to Philip José Farmer about my collaboration with him. You see, I was editing the first chapter, which is my 26 year old story about Tappy, the girl who—ah, I see you remember. But I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and now it’s about a thousand words longer than it was. No, I improved it. Oh, you don’t believe it? You don’t think I can write better now than I could twenty six years ago? Well, maybe I can’t, but I can still revise something. Anyway, I do like that story and I mean to read it to you, Jenny. Sometime, somewhere, someway. You just have to promise to remain 13 years old until I do. Then you can judge whether it’s improved. Anyway, so some of those letters were complicated and took time. The only other thing I did was exercise on the cycle. How far did I go this time? What does that have to do with it? I mean, I cycle for half an hour regardless. So let’s get back to business—you still want to know? Jenny, have I told you how aggravating you can be when—oh, last week? And the week before? Sigh. Okay, 9.6 miles. That would translate into about 3.2 miles on the treadmill, but the treadmill now just grinds and staggers even when I’m not on it; it’s definitely a bum machine. I like the cycle better anyway. So will you take my word, I wasn’t wasting time? What’s that? Why did I leave your letter until last? Well, I can answer that, Jenny: because I wanted to do your letter, and I didn’t want to do the others, so I did the chores first so that they would be out of the way. Now aren’t you sorry about your suspicion? You’re pretty quiet, all of a sudden!

You know, it was a job completing
Mound!
It’s 815 pages in manuscript, about 204,000 words. But the emotional aspect is wearing, too. I care about the characters in it, and now I’m through with them. There’s Tale Teller, of course, but also Tzec, whose mother was Mayan but sold into slavery in barbarian Florida. Tzec was nine winters old when Tale Teller met her; then he met her again fifteen winters later and she married him. She had had it in mind all the time. She was forty-four winters old when the small pox evil spirits killed her and she was buried in Tatham Mound. If the white man hadn’t come, bringing his deadly diseases, which may have killed nineteen of every twenty Indians in the western hemisphere, and then had the gall to claim the land was unpopulated—well, I have mixed emotions.

So how are things with you, Jenny? Well, yes, I know the routine gets dull. But apart from that? Well, if I told you I know how to break that routine, would you believe me? No? Ah, well.

Meanwhile, back here, things continue. I received a call from the man who was going to clear another dozen or so acres for us, to put in more pine trees. But in the intervening year since we made that plan, I have slowly changed my mind. I have seen how the bunnies live in the palmetto and small brush, not the pines. That’s the natural wilderness, while the pines are planted, and the local wildlife isn’t adapted to them. I don’t want to cut the habitat of that wildlife. So I told him I was sorry, but no: I no longer wanted to clear those acres. And do you know what? No, he didn’t throw a fit because of lost business. He said he likes wildlife too, and prefers to keep land natural when he can. He clears land when he is hired to handle that, but he doesn’t like it. So he was glad I had changed my mind. That brightened my day.

What else? Well, it is getting closer to the time when we’ll see about making that video movie of
A Spell for Chameleon
. I learned that they will start with live actors, then remake them into animation. I guess they go over the film, and the live actors become models for drawing over— Jenny, you must understand this sort of thing better than I do! I’ve been out of art a long time. But it should result in extremely realistic animation, and that’s what I want: animation so real that you can’t be sure it is animation. What’s that? What about the Elfquest folk and their project? Well, that seems pretty firm, now; they’ll do Xanth #13,
Isle of View
in comic format. Oh—that’s right, I said you could be there to help negotiate the contract. You
would
remember that! As I recall, you pulled one of your fits, and—no, don’t pull another! It’s bad enough when your mother does it, without you proving whose daughter you are. We’ll see, we’ll see; with Xanth magic, you can never tell what may happen.

Speaking of Xanth, I may have to write two Xanths next year. One a year is comfortable; two may be a bit much. No, they won’t be as good as the one Jenny Elf is in. Unless she’s in one. I don’t know yet. You see, at the end of
View
her future is in doubt; for all we knew she might go back to Elfquest. But with the Elfquest folk handling her in Xanth, maybe she’ll like Xanth well enough to stay. Sammy’s with her, remember. Xanth #14,
Question Quest
, is pretty well locked in; Jenny Elf might appear in a bit part, but no more than that. But if I have to do
The Color of Her Panties
the same year—what? You want to know why I may do two in one year? Because this is a paperback series, but we might want it to go hardcover, and the way to do that would be to do two so that they could publish the hardcover edition of #15 the same time as the paperback of #14 and the paperback readers would still have one a year, same schedule, instead of having to wait an extra year for the hardcover edition to clear. We’re thinking of the readers, see. What do you think? Should I write
Panties
next year too?

OctOgre 28, 1989—Yes, it’s next morning now; I zoomed as far as I could, but I couldn’t finish this letter last night. So have you thought about whether I should write two Xanths next year? I mean, you’ve had a whole night to ponder the matter. Don’t tell
me
you haven’t; there’s one date at the top of this letter, and another just now, so I know a day has passed!

Well, on to the enclosures. Do they show you “Garfield” each day? I can’t be sure they are taking proper care of you, so I cut out this week’s adventure. I mean, Garfield is a brown cat, so he’s in your department. He was snoozing, and he dreamed, and this is his dream: of the far future when everyone else is gone. It concludes with a message about imagination. So here are the strips for your collection, and your homework is to think about that business of imagination.

Other items: how to magically figure out someone’s age using math. Little color map showing the path of Hurricane Jerry, back when. Another year when it’s Hurricane Jenny, it’ll be much worse. A chart showing how the stock market plunged, that day. You know, when I banged my shoulder into the doorframe. If you think of the stock market as a landscape, this is a mountain that became a cliff. Wheeee—crash! A picture of a house. It’s an ad, and I couldn’t cut out all the ugly print, but the house is nice enough. Your mother has something like this in mind for you, with an elevator in the center and a pony out back. And inside is your room with a computer and a light fixture which looks like a rocket ship crashing through the ceiling. An ad for a toaster made in the shape of two pieces of toast. A cartoon about how a witch turned her publisher into a frog. That’s simple justice. Clipping about a killer whale making friends with a Norwegian ferry. “Curtis.” And one I don’t generally send, “Sally Forth,” about you and your mother. Plus three for your mother relating to computers and such, including definitions of common computer terms such as “End User: one born every minute.” If you don’t see what’s funny, ask your daddy to explain about Barnum the circus man.

Okay, Jenny, that’s it for this week. I want you to promise to be in a better mood next week, and to figure out whether I should do two Xanths next year instead of one. Wave “Hello” to Kathy for me. No, not with one finger; use the whole hand, dummy! That’s better.

November 1989

A new roommate. A plane takes off. A plane lands. A little girl goes for a ride. And a happy coincidence.