Letters to Jenny (30 page)

Let’s see: you told me not to write two Xanth novels next year. Was that because you’re tired of Xanth? Oh—because you figured I’d be working too hard. Jenny, it’s not like that. I’m a workaholic; I’m always working. If I don’t do another Xanth novel, I’ll be working on something harder, like my novel about the sociopaths. You know, folk like the one who ran you down with his car. It would be more pleasant to be in Xanth. So I may do it, if the publisher really wants it.

Meanwhile, I have some accumulated clippings for you: comics and such. I’ll dump them in with the Convention Report. It’s not that I’m trying to get rid of you, Jenny, but my dripping nose is making my face hurt, and I just have to lie down somewhere and read something. Otherwise I have to wipe my nose constantly, or it will drip into the computer keyboard, and that’s really not best.

Have a good week, and let me know how you liked the convention. What do you mean,
what
convention? The one that came into existence just for you, Jenny, so you could be princess for a day.

NoRemember 24, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Harpy Thanksgiving! Yes, I know it’s over for you, but we’re in the throes of it here as I write this. No we didn’t eat any turkey! We didn’t eat any harpy either. We’re a family that serves the stuffing without the bird. My two daughters came home from their separate colleges, and we ordered new computers for each of them, and today the man brought them and set them up and the girls are figuring them out. You see, we wanted to get them, aligned with us, so they can do homework when they visit home, and so the computers have to be compatible. We got them nice printers, too: they are dot matrix with 24 pins (that’s good—ask your mother) that can print regular or script so well it doesn’t look like dots at all. Penny grumped because it wasn’t a laser printer. Sorry; I don’t trust something that expensive in a college situation. All we need is someone spilling iced tea into it. Meanwhile, Cheryl is using my stereo system to transcribe music from her CD disk to her cassette tape, because she has a tape player but no CD player. And I showed the girls how to set underlined words on the screen in blink. Now I’ve set my own “Bold” in highlighted blink mode. See?
BOLD
Well, I know my screen isn’t there; you can just imagine it. Innocent fun. Anyway, we’ve been busy; how has it been with you?

Your mother was asking for Kelly Freas' address, having thrown it away before. Okay, I’ll tell you, and you tell her. If she loses it again, tell her again.

Speaking of your mother: she was naughty. I gave your daddy a copy of
Pornucopia
, which is my Super Adult Conspiracy XXX-rated close-your-eyes-while-reading Not For Women And Children censored novel—
and she read it
! Naturally her brain now looks like rotten eggs on drugs. So if she visits you, and she seems to have swallowed all her teeth and suffered a foul-smelling jawbone infection, that’s why. What’s that? NO, YOU MAYN’T READ IT TOO!! Haven’t you been paying attention, girl? Stick to Xanth, where stuff like this is banned.

It was nice getting to see you and Kathy at the hospital. I understand you have a new roommate now, named—wait, that’s
your
name! You mean she’s Jenny too? How will you tell each other apart?

I forgot to give you the two magnolia seeds I brought along. I saved those from way back, when they kept getting crushed in the Post Orifice, so finally I had to bring them myself. That’s why I came, after all. I remembered them Monday morning, so I gave them to your daddy. You mean he forgot too? Well, demand them; he has them somewhere. If they sprout in his shirt pocket he’ll look like a walking magnolia tree.

Some tag-ends about that hospital visit: I thought of the quartz crystals I gave you and Kathy because they are in
Tatham Mound
. The Indians believed they had healing properties, and could be used to tell the future. So if you recover more of your powers, you’ll know why. I hope Kathy liked hers; she didn’t want to put it on, but maybe she was just too shy. I wonder if she really didn’t receive that letter I sent her over a month ago. I have it on the computer; I can send it again if I need to. And about that song I sang you: “The Eddystone Light”: it’s a funny song about the sea, and I thought it would make you laugh, but it didn’t. Sigh. These things don’t always work out. Actually it wasn’t easy to get much of a reaction from you on anything. I worried that you were falling asleep when I read “Tappy.” Kathy was awake, but you were getting uncomfortable. And I never got to meet that boy you mentioned—I can’t remember his name now, which is par for the course; I can’t remember any names without rehearsing them. Oh, well; the way we picture things is seldom the way they happen. It’s a nice hospital, and I’m glad to be able to picture you there.

Which means you’ll be moving soon, so my picture won’t count. This is in the nature of things.

Meanwhile we have progress on that project to make a video tape from the first Xanth novel. The man who is working on it came to visit me last week and showed us his five minute sample. It’s okay but not phenomenal; he said it costs $9000 a second to make such animations, and he doesn’t have that kind of money, so had to fill in with still pictures. Yes, nine thousand dollars a second! That’s more money than your mother makes, even when her teeth aren’t bothering her. But it seems like a good project, and we’ll probably go ahead with it.

Did you hear the news about Kimberly Mays? She’s the girl who turned out to have been baby-swapped in the hospital ten years ago. The Mays family got her, and the Twiggs family got the other girl, and only now have genetic tests confirmed it. So Kimberly was in effect adopted. No one knew, except whoever swapped the babies, way back when. Imagine what it would be like if you turned out to have been swapped: then someone else could be in the hospital and you could go home to strangers. I don’t know; that might not be that much fun. I understand Kimberly is upset about it. Strange things happen on occasion!

Well, Jenny, say hello to Jenny for me. I only have one enclosure for you this time: “Curtis.” Yes, you may show it to Jenny too. Have a harpy week!

NoRemember 30, 1989

Dear Jenny
,

Friday is my Jenny-letter day, but I’m doing this on Thursday, because I’m wrapping up much of my correspondence for the month now and want to keep the first of next month free for paying work. If I can get in four more good days, I can finish
Ore’s Opal
except for the editing, and be just about on schedule for the next novel,
Virtual Mode
, which features the suicidal fourteen year old girl. What would happen to the world if you turned fourteen and I didn’t have that novel done, so I couldn’t read you a chapter from it? (Would you believe: I typed control-O instead of control U to underline
Orc
, and it jumped me to the top of the paragraph, inserted a ruler, and started typing there. Apparently control O followed by O does that; it’s part of the “O” roster of commands which Sprint has but doesn’t list; they are there to emulate one of the other stupid word processors that do things in peculiar ways. Remember what I told you about how computers are always out to get you? Believe it!)
Mode
should be published in 1991, and maybe catch your Last Days of Fourteen. See, there is order in the universe. You’ll like Colene; she’s not at all like Tappy, but she’s all girl. You might get the notion from all this that I like girls. Right; I’ve been tuned in to girls ever since my first surviving daughter was born, and maybe even a bit before then. A correspondent recently wrote me to tell me that she had just had a son (she appeared in Xanth as Emjay, who married the Ass who helped her compile the Lexicon of Xanth). I wrote back that she should keep trying, and maybe next time she’d have a daughter.

Meanwhile, what’s doing here? Well, on Tuesday we had our thickest fog yet. It made the morning forest quiet, a wonderland of only close things, no distant ones. It’s probably easiest to reach Xanth from here on such mornings, because the magic trails have proper concealment. I think it was such a morning that Jenny Elf crossed over into Xanth from the World of Two Moons, starting a complication that the Muses still haven’t quite resolved. Which reminds me: I tell them not to do it, but I have had experience with my fans, and they’ll do it anyway. They will write letters to you, sending them to me through the publisher. I’ll have to send them on to your mother, who will have to read them to you, and then you’ll have to answer them. So be prepared for your fan mail, Jenny, after
Isle of View
is published. Because I know you will intrigue the readers the way Ligeia did.

Which somehow has led to my next subject: much as I’d like to see you recover the full use of your body, and become a marathon gymnast, and live happily ever after, I have this nagging little suspicion that you will have to settle for something less. But I feel that the computer can bring you a great deal of joy, once you get around its out-to-get-you syndrome. All you need is a way to input it, and it doesn’t really matter whether you use a finger or your head or your big toe. (No joke; if you have good control over that toe, they can set you up with a toe button to operate it.) Then you can have sentences programmed, such as “Thank you for writing to me. I still can’t walk or type, but with the help of this computer I can answer you. I’m sorry to learn that you also got hit by a car. Doom to all careless drivers!” You can have a signature block made up, even. Your mother could program that sort of thing, I’m sure. Did I ever show you my Xanth stamp? No? Okay, here is one; don’t try to use it in Mundania, though.

So you see, much can be done with the computer, and not just sentences. You’ll have a ball with a drawing program. First get a good way to direct the machine—maybe a little “Thinking Cap” that is attuned to the small motions of your head—then enter the wonderful world of increasingly proficient control. It really is like a magic realm. I was dragged kicking and screaming into computers; I wouldn’t have changed over from pencil and manual typewriter if they hadn’t stopped making good manual typewriters. But once I really got into the computer it was wonderful, and I really wouldn’t trade it. Those little talk-box computers you and Kathy have are fine, but I’m thinking of the heavy stuff, that has the potential to tune you in to the larger world so well that others would not know your situation unless you told them.

Say, maybe we can make a Jenny stamp! Let’s try it:

Anyway, I now have a nice mental picture of you at the hospital, though I guess you won’t be there much longer. I also have one of you in your fancy go-to-the-ball gown, with your matching shoes. Actually, I thought your little bare feet were cute, too. I have your rose by my computer; I see it sitting there and I think of you, between paragraphs.

Meanwhile, back here, we had another visit by the cows. They were suddenly grazing right by our house: Elsie Bored, How Now Brown, Bossie, and one whose name I didn’t catch. We phoned the sheriff, and that afternoon he came and shooed them back onto his property and patched his fence. Air-boaters on the lake keep breaking it down, and then the cows get out. I guess those boaters don’t know whose fence they are so cavalierly violating. One of these days they may find out the hard way. Which reminds me: we have deer on our property, and there’s another deer who joins the sheriff’s horses, grazing in the field right in sight of passing hunters, leading a charmed life, because everyone knows whose horses they are and how he feels about his horses' friends. I wrote that into
Firefly
: a true story folk will think is fiction. But that deer hasn’t been seen for a couple of months. We hope some hunter didn’t—or some reckless driver. Maybe that deer got to know our deer, and is with them now. But we’re worried. Deer are so innocent, and hunters are such ||
CENSORED BY ADULT CONSPIRACY ||!

Which reminds me:
I
have played with the typestyle modes on this mono-mode system, and find there are seven ways to show print on the screen: plain,
underlined
, HIGHLIGHTED, Blink, invisible, blink/
underlined
and blink\HIGHLIGHTED. You can’t see several of those in the printed version, of course. But let’s try the invisible, and see whether it does or does not print:
Invisible
. On the screen that word does not show; if it doesn’t show when printed out, it’s truly invisible. Yes, it’s really there; I can see it when I go into Codes Mode: Invisible. Yes, I know, here I am wasting time instead of getting on with the letter. It’s my way. Meanwhile right now my wife Cam is wasting her time trying to make our DEC printer print from her IBM-clone computer; it’s supposed to be possible, but a new cable and several codes later it still won’t do it. We bought new computers for both our daughters, which are fine except that they insist on stopping after every page. We’ll get that ironed out in due course. Maybe you can find the setting on your computer that makes
you
invisible, Jenny.